EMAIL HIM

His Philosophy

So we were driving all night through Texas heading west from Austin. In the morning we stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. I mean really NOWHERE, just desert all around and maybe some small moutains in the distance. My lips were chapping from the dry air so I took a drink of sink water that was sandy tasting. I don’t like to drink gas station sink water but sometimes you get thirsty and don’t want to spend $2 on a bottle of water that’s probably not much cleaner anyway.

We drove along the Mexican border down on I-10, nearing El Paso. There was a family of Mexicans pulled over on the side of the road which is probably a fairly common sight down there. They might have been Mexican Indians. When we got down in the West Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl. Not really. That’s an old Western song that Vee was singing. I think Conway Twitty might’ve covered it on his greatest hits album he sold on TV. We got the oil changed and tossed some football and found a CiCi’s Pizza to eat at. Buffets are the shit. You can pay 3.99 at CiCi’s and eat about $25 worth of pizza and not have to eat for at least 24 hours. I don’t think they have them up in PA yet, but there’s one in Durham.

Then driving out into Arizona more desert and little trailers and broken down cars and rusty old shacks on the sides of the road. Multiple billboards for The Thing? every five miles that didn’t tell you what The Thing? was and it got me all curious. But of course we stopped where The Thing? was and it was nothing but a gas station and a gift shop with a fast food place attached to it and there was this big door in the back of the gift shop behind where The Thing?, um, lurked, and you had to pay a dollar to see The Thing? and I’d like to meet the guy that invented The Thing? so I could shove The Thing? up his ass.

It was storming in Arizona and I’ve never really seen a storm in the desert before but everything is so flat and vast that you can see miles and miles of storm and all kinds of colors and odd cloud formations that I was thinking and faintly hoping were going to turn into tornados. We saw two rainbows which made the sky a weird color like you’re looking through yellow lenses, which rainbows do, but then one vanished and the other receeded into a single spectral, rectangular strip which shown a weird beam of light with that yellow-lens effect down on a single spot of desert. It looked like one of those magnetic beams from an alien spacecraft like in the movies. I was hoping it was all a sign from the gods for good things to come. But I’m more inclined to believe it was just light reflecting on clouds.

Phoenix, AZ
9/3/02 @ Jugheads w/ the Spiders

We arrived in Phoenix around 10 o’clock p.m. on Monday, the night before our show. Luckily we hooked up with a guy that went to IUP named Adam Kerr, who knows John Flude because they’re both from Hollidaysburg,. Adam Kerr was a KDR brother, and him and his brothers used to host punk rock shows at his house. The first incarnation of Captain Bigwheel featuring Matt T. and myself played a show there with 5 Knuckle Shuffle and we were horrible. Drunk. Sloppy.

Thank God we hooked up with an air conditioned place to crash because Phoenix is fucking HOT! We would have been finished if we had to sleep in a van anywhere around there. The air was cool driving through Arizona, probably because of the storm but once we got close to Phoenix it was like the goddess of hairdryers was blowing her Conair 5000 through the windows of Scumbag One. And this was at 10 at night. In the daytime there it was 115, and people die all the time out there from heat exhaustion and dehydration.

Scottsdale is where Adam’s pad was, a town east of Phoenix, which is a town filled with wealthy people and the people that sell cars to them. Adam sells cars. We went out through the clean streets and passed car dealership after car dealership and shopping malls. It’s the kind of place where it’s impossible to live without a car. In fact most of the West is like that. Spread out. Adam was saying that back in PA you’d go 70 miles from home and you’d be kissing mom goodbye and carrying boxes of food out the door. But out in Phoenix a 70 mile drive is nothing – a day to day occurance for some people depending on what the job calls for.

We went out that night to a couple of new, clean bars. The first was a laid back little joint with Picasso-ish paintings and jazz playing and Adam bought us a round of Fat Tire’s, which is a good damn beer they have out West. Then we went to this bigger joint occupied by richy-type college kids and their princesses. We sat down and shot the shit and just hung out even though I probably looked like a bum to these people in my cut off shorts and ungroomed and haven’t been in a shower for a couple days, but fuck them I had a good time listening to Adam talk about the ins and outs of the car dealing business and how the customers can be shits and how easy it is to get fired, and after we left Phoenix we were hoping he still had his job.

Next day we went to downtown Phoenix and ate lunch at Alice Cooper’s Cooperstown, which is a cross between the Hard Rock Café and your average ordinary sports mega-bar. We walked in and the hostess was very polite and said “How many?” while grabbing some menus. Only thing that was odd about it was she had spooky Alice Cooper paint around her eyes. I tried not to laugh. Alice made all his employees wear that. We looked around and the golfing bastard made all his employees wear that shit. Menu items include: Megadeth Meatloaf, The Ryne Sangburger, and Alice Cooper’s Big Unit, which was a 2 foot hot dog with some chili and loads of other shit on it. Vee had that phallic frankfurter and “could only fit half of it in me.” We looked at some of the memorabilia: some shit guitars signed by Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana and a junk strat signed by Paul McCartney that, I noticed, wasn’t even strung left-handed! He never played that guitar! Authenticity not a big proirity in El Ristorante de Alice. Mya mya mya.

Show that night was everything you would expect from a Tuesday show – barely anyone there and the people who were just there for a drink or three. They had a $2 black and tan special but we were getting them for free after a while, and who gives a damn how many people are there when you got the greatest beer concoction known to man for your dry desert lips? We met the Spiders who we didn’t know would be playing that night but we knew we were on a show with them in LA. They’re like a mixture of garage rock and alterna-weirdness from the great city of Austin that works well and it’s entertaining. They had a souped up camper some old lady gave them for FREE, the lucky sonsabitches. We opened the show and played okay but we had to run our own sound and the mics weren’t working. But Nick Peterson, a fine roadie indeed, reversed the polarity and we had it going. Hell yeah. Adam, the only person we pulled for that show, got drunker’n hell and he was making me crack up all red-faced and loud. Just like me. We left for L.A. that night and Adam was still there and I don’t think we’ve heard from him since. I wonder how many cars he sold the next day. If he’s lucky Alice Cooper might’ve shown up and bought a Lexus so he could speed passed those big Arizona cacti you see more of in movies than in real life on his way to the golf course, with clubs in tow.