Lenny, suddenly hungry, went into the aquarium bank for some fried chicken, tailed by the remaining emo guy, who wanted to do almost anything but that. Meanwhile, outside Matt found and confronted his man.
“Oh, shit! Yeah, man. I got robbed!” said the old man.
“Robbed, you say.”
“That’s right. Took everything. Hard out here, yo. Real hard.”
“All the same, we had a deal, did we not? There’s a principle involved.”
“I told you. I got robbed.”
“Yo,” said a nearby crackhead. “You looking for a rock?”
“Well,” said Matt, “I was under the impression I was purchasing some cocaine from this gentleman here, but our arrangement seems to have gone awry.”
The second crackhead grinned at Matt holding a crack rock in his grill. (Lenny, in view behind in the chicken takeout, was visibly agitated about the status of his order.) Matt produced another ten-spot and the second crackhead spit the rock into Matt’s hand.
“See?” Matt said to the first crackhead. “Now that’s a businessman.”
Lenny—now doing a full-blown Mrs. Robinson, pounding with both fists on the bulletproof order window of the chicken shack—and the panicking emo guy, who was unprepared for any of this, trying to stop him, were starting to draw unwanted attention. As Matt said later, “Things got a little sketchy at that point.” The emo guys who left earlier reappeared, screaming up in a Civic, and Lenny got into it with his box of fried chicken. “See? Whaditellya. No problem.” Matty was collected through a window as they hightailed it.
Sometime before dawn Matt stumbled into the hotel room laughing uncontrollably, and once everyone was awake, produced the thing Crackie had spit into his hand, which might have been a heavily decayed tooth. We fixed up a beer can, smoked the rank pebble out of existence in four hits, and were high for about as many minutes, rolling with laughter as Matt recounted some of the highlights, noted above. Then we tuned the television to one of the dozen evangelists pacing and blabbering at that hour, and hit the hay. I think.
I remember having a booze with Lemmy at the strip club, and being told there was no ice, and that none was expected. My fuzzy recollection ends there, abrubtly for some reason. A cat yanked up by its scruff and chucked into Schrödinger’s box—leaving open the possibility that Matt’s account, in which I was asleep or resting or otherwise occupied at the hotel all night, is true, and Lenny’s version of events, in which I was not at the hotel at all but roaming the shadowlands of Milwaukee accumulating narcotics for, and or with, Lemmy, is also true. This is called quantum indeterminacy. And there’s a hell of a lot of it out here.
16
AN UNBAND ABROAD
On our way into the city Lenny called and told us to meet him at an Irish bar called Molly’s. “The one on Twenty-Third,” he said.
“The Molly’s next to the sandwich place or the Molly’s on the corner.”
“Corner.”
Lenny bought us a round, we clinked it, and he said we were leaving for Europe, we should pack for a month. (Just a figure of speech—there’s only one “pack,” nothing to do with duration, or weather, except in extreme cases.) “You and Fu Manchu are sharing a bus,” he said. Fu Manchu is a ranking chief among Stoner Rock bands. Heavy, fuzzy, laid back. We play them in the van whenever we’re in the desert. “T minus eighteen—no, sixteen hours. I suggest you guys finish these up, get to your appointed couches, and catch some shut-eye. For once.”
We all agreed that was wise, and that we’d do it, too. Lenny left and we met some cops, as you do in Molly’s—anywhere—and closed the place drinking with them. Then we went to Max Fish for a nightcap and one thing led to another. I crept into Ms. Management’s apartment on Third Street on all fours at about seven in the morning, lucky to be alive, and broke in her new rug by sleeping facedown on it. Everyone else was in much deeper shag, saucer-eyed and lockjawed in cabs on the way down to the emergency passport place.
OCTOBER 23
Can’t see two feet in front of your face inside the glass lung at JFK, the smokers’ lounge. No lounge: gas chamber. People on molded plastic chairs wheezing half-visible in the toxic cloud. The vent is a joke, way up in a corner at the far end, and might be just painted on. The woman next to me, from Long Island, talked about her previous flight into London, on the anniversary of Lady Di’s death, at around the time of the accident. The plane circled she didn’t know how many times before landing. “Maybe it was in homage,” I said, with nothing to say. “No,” she said. “It was definitely London.” It’s like breathing dryer lint through a watchcap in there. Woolly.
Cruising altitude now.
Steve’s never been overseas, and is a fast learner but also a Yankee cowboy, which ought to be interesting. When tour parameters were laid out we were all surprised that no one had questioned Fu’s tour manager handling both bands. I understand their tour manager is an experienced professional—tour-managed Van Halen, we hear; that had to have its moments—but by now even we don’t think we should be unsupervised, by a trained eye. Meaning necessarily Steve. Like finding a great mechanic who happens to specialize in the one-of-a-kind, special-edition, goofball-powered pogo stick you happen to ride.
I had a self-sustaining private fantasy—denial, I guess you’d call it—that the no smoking on the plane rule was just something the airline told nonsmokers on the ground to get a break from their claptrap. Once we were up here, surely we’d be able to smoke. Here we are, thirty thousand feet and it’s true: No Smoking. Six hours without a cigarette. I smoke a cigarette before, during, and after everything I do. I smoke two cigarettes before I have what I consider my first cigarette of the day (coffee). I sleep-smoke. I break off toothpicks in the showerhead and smoke between the streams. I smoke while I’m swimming, eating, running, doing sit-ups, having sex, sitting on the toilet, waterskiing, putting up a Christmas tree, painting a chair, smoking a cigar, folding socks, sorting recyclables . . . Night-night tabs can’t kick in soon enough.
Eugene just reminded me it’s my birthday. He always remembers birthdays, by some method unknown to me.
OCTOBER 24 / LONDON
Oh there’s a bustle in your Heathrow, and you don’t know . . .
Collected the baggage without hassle and got breakfast and beer. On my third Winston in England, thumbing through magazines, pleased as hell. Not with the magazines, by being overseas. Where incidentally, the magazines are better.
Went into the parking structure to meet the tour bus. A double-decker, the skylights on top barely a half a foot from the roof of the garage. And it’s—what’s the color? Mauve. Fu Manchu’s tour manager emerged. Alain. Head to toe in black, clinking with backstage crisis equipment: flashlights, keys, caribiners, every pocket in his black fishing vest bulging with anticatastrophe doodads. He supervised a military-style load-up. Luggage into the bus, amps and guitars puzzled into the lower bays with Fu Manchu’s. Clearly he’d been debriefed in some detail because he was already putting his foot down, giving us a look at his boot, next seen on our necks if we’re not careful—Alain’s just doing his job. We’re already half in the bag, doing ours.
The bus is much better than expected. For starters, it exists. (I hear “tour,” a decade of conditioning still pulls up images of Peavys crammed into a shitbox car, the Vulva, usually.) It’s piloted by a beaming Welshman called Brian, who showed us around. The lower floor has two booths on either side with airplane seating for two behind the far one. Kitchenette, and the “WC,” says Brian. Alain pokes his head around the corner and says, “Nobody shits in there. Ever. That crystal?” Very. Learned that lesson well on the RV trips. Stairs with running lights spiral up to the second-floor lounge, a horseshoe couch around a partially collapsible table, media cabinets—TV-VCR, a stereo, stacks of videocassettes and CDs. Alain appears again and says, “You can smoke in here, but only cigarettes, nothing else. Got that?” (Does the SoCal stoner-rock band on the bus got that?) The rest of the second floor is the b
erth, thirteen bunks. The snoozarium of Fu Manchu, who remain invisible in the darkness for now.
Through London following the Thames. Brian threads this bus the size of a sperm whale (purple-sparkle) through streets too narrow for an anorexic on a unicycle, then drops us at a music store for supplies. Through an alley and an empty warehouse, out a metal door, then another metal door, up a flight of stairs to a cramped flute shop, by his greeting a place that Alain frequents. Dusty woodwinds, yellowing sheet music, “The White Cliffs of Dover,” “Jailhouse Rock” . . .
I was “a pain in the ass”—according to everyone—all last week for harping on it but we really ought to have done this part in New York or online before we left. Rather than have the equipment budget kept from us until the last possible second to prevent us blowing it on drugs and alcohol—which I get. But now here we are in the UK, where, as anyone paying knows, everything is prodigiously taxed. Since our equipment budget was calculated based on US prices (oops), it evaporated on contact with two sets of guitar strings and a voltage adapter. Back on the bus Steve borrowed Alain’s brick-size sat phone to call New York for more money. Dialing endlessly, getting the error recording. The three of us went upstairs to pod-up for naptime, along with the yet unseen Fu Manchu.
There will be a curfew every night on this trip. The home office was very clear about our abiding; Alain was clearer still: “We will fucking leave you behind, and that’s it, you’re on your own.” Blew the London curfew straight off, though only by forty-five minutes or so. The bus waited. Maybe because this was our first missed curfew we got a freebie. I have a feeling it had something to do with Brian, who seems to be pulling for us.
During the trip to the channel ferry Steve, Matt, Eug, and I got a card game going. Hearts. Our version involves paper bags over the head, singing, and the principal elements of “punchbuggy.” Alain observed from the other booth. At one point he looked as if he’d been hit with a freeze ray.
OCTOBER 25 / GLASGOW, SCOTLAND
Small club. Capacity one fifty, two hundred, tops. There’s a security barrier to keep the crowd a full five feet back from the stage. I asked what that’s about and Alain said, “Fuckin’ Glasgow is what that’s about.”
Some locals took us out for a drink—in Glasgow, where that means quite a bit. Memory of the evening in pieces from different puzzles: the fixed grin on Eugene (equally happy naked or in a kilt and either way happiest then, and with a philia for redheads), his grinning face against various backdrops—banquettes, flashing lights, a pub brawl, accordion gates on the street. I was on a Vespa for a while, a promotional vehicle courtesy of Absolut, not sure how I was allowed to “test drive” it, or if it was ever in motion at all. A tiny modern art museum (unless it was a graffitied freight elevator), and a very late meal at an upstairs Chinese restaurant that may have already been closed, where something happened that was unusual, for everybody but us.
The Channel crossing was undertaken in the wee hours with the bus shut down in the belly of the ferry. I slept through it alone on the bus in my bunk, sweating from dreams about the price of cigarettes in Europe. Mechanized nightmares, the rhythm of the boat engine spawned a mantra—Ten dollars—Fuck me—Ten dollars—Fuck me—Ten dollars—Fuck me—that I repeated as I was buying cigs in a weird little store—“Ten dollars? Fuck me!”—the attendant responded in turn, “Ten dollars. Fuck you.” Then I noticed a girl near the gas pumps outside. She was in pigtails (“beatitudes,” in the dream’s lingo), wearing a sundress. Hooked over her arm was a wicker basket full of bang-snaps—those paper teardrops filled with gunpowder you get at parades that explode when you throw them against the ground and on floats if you throw hard enough. She was twirling, singing, tossing handfuls of them, little explosions all around the gas pumps. I burst out the door to stop her, just as the pumps flamed, then detonated, and the shock wave slammed me headfirst into the very real roof of my bunk. I saw bangsnaps exploding all around me, unable to determine if I was actually awake until I felt the huge, throbbing, egg burst out of my skull and the door downstairs banged open and someone said we were in France.
I went up on deck and chain-smoked numbly beneath my egg. The docking procedure. Tedious.
On the way to Paris I rode with Brian in the cockpit. The windshield is floor to ceiling almost, the IMAX of bus windshields. Dawn in the countryside, drear and drizzle. We passed a place called Ruby Ridge, where according to Brian the Germans first used poison gas. Killed thirty-three Canadians without firing a shot. The monument there is a staging of the aftermath, trenches with “filthy mannequins tossed about,” he said. I said I knew arty girls in New York whose apartments looked like that.
Went upstairs for more of this delicacy called “kip,” the Brit-English way of saying you’ll probably be woken up sooner than you’d like. A common sleep schedule has developed on the bus but I’m not on it. I haven’t seen anyone in the touring party for two days, apart from running into Alain in the galley, pre-dawn. He said nothing as he blearily drained a box of orange juice, looked at me as he crushed the box, then disappeared back to his bunk. It’s as if I’m on a one-on-one World War II informational jaunt led by a jolly Welshman.
Woke at two in the afternoon. The bus was dark, silent, no one around. Stepped out onto the street in my robe and socks, to stretch and get my bearings if they could be got. It seemed a not-so-legal place to park the bus—a cobblestone island in the middle of a busy street—but good luck towing it. All around were sex shops. Sex shops to the exclusion of all other kinds of shops, save the odd bakery. The Sex-o-Drome, Sexxxy Sexxx Souvenir, Le Sex. There was a little magazine kiosk on the island too, rendered inaccessible by the bus. An annoyed Vietnamese woman smoking in there. Yes: Paris is above all a place to smoke cigarettes. Get to it. I yanked at the door of the bus a few times. Few times more. Dread gave way to controlled panic, back to dread, then uncontrolled panic, on a rising wave of despair.
Items locked inside the bus, apart from keys: cigarettes, itinerary with club information and cell numbers, shoes, cigarettes, shirt, sunglasses, French phrasebook, cigarettes, and money, for cigarettes. Items on my person: none. Items required: one. A fucking cigarette. I climbed on top of the bus to the skylight, the translucent blowhole, thinking I could squeeze through—it was locked. I climbed down and tried the door again. Applied brute strength, kicks, fists, my forehead . . . The discarnate voice of Alain could be heard, firmly cautioning about the keys, about not letting them out of sight, ever. My face reflected darkly in the tinted porthole of the door. I was looking at a desperate man.
The task at hand was simple: locate cigarette, acquire cigarette, smoke cigarette. But simple is not the same as easy. Take the inventory: I’m in my bathrobe, the one every woman who has set foot in my apartment more than twice has attempted to dispose of because, I’ve been told, it isn’t fit to shuffle around a mental hospital in. My French is limited—bodily functions, historical events—nothing useful. I tried to make conversation with the magazine woman. She let me yammer for a while, then laughed at me and handed me what was left the pack she was smoking from. Silk Cuts, eight left. So it would be war rationing. And bumming. Luckily every mammal in Paris smokes. Babies, squirrels, cats . . . I expressed gratitude with spasmodic, probably at that point chimplike gestures, then went and sat on the ground, lit a Silk Cut (about which there is nothing silky), and considered the options. No itinerary, no map, no phone numbers, no clues. Infinite possibilities, from one angle, very few from another. Like the bigger picture, Life, the only sensible way to proceed was by misadventure. I started shoelessly up a steep street in Pigalle, smoking a Silk Cut. Like sucking pulverized glass through a sock.
I stopped at a little chalkboard that read:WINE TASTE INSIDE.
It began with a light red. I sniffed, sipped, swished a bit, raised an eyebrow, nodded, drank. The men laughed, with or at me I don’t know, or care, and I laughed the same. They poured another round from another bottle, and soon enough it was just drinking goblets of win
e. Good wine and no one spit. Cheese and things. I circulated. My socks having accumulated significant filth I said to someone noticing this the only complete French sentence I could manage. “Je suis un rock star,” I said. Champagne was opened, seemingly in response but probably coincidental.
I emerged from the storefront after the better part of an hour, wine-stained robe, teeth, socks, hair, eyelids, and tromped back to the bus, which I noticed, happily pie-eyed, was not there. Making wobbly triangulations—magazine stand—Le Shoppe Sexe d’Animal—pigeon lady with goiter (no more fixed if she were cast iron)—I confirmed that I was where the bus had been. There was now a Moroccan man in the magazine kiosk instead of the Vietnamese woman. He had rearranged the magazines and the gum rack and the cigarettes. I asked where is the woman, or tried, and by my convoluted pantomime he finally understood that I wanted a prostitute. When I understood that, I engaged in another convoluted, more rigorous pantomime, that made him understand that I did not want a prostitute after all, but meanwhile one had arrived. He sent her away and I eventually got him to understand I wanted cigarettes. He held up a pack and I made clear that just at that particular moment in time I was not able to pay for them, at which point he put the pack back in the carton and took no further interest in me.
I sat on a thing and smoked my penultimate cig and did some indeterminate assessing. As I sat there a drunk flipped himself over a fence into a bush next to me. For a few seconds I thought he was dead, then he began snoring. He smelled like he had three assholes, all volcanically active, so I got up and walked.
An old man carrying several bottles of champagne in a shopping bag stopped me and said something in French and I pretended to understand. He was animated, something about Neil Armstrong being stabbed, or that he was Neil Armstrong, I had no idea. He paused, rapidly snapping his fingers to spark his memory, so I said, “Greenland,” and he said, “Merci!” in a burst of false recognition and spittle, and continued whatever he was talking about. It soon dawned on me that I had been nodding along saying oui to a racist tirade in which not only hanging but dismemberment was central, and I shuffled off as quickly as I could.
Adios, Motherfucker Page 15