EMAIL HIM

His Philosophy

Birmingham, AL
Mon 8/26/02

We woke up in the van in the parking lot of a Motel 6 or a Super 8 or one of those second rate motels and it stunk and was a bit sweaty and we got about as much sleep as you can possibly get in a parked vehicle. We took care of our feet with some foot powder and a couple of us took a piss and a sink bath at the gas station next door and we starting up the van. As it got rolling it was making grinding noises from somewhere on the underside of it so we stopped on the shoulder of the highway to take a look. We decided to take the next exit and we found a McDonald’s and parked and called AAA. It was early morning, probably around 8 am and the neighborhood we were in was a bit shady so the tow truck driver went against the rules and let me and Nick Peterson, a fine roadie indeed, ride way high up in the van while it was being towed. He told us when we got to the garage, 3 miles away in a rusty industrial section, that the neighborhood we were in was about the worst in Birmingham and if we stayed there any longer we would have seen stray or intended bullets whizzing past our heads, so we thanked him again for risking whatever there was to risk breaking the rules in the tow truck business to get us out of there fast.

We spent all day there at the garage. Me and Nick Peterson, a fine roadie indeed, decided to walk about 10 blocks into the downtown to mail our love letters home to our missuses, and we had to walk on the side of the road with no sidewalk and cars speeding by, through the kind of very sharp spikeball weeds that stick all over your shoelaces and make your fingers bleed when you try to pull them off that grow near railroad tracks which we walked over, and through a hole in the fence and under the freeway where the bums sleep and through some high muddy grass that we were careful to step because of snakes and through some piles of garbage left near the road and finally into town, where we found a post office quick, then back through the garbage snakegrass subfreeway bumbeds fencehole railroad spikeball speeding cars and back to the garage. It was like a damn game of Pitfall on Atari. What guys do to get laid.

The mechanics there were a bunch of characters and regular ‘bama boys like mechancis in most parts of the country are regular whatever-the-place boys, and they liked to swear every chance they got. “That thang was hotter’n greased pussy!” someone said of our rear axle. Their leader was an old fat man with a long grey beard that smoked cigarettes and worried about things. He’s the kinda guy that you wonder if he stopped counting the number of heart attacks he’s had. The rest of the guys including his son kinda looked at you when the old man spoke, partly to see your reaction to him and partly as if to let you know they know he’s a character and we all know he’s a character together. We’re 4 days in and we told him about going to California and through the Rockies and up to Chicago and back home and with each direction he looked down at the estimate in his hand, one hand holding a lit cigarette and laughed silently in between sighs so that his whole upper body shook and lurched upward in the waiting room chair. He kept saying he wasn’t trying to be funny but it looked bad and they kept looking at the van and discovering new things wrong with it and he’d come back and be all serious and say “Motherfucker. Look at this shit” like there was something gravely terrible like a dead baby mangled in the wheels or something. The ball bearings were shot and the rear axle was fucked up and the brakes were fucked and the exhaust is hanging by a thread and they weren’t sure if they could get the parts and the old man’s shaking his head and telling us we’d be lucky if we make it to Texas, and he knows we got no money but he’s trying his damnest to settle for the bare minimum, but there ain’t much he can do, and I can tell he’s being honest because I know an honest man from a bullshitter. And we’re pissed and bummed out but this kinda thing ain’t shit when you look at the whole scheme of things and I’d been hit too hard by fate lately where my proverbial face is numb so it’s like a kitten scratch and we decided to suck it up like men instead of acting like women and whine and boohoohoo and throw fits about it.

The repairs came to about $700, which sucked but it was $125 less than the estimate. The main guy that worked on Scumbag One sympathized because he got friends in bands and so he gave us a free spot welding on the exhaust and he put some kinda do-hicky on the axle so we could settle for it and not wait for a new one and the brakes they went to town on and were as good as gold.

Killing time in the waiting room I read a children’s book I’ve never read before there called The Treasure by Uri Shulevitz. It was a good children’s book, not all Barney-fied and shit. It was the kind of book that if I ever accidentally have a kid, I’d read him this book. It was about a poor old man named Isaac who has a dream which told him to travel from his town to the Capital City and look under the palace for buried treasure.

“Now and then someone gave him a ride. But most of the way he walked.”

Isaac arrived at the Capital City and went to the palace and found it guarded. He told one guard of his dream and the guard laughed at him and said, “You wore out your shoes because of a dream?” The guard told him, “What if I had a dream that told me to go to the house of a man named Isaac and dig for treasure under the stove? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous for me to do such a thing?”

So Isaac walked back home, and on his journey Shulevitz repeats the line:

“Now and then someone gave him a ride. But most of the way he walked.”

like the man was speaking to me directly, in the waiting room of a garage wondering how far the van’s gonna take us.

Isaac dug under the stove and found the treasure, which is not shown in the illustration as to leave it to the imagination what the treasure may be, which is a cool little trick that’s used from time to time in stories and in movies like Pulp Fiction.

“Sometimes one must travel far to discover what is near.” is the moral of the story.

…

Birmingham is a shithole and Vee said it reminded him of bombed out postwar Germany. Everything is run down and boarded up and garbage and bums everywhere.

The Boiler Room, the venue where we booked a show, was in a neighborhood worse than the one the tow truck guy rescued us from, the kind of neighborhood you look around to see if any stray or intended bullets were whizzing past your head. We had to wait outside in the parking lot of the place for an hour and a half. Andrew the booker was inside the whole time but couldn’t hear us knock because he was in the back. It was a gloomy, eerie feeling in that neighborhood and a high school band was practicing off in the distance and the drums made me feel like we were in unfriendly tribal territory and the natives were becoming restless.

The room was surprisingly nice inside. The cap was 750 and they had flyers for people like the Undead, featuring a guy that used to be in the Misfits of course, for shows coming up there. Andrew informed us that the local band with the draw, Pen-15 cancelled and, after we loaded everything in and set up on stage of course, he gave us 2 options. “Option A.” long pause “You play here to no one.” Long pause. “Option B:” Long pause, us getting antsy. “You go across town to the Nick and see if you can get on that show.” He then made a few calls which filled us and the other band from New Jersey with optimism and we’re thinking, Okay, here’s a guy whose show went to shit because of the local band and he’s trying to hook us up. Swell!.

So down goes our gear and over we go to the Nick. The Nick was a cool little juke joint with a good vibe. The sign was all old time-y and shaped weird and it looked like it’s been there since the 50s. We walked in and explained our situation and hoped for the best. The guy we spoke to, Trent, said “No way.”

“I can’t let you do it. That guy does this at least twice a week, and if he fucks up his booking, I can’t be covering his ass. If you just came in and said, ‘Hey can we play’ without mentioning the Boiler Room, I would’ve let you play. But I’ll buy you a beer.”

Well, this day’s for shit. Lets get drunk. So we drink a beer. And Trent, a very cool guy but not stupid as to let the kind of thing described above happen, bought us a few more – “Oops! I accidentally opened a beer – who’s lucky day is it?” and he did that 8 or 9 times. The band that was playing the Nick that night were insanely generous and sympathetic to us. They gave us $75 out of their own pocket! Not to mention bought us some beers. I was blown away by their kindness, and it put me in the best mood I’d been in since I don’t know when. It was as though, right then and there at the Nick in Birmingham, Alabama, that our luck did a 180. You could almost feel it rotating. There we were in a run down, ghetto city with a broken down van and a broken down show but we walked away with $75 and a damn good buzz.

We drove out of Birmingham that night on to Mississippi. These are the states that all the bands tell you about getting pulled over, getting searched, just because you look funny. Thank God we weren’t going through Louisiana. We pulled into a rest stop and I was so drunk and confused because the place was so nice that it looked like we were parked in the back of some bank, and I had to piss SO FUCKING BAD. So I decided the trees needed some watering, and it was one of those pisses when you’re out in public that you wish you could’ve waited to be inside because it was looooong. The mulch around the tree I watered was floating. I went back into the van and it so happened that a Mississippi State Trooper was there and watching me drain the main vein from down below near the proper bathrooms, and I saw him peering up at me like he wanted to give me the pistol whuppin’ of a lifetime. Vee came out of the proper bathroom and he stopped and the trooper said to him, “You tell that boy –“ you know how cops and military guys from the South say boy like it has 2 syllables “- that there’s women and children about and we don’t appreciate that sort of behavior around here.” Well excuuuuse me! They don’t like that around there? Well hell! They love that shit up North! We can piss all over the place up there! The womens and chillins come out in droves to see men piss! What’s with you Mississippians?

Well that was a close call and like a little pussy I apoligized to everyone for almost getting us in trouble. We pulled out and headed up US 78 North. About a mile down the road we hear a si-rene and see those patriotic red, white and blues in the rearview. We’re quietly praying to God in Heaven that it’s just Buford T. Justice chasing down Burt Reynolds and Sally Field and getting mighty hungry for that roach in the ashtray. It got closer and closer and Nick Peterson, a fine roadie indeed, who was driving slowed as tension built, closer….CLOSER….and it’s so close I start going from panic to cool, dealing with cops mode as not to look nervous and suspicious…. PHEW!! Only an ambulance. God bless America.

We stopped at a truckstop a few more miles down the road and parked there and slept a few hours. It was a scary place as one might expect a truck stop in Mississippi to be. I could feel the eyes burning me with super redneck freak-seeking vision as my drunken ass entered the store to purchase a sausage egg and cheese biscuit. I locked the doors to the van before sleeping so none of the large population of homosexual truckers would get any ideas.

Pit Stop in Memphis

Nick Peterson, a fine roadie indeed, and I awoke and we got back on the road. We passed Tupelo, the birthplace of Elvis on the way to Little Rock via Memphis, the deathplace of Elvis. I was drinking out of a Pepsi can with Elvis on it, so Pepsi could jump on the commemoration bandwagon on the 25th anniversary of his death which happened just 11 days earlier (the anniversary, not the death). As we rode past the lush green of Mississippi, I thought of Elvis how tragic it was to have his image bought and sold just like the American flag and how tragic his life was and the life of this country is. Elvis died of pills and pressure and having to live up to a certain image and wondering whether what he was doing was sincere or a fake. When I think about it, that’s pretty much the same thing American is dying of now. So I made up a song on US 78 on the stretch of highway that’s the road from Elvis’s birth to his death and I’ll keep the song in my head until it gets good enough up there to sing it down here. I doubt I’ll ever record that thing or even bring it into any band.

Memphis was a bit of a shithole from the vantage point we saw it and for the brief moment we were there. There were all kinds of little run down rib joints and Grain Fed Catfish joints so it had it’s charm. We missed the turn to Graceland but we found Sun Studios and Nick Peterson, a fine roadie indeed, took a picture out the driver’s side window and we got the hell out of there. Traffic was hell there and it took us too long to get back on the highway.

Little Rock, AR
Tues 8/27/02 @ White Water Tavern

We got to the home of former president William Jefferson Clinton and found the White Water Tavern which was back behind railroad tracks and not really in any sort of business or entertainment district, which is cool because it gives it kind of a neighborhood tavern vibe. You had a good view of the capitol building there and not long after we pulled up a guy with grey hair and a beard and crooked teeth came up and started talking to us. He was a slightly wacky, witty old stoner who looked like he hasn’t stopped partying since the 60s and he smoked with us and told us about playing flute in a Jimmy Buffet Cover Band, which he announced in a geeky effeminate voice connoting the fact that he knows it’s a cheesy outfit but it pays so that he doesn’t have to work regular jobs much. Less shame in that than in most American jobs.

Overheard at the bar around 6 pm: “Willie Nelson said he only smokes Arkansas dope!”
”RAZORBACKS!!!”

We played for tips on a Tuesday and sold only one 7 inch but the atmosphere of the place and the people made it a good night. Stayed at the guy-who-set-up-the-show-TJ’s house and hung out with him and his friends, listening to records and having conversations about politics, music and all that shit. They had a book of Charles Bukowski’s poetry there that I was perusing. He’s rowdy and “rowdy is good,” said Sherman Alexie in an email to cartoonist Derf. I think he might just be my new guy to read. I’ve been looking for a new author – I go through phases of authors, mostly dead – it’s great to read and listen to and look at the art of dead guys because when you begin to admire living artists there’s an off chance you might meet them and find out how much of an asshole they really are and it’ll foul up the whole experience. My last guy was Mark Twain (dead) and before that it was Vonnegut (still alive and has a new commercial out) and before that it was probably Walt Whitman (dead) or Allen Ginsberg (died in ‘98, was it?) - one of them ingenious queers. Nick Peterson, a fine roadie indeed, is the other reader in our caravan and he was telling me about Bukowski (dead) and then there was his book at TJ’s house as though the guy was introducing himself to me. I’m cracking the 3rd book by him now as I type.

We finally got hot showers the next morning which put us all in a good mood for the long trip to Oklahoma on I-40 and that’s all for now.

Next time: Switchblade Rumble at the Bowlin’ Alley (that’s a song by Vee’s side project, “The Rockin Daddy Cats”, the Most Generic Rockabilly Band of All Time), Dallas Ain’t as Shit-Suckin’ as the Cowboys, and GEARFEST in Austin