Adios, Motherfucker Page 5

  “Ah, crap. I remember this now. I went to the other place. Then the ambulance came because I was spurting blood all over the Dunkin’ Donuts. From my . . . this.”

  “Arm.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ah! Hence you never came back from Death’s with the fromage Satan promised Psycho Dan you were bringing.”

  “You mean Dan?”

  “Psycho Dan now. Turns out he’s got a bit of a drug problem—a ‘no drugs’ problem, actually. Picked up the fridge and chucked it through the wall.” Mink shook the last granules from the sugar bag into his cup and tasted. He whinnied like a horse, a declaration the cup was at an acceptable level of criminality. He took a small sip. “But hey!” he said, dumping himself a shot of Pepto. “At least the gig was good.”

  My memory was still a gathering gloom, but I could recall two things about the previous evening. Landing flat on my back with nothing in my field of vision but the huge, glowing, Citgo sign in Kenmore Square—that master switch of Bostonian civic pride, and a tall man in a blue suit firing mechanized profanities at me through a device he held to his larynx. The sum told me three things: that we had played the Rathskeller, that I had likely left the building under some power other than my own, and that we had not been paid. “Doesn’t feel like it was good,” I said.

  “Well. You know,” Mink said, starting a new cup, having drained the first, “‘good’ is a funny word.”

  6

  SECONDARY EDUCATION

  “And there’s nothing left to learn, You’ve gone four years and you feel burned. Drop out.”

  —The Unband, “Drop out”

  The Vulva was a rusted, brown, 1970 Volvo that Eugene got for a hundred dollars off a guy who grabbed the money and ran. It fit all of our gear and the engine ran all right; the interior however looked like it had been scavenged by methhead Jawas. Most of the paneling was gone, wires were taped in place or they dangled, and there was no floor panel at all behind the passenger’s seat, just road. The car was a relic from the seat-belt-optional era, and riding in the back you had to keep your wits about you or else have your leg chewed off by Route 9, whipping along like a band saw ten inches away. I was back there en route to a gig in the dead of winter, bungeed in with the amps and guitars, getting pelted with filthy ice and slush coming up off the road at eighty miles an hour, my extremities anesthetized on the edge of frostbite, when the remaining six inches of bent, rusted chassis behind the driver’s seat wobbled, caught the road, and sparked off behind us.

  We pulled up to the gig, a pub between a psychic and a terminal Chinese takeout in a commercial strip in the tobacco fields of Western Massachusetts. Inside, one hammered local guy in a CAT hat and the bartender. As we set up on the small stage—plugged things in, then unplugged them, stared at them, then plugged them in again—the bartender turned up the volume on the TV another notch every time we tested or tuned something, and at our preliminary power chord the CAT hat guy yelled, “AFTA THE GAME!” and pointed at the television, tuned to jai alai, a sport played like raquetball, using a long scoop thing instead of a racket. It’s only played in Bridgeport, Connecticut; Miami, Manilla, and Tron. We waited it out, shot pool. The CAT hat guy left when he couldn’t pretend to be interested in jai alai anymore, and the bartender offered us our twenty-five-dollar guarantee to not play. We played, then spent our guarantee at the bar.

  I was in school out in the Berkshires, the forested mountains on the New York border. Deer, bears, and Yankee hicks who glared at you in the village. It was a good school, an experimental one, I was there early admission, arranged in part by my high school’s administrative staff, subsequent to our agreement that my leaving would be best for all parties. I was on a delicate academic probation, eating Smack ramen out of a coffeepot, skimming communist newspapers, playing in a cover band with my roommate, studying sitar, having succinct but formative relationships with women, chugging mushroom tea, and wandering around the local peacock farm—getting what’s known as a higher education. Matt, Mink, and Eugene were at UMass, in Amherst, an hour and change east on the Pike. They would drive out and we’d play in the tiny Student Union at my school, when the building wasn’t occupied by student sit-ins demanding “peace” or some other abstraction, like “better” vegan meal options. Sometimes Eug would come to pick me up in the Vulva (having relieved itself of a door, a bumper, headlight, slowly suiciding), maybe spend a day or two—between his dreadlocks and casual nudism, on the ultra-progressive campus Eug was welcomed as a tribal head-of-state—then we’d boot east on the Pike to UMass, and play there.

  The University of Massachusetts campus is a teeming city, with smokestacks, an independent transit system, students housed in skyscrapers with higher population densities than Tokyo, all hemmed in by farmland—tobacco, famously; when hanging in sheets in the backroads barns in summer the whole area smells like heaven would, if there were one. Mink lived just off-campus, in a minimally furnished house with his guitar and amp and indeterminate roommates; Matt and Eug lived in a place called Butterfield, a coed dorm with its own dining commons. Everything about the dorm was anomalous; a rogue state, or a pirate ship. In fact a flagpole on the roof flew the Jolly Roger.

  Band practices in Matt’s room, with amps and drums on top of, around, and wedged between bunks and desks, were usually open affairs. People always stopped by, wedged themselves in, too, passed joints around, facilitated hands-free bong hits for us. For a gig we might cram the amps and drums into the hallway, at one end of a Slip’N Slide covered in shampoo and Crisco, naked, magic mushroom-stuffed bodies flailing into the kick drum all night, orgies going in the steam-filled bathrooms at the other end. We played the monthly recital held in the dining room with the tables pushed back and the lights out known as a “coffee house”; free-for-alls where Deadheads drifting around on LSD and mosh pits were not mutually exclusive. (Matt and I had been splitting the singing, and it was somewhere in here I decided I’d rather not be obligated to any fixed spot. There was too much going on elsewhere in the room.) Given our tendency to make up songs based on our immediate surroundings, this was fertile ground for us. We followed Matt down a lysergic rabbit hole one night as he tried to stop downspiraling by making up a two-chorder that went from the fastest tempo we’d ever played to the slowest, later titled “I Sure Do Feel Like a Piece of Shit,” the main, nearly sole, lyric. It worked, wresting him from the pull of a bad trip, and, after we shortened it by ten minutes or so, to about ten minutes it became our regular set closer. We were just as open to creative flights when we’d play one of the local bars in Amherst, or take a perilous ride in the Vulva to play a mouldering country inn or hybrid biker-hippie joint in the boonies, pulling out Joe Walsh and Thin Lizzy covers when the crowd got ugly.

  After a semester and a half my GPA hovered just above a Blutarski goose egg, flagrantly violating my academic probation. I tossed the Mr. Coffee, my ball of clothing, and my whiskey-soaked books into a borrowed car, and waved goodbye to my secondary education, in the person of a hippie peace-signing from the little gatehouse—and that, as people say, was that. Exiting the Pike back in Boston I blew past the tollbooth, as usual—plus ça no change.

  I moved home, cut my mop of hair and got a job processing international trades at an investment firm, commuting on the T five days a week, for as long as could have been expected, and, on concluding that little episode about as well as could have been expected, I decided to check out California. Aim for San Francisco, maybe land somewhere else. A change of scenery was the plan. I wasn’t about to tempt the Fates by getting any more detailed than that. If the band thing was going to work out, it would work out. A band that couldn’t transcend distance, jobs, college, hiatuses, and everything else was just a regular band, and not worth doing.

  Right on time I came into a Buick, a 1980 Century, sedan, light blue, low miles, something a Mafia soldier would drive. A thing of beauty. I added busts of Jesus decals on the headlamps, Lights of the World with high-beams, said my goodbyes (�
��nevermore,” to the crow), and exited.

  On my way out of town I stopped in at the liquor store to see Mink. A combination of restlessness at the end of the semester and student loan thugs had driven him back to Boston, where he was working on his rock opera, and employed at the packie Crimes managed—an extraordinary situation. His move was discussed in terms of the band about as much as his initial membership in the band—not at all. Almost nothing about the band was discussed, per say, only done, or not done. The Tao of Un was long established. I told Mink I’d call soon, and drove off with enough booze in the trunk to open a bar.

  I swerved in at UMass to see Matt and Eugene. A night turned into a week. When it was time I peeled out of the lot clearing campus parking tickets off my windshield with the wipers, heading west.

  When I got on the highway it was getting dark. I didn’t know how many miles I’d put behind me but I figured I’d do better with a fresh start, in daylight. I pulled off at the next exit and found a parking lot. I had a few cognacs out of the trunk and found a tab of LSD in my jacket pocket, folded into a piece of paper on which someone had written, “Adios!” The tab had Mickey Mouse printed on it, waving. Can’t be traveling cross-country with that sort of thing.

  A gas guzzler, sure, but a major plus with a giant, rambling, land yacht like a Buick is that when you need to sleep you can really stretch out, especially on the hood. Which is where I woke up the next morning, with a parking ticket under my face. A five-dollar meter violation, payable to “Town of Northampton.”

  7

  THE OLD HOTEL

  What you first noticed about Northampton, Massachusetts, meandering hungover up Main Street after waking up on the hood of your Buick with a parking ticket under your face, was that it was nice. A nice town. Historic architecture. Lively commerce. Visible regard for the creative arts—bookstores, art supply, loose cigarettes for a nickel from an actual tobacconist. People smiled at you. Not for nothing was the place subtitled “Paradise City” on the road sign.

  Further up and further in, behind the commie-vegan-spiritualist coffee shop, an anarchist had tagged a wall with a Circle-A and misspelled “anarchy” (no h: Anarcy!), across from an alley where someone had scrawled “One World” above a Mercedes-Benz logo where they’d clearly intended a peace symbol. A row of Harleys was in front of an ice cream shop, bikers loitering with coffee and double scoops, saying things like, “I ain’t sayin’ your feelings are invalid but I don’t feel I’m being fuckin’ heard, man.” Up and down the street women were holding hands with other women—diesel dykes, lipstick lesbos, butches, LUGs, muffers of all shapes, sizes, and denominations, in numbers you ordinarily wouldn’t see outside of an organized event or demonstration, and the main, four-way intersection looked like an out-of-control dress rehearsal for a Monty Python sketch. In the stream of crossing academics, restaurant workers, and professional junkies, a man wearing a retro Sherwood Forest feather cap smoking two cigarettes at once kicking his legs straight out in front of him in a Prussian Stechmarsch crossed paths with a hippie transvestite riding loopily through on a Victorian bicycle; a burly senior in a watchcap with an improvised badge on it waved a Maglite around and shouted orders at an ancient, runty woman in a housecoat who told him where he was welcome to stick it, and flipped him off: “Asshole!” while all that time, a loud, incessant cuckoo-bird sound was emanating from somewhere not immediately obvious, timed to the walk signal, presumably to alert any sightless townspeople in the area that the peanut gallery was on the move, watch out. No, standing on Main Street Northampton at midday trying to work out whether you were still tripping on acid was a waste of time.

  Across from the train tracks that run north-south through downtown, past the benumbed barber stropping his straight razor under an old-timey placard that read Never trust a man who won’t take a drink and the shop that sold formalwear for cockatoos, was an old railroad hotel called the Bay State. Two hazardous-looking balconies spanned the front, and at the top of the place a square of masonry set into the brick had “1892” chiseled into it, the date of the building’s erection. Safe to assume that any after that hadn’t been recent.

  Inside, the expected Stygian must, wood paneling, bad carpeting, and melancholic oil portraits. The requisite Sad Clown looked suicidal and drunk, the Happy Clown homicidal and drunk. A portrait of a cadaverous waiter who looked beyond drunk, and like he might have corrected a child or two with an axe. Lining the top of the wall above the bar was a gallery of small, carved nautical heads: fishermen, sailors, captains, all piratical, and drunk. Dry-drunk Windsor chairs, hungover pendant lamp—the room had an air of boundless, metaphysical, inebriation. As did the two men at the bar, in their late fifties, sixties maybe, obvious fixtures. One, Ron, the owner-proprietor, was half-soused on Bud Light, and the other, Larry, an ultra-sardonic Paul Lynd downing tumblers of uric-looking liqueur, was an accountant who handled Ron’s financials, at least. The bartender was a younger woman. She was friendly, and generous, but thought I ought to be drinking somewhere else, for my own good. Said as much. I was fine right there, though. I had a couple of whiskeys with them at the bar, and when I learned there was a room available upstairs I paid cash for several months in advance and forgot all about California.

  The hotel was three floors of shell-shocked vets of various wars, some military; base-functioning alcoholics, ex-patients of the mental hospital up the hill, all men, except Gretchen, the den mother at the top of the stairs, who could stop a knife fight with a look. They were all, Gretchen included, casualties of the System, all systems—some you’d never heard of, plenty that didn’t exist—and they were all living off several. Section 8 vouchers, disability checks, duplicitous VA programs. There was plenty of the usual three-penny chaos: the customary drunken tumbles down the stairs, drinking-related fires, wet-brained feuds, DTs, flashbacks, dissociative episodes, terminal-sounding yet never-ending coughing fits, exploding colostomy bags, indiscriminate urination, Antabuse-induced vomiting, bupropion panic, cardiac events, antique weapon injuries, cigarette thievery, and certainly no dearth of pantsless ranting in the hall. But between the obsessive behaviors, soup kitchen serving times, and the myriad bureaucracies of assisted living, there was a core of anesthetized routine, and a good deal of the time the hotel upstairs was quiet.

  My room, number 1, was a corner double furnished with a card table, a recliner, a bed, improvised shelves, miscellaneous accent pieces I found down in the basement. A couple hundred square feet of down-and-out, Dickensian flat, with a breathtaking liquor cache. The heating pipes that ran floor-to-ceiling through all the rooms in the hotel were cockroach highways, and every part of the building creaked and banged, a veritable symphony of dereliction with every footfall. Nicotine stains overpowered layer after layer of paint, up to a muddy waterline that broke on all the walls about six inches down from the crown molding. Ron did have moments of clarity as a landlord, and the place wasn’t half as verminous as Shaw’s or Northampton Lodging, the nefarious wino lairs across the tracks. My room had been freshly carpeted just before I moved in. An aggro vet who lived down the hall noticed this one day when I’d left my door open and said, “Oh—pahdin’ me, ya highness,” rolling his hand.

  Except for the floorboards and the simulcast from Saratoga, the Tap Room—as the bar downstairs was called—was silent as the crypt, and seemed caught in a time loop. All day, every day: Ron, morose on his stool at the corner of the bar working through his daily case of Bud Light and playing Keno, whatever that involves—apathy and a golf pencil, basically. Larry chain-consuming Merit Ultras and his Galliano. And the mute, slight chef lurked—pleasantly, but lurked—sucking down Pepsi instead of whatever he used to suck down (he looked like a Bacardi man) and Basic 100s, stepping into the kitchen to make something à la king for the bridge club twice a month on Tuesdays. The bartender came in nights, and she’d close the place early sometimes, when there were no customers, and Ron and Larry had called it a day.

  We had played a couple of open
-mic nights around town as the Unknown Band, wearing grocery bags with eyeholes on our heads, after the Unknown Comic, but setting up a proper gig in Northampton was proving to be more difficult than expected. It was a small town, and insular. I was working on Ron to let the Unband play in the dining room, and would bring up the idea with him every so often, usually around 1 P.M., when he was seven or eight beers into his drill and upcycling from lunch. That dead end conversation got sucked into the time loop along with everything else. Until one day Ron hissed as usual, but then said, “Talk to Mal.”

  Mal was Mal Thursday, who appeared in the Tap Room one day wearing a turtleneck under a blazer and wayfarers, like a pickpocket in a French film. He had a small record label that put out albums and seven-inches from local acts, and he’d been negotiating with Ron in regard to booking regular gigs in Ron’s un-dined-in dining room. When Ron relented, Mal got what he called the “Bay State Cabaret” going, an occasional event at first, eventually three bands per night, Thursday through Saturday. It caught on quickly.

  Northampton was a natural midpoint between Boston and New York, but until now the only venues in town were medium and high capacity, and low flexibility. The Bay State held about a hundred-fifty people, just right. Before long there was a built-in crowd, at least a handful of people drinking there every night. Any unknown band rolling into town in a shitty van wouldn’t be wasting their time.

  Northampton was already high-yield as college towns went. On any given day you might walk past the original Batmobile with a parking ticket on it (for Lovely Marcia Meter Maid a local comic book magnate’s trophy car might as well be just another Subaru held together by bumper stickers and extension cords, just another Buick with a guy in a bellbottom suit asleep on the hood), quick-step past alt-rock primogenitors in the natural foods market—Sonic Youth in the avocados, Sebadoh in the tomatoes, Dinosaur down by the watermelons; grab a few snacks off a catering table as you strolled through a major Hollywood film set, turn the corner and see a famous method actor being methodically tossed out of a bar, nothing to do with the film. Half the people you passed on the street were artists of some kind or other, half of those were in at least one band, and the crosswalks were practically gridlocked with celebrated novelists. (I came inches from mowing down Kurt Vonnegut one day—and so it nearly went.) As the action at the Bay State ramped up, the town was in the midst of a creative surge.