Wednesday, March 6th:
Neil’s stated ETD: 7:30am
ETD: 8:00am
Current time 11:53 and not yet departed.
We’ve
loaded in guitars, amps, microphones, pillows, blankets, tea, yoga mats,
singing bowls, kegs, generators, newly-installed on-board internet, gopros mounted
on the windows looking out, and on the windows looking in, and atop the stripper
pole. Ten of the thirteen bodies
that will also be aboard are in place and happily chittering about the benefits
of touring Las Vegas rather than Hollywood.
Someone’s
gone back inside to drop off things we’ve weeded out: two guitars, an extra
kickstand, someone’s huge and ugly corduroy coat, and someone else has gone to
the bathroom and no one knows why we still only add up to ten.
“Where
is Jonny?”
“Don’t
let Jonny go back! No one let
him back into the convent! He'll never come out.”
10:00pm
We arrive at a mansion up in the
Hollywood hills. The singer of
Garbage lives next door and apparently, infamously, was unimpressed with a
soaking wet, tuxedo-clad Zweng once upon a midnight dreary.
The
air still carries the daytime burnt-sugar smell of manicured foliage melting in
the sun. Rocky asks me where I am
from, and I tell him California. “So you’ve always been spoiled,” he says in
wonder, looking out at the lights twinkling through palm trees. Though his words contain no malice, I
resent them.
“I
didn’t grow up around wealth…” I start, “ I didn’t grow up around this, these
big houses, not quite this weather.
I’m a hood rat…”
Ours
is a culture of victimhood, and I am prey to it; San Francisco is one place
where the kids want to be a minority (but not too minor! Something safe. Mixed, maybe. Peruvian and English is a prime example. Tanned but not dark, Spanish-speaking,
but not a “beaner.”). Either way, my desperation to deny what beauty life has
afforded me is thankfully lost on Rocky.
He is too busy enjoying California; he probably is in some way pleased by
the idea of traveling with a native.
We park at the bottom of a hill and
begin piling our things and selves on the stoop of the mansion, but Neil
wonders aloud who is staying back to sleep with him in the bus.
No
one answers except Zweng, who tells me that I can sleep wherever I want. “Do what’s rad, Butlah.” I follow him to the house. Jonny is already there, unpacking his
guitar in the living room while Eve fusses over him. He says nothing.
He’s slept most of the way here, back in the media lounge, where we
treated him exactly like the cat of his nickname, a quiet, unassuming kind of
cat who silently retreats wherever it is that we go.
4:37am Friday March 8th, 2013
We
have arrived in Las Vegas. We
escaped the gingerbread house and with it, Eve’s insistent “Do you want to make
it?” queries and demands that we not only record every conversation, but also
actively drive dramatic interpersonal exchange. This lovely woman with a lovely home has for the first time
in my life made it clear what “selling out” really can mean. She wants to ask Jonny why his
girlfriend didn't come with; she wants to try to create a dramatic storyline about the tension
that doesn’t actually exist between Nicole and Neil. Every half hour she seems to have yet another of the boys
cornered in her kitchen, whispering to them a list of what Nicole has been doing
wrong. She has been so fully
infected by reality tv that she doesn’t even conceive that anything could be
wrong with this, that there is any other way to live. We want to make a documentary about creativity and the endurance of the team; not pitch yet another show about tearing each
other apart.
Even
the language we use with one another when we’re angry is full of invitation to
reconcile. “I am frustrated
because I need your support!” said David, for example. These are not the men that Cosmopolitan
magazine covers warned me about.
These are testaments to the power of art, to the beauty of communal
living. They have to be coddled, cuddled, and spoken to “Explain it to me because
I want it my way but if you give me a reason…” says Neil. The ellipses is meaningful, because
sometimes we do it his way anyhow, but still at least we are all communicating to
each other, rather than whispering behind gumdrops in Eve’s gingerbread
house. Part of the reason we
really did have to leave LA last night is so that Nicole and I weren’t tempted to push her into
an oven.
And so now: we’re staying in a hostel where the
fitted sheets don’t quite fit the bed, but we’re welcome here, welcome to stay
late, to park our bus, to wander in and out at all hours, to ferry the hostel
kids in and out of the main strip for ten bucks a pop.
As we drove into Las Vegas, I
remembered what it was I always thought I disliked about this place. We drove past a number of brilliantly
lit-up recreations of beautiful places and world wonders, and instead of taking
on a graceful beauty, the way that certain New York streets do when they’re
silent in the middle of the night, they seemed more like a drag-queen whose
just taken off her false eyelashes.
They were bare, eery – and it is because Vegas screams at you. A person who sits quietly staring out
of a window and is alone isn’t creepy (like JonnyCat, these people seem somehow
more dignified in fact), but a person shouting alone in a room is certainly
creepy, and that’s what Vegas is without hundreds of people, just a person
shouting alone in a dark room.
Chuck pointed out where he got married ten years ago and it only made it
seem more lonely.
Vegas is Disneyland for adults, and
just Disneyland filled me with existential angst, so does Vegas. It is sterile here, washed clean of
self-questioning by high proof vodka. The culture of
indulgence is the only one here; but the bright lights and catchy ads seem more
a testament to the general populace’s need to be told what to do and led like
moths to flame than for their need for luxury, brilliance, inspiration.
9:30pm Saturday March 9, 2013
We’ve
cut our stops to the Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon, the former because of our
time delay due to our necessary visit to the mechanic, and the latter because
of weather.
We
stopped somewhere along the border of California and Arizona. I’d been feeling dizzy for the last few
miles, but I’ve mostly just slept today.
I struggled to my feet and dropped again to my knees a few feet from the
media lounge, not even quite to the middle of the bus. Liza gave me water and helped me up. I
stumbled forward again, but into Jonny Cat. “Butler, are you ok?” Someone, I think Ryan, told me to come
outside. I nodded. The air smelled new to me; someone said
it was dusty but by contrary I found the air to be quite clear, desert-clear
without the sharp cold that I’ve experienced before in association with such
clear air. I stepped out into the
clear air and looked up into a clear sky and lay down on the rocky ground. The feel of the craggy rocks coming up
through the packed dust was unexpectedly wonderful – perhaps it was newness
again, the comparison to the soft
den of the media lounge that I’ve been effectively buried in all day. Even the skeletal shrubs that pulled at
my clothing seemed kindly.
“Butler!”
Ryan laughed. “What are you
doing?”
“I’m
just getting some earth, Ryan. I
just needed some earth.”
No comments:
Post a Comment