Adios, Motherfucker

by Michael Ruffino

  This is an older crowd, who maybe don’t get out that often—but when they do: fuckin’ A. Fuckin’ B and C if it’s for Ronnie James Dio. People are losing their minds, women ululating as their eyes roll back in their heads—there are women at the Dio show, in number. This might not seem worth noting unless you’d been trapped for months in a mindless, plodding, sausage party with the Anthrax. Dio’s band are ringers, all real-deal.

  No one chucked anything particularly dangerous at us tonight, but then Seattle is one of the more refined destinations on this trip. Loaded up the gear and the remains of our vegetable platter and returned semivictoriously to the hotel. Some Dio fanatic has scrawled “DEO ROCKS” on the back of our trailer. Can’t tell if it’s yellow crayon or yellow lipstick.

  The motel hunt, along Aurora Avenue. A stretch of dark road lined with windowless adult video stores, masturbatoriums. We chose the Marco Polo Motel because all the lights on the sign worked. The office was clean, run by a pleasant couple. A skinny man obsessively squared off the tourist pamphlets (spelunking, zoos, unsung vineyards) as his 400 lb wife overflowed a plastic chair and managed a shaved dog, or doglike animal, with its jaw wired shut. It skidded around the place making species-inappropriate noises we all had a hard time speaking over. The marquee out front promises cable television but the only “cable” is the one connecting the rabbit ears to the back of the period TV. Fiddled with those enough to get something. It was Maury Povich or bust. Povich, a sickening fraud like all the rest, talked to guests with Tourette’s as if they were retarded. Self-deluded morons like Povich seem only capable of understanding that someone has a “brain problem.”

  I skipped the breakfast adventure. Matt, Eug, and Steve wound up at Jimi Hendrix’s grave. Eugene left him a drink ticket from the Continental; Matt left him an expired condom. (Jimi hat?) Not sure why they were carrying either of those around. I planned to nap but didn’t. Tried to go for a walk but there was nowhere to walk to. Took a shower instead.

  MARCH 25 / PORTLAND, OREGON

  Sold-out show. Local opener, The Wild Dogs. The singer in spiked leather armor, laughing, for sure, but not kidding—kindred, in that. Watched from front and center in the crowd, Eug stage-diving. Fast friends. Our last song a low-frequency blast, a test tone of some kind, came out of the PA tower next to me. Matt was convinced I was turning my bass up, and that I was out of tune. He didn’t believe what he’d heard was a test tone at all, gave me hell about it. “Try fucking tuning!” A very strange thing to say angrily. I said, when they tune it in my cold, dead hands. First thing that popped into my head.

  Fell in with a couple of bikers after the show, Angels. Steve was raised around bikers, one of whom these guys apparently knew. We declined their invite to another bar; we were all asleep on our feet. One of the bikers palmed me a couple of Baggies, saying that ought to set us straight.

  By some total miracle, by which I mean something Steve had the presence of mind to do, the gear was loaded out and we made it to a Motel Styx. We opened another bottle of Ketel and I went for ice. I’m perpetually going for ice in dicey motels, but this one was not like the others. The place was all wrong. A maid was pushing a cart down the hall toward me. As she got closer I saw that it was some type of surgical cart she was pushing, and she was not a maid, but a nurse, with no eyes and no mouth. I picked up my pace. I felt wobbly, going toward . . . The vengeance area . . . the bending machines . . . words were disconnected from their meanings. The letters on signs rearranged themselves, and directional arrows couldn’t be trusted; they had hidden motives, knew things. At the end of a mile of hallway the window screen had been removed from the window and propped against the wall. A hotel phone was on the sill. I leaned out. The handset dangled against the brick of the building. I reeled it in and listened. The timbre and rhythm sounded like the automated wrong number message, but the voice was saying something else, I couldn’t make it out. And the error tone was way off, backward. I hung up—then thought, no, and threw the handset back out the window. The carpet was a problem, too. I was chest deep in it, wading through a green-gold bog, a mood-ring soup, and heading into the deep end. I slipped out a door into the stairwell. Solid ground, but here I recoiled, shielding myself against the fluorescent light. The bulbs, I saw now, were not bulbs at all but tubes of frantic, luminescent insects. Each landing in the stairwell looked like it had hundreds of stairs going in different directions (including, I perceived, “betwix,” “askrance,” and, hauntingly, “in”). Wrong, all of it. Back in the hall I was happy to find I could walk messianic along the surface of the carpet without sinking, so long as I hummed a steady tone. I made my way back down the hall thus, circular breathing (the old trumpet skills) to keep up the tone, proceeding flat as I could along the wall, to avoid the holes randomly opening along the center of the carpet. In the next stairwell were four Girl Scouts on the landing passing a glass pipe. Smoking crack? I didn’t want to ask. Their mouths were more like assholes than mouths. Frightening at first, then I understood why that made sense (I’ve forgotten). I abandoned the idea of taking stairs anywhere. But back in the hallway things had got bad again and as I regained my footing there, the shifting geometric patterns on the carpet sped off to collude at the far end of the hall, where they rose up in a great hump and rushed forward, a ten-foot swell rolling toward me as the walls melted away, revealing a colorless void impossible to describe further. Now I knew that the drugs I was on were not the drugs I had remembered forgetting I’d taken, but rather the drugs I thought I was on weren’t the drugs I thought I’d forgotten, and the drugs I remembered I’d taken weren’t the drugs I thought they were. That cleared up, I contemplated lying down right there to ride it out because: (a) early programming to stay put when lost in department stores; (b) those Girl Scouts have something and they might walk by and maybe a hit or two of whatever it is would sort me out; and (c) gentlemanly repose. Then there was the matter of the ice. That was everything. So I kept on. I used the walls, sliding along them. I found the vending area. The ice machine, its melodious electrical thrum. I tugged the handle. Locked. Key-card slot there. For putting a room key card. I didn’t have that with me. Pulled together as best I could and went around to the registration office to see what could be done. The night clerk, who had a crow on his shoulder, did not speak English, so far as I could tell, my own grip of language being loose at the time. I asked as best I could for a key for the room—have to get into the room, I said, meaning ice. He nodded and asked me which room I was in. Exactly the kind of question I have no prayer of answering. So I say very confidently, working up to it, “two thirty-seven,” thinking maybe he just needs to know that I’m a guest, entitled to an ice key. He stepped just out of view (the crow stayed where it was) then he reappeared and handed me a key card. I realized I was carrying the ice bucket, pointed to it. He shakes his head and takes the card back. He writes “237” on it with a marker. Right. He made me a key to somebody’s room. Great to know that any wandering freak can get a key to a stranger’s room merely by standing at the front desk fucked sideways on drugs dribbling out random numbers. The clerk pointed to the key, then to me. Then to the crow, which was gone. I said, all right, fuck it, and went back to the vending area. The key opened the door. I slumped, exhausted. I might have cried briefly. Then gathered myself, the Moment of Truth. But there was no scoop. I used the key, pushing ice into the bucket, and onto the floor and everywhere else. I left when the bucket was as close to full as it was going to get, and spun around just as the portal clicked shut. Through the glass door I could see the lid—the maw—of the machine was up and the key to room 237 poking out of the ice, a spooky tooth. Now any freak could get into that room, and do their freak worst. I went back to the desk. No guy, no crow. I hit the bell. Hit it again. I started back down the hall. It was endless . . .

  I made it back to the room. Went in and sat down at the table with the ice bucket on my lap, unable to speak. Matt got up and scooped a handful of ice and tossed it into a plastic cu
p, dumped four fingers of Ketel over it, splash of cranberry, sat back down to his crossword, nothing to it.

  MARCH 24

  Show fine. Other than absorbing the derision of thousands of people at once for thirty minutes. Steve told me Dio’s people want me to stay off Dio’s box. A cube—a metal pedestal at the front of the stage he jumps up on, e.g. last night for “Man on the Silver Mountain.” Noted.

  On I5 somewhere. Reading the Hit Parader we picked up in Portland, Consoli said there’s a piece in there on us we should check out. It’s a decent piece. The writer is generous, while making quite clear that we are not playing at “rocket science.” Fine, neither is NASA. It’s the sixth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, so he’s featured as the centerfold, weary and addicted in a moth-eaten sweater. His photo is bisected by a pullout poster of Slipknot, in cartoony rock poses, wearing coveralls and masks. Extra-large print across the top reads, “We Are Not Afraid to Be Who We Are!” Music magazines these days are dispatches from a loony bin in another dimension.

  Woke at just toward dawn in the passenger seat. “Dear Mr. Fantasy” meandering out of the boom box speaker, pre-dawn sky reminded me of faded denim. By the windshield we’d been through a downpour, but the road was dry. Steve piloting. “Did it rain?” I said.

  “No, that’s champagne,” said Steve, passing me a bottle. Mmm, half full.

  “We get some kind of haul?”

  “Obviously,” he said.

  MARCH 25 / SAN FRANCISCO

  Maritime Hall is officially that—the headquarters of seafarer’s unions, and related. Portholes for windows. Model ships in spit-shined cases in the lobby, floors swabbed reflective. A hippie on the sidewalk outside the place is holding a “Marijuana Permit,” like a giant novelty check. Couldn’t hear through the dressing room porthole what he was yelling about; whatever he wants today, tomorrow it won’t be enough.

  Tonight Dio added “Last in Line” to his set. The first two chords brought the house down. The hall literally shook, enough to remind you the building is quakeproof, and wonder how quakeproof. There don’t seem to be any casual Dio fans, nobody “on the fence” about Dio. After the last show I fell into a conversation with a gentleman wearing leather wristbands and an imposing mullet, aka neckwarmer, Tennessee top hat, or, if you prefer—and at the moment I do—Missouri Compromise. He told the story of how Ronnie James saved his wife’s life by coming to her hospital room, with flowers, smiling, making her laugh. After chatting with Dio a few minutes she regained the will to live and maintains said. She’s perfectly healthy, and recently lost forty pounds. A photo of Ronnie making his devil horns has been on their mantel for the ten years since. The guy showed me the photo he brought to show Ronnie, a photo of the photo of Ronnie on the mantel. In almost every town you hear tales of miracles performed by Ronnie James Dio, from saving community centers to thwarting suicides, everything short of healing withered hands and distributing miraculous fishes (so far). Back in Portland a guy insisted that he would without hesitation lie down in front of a train for Dio, and asked me to propose other sacrificial acts, to test him.

  “Eat glass?”

  He scoffed. “That’s bullshit, I’ll do that for five bucks. Ask me something real, that I’d do for Ronnie James.”

  “Say Ronnie James Dio asked you too . . . amputate your own leg.”

  “Done.”

  “With a rusty bread knife, no anesthetic.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Then get in a bath of lemon juice.”

  “Can do.”

  “And salt.”

  “Dude,” he said. “I’m already sittin’ in fuckin’ lemon juice.”

  “Fair enough. Let’s cut to it, then: Is there anything you would absolutely not do, even if Ronnie James Dio asked you to?”

  “Well,” he said. “Kill someone. I wouldn’t do that.” He took a sip of his beer, and added, “Unless it was to save Ronnie.”

  Promoter here who “used to be in a band,” all with the hey, dudes, I totally get it, been there, man, oh yeah, I feel ya, so on, refused to pay us. Outright. Unapologetic, straightforward: No. Despite the guarantee on the signed contract in plain sight on the desk in front of the guy, Steve pointing out where it says he has to pay us, the guy said he didn’t care, that there was nothing we could do about it, go ahead and try. Steve very wisely waited until we were on the road to tell us this. He found out from the Dio guys that this isn’t unusual for Maritime Hall. It’s not unusual for ex-hippies, either: same con, shorter hair. Eugene, catching wind of getting stiffed, bellowed from the back bed, suddenly very awake. “Turn around!”

  “No way. Bad idea,” Steve said.

  “No. Good idea. We need to go fuck them up. I’m serious. Turn around.”

  Matt and I got behind that, up for it. But Steve refused. (Matt forayed over the who-works-for-who line, quickly retracted after Steve lifted an eyebrow at him in the rearview.) “This is what you have the Agency for. Let them handle it,” Steve said. Love to. I don’t know how they’ll find out about it, though. They never answer the phone.

  Steve reminded me about staying off Dio’s box, offered to mark it off with duct tape. Not necessary.

  MARCH 26 / SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA

  Downtown Santa Cruz is like the courtyard of a mental hospital. Surf town, lezzy fair with the crazies.

  Tiny, tiny stage. Dio’s gear on it leaves us an area too small to be usable for us. Bazooka Joe’s or whatever the place is called had earlier simply decided that there would be no opening band, that they couldn’t “accommodate” one, as if it’s an option. Wendy Dio calmly tore into the appropriate people and it all worked out, but not before a ton of math and chin-stroking and trial and error went into trying to fit everything on the stage. Crew informed us that this place is a well-known “write-off,” because there’s always some bullshit like this.

  Urged by one of the Dio techs, Steve mentioned Maritime not paying us to Wendy Dio, just an FYI. Minutes later the scumbag from Maritime rings our phone, apologizing. Says he’ll forward a check for us to the next venue. The promoter here tried the same crap, apparently. Not sure if Steve or Wendy or both got to him, but we got our two hundred fifty.

  Woke at just toward dawn in the passenger seat. Velvets droning on the lo-fi, the horizon a swipe of drugstore eyeshadow. By the windshield we’d been through a downpour, but the road was dry. Steve piloting. “Did it rain?” I said.

  “No, that’s champagne,” said Steve, passing me a bottle. Veuve, nearly full.

  “We get some kind of haul?”

  “Obviously,” he said.

  MARCH 29 / LOS ANGELES

  House of Blues. Another sold-out show. Check from Maritime Hall was waiting for us in our dressing room. Couple hours of press, phoners. Drinks in the dressing room with the Los Angeles crew, and a slew of other people, unknown. The staff got nervous, managers peeked in every so often—it’s getting harder to remember to be discreet these days.

  Now we are in the party-wrecked kitchen in Glendon, alma mata; still condemned, still here. It is noon-thirty. The cat is watching us light a Winston, without understanding that this is our first, since Sweden. Do you understand, cat? Sweden. Looking through to the next room, a jumble of bodies on the floor . . . A doomsday cult off to their home planet . . . And now, cat, we are extinguishing our Winston—see? Because it is not good, and the world is not what it was, nor, probably, what it is. There is vodka left. Let’s have one.

  MARCH 31 / YUCAIPA, CALIFORNIA

  The Inland Empire. Certainly Inland, we’ll see about the other. Crossroads Bar and Grille is the place. Bikers, stoners, and Other. Open roof, multiple bars, a tightly run place considering the house specialty drink is five kinds of rum in a pint glass. The “AMF,” for “Adios, Mother Fucker.” As the bartender slid one AMF in front of me, I said that I’d always considered motherfucker was one word. He said he did too. So why the third letter? He shrugged and said, “It’s never come up.” I understand why. The
powers of the AMF are such that here, in this parched wasteland, cacti and lizards everywhere, I ordered a shrimp cocktail. A ramekin of ketchup with dead sea monkeys stirred into it. No more or less than I deserved.

  The opener here is Unida, exKyuss (good). This is the Fertile Crescent of desert rock—Empire of Fu Manchu. It’s wide, steady music they make here—it’s all horizon, and chord changes like a lizard changes direction.

  A girl who won Dio tickets on the radio was escorted backstage right after our set. She was very impressed and wanted to know which one of us was Dio. I think it wound up being Eugene who was Dio. Nice girl, didn’t stay long.

  APRIL 1 / LAS VEGAS

  House of Blues again. This one’s homey now. Managers, bartenders we know by name. Show better than last time, in that there were over a thousand people who hated us, instead of just seven. I still don’t understand why we went to Treasure Island. How was that not going to be a disaster?

  APRIL 3 / KINGMAN, AZ

  A few weeks now since the album was dropped—and that is the right word for it. We’ve just hit a sales threshold: triple digits. Should NOT have had the pulled pork “delight” at the meth hotel. Maybe we’re as dumb as the Aquarian Weekly header says we are: “The Unband: Get on the Short Bus.” Though the review is kind.

  APRIL 4 / UNDEFINED LOCATION, CALIFORNIA

  Rabid Bingo action here. People are either obese or skeletal, and always with the Bingo. Carpeting in the ballroom we performed in; anechoic. Halfway through our set a guy down front, eyes set like a crooked flounder—literally, one on his temple, the one opposite closer to his cheek—asked, honestly, if we were Dio. Needed to know, before proceeding. When I said no, the perfectly spherical Mexican lady next to him—her face in her midsection like a pimento, flippers going, all a-dither—wanted me to clarify that Dio would be playing later, and was I sure I wasn’t Dio. What’s going on with people out here in these “unincorporated areas” is molecular, not genetic. An evolutionary side-step in progress, you ask me.