7:13pm March 12th Austin,
Texas
We’ve
settled into two separate houses, both friends of CG. We’re all gathered at one and have BBQ’d for all the
neighbors. People have been
trickling by all day, purportedly to ask after our host. They wandered in past
the bus, mouths wide, and into the living room where the girls have been
gathered around the wifi and power strips that we brought in from the bus. Joelle is transcoding and Nicole is
editing and I am cutting apart the writing I did on the bus, trying to post
invitations to our shows here, and talking to Zweng’s girlfriend about a job in
Austin.
I
go out to the bus to gather stragglers (both Ian and Zweng are missing), and I
pick up Ian’s singing before I even get on the bus. I step up and see him in a red hammock slung across the
inside of the bus, using the sink cabinet to swing himself. He’s belting out Neil Young’s "Harvest Moon," wearing a
cowboy hat, no shirt, but a leather vest and red scarf.
“Jesus
Christ, Ian.”
“This
is how I relax. I’m beyond sleep
now.”
“Texas
has chewed you up, missed the spittoon, and hit this hammock.”
“That’s
right!” He flashes me a toothy
smile, “So: I’m the beer-tender;
you need one?”
I
have him pour me a beer from the keg nestled near his head and walk over to the
Baberaham next. Zweng is in there
passed out, as I expected, and when I ask him if he’d like to join us for
dinner he mumbles something through cracked lips about wanting food and not
being able to move.
Inside,
the neighbors laugh and share the cucumbers, rice, corn, steak, chicken strips
and guacamole. I bring out a plate
to Zweng, and on my way back inside, run into Neil mucking with a toolkit and
simultaneously tossing women’s lacy stockings, still in their shrink-wrapped
packages, onto the living room couch.
For someone who has just run out of money, has lapsed on his rent, and
lost bus insurance, he is ridiculously giddy with happiness.
He’s
like the carpetbagger uncle in a novel by Upton Sinclair who arrives with
strange baubles for the girls just as the family has lost hope entirely. I
actually suspect that he knows he’s lost our trust and has squirreled away
these stockings from his trip in Thailand just for this inevitable moment. I recognize the ploy, I see the glint
in his lascivious eyes. If it had
been a week ago, I’d have rolled my eyes and continued writing, but we’ve been
on the road so long that my shirts all smell like body odor from bodies not even my own, and
cigarettes and feet. My mind is
still on Sinclair and my lips say the words, “Neil, you’re ridiculous,” but my
body moves to crowd around him with the other girls admiring the sweet eyelets
on the grayish fishnets and the cute bows on the oh-so-silky thigh-highs.
I’ve
just looked up to glance around the room again and – “Hi Rocky!”
“Hey.” Rocky winks and, with the
self-conscious vanity of a woman pulling pearls to sit in the crest of her
cleavage, turns his backside to me while adjusting his pants to sit lower,
revealing the beginning of a deep crevice whose ultimate end is the human waste
evacuation mechanism. I am not
sure when or how both Rocky and Neil came to malign the female mind so much as
to expect a plumber crack to be appealing to it, but the result of this
irreparable error in their judgment is the travesty I see before me: jeans that
appear to be on the brink of falling, an undesired preview of the things I’ll
never be seeing.
“You
should see the babes here.
Texas-sized. Yeah, this
girl weighed like 165 pounds.
Slammin’ big fat butt.”
Joelle
comforts Nicole and me. “Look at
it this way: It means we’re safe,” she says, indicating the smallness of our
three selves.
Suddenly
I realize that the tools Neil has been fiddling with are for fixing the
bass. We only have one bass guitar
and somewhere between Vegas and here, the connection to the amp has been
ruined.
“We
could have taken another one! We
could have-“
“Ta-da!” This is why we keep our trust in
Neil. He’s somehow fixed the
connection. That first chord he
strums is like the longed-for nightingale to this Romeo’s ears. I think the music is my Juliet
today. The metaphor fails if we
take this any further…
Our
desired, agreed-upon time of departure is 11pm. At 10:54pm, Nicole is tugging on a new bra with one hand and
struggling to put on my cream eyeliner with the other.
“Zweng! Rocky doesn’t believe that
I’m a D! FUCK. Frame rate has to change on all the
gopros before we mount anything. Photos
looked like shit the other night.
Where is Dave?”
“God, I wish I had my heels. Do you think we’ll go back to the other
house to get our things? Zweng?
And – I’m not sure where Dave is, but are we getting a time lapse on one
of those?”
I love these girls.
10:51am Wednesday March 13th
I
wake up with a tiny lego guy stuck to my arm and tucked within space-themed bed
sheets. We are at Billy’s house,
and I am asleep in the bottom bunk of his sons’ bed. Nicole, I know, is asleep above me in the top bunk, and I am
comforted and amused by the presence of these half-pint grown women in the
little-boy beds. As I admire the
boys’ taste in space-age décor and also their little league trophies, I
suddenly, to my dismay, overhear the girls who followed us home last night
talking to Billy. :
“Can
we play more music?”
“It’s
10am, girls. I think we’ve played
out the music. I’m about ready to
start work again.”
“You
should come with us, Billy!”
“Well
girls, my boys live here. And my
wife – that’s her picture. The
band’s asleep. I think it’s time
y’all went home.”
Skip
to about two hours later:
[We lost internet/my power cord around this time, so most
of the following is copied from my notebook that has been sitting in my tiny
fannypack (now destroyed). A
German man who got on the bus asked, “What are you writing?” and I said simply,
“everything.” He didn’t believe
me.]
“Listen, from now on, we don’t
bring the party home.”
“And we test a girl’s IQ if the
boys insist on bringing her with us.”
Rocky steps in, “Yeah. Stupid and skinny? I can’t deal. Now if she had a bottom so big she can’t walk, that would be
something to negotiate.”
“Now, now. You girls are just territorial.”
“ Doesn’t matter even if we are. No
more strippers!”
“She wasn’t a stripper!”
“She told us that she wasn’t a
stripper three times, when no one had asked. She was a stripper.”
“Look,
this is not our fault. It is just
that we happen to make music that strippers love.”
“And
we’re gentleman!” says Jonny with a look far too genuine for this
conversation. “So we can’t turn
them away. Into the streets? No.”
“Zweng,
you don’t really want strippers around.
Tell me the truth.”
“I
am just trying to tap into the eternal human essence. It’s important to add to the stories of your life and care
about people while you can. You
die alone.” He laughs maniacally
and orders another strawberry and lime swirled margarita.
3:51pm March 16th Austin,
Texas South by Southwest (SXSW)
It’s
like Lord of the Flies out here.
It all started last night.
CG doesn’t usually reach a point of actual drunkenness, but when he
does, he tends to get on a path to destruction paved with inaccurate and
continuous use of the word “fags” (changed here to idiots, because that is what
he means by the word, and because it nauseates me to type that word) and the
quietest, most mild-mannered little tantrums the world has ever seen. Sometimes the complaint will be that he
isn’t being featured enough in media, and other times it is that someone he
doesn’t like is around, and just as often it stems from a sense of
overprotection toward the girls.
Whatever the cause, the result is the same: a pouty man mumbling in the
corner, brushing off any attempts to console him, and
Last night a rival band from San
Francisco boarded the bus. The Coo
Coo set had been over for a little while and Neil had been jamming out with
Chris (our equipment manager) and Ian (general manager – finances, insurance,
etc. His job is to keep Neil from
running this thing into the ground).
CG didn’t like other people playing. “This sound sucks.”
Zweng tells him to be calm.
Zweng tells him to be calm.
“I’m
mellow, but it sucks. Sounds
bad. I don’t like idiots playing
my instruments.”
“It’s
cool man. Think about how cool
we’ll be if we’re famous, and we let our roadies play a last set, jam on our
stuff just for fun. We want to be
those guys.”
CG
won’t listen. He storms off and
Zweng and I continue to talk about his girlfriend, or skyping or something,
when suddenly Neil is yelling and CG is pouting loud, and I run back to the
back of the bus along with Zweng in time to see Neil trying to kick CG off of
the bus. “Don’t do this.” I tell
Neil, but he is on a rampage. Neil
isn’t entirely in the wrong, either.
CG tried to smash his own bass guitar after seeing his rival playing on
it. We’ve already broken this bass
once on this trip, and cannot afford to buy or ship out another. Neil finally takes the argument far
enough that CG leaves in a huff.
Nicole and I walk off of the bus with him.
“Why
would he leave me? I can’t call anyone without a phone.”
“He
hasn’t left. The bus is still
parked. And we’re with you, CG.”
“But
listen – I wasn’t even mad. I just
thought it would be funny.”
“But
you can’t smash your bass.”
“He
was about to leave me.”
“No
one would let that happen – but CG, you Can NOT smash your bass!”
“Nah,
dude. Sometimes the music doesn’t
even matter as much as getting rid of the idiots.”
This
went on for hours, until finally we end up back on the bus, except that I go to
call Paul underneath a willow tree.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” I tell him. I get back on the bus and Ian and Neil aren’t speaking; Dave
and Chris aren’t speaking – I decide to speak to no one.
Things
continue this way, or perhaps getting worse every hour, until we pack up and
get onto the bus. I’ve been
crying, because keeping up with photos and the “right” tags, and also my own
desires and how to voice them to Neil without being shot down all seems too
much. I don’t like the yelling,
the insistence that we can do more than I know we can afford. I ache for the quiet Sundays I’ve spent
curled with my head on Paul’s knee and his head on mine, like a yin-yang,
looking into his liquid brown eyes and feeling the strength of his arm with my
wiry fingers as we talk about nonsense – the existence of a genetic marker for
psychosis, psychopathy; what stars are made of.
We
hardly want to take the bus out, but when we do, the band sounds better than
ever, and Jonny catches my eye self-consciously, but smiles when I smile, and
Zweng is soulful and Chuck looks like a boss. We start to run like the well-oiled machine that we are,
even despite each of our own inner emotional turmoil issues. I get someone else to man the door, and
the beer, and just rock out at the bus’ stage. When little journalist from the
night before finds us, and asks me why I am here, and I say it is because the
way that we operate allows me greater artistic freedom than ever before;
because when we are at our best, I’ve been at my personal best; because I
believe in the sound of the Coo Coo Birds; because I have always wanted to be
the Kerouac of our times – I want to record the strangeness of today.
6:21pm March 18th McAllen,
Texas
We
arrived in the middle of the night after I’d had a little too much of one of
MG’s elixirs and not enough ginger.
They’re all natural herb drinks meant to loosen joints or heighten
senses “or just let you sleep, princess,” but I hadn’t eaten enough and almost
had to spill their spiritual goodness from the innards of my royal bowels upon
the perfectly manicured lawn of Doctor Love. I stepped into the house barely able to function and was led
to a tiny room with a tiny bed and its’ own bathroom. I stumbled in my fatigue, and Dr. Love assured me again, to
please tell him how he could help me heal, that I could even write out my
symptoms if I felt embarrassed.
What a kind, kind man.
Doctor
Love owns a house more beautiful in and of itself, but also full of separate
things more beautiful, than anything I have ever seen. On one of two islands in the kitchen
sits a 3-foot high four-cornered structure with various glass tubes and ropes
and perhaps a bubbler of sorts: I think it is a relic of chemistry gone
by. There is a stand-up bass and
piano and 8x6 foot painting in an auxiliary living room that is otherwise
almost entirely bare: “for when the circus comes to town,” says MG, referring
to ourselves, but also a suspicion that these wonderful people have hosted
others as well.
Doctor
Love’s wife is a dream, a platonic perfection of what you’d dream of in a
doctor’s wife. I awoke this
morning to the sound of her laughter and thought that it must belong to a much
younger woman. She is bright,
beautiful, happy, clad in yellow and wearing glasses, with hair that curls
around her cheeks, and is determined to feed us all. Her eyes were wide with wonder as one after the other of our
boys walked through the room – so many tall, fit, shirtless, bright-eyed men,
just one after the other after the other.
Even her brother asked me what we all did for fitness, that he never saw
so many fit people in one room together. I tell him that I can't speak for the rest of them, but I am on the "Rocky diet" - a desperate need to stay under 160 pounds, as that is the weight be proclaims as being the best.
We’ve
just had a beautiful supper: a huge plate of pasta smothered in clams, mussels,
garlic, red bell peppers, olive oil, broccoli, and brussel sprouts bigger than
any I’d ever had, and white wine. The boys are all in love with Mayra (Doctor
Love’s wife), and I am in love with life.
In
the space of time it took to record this and then have a conversation about
mutual dislike of second wave feminist apologism for feminine behaviors with a
guest of the family, our gracious hosts have cooked up a second meal entirely,
of lamb and beans, and then home-made vanilla ice cream slathered with
cinnamon-roasted peaches.
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