Adios, Motherfucker

by Michael Ruffino

  “Hi, thanks. Guitar strings, please. Three sets of D’Addario elevens.”

  “Tens are better for bending.”

  “Okay, thanks. The elevens, please. Three sets.”

  “Just starting out, huh.”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Save a buck if you buy five sets.”

  “Three sets, please. And bass strings.”

  “What kind of bass strings.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “You don’t care what kind of strings you play.”

  “I care that it doesn’t matter.”

  Nothing.

  “Okay, how much are those bass strings right there?”

  “Those? Those suck.”

  “I’ve used them. They’re fine.”

  “Trust me. They suck.”

  “Okay. Which ones don’t suck.”

  “These, and these.”

  “Which ones are better?”

  “These.”

  “Okay, I’ll take the other ones then. And some picks.”

  Eye-roll.

  “Just the black nylon picks. Right there.”

  “Play a lot faster with these, man. They have a speed nib.”

  Nothing.

  “Speed nib.”

  “No, thank you. You carry kazoos?”

  “Ess vee ess tee eff fifty-forty-nines are on sale.”

  “Umm. Is that a kazoo?”

  “Yeah, I usually do a little research before I come into a store asking for things.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Steve Vai? Heard of him maybe?”

  “I am aware of Steve Vai.”

  “Signature quad-prong tuning forks, purple glitter monkey grip. On sale.” (Produces nonsensical item.)

  “Pro model comes in neon tortoise, monotone zebra, or custom zoo snot.”

  “Just the kazoo. Please.”

  “Yeah, you probably wouldn’t need the pro model of anything.”

  Brass kazoo clatters onto the counter.

  “Twenty-five ninety-five. I highly recommend the warranty, twelve ninety-three a month. Covers diaphragm replacement, but not rust. You’re only as good as your equipment, dude.”

  “No thanks. How much for everything?”

  “Hang on.” He picks up the phone and has a completely unrelated conversation with a third party, for several minutes.

  Hangs up. “Comes to fifty-seven fifty-five-fifty.”

  “Fifty-seven fifty-five . . . fifty?”

  “Cash or charge.”

  “That’s too many numbers. I don’t—”

  “Cash. Or charge.”

  “Cash.”

  “Address.”

  “No, I said cash.”

  “Still gotta have an address, dude.”

  “Why.”

  “Policy.”

  “I live in a van.”

  “Who doesn’t. Girlfriend’s address.”

  “Huh?”

  “You don’t have a girlfriend?”

  “Do you?”

  Silence. “Take this slip up to drums, ask for Gerard. Come back down and pick up your stuff at the exit.”

  Around an eon later, you emerge from the almost sublime ineptitude of the drum department, nerves completely shot, no one around where the first guy said to go, go ask a different guy in Ed Hardy if anyone can help you (no), you do more bouncing around, finally a guy at the exit checkpoint hands you your bag of crap, then snatches the bag back when you are unable to produce a mysterious slip of paper hitherto unmentioned, which you have to go to some other part of the store and disrupt a “clinic” on “power punk songwriting techniques” to get.

  Back in the van, everybody goes, “what took you so long, blah, blah,” even though it’s well known what kept you, and later in the dressing room at the gig, the clock ticking, you whip all the strings off your guitar, grab the music store bag. It contains: banjo strings, a clarinet reed, sheet music, and a stack of handbills for a gig: Signs! The #3 Tesla tribute band in the Dayton-metro area!

  JANUARY 30

  It was a hell-drive for various reasons (out of ice, etc., etc.) long before the vansion conked out on a stretch of highway in East Jesus with no breakdown lane. Getting rocked in the backdrafts of eighteen-wheelers whipping by at 95 mph, inches away. Almost killed, repeatedly. All kinds of rescheduling, reconnoitering (the mobile earning its keep) for hours and hours at a service station while a shady mechanic applied a temporary fix to what he insists, correctly I’m sure, is only the tip of our engine problem iceberg. Nothing we can do at present but get back in and keep driving. No showers for almost a week now, no horizontal sleep for two and a half days. I am deficient in all categories of health; we all are. My organs hurt in new and fascinating ways. I no longer favor my own stink over other people’s—not that I prefer theirs, simply an indication that we are through the hygienic looking-glass.

  JANUARY 31 / BOULDER, COLORADO

  With Boulder you have the hippies. The place is inundated with entitled dirtbags and trustafarians, whose food markets are of use to me. With no difficulty I found one and beelined for the wall of plastic bins full of dirt-wizard remedies. Twigs, berries, newt eyes, gills, whateverthefuck, shove it all in. Yanked the plastic bags off a roll and stuffed them full, already chomping on a rank root of some kind, then careened through the place hoovering indiscriminately: half a bottle of high-potency chewable vitamin C, two reams or whatever of yinchows, a chai tea, two multivitamin packets, some kind of “sacred energy” ampule (plastic, I think, or anyway not food), a double shot of chlorophyllic estrogen booster (accidentally), a fistful of milk thistle, most of a plate of sauced tofu cubes (the green-aproned gypsy chick pulled it away from me before I could polish it off), and a honey stick with ginseng, like something a chimp might poke into an anthill, requiring more suction than it was worth. I then sat heaving on the bench outside waiting for health to suffuse me like it does these Coloradans, who look like outdoorsy fitness models all. I was let down when a barely perceptible activity in my stomach turned out to be the onset of another, inexplicit cramp. An existential one.

  Our situation is improved by two kitchenette rooms in the area of the college, inexpensive and comfortable. The stove doesn’t work, except as a fetish for contemplating domesticity; a monument to a lost world. Fifteen dreamlike hours we have, of unobstructed access to a shower, kingly beds, and a television. Always surprising, how grounding and comforting bad television can be. No clue what I’m watching, besides civilization in steep decline, in some kind of desperate race to cretinize itself, and I don’t care. We’re a mile high and almost human again. And the altitude—dizziness and disorientation in every breath, as we would have it.

  There might not be a link between “wellness” lifestyles and male-pattern baldness, but the bird’s-eye view of the crowd, from the window in the “artist loft,” makes you wonder. Half the room down there tonight not for Anthrax but for Fu, on account of Colorado’s massive stoner population, obligingly looped on “Thunderbud.” A more open-minded crowd, much to our advantage. The only thing anyone threw at us was a joint, and we sold several T-shirts, bringing the total up to several. I’m above the fray in a fraying armchair right now feeling good with my ration of sushi supplied by the theater, having just finished off the pickled ginger, the shiso leaf (and in my animal haste very nearly the plastic thing that looked like a leaf), and squeezed the very last, organic, low-sodium drop of soy onto my tongue.

  FEBRUARY 1 / SAN DIEGO

  We have some good friends here, a tight-knit squad of partiers, UMass guys, formerly of the house in North Amherst where we played the infamous 65-keg berserker pig roast that nearly went Altamont on us. Their local bar here is a minuscule collegiate sousehole called Joe’s. You don’t have a prayer of walking out of Joe’s unassisted; ten minutes after walking in you’re grabbing at furniture for support, in vain; total chaos always at last call, people walking face-first into walls, turtled on the sidewalk trying to roll themselve
s upright. A guy out front last time thought a mailbox was arresting him and kept yelling, “Brian! Call my dad!” We play there whenever possible, sometimes after a gig somewhere else.

  Last night we roared into the lot behind Joe’s around last call—prime time. It was a ghost town. The bar was dead and we couldn’t get in touch with any of the usual crew. Hadn’t occurred to us to book rooms anywhere and there was a convention in town, because this is Orange County, always with the conventions. We decided to sleep in the van, as usual taking turns on the back bed so each of us can be horizontal for a portion of the night. (I often decline, because, whatever. Fuck it.) One guy left in the bar, down the end in a Queensrÿche shirt. His name was Kenny, he said, smearing the n’s. He was beyond wasted and knew us, or of us. When we insisted—eventually—that he stop buying us rounds, he became morose; we obliged him by accepting his offer to stay at his place.

  On the way to the van Kenny fell into the same shrub four times, asking why our seats were so “faggg-kin spiky-pointy,” and when we finally got to driving he didn’t know where he lived. Eventually he spotted his house out the window and yelled stop.

  Steve and Eug stayed in the van, and Matt and I humped whatever we could find to serve as bedding up the stairs to Kenny’s carpeted efficiency on top of a garage. He had one spoon, one bowl, one coffee mug with a “ReMax” logo on it, a half-dozen CDs, a stereo, and a couch, nothing else. Kenny stood there and kind of pointed at things, then he emitted a weird, multisyllabic growl and fell down the stairs and out the door. I went straight to his medicine cabinet to see if he was on or possibly off anything—or in possession of anything we should know about. The cupboard was bare, not even toothpaste. Kenny returned and handed us beers. We brought up—and there’s no way to do this graciously—that these were nonalcoholic beers. He responded by asking, “You guys wanna see my mind crime?”

  We said no, several times.

  But Kenny already had his sneakers off. He cranked the volume on his stereo and, the windows rattling from unlistenable prog-metal, launched into a completely deranged Isadora Duncan routine. He swooshed, twirled, collapsed to the floor, sprang up again. He was into what appeared to be the rising action (something to do with heroin, I think—fell to his knees, burlesque of injection, rolled his eyes back), when the door downstairs crashed open and a man shouted up to “Kenneth” that he had until 8 A.M. to vacate the premises or the police would throw him out on his ass. “Your mother and I have had it with this shit!” the man said, and slammed the door shut. Kenneth right away launched a mostly unintelligible campaign to convince us he didn’t live with his parents. Wild, conspiratorial, explanations as to why his landlords were pretending he was their son.

  As we drove off in the van, away from a sleepless night of near beer and deranged interpretive dance to Queensrÿche, Kenny was in the street with his ReMax mug (whatever ReMax is, it makes me feel dead inside) and his stack of dork-metal CDs, freshly evicted, on the threshold of a new life. He threw us the goats.

  Matt said, “What the fuck. How much worse can this fucking tour get?” Steve checked him in the rearview and said, “You want me to tell you now, or should I wait until we get some coffee?”

  FEBRUARY 2

  So-and-so’s bar and grill but it could be anybody’s. Giant, sportsy beer hall with cut-rate tiki decor, typical in San Diego. Out back, beyond a roped-off deck, the beach. A lungful of sea air feels good; flimsy, though, compared to breathing the Atlantic. The ratio’s off out here—short on sea, or salt maybe. Whatever it is, the Pacific can’t silence human concerns like the Atlantic. It’ll take you down a peg or two, but that’s about it. Crossing the deck I passed Paul Crook signing some glossies for a couple of locals. He called out and I stopped. “Dude. I see you everywhere,” he said. “Are you on tour with us or something?” The first time anyone from Anthrax had said a word to any of us, apart from Steve.

  “That was the idea,” I said.

  “That’s so cool, man! So how many shows have you been to?”

  “All of them,” I said, a split second before it dawned on me that he was taking me for an ultradedicated fan: on tour as in following Anthrax around the country just to see them play, Deadhead style.

  “Whoa! That’s hard-core! Just you, or?”

  “I’m with my band and our tour manager.”

  “Wow. That’s . . . cool. You guys playing shows too, or . . .”

  “Yep. We’ve been opening for you for a couple weeks now.”

  He was perplexed. “Wait . . . You’re in Fu Manchu?”

  I resumed walking.

  Steve told us earlier that our set time for the next few shows is five minutes, instead of seven. Matt, Eug, and I were drinking on a grassy area by the parking lot mulling over whether we should bother playing the remaining shows—what tangible good, if any, could come from our finishing the tour. Not that there’s any immediate chance of a sensible tour as an alternative. I maintain that to quit is to choose failure—but we are hemorrhaging money. $300–$600 per day, average. Sometimes more, never less. Across the parking lot we could see Steve driving a golf cart toward us. Steve pulled the cart up to the curb, a look on his face we’d learned to read.

  “What. Is our set negative two minutes now?” Matt said.

  “No. It’s still five minutes. At this particular venue however, the five minutes happen to be before the doors open.”

  “Fuck this. Let’s just go,” Matt said. Eugene seconded; I agreed, with reservations.

  “I’m sure they’ll be fine with that. You’d be doing them a favor.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes.” Steve waited.

  “Never mind. We’ll play.”

  “I figured,” said Steve. “I’ll let them know.” He reversed and Eug hopped in, headed to a pay phone to call his girl. A few minutes later the cart came barreling back across the lot and skidded up onto the grass.

  Eugene, who had a shiner and a bloody lip, said, “Anybody feel like beating the shit out of some people?” Matt and I didn’t ask. We leapt onto the back and Steve stomped on the gas. The cart shot forward, caught the curb, and capsized.

  It was just past midnight when we walked into a bar in Joshua Tree, very much the sort of screwball roadhouse you’d expect in the high desert. Trailer, who had some time off between tours (hours, literally), was waiting for us. Steve had called him from mid-calamity in San Diego, figuring a quick break to decompress at Trailer’s desert outpost in the wilds would be good for morale. Of all the places in which to chillax, a rattlesnake-infested wasteland popping with tarantulas would not be my first choice, but any port in a storm.

  Copiloting in the van on the way out to his place, Trailer told us that the area is also known as the Morongo Basin. Because only a moron would go out there, I said. Joshua trees have a bouquet like food you forgot about under your car seat.

  Trailer’s house is an old homesteader shack in an abridged neighborhood on the edge of nowhere. As with most of the houses around here, his is in a losing battle with the desert. Inside is as homey as home can be for a man on the road three hundred days of the year. There was a guy from Northampton passed out on the couch. (Put an old couch anywhere on the planet. Close your eyes and count to ten. Open them: Guy from Northampton passed out on it, snoring.)

  “You guys remember Spooner,” Trailer said. We did. A soundman from back in the day. Spooner was one of the good ones. Most were good, in my memory. Odd, since I recall our shows at the time as a montage of other people’s audio equipment being destroyed.

  We unloaded some stories to Trailer and Spooner, for entertainment purposes. Trailer, who knows our Normal as well as anybody and has been professional in this business for a lot longer than we have, says he’s seen worse situations. He couldn’t remember what any were, offhand. Hours later a jangly pagan chick emerged from somewhere, presenting a pie pan with lines laid out on it. We’d been going too hard for sleep to be practical, and didn’t ask what sort of lines, just hoovered
’em up.

  Hours later we were looking out across the desert expanse at a small forest of Joshua trees, the sun coming up over the ridge behind. “This truly is a magical place,” said Spooner. He was screaming and clawing at his face, from the drugs.

  “Good place to throw beer cans on Sunday,” I said. Spooner reacted.

  “What!” He was jumping up and down. “What are you talking about?”

  I didn’t know.

  FEBRUARY 3

  Curls of alkali dust sweeping across the road, skulking three-legged dogs, dilapidated ranches, eviscerated Chevy big blocks riddled with bullet holes. Everything out here has been shot at least once and is in some stage of being consumed by the desert. Coasting through the downtown along the main drag . . . This is a company town. Bathtub psychostimulant boomtown. No place compares. The air chokes; to breathe is to snarf a vichyssoise of hot dust, phosphorus, hypertoxic detergents. Not so, perhaps, for our man right there, the goose-stepping crank wraith, swiping madly at his personal swarm outside the boarded-up check-cashing place. No, for him the acrid wallop of Sudafed dissolving in lye is as natural as the fragrance of oranges to the gentleman of Seville . . .

  Steve is bent into the drive, his nose an inch from the windshield. We resupplied the cooler with beer and ice, but the beers won’t chill. Neither will we—we can’t, not for hours, who knows how many. No surprise if our intermittent, pseudophilosophical conversations are patterns of shrieks only we can understand. Food might take the edge off, we thought—or somebody said. Eat? How is that done?