Adios, Motherfucker

by Michael Ruffino

  At a time-warped Denny’s in Barstow, a disintegrating person with sharp little teeth shouts at the claw game by the restrooms, his finger jackhammering the glass at something defying him. His body is emitting fumes, gases. A waitress tying on her apron looks over. “How long’s he been doin’ that?” The nearest busboy answers, “Two hours.” Eating is a joke, and not funny.

  There’s a last house, a last murdered Ford, one more limping hellhound, then nothing, billows of dust and filth in our wake. Phone’s dead and no one’s got a watch.

  Night. I’d forgotten where we were going until now, when we crested the hill and a beam of light shot into the sky ahead, from the apex of the Luxor.

  FEBRUARY 4 / LAS VEGAS

  We are here.

  We have a system for blackjack, given to us by our friend Rob, Matt’s roomate from Butterfield, now a noted Ripperologist. Several notebook pages of complex, hand-drawn tables, numbers columns and letter rows, abbreviations for stand (s), hold (h), split (p, for some reason), and so on. Too much to process until, as luck would have it, I gained a bolt of heightened awareness while observing bacterial activity on the restroom door handle at a place called the Gas & Giggle (?), last (?) night. To use the system to its fullest involves counting. Under the circumstances counting might become a permanent condition, so I confined myself to Rob’s ground rules, as I understand them. Stick on anything above a 13, occasionally double down to appear as if you know what you’re doing and give a shit, and, the hardest bit, always trust the math over your gut: probabilities are eventualities.

  We were nice and loose (and I was fifteen dollars up at the tables) when we leaped onstage and blew through a dozen songs in half as many minutes. Then Korby, the “rock and roll concierge,” met on an earlier trip (no idea), escorted us to a club and showed us to a pole-position booth (we didn’t really sit) with a bottle of vodka, a tub of ice, and some juice. One of these three-foot tall booze bottles you need to stand up and use both hands to pour. The dance music sounded good and everyone we met seemed to be on some kind of drug, and at times it was difficult to get a handle on what was happening right in front of you, or to you. At one point a girl sat down next to me and said, “Sit on your face?” I said, “What?” And she said, “Sit on your face?” We did that a couple more times and then she left. Unclear.

  I don’t know when we left, only that we left the goliath Grey Goose bottle slain on the floor and the table strewn with business cards of people in businesses you only come across in Vegas—“sex detective,” “elite lifestyle coordinator” . . .

  Blasting to San Fran now. Continued: no sleep, not even close. Pretty sure we’re all shouting, all the time. Eug is agitated. “Where are we!”

  Steve: “California! Death Valley!”

  “We can’t be! Speed up! I have to meet Maude! We can’t be here now! Death! Bad!”

  “Why did you make plans! That’s ridiculous! And Maude is a lesbian!”

  “Not totally! She’s bi! Hurry up! Get us out of here! Fuck!”

  “We’re floored! We can’t go any faster!”

  “Maude! I’m late! Maude!”

  “Maude is a lesbian!”

  Eug pounding on the window. “Death! Fucking! Valley! DEATH!”

  Staying out of it back here.

  FEBRUARY 5 / SAN FRANCISCO

  Warfield Theatre now. Commotion outside the dressing room. Michael Keaton, the actor, dressed not very believably like a metalhead handing out hundred-dollar bills to actual metalheads. Got a good hang in with Brant, Bob, and Brad from Fu, Bob and Brad reached new heights of deadpan. Brant had a new hat, a Sergio Leone special. It looked good on him. A new hat can change your whole thing, probably. Tripped over an army duffel of weightlifting equipment in the hall—again. Ankle fucked.

  Blazed through a few ten-year-old songs in six-minutes-thirty tonight, left it at that. Entertained some friends from back east downstairs, one of whom pointed out that the guy in the headband handing out hundreds I kept referring to as “Mr. Mom” was not Michael Keaton but Lars Ulrich, to a unanimous groan.

  FEBRUARY 7 / CANADIAN BORDER

  For a minute it looked like they might let us through. Not even sure what the problem was this time. Bang a U-ey. For the best.

  None of us knows for sure but we all calculate about the same; we’d been awake for around three days. Sleep came to me suddenly all at once, in the motel restaurant, and I faceplanted in a dish of peas I had been failing to eat. I hadn’t ordered them, I was trying to say “please.”

  FEBRUARY 9 / PORTLAND, OREGON

  Flyers all over Portland leave the indefinite article off our name. Why is this so difficult for people? “Unband” is not the name of our band. Without the article it’s simply a qualifier, as in “Unband time,” as opposed to the appointed time, or expected duration.

  Went to the Saturn Room for Bloody Marys with Tall Tim. Portland life suits him well, says the rain keeps him sharp. Inhospitable weather makes people read. This is known. The waitress saw the Northampton addresses on our IDs, and asked do we know a guy Antoine there. There’s only one. She ran off, to the pay phone I guess, because a few minutes later here comes Antoine walking through the door.

  Antoine was already a drinking machine before the United States Army turned him into a drinking and killing machine. Antoine was also sufficiently fucking—mercurial, let’s say, prior to watching legs and heads getting blown off in the Gulf. You always knew he had your six but you felt safer when he was at your twelve.

  We shared notes with Antoine on coming home, half impostor in your own life, a body-snatcher. Everyday business is alien; road habits in stark relief, incompatible with any sort of domestic existence. Not that our experience compares to what goes on Over There. Antoine reports that there in fact is such a creature as a camel spider, and yes, they are that big, and yes, they are a problem. “Fuckin’ right they leap,” he said.

  We traipsed a whole crew down the stairs at the gig. On the way to our dressing room we passed through the common area where The Anthrax had some of their workout gear set up. Tall Tim, sufficient with drink that his Nicholson drawl sounded like Christian Slater doing Nicholson, exhaled his fortieth cigarette of the day and said, “Someone oughta drop a nice ol’ deuce in that weight bag.” Antoine paused and said, “You boys go on ahead now.”

  When Antoine appeared in the dressing room a few minutes later I asked him if he’d done anything. Re: our position on the high road, all that. “Not sure what you mean,” said Antoine, confiscating the rider vodka. “See? That’s what’s called plausible deniability.”

  “Appreciate that.”

  “Anytime,” said Antoine.

  Passing through Eugene (Oregon), Eugene had us take a lot of pictures of him in front of local businesses: Eugene One-Hour Cleaners, Eugene Department of Sanitation, a sign that read, “Keep Eugene Beautiful!”

  Morning:

  Matt in the lobby of the hotel beating a pay phone with its hand-set. His girl back in New York. He didn’t say what happened, right away. Didn’t need to. Whatever uncertain and variable perks of the traveling rock guy gig, at this stage the only thing anyone can really count on you for is your unreliability. All relationships are long-distance, and the problem is that for the person (female, say) back home, “wish you were here” gradually becomes shorthand for “I am consistently disappointed that you are not here.” And it’s not the mileage that separates you—transcending geography is Romantic Love 101, there’s stationery in the hotel drawer, and you can’t walk into a gas station or a rest stop without knocking over a postcard carousel, or noting that postcards are available. Talking on the phone, interacting in real time, that’s the tricky part. By week two on the road, with all the verbal shorthand, slang, inside jokes, and being immunized against normal social cues you sound like a gibbering spaceman to everyone back on Twin Earth. “You sound funny”—you get that a lot. Whether the subtext there (infidelity) is relevant, to a man who’s just spent yet another afterno
on curled up with gas cramps listening to someone hit a snare drum two hundred times in a row, a woman who spent the same period going to the grocery store and having health salad lunches with girlfriends sounds pretty goddamn funny, too. Unfortunately, the more normal you feel here, the more likely you are to sound aberrant etc. there. Later, communication involves a lot of “you don’t understand,” variously phrased, which is true on both ends, and when you’ve been gone for months, missing birthdays and dinner parties and movie nights and failing to be sufficiently empathetic about somebody’s cat’s cancer because you can’t quite remember what a “cat” is, her “you don’t understand” starts to sound like another way of saying maybe there’s someone else who does understand, and vice versa. Try to ignore it—compartmentalize—but a week doesn’t pass in road-world that you don’t come in contact with someone confronting the ugly reality that he’s been superseded back home by some supposedly stable prong in a steady job with nights and weekends off—and it happened “out of the blue, dude!” Yeah, but not really. Holding a relationship together under these circumstances takes a stockpile of trust few people have had time or occasion to build. What the octogenarian couples feeding pigeons in the park have, that would come in handy, but Big Pharma hasn’t figured that out yet. Neither has Jack Daniel’s. Absolut Trust remains unavailable. That’s why there are always smashed-up pay phones outside rock venues. Well. That, and unreturned drug pages.

  As for the matter at hand it’s strictly textbook. Reliable sources say Matt’s girl, one who “got away” years ago and resurfaced after seeing Matt in a magazine somewhere, admitted to being “into him for the money.” Bit like being into a guy who sells oranges under a bridge for his frequent flyer miles. Nothing you can do about it from a world away. Desperation—very dangerous in these parts.

  FEBRUARY 11 / RENO, NEVADA

  Again—no.

  FEBRUARY 12 / LOS ANGELES

  House of Booze, at least.

  Did what we could for our five minutes. I was having some technical issues so Matt did his solo a capella version of “Mercedes Benz” (imagine Lemmy doing Bob Dylan, with a hokey southern accent), for a packed house of jock metal fans. The tech who was helping me out said, “Your singer’s got balls doin’ that.” I said, “Is it still ballsy if he doesn’t give a flying fuck?” When I was fixed up we played “Whole Lotta Rosie” and called it a day. Returned to the dressing room to find that it had been stripped of everything except one six-pack of bottled water and the dregs of the deli tray, which had been transferred to a paper plate. We were standing around in awe of this when Steve walked in, looked at us, walked out. He came back a few minutes later and told us that the booze and foodstuffs there earlier had been left in our dressing room “by accident,” and had to be removed to the headliner’s dressing room. Too exhausting and stupid to think about. We went and drank in the VIP bar. It’s nice but it isn’t free.

  Metaldom Los Angeles was out en force. Bands, porn stars (Ron Jeremy, always), veteran groupies, the halls backstage shoulder to shoulder, everybody decked out, prom night. Brad from Fu Manchu, learning that in six weeks only Steve had met anyone in The Anthrax officially (apart from my brief interaction in San Diego with Cook, the hired hand), wanted to bring us to The Anthrax’s dressing room to introduce us, but what was the point. We didn’t see enough of Fu this trip.

  At some point later Matt and I were forced by a bottleneck in the hall into The Anthrax’s dressing room, where we met them, as part of a superfan reception line we didn’t know we were in. We were introduced to the band by someone on their team who got our names wrong; it wasn’t even close. Not sure which member of The Anthrax said to Matt and I, “So you guys have been opening? Cool.”

  “Not really,” I said. That didn’t go over too well. Meant nothing by it, just stating a fact.

  18

  SWAG

  Streaked through a handful of decent but poorly routed shows, tracing a boozy pentagram across New England, then vaulted over the border and ping-ponged around Ontario and Quebec, minor gigs and press engagements—radio call-ins, interviews on Canadian MTV, completely assholed on umbrella drinks—then back to New York for another dose of whizbang before being punted out to a ski resort someplace (Aspen? Saturn?) for an extreme sports event, people flipping out on snowboards and athletic swag launched out of mortars around the stage, which we shared with a chick metal band (okay) and a nü metal band (not okay—reptillian, on top of being basic twats); caught the nearest wormhole back to New York—drink drink drink, drug drug drug, keep it moving. . . . scurried home—country matters, forty-eight hours or so of unspecific atonement and domestic bungling—and out the door again, flooring it to New Jersey or Long Island, or somewhere as appropriate to play a CD release party for a heavy metal ballads compilation (did KISS’s “God Gave Rock and Roll to You,” BoJo’s “Dead or Alive,” a few more, nothing from the CD), followed immediately—practically simultaneous—with a series of saused sorties by flying machine—divers inebriation on assorted jetways, sacked bar carts on the flights we didn’t miss, hurtling through time and space . . . Ultimately spit out of the tesseract, late—relativity is no match—and, gushing fuel, dials whirling, descended onto Austin, Texas and its music festival, a screaming kamikaze, meeting our potentially pivotal industry showcase with a flaming nosedive, straight into the deck. Still awaiting that damage report.

  At baggage claim back at JFK the amps slid down the ramp onto the carousel looking like they’d been thrashed by a mountain gorilla. Our homemade road cases failed the Samsonite test, spectacularly. Some random parts came around in a plastic bin with the airline logo on it.

  As much as I can recall offhand about the past three weeks. Two and a half, actually. Now that I see a calendar.

  NEW YORK CITY / WEEK DAY, THE SOMETHINGTH OF SOMETHING

  Woke around noon, judging by the sun. Carpe diem.

  Matt wasn’t around the usual places. Ran into a couple people but nobody had seen him, so I continued to the TVT office solo. Figured I could use a phone there and track him down for the meeting, if the mobile was still on his person and not in a bush or smashed or burbling in a toilet.

  There was a new receptionist at the office. Eventually she buzzed me through and I went and poured myself a coffee, rummaged around the break area for something unmarked to eat, turned up a goose egg, then went down the hall to the publicity department to visit with Consoli. Lately a magazine he pitched to interview us had been enamored enough with his pitch letter to actually run it in its entirety on their online version. It was impressive, and actually laugh-out-loud funny. How I used to struggle trying to write those things for Erin’s PR company—it’s next to impossible to do well. Consoli was percolating in his galley office, a barrel of guinea, outer borough grit. “What’s up, Masshole. Heard you guys were pretty fucking drunk for that interview yesterday,” he said.

  “Interview?”

  “Writer said a bag of drugs exploded all over the place or something, and Matty dropped trou at Veselka. Again.”

  “Sounds about right,” I said.

  “Nice. Where’s Matty?”

  “No idea. We have a meeting.”

  “No, you had a meeting. That was at noon.” I consulted my empty wrist.

  “No big deal,” said Consoli. “We’ll grab a drink with Lenny in a bit.”

  “Good.” I pointed to the desk phone. “You mind?” Consoli pushed the phone toward me and I dialed the mobile, waited. “Hey, how come the paper says—could be read to suggest that I’m involved with the chick from the stabby movie?”

  Consoli grinned. “Does it. Which paper?”

  The paper was on his desk, open to the item.

  “I was there talking to that guy about the thing. I vaguely remember passing her the breadsticks,” I said. “Poorly.” Matt wasn’t answering so I hung up.

  “Hm,” he said. “Well. She’s got a new movie coming out. It can only help.”

  “Help who—my girlfriend?�
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  Consoli frowned. “You get the Post in Northampton?”

  “Of course. There’s also indoor plumbing, and television.”

  “Well. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “Yeah. All right. See you later.”

  “Fuck yeah.” Cocktails, motherfucker. “And let me know if there’s a problem with the missus. I’ll—you know.” He skated his hand.

  Got some more coffee. Figured I’d make the rounds of the office. Matt would have had to stop in for coffee or water, resupply at some point. TVT’s got decent coffee. We’re not entitled to it contractually or anything, but nobody’s ever stopped us.

  I popped in on Sheena. She hadn’t seen Matt since yesterday, when he popped in and drained most of the bottle of rum that had been sitting on her desk since who knows, before our time. Sheena was not quite a punk rocker. More like a pulp novel antiheroine, a lot of animal print, and sass.

  Cluttering up her area were stacks of boxes marked “The Unband.” I asked about them. “Tell you what. You can have the last of this rum if you take those boxes with you,” Sheena said. There were a lot of boxes, and not much rum.

  “I don’t know. What’s in them?”

  “Those,” she said, “are full of these.” She held up a square of gray fabric with the band logo on it attached to a plastic stick, a flag. Waggled it. I didn’t understand. I peered at an invoice taped to one of the boxes. The total was more money than I’d ever had at one time, personally.

  “Are they supposed to be . . . drink stirrers?” I asked.

  She dumped the rest of the rum into a plastic cup, popped the flag into it, handed me the cup. “Steer it up, mon.”

  I went to the kitchenette and got some ice, found a little thing of pineapple juice, stirred it up. On my way out, I noticed little Unband flags in people’s cubicles, in pencil cups, poking out of succulents. There were thousands and thousands more where those came from.

  Matt was on the leather couch in the reception area, passed out cold. I left the flag sticking up from his armpit and waited for the elevator, which came immediately. The receptionist asked me if I knew that guy, meaning Matt. I told her to check his flag.