Adios, Motherfucker Read online

  MARCH 4

  Steve drove straight through to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, parked us, and went to sleep in the back while we checked in at the local record store, for what that was worth (2 CDs, $12). When we got back to the RV there was a cop next to it saying we had to move. Didn’t want to wake Steve, so Matt drove us away. He tried to parallel-park us somewhere else and a rear panel got caught on a parking meter. Eug and I tried to dislodge it by hand but couldn’t, so Matt continued reversing, slowly mangling the rear panel of the RV, until the meter burst open and change geysered all over the sidewalk. People passing by scrambled over it.

  Local 506. Whoever feels like it dances in a cage onstage. Sold a few T-shirts, gave more away. Closed out the bar, but didn’t get off the barstools until almost dawn.

  MARCH 1

  Atlanta. The Clermont is a semi-residential hotel with a dive bar on the first floor where bands play. It’s the Dixie Bay State, all the stops removed. Calling it a strip club is misleading; it is, but it’s a regular bar first. An establishment you might see in the old West, where you couldn’t afford to specialize too much. Blondie, the chocolate matriarch, fifty-plus if she’s a day, with the legs of Tina Turner, practically killed Steve by suffocating him between her boobs during a lap dance. Bond film henchwoman lethality (“Boobjob”). Drink tickets were unnecessary. Later we hosted a party in the RV. A merciless downpour in the wee hours. Eugene stripped and ran out there with some soap, and showered in the rain.

  Back in Atlanta, played the club that isn’t the Clermont tonight. A downtown that feels like the boonies. At the end of the night the guy flat-out refused to pay us our guarantee—$50. He didn’t give a reason, and “reminded” us that this is his club and he can do whatever he wants. He should have taken into account that a band traveling in a motor home has access to a tank of human waste, and a hose by which to distribute it. He will next time.

  MARCH 2

  Louisiana. An old theater near the university. Accommodations included a handwritten meal voucher for the food shack across the road specializing in alligator. The sign out front had a cartoon of an alligator doffing a top-hat and a cooked chicken with an equals sign between. As if the place is run by Dadaists.

  I was on the couch in our dressing room poking at the breaded alligator nuggets, the takeout box translucent from grease, and had just finished smoking a roach someone left lying around, a creeper, I could tell, when a young rep from the local radio station knocked and came in and asked would I sign this denim vest. The vest was donated to the radio station by a rock singer from a famous band—I thought he’d said the singer from Three Dog Night so I said, “Yeah, imagine your penis just exploding one day,” imagining that with all due horror. The kid had no idea what I was talking about. I guess I’d heard him wrong, it was some other singer. The vest already had a handful of signatures and sloganish notes, bands who’d passed through recently, the kid said. I recognized a few of the names. “We’re going to raffle it off for charity,” he said. Denim vests branch off into two distinct sartorial categories, heavy metal and all-American, and when he handed me the vest it looked to me like a typical Springsteen variety, and I signed accordingly. Few people would recognize my name even if it were legible, of course, so I wrote “The Unband: Born in the You S.A.” Then I drew a tongue in a cheek, which looked like nothing. The rep looked at me, unsure. I explained. “Because see, this isn’t a metal one,” I said, indicating the vest.

  He nodded, “Um. Yeah. It’s denim.”

  I could tell he wasn’t catching on, so below what I’d already done I wrote, “For the People, By the People,” to clarify whatever it was I was getting at. That didn’t look right to me, nor did it clarify anything, so I Sharpied out the indefinite articles. “For people, by people.” This made more sense yet meant less. Too much less, I decided. So I blacked out that whole phrase and wrote, finally, “People Music” and began drawing a Confederate flag. The rep tugged the vest away from me, just as I noticed I’d misspelled people. Twice.

  “Okay, okay! That’s enough!” he said. He walked out shaking his head staring miserably at the vest, looking upset and confused. I went back to my alligator. The cartoon is right. It does taste a little bit like chicken. Tedium. But gamier.

  Showtime the theater filled with ten-year-old drunks, violent rednecks, and English majors. The other band on the bill, Becky Sharp, is in rotation on an MTV show, called 120 Minutes, that plays the latest alternative music videos and is at least a hundred minutes too long. Becky Sharp are good guys, decent band. Eug liked them especially. A pretty (minus the walleye) bottle blonde dressed in a nurse’s uniform parked herself in front of the stage and commenced an unremitting critical squint for the duration of our performance. She was already in our dressing room when we returned to it after the show, draped over the couch, as salacious as she could manage. Naughty nurse was the idea, but not the strip-o-gram fetish getup. Scrubs, with Tweety Bird on them. I hoped she was in pediatrics but also hoped she wasn’t.

  “Did someone send you here?” Steve asked, skeptical. “Maybe,” she said. Before anybody could question further, she said, getting a laugh, “Doesn’t your band ever practice? Y’awl’s band needs to practice if you want to make it, you know.”

  “Make what?” Eugene said.

  “Make it as famous. Don’t you want to get famous?”

  “Do you?” Matt asked.

  “Oh, I’m already a legend in my own mind,” she said, barely getting it out before she erupted into crazy, octave-jumping laughter, for way too long. A hyperactive kid bounced into the doorway, visibly relieved when he saw the girl. He said something to her about her not wandering about on her own but she pretended he wasn’t talking. “Oh, I get it,” she said. “It’s cool to be all drunk all the time and be all, ‘ah jus play my g’tar and drink mah booze.’ Y’awl pretend like y’awl don’t care.”

  “Don’t care about what?”

  “Don’t care about me,” she said. No one engaged. She laughed and said, “Your fans, I mean. Not me personally.”

  We laughed: “fans.”

  From the doorway her friend invited us to a place where his brother tended bar. Made a good case for it. On the way, bouncing along dirt roads in the RV, the nurse, a phlebotomist she told us—“Ah take people’s blud,” she said—asked our names again, to get them straight. We told her, she repeated them, pointing at each of us accordingly, then she did that again. She was not right in the head. A joint appeared and the phlebotomist’s eyes saucered. She brought out her crazed laugh, amped up this time. When she was finally able she said, “Y’awl usin deruuggs? Y’awl jus keep gettin’ stupider, I swayar!” She pointed at the joint. “Jesus hates that.” Not to be confused with Jesús, who sold it to us back in New York.

  The bar was good. Crowded, unexpectedly urbane.

  The kid, the nurse’s chaperone, pulled me aside. Being that I was a stranger and he’d probably never see me again, and he figured I’d “been around” he said, he sherwood preshate my opinion on some family issues a friend of his was having, then proceeded to unload the most unthinkable, sick, backwoods shit I have ever heard or ever hope to.

  I took a breather and was out by the RV having a smoke, thinking about kudzu, how people hide bodies in it because it grows so quickly, when the phlebotomist stepped out from behind the RV into a diagonal of moonlight and said she and I needed to be married as soon as possible so she could protect me from the “undying worm.”

  MARCH ?

  New Orleans. Show here was days ago. No one knows what the hell is going on. Steve’s been an enormous help, above and beyond driving. He’s done a little touring with his band, learned a few things, and learning more now, fast. The owner of the club we played here convinced us to stick around and party for a few days, then play again later in the week, so we’re doing that. Last night I did a “twisted,” someone said, parasol dance around Harry Connick as he played. In a theater—tickets, seats, ushers. I just walked in and got on st
age I guess, no idea where I got the parasol. He laughed and people applauded. I think. Either last night or the night before Matt got tossed out bodily from the karaoke on the corner of Bourbon Street. Eugene and I were half a block away walking toward the place when he came flying out an open window onto the sidewalk, followed by his Hurricane.

  MARCH ??

  Other bands told us: don’t ever tour in an RV, it’s disgusting. I didn’t buy it. Well, this thing is like a fucking bonobo sanctuary in a nightmare.

  DJ Paisan’s strip club addiction is real. Clinical, maybe. He’s like a junkie. Sweating Steve for another twenty out of petty cash. Couple nights ago he came back all excited from Big Daddy’s, the place with the female lower half on a swing that pokes out onto the street, and said a bunch of the dancers lived in a big house up on St. James, a “stripper mansion,” he said, and that these strippers had invited us to come stay. At this “stripper mansion.” He got us to go with him back to Big Daddy’s. A lubed-up girl wearing only a ball python and white pumps came out and danced to “What a Wonderful World.” She could dance; it was pretty, as these things go. Transcendent, bordering on a tearjerker, if you were as high as I was. Afterward she came straight over to the table and introduced herself, very friendly. She handed a set of house keys to DJ Paisan. After she walked away Paisan kept doing his De Niro face until we agreed he wasn’t full of shit. I couldn’t help wondering where the hell she’d been keeping those keys. Paisan instinctively put them to his nose: negative. He shrugged. “Python, I guess.”

  As for the mansion, it was one. Massive Italianate thing with porches all over the place. Nice girls. All working their way through colleges. Computer science and communications, mostly.

  MARCH 18

  In Texas. Unclear: where in Texas. Clear: no gas, no money for gas. Working on this.

  MARCH 20

  Arrived Austin, Texas. Can barely untangle the past twenty-four convoluted, insane, exhausting hours. Hitchhiking, dealing with this meth head (like trying to get a bird out of the house, flying up into corners, out of reach of the broom), the FedEx guy with empty eye socket who turned out not to be a FedEx guy at all . . .

  One of the festival organizers met us at the sign-in at the convention center (apparently this is not usual) and showed us around the convention hall, introduced us to some people in there (too many, Steve got their cards), then led us upstairs to meet the camera crew. They were shooting an interview with Wayne Kramer (MC5). We talked to him for a good while afterward—he’s exactly as expected, but friendly. Dodgy thing, meeting people you admire, but he was all right. When he left we sat down and did our interview (unsure whether pupils would “read,” so sunglasses on). We finished that and spent a few minutes with Exene (X, admirably crazy) before her interview. The other artist in the movie is a blues guitar hero. Called Johnny something, of course.

  Parked the RV at Emo’s, right outside the front door. Triple-checked, including asking a cop, who said, yes, it’s a legit spot, good until Monday (we’ll see, but so far so good). This is what Eugene calls “TV parking,” pointing out that no one on television ever has to look for parking. Unrealistic, but not unfair—take a guy like Jim Rockford, for example. Guy already gets blackjacked every time he walks into a room.

  Went into a bar next to Emo’s as soon as we woke up. Deserted. No bartender, not a soul in there. We waited for a long time. Really strange so we searched the place, looked in a stockroom, etc. Sat at the bar and waited more since it was dark and cool in there and there was nothing else happening. In comes a drag queen, had to be seven feet with the platforms, having a rough morning. She goes behind the bar, asks what we’re drinking, doing her best. We ordered some Bloody Marys, which is what we were after when we came in. She said, “Comin’ up!” But all she had was vodka, way off-brand stuff, and the dregs of a bottle of Worcestershire sauce that looked like it had been floating in a pond for a month. She dinged open the register, gave me ten, and said, “Honey, run over ’cross the street and get some V8, however much you can get with that.” I headed out and she said, “Oh! And they got them little hot sauce packets in there, you know the ones, they’re by the tacos—get summa those too.” I went and did that. She dumped the bottled ingredients into plastic cups, then one by one tore a corner off the hot sauce packets with her teeth and squeezed every drop of hot sauce out of them, drawing packets through her three-inch press-on nails, as if that’s what they were there for. Then she submerged her index finger in each drink and stirred before handing them to us.

  Found a place that sells cheap Xmas lights. Bought some and strung them along the RV, where we’re maintaining an open-door policy so far.

  MARCH 21

  RV might as well be just another bar on Sixth Street. There was actually a line out the door for a little while yesterday afternoon; people at the back of the line didn’t know what they were in line for (I got in line and asked). And I was asleep in bed this morning when the door opened and a group of fratty-looking dudes bumbled in. After looking around in what is obviously someone’s residential vehicle—pizza scraps, clothing, people sleeping, and seeing me, interplanetary confusion and a girl next to me wearing a football helmet (no idea re: girl, or helmet), one guy in the group goes, “You guys do pitchers?”

  The doc crew happened to come by while I was blowing a fire extinguisher off the roof of the RV, at a parking sign. I spend a good amount of time up there now. Above the fray, but not always.

  Our “showcase” was well-attended—right place right time, but game plan went out the window instantly. Bass fucked off straightaway and we went free-form, me on the mic, bleeding from a head wound, running around screaming, “DOES ANYBODY HAVE A KNIFE! SOMEBODY GIVE ME A FUCKING KNIFE” figuring “to use as a screwdriver to fix the input jack on my bass” was implied. I explained this to Clara later. She moved here from Northampton recently. She said I’d “made it plenty clear I had a screw loose,” but that next time I should “use my words.” Always liked her. Sharp.

  MARCH 22

  Woke up needing air and tumbled out the door of the RV in the usual way, but we’d moved in the night, and instead of the sidewalk in front of Emo’s I found myself in the middle of a busy street of honking cars. I thought for a second that a car had hit me but it was the camera guy from the film crew, pushing me out of the way of a car. They were trying to catch us waking up, to film our “morning routine.” Mornings aren’t that special. Drink a scotch, maybe eat a banana if you have one. Try to figure out where the hell you are.

  9

  UNWELCOME HOME

  We were welcomed, warily, by the Iron Whore. More an overpriced nachos with Arlo Guthrie sort of place, usually. Delivered a sold-out show, boffo bar, overdelivered in the antics and mishaps department. The Bearded Lady (chin-curtain, currently), gay Northampton’s materfamilias, joined us on stage for “Dyke City Theme,” did her act. We informed management about this prior, not sure what they thought we meant by “fire-breathing.” Rhetoric, maybe, instead of giant plumes of actual flame. Broke a mic or two, and the coordinated mass spooge of Silly String (highly flammable, it turns out) from the crowd during the encore made a big mess. Also people say some kid jumped from the balcony, or dove. And so on and so forth and we won’t be back there anytime soon. The Hadley Pub and the Polish-American Club did us for volume, and general rowdiness. Mixing drinks on stage, a la Rat Pack, was frequently cited as a problem, as was house equipment being damaged by the squalls of the flour and confectioners’ sugar in the prop cocaine we slam our faces into every few songs, for comic effect (and a kind of PSA—secretive drug use kills). Eugene’s exhibitionism, though practical for him, was an issue at a couple of venues, particularly when he’d order a drink at the bar, chat with people, etcetera (his stock response: “What. The human wang is a beautiful thing”). It remained unclear whether it was a specific element of our repertoire or some more general objection that got us the boot from Katina’s, the Pub, the Hadley Pub, Amherst College, Smith College,
UMass (Central and Northeast Residential Areas) the Blue Wall, the Holyoke Waterfront, Fat Cats, Divas’ Nightclub, the Tic-Toc Lounge, the Center for the Arts, Ralph’s (banned forever while our first chord was still ringing out), the Half-Cock, Treehuggers’, the Nunnery, Sappho’s on the Hill, Hubba-Hubba Candlepins (both locations), open mike night down at Shenanigan’s, the Town of Ware . . . The list goes on.

  We discovered, however, that we could get away with a Bay State gig in spite of our well-publicized bannishment if we played under another name (usually “Fistah,” Matt’s brainbaby), so long as I wore a disguise. Ron didn’t seem to have a problem with Matt or Eugene performing, though it’s possible he simply didn’t recognize them through his personal fog. I played in Halloween masks, full drag, facepaint, beards, Groucho glasses, ye olde grocery bag on the head, the bedsheet ghost trick worked well. None of this rigmarole fooled anybody for long, only Ron. Every so often something would arouse Ron’s suspicions—such as overhearing multiple conversations at the bar about how The Unband was playing under a different name in the back at that very moment—and he would shove his way into the dining room. After seeing it was only Matt and Eugene . . . and a Space Klansman or a big fluffy bunny, he’d calm down and return to his stool, and his Bud.