Adios, Motherfucker

by Michael Ruffino

  “It is. I double-checked. That’s the total, right there,” Steve said, pointing to the bottom line. “And that’s Canadian dollars.”

  Matt said, “What the fuck. If I’d known it was gonna be that cheap I would have wrecked a lot more shit.”

  NOVEMBER 10 / WINNIPEG, MANITOBA

  Matt’s hand made it through the show, in some arctic outpost I forget the name of (can’t find itinerary). He’ll make it through tonight. Then we’re home with almost a week off, so as long as he’s attentive to the wound, and is careful not to injure it further, he’ll retain use of his hand. Steve sat us down and told us the news: Trailer’s girl barely made it over the border before she totaled the van, rolled it off the road somewhere upstate. Miracle she’s alive. She’s okay, just banged up, as far as we know, though latest prognosis is “not out of the woods yet,” vis-à-vis any head trauma, whiplash, so forth. Steve is keeping tabs through Trailer, who is in Europe for several weeks. Immediate effect is we’re in the hole for towing, storage, and whatever else the local charlatans will demand, plus a rental vehicle of some kind to get us home, and we’ll set something aside to help with any medical expenses, best we can for T’s girl, do the right thing. We’ll have to get jobs of course. Wash dishes, sell drugs, whatever. The van is totaled, Steve says, and our insurance company is turning its back because nobody renewed the policy. Therefore the registration isn’t valid, which under local law is the same as unregistered, meaning although we’re paying a hefty fee to maintain its current location, legally we’ve abandoned it, which is a crime. One with a juicy revenue for the state. In my head I hear Brian, our driver in Europe: “You’ve git sum werk ta do . . .”

  On the other hand, word is this morning that our entire country just flunked a multiple-choice test that had no wrong answers, and now we have no president. So it’s not just us.

  NOVEMBER 12 / NIAGARA FALLS, NEW YORK

  Thrust back into fissures between the gear in the cargo van again, headed south. Disposed of all the loose loonies at duty-free at the border, Canadian souvenirs for people, goofy as possible. Beaver bottle opener, moose antler backscratcher, plus some good ice wine, and cured salmon. Everybody had all this crap, laughing about this goofy crap, and Matt got back in the van with four liters of Absolut, no different than what he could get off the Sikh at Pops’ in Northampton. I pointed this out and he said, “What. Fuckin’ four dollars cheaper here.” Steve had us pull over in Niagara, mandatory half-hour of sightseeing, so everybody could “chill out.” Had a partial view of the falls as I pissed in a bush. It may consider itself seen.

  24

  SNOWBLIND

  “I feel sick. I wanna throw up in your face because I hate

  you. You’re my nemesis in every way.”

  —The Unband, “I Gotta Go Lie Down,” Chung Wayne Lo Mein

  DECEMBER 2 / COMPOUND

  Twelve bone-rattling, contortionist hours from the border, home at six in the morning, I’m in bed two minutes and I hear tires in the drive. Truck tires—that troglodyte from Mass Electric. I was downstairs and outside in seconds, staggering around in boxers and one boot trying to talk the guy out of shutting us off, the tired routine. He was unimpressed—until, after extracting myself from some unfamiliar, highly aggressive shrubbery installed in my absence, I attempted to re-enter the house by opening the kitchen door and walking through it in the wrong order. Of course the guy did shut us off, wordlessly.

  Je suis un rock star.

  Returned to the Amish nightmare from which we so recently awoke, naturally, I had to hear all about it from the Better Half (as in “you’d better not . . .” let the power get shut off again, for example), while I struggled to remain upright in the kitchen—in underwear and one unlaced boot, microphone-shaped bulging black eye, borderline necrotic cymbal wound, loose tooth, banged up knees, numberless mystery bruises, repetitive stress everything, and smelling, of course, “like a fucking distillery.” Just trying to live. It’s not a position you want to argue from. She’s right, take your lumps. Though for the record, let’s not forget that whatever it looks like, I got this way at work. I was busy keeping that to myself, when from the basement came the unmistakable, leaden, humph and double-clang of the boiler shutting off, audibly out of oil. Oil which is at present, like everything else, unaffordable. Much was made of this, silently, in a splenetic lull, the gathering blizzard outside not helping matters, dumping several inches an hour, wind picking up . . . Eugene just then moseyed into the kitchen to get something—a beer, unfortunately—and was given no quarter. He acquiesced right away, he knows the drill, but laying into bandmates is patently offsides, and had to be addressed on the spot—which, foolishly, I did, giving the impression of an attempt to minimize the original matter at hand, about how nobody has their shit together, and (Eugene using the split second let-up to teleport out of the kitchen) I was skelped afresh. Until the sun went down and it was time for band practice. Hardly preferable.

  Used to be that bashing out some rock music was the refuge, the recharge, by lightning bolt.

  Eug and I humped the gear through the deepening snow and into the Ford Clitoris, tags as expired as ever—more so, in fact—and tobogganed down to Northampton on the sheet of ice over the road, doing about 4 mph when we weren’t almost skidding off into a ditch. (Rehearsals same: slow, always downhill, skidding off into ditches.) Lenny sent us up a minidisc recorder, a preproduction tool for album number two (working titles: Drugs and Drinking and Drugs and Drinking and Drugs; Sexy Offender). Record rehearsals and send the discs, with notes, to whoever’s producing—still a lot of names going around. So far there’s not much music to speak of on the discs, but the machine is sensitive enough you can hear the silences are loaded.

  Thirty minutes into the ordinarily twelve-minute drive, the blizzard in full swing, we turned onto State Street where Matt and Wilma are in residence in the row houses, in time to see Wilma thrashing around in the middle of the road, wearing nothing but barrettes and pink dental floss up her crack, a contrail of vaporized profanities behind her as she came again and again at Matt, who was alternately protecting his head and his groin whilst being pounded into an exhaust-blackened snowbank.

  Eug didn’t even slow down, no words—drove right on past, straight to the Calvin bar for a beverage. Then past that, too; it was closed. Eug said, “Huh. Must be Monday,” because that’s how you know.

  DECEMBER 30 / TORONTO

  Back to Toronto to play New Year’s Eve at El Mocambo. Eug, me, and the womenfolk, driving through a fifteen-hour blizzard, intrepid-stupid—Shackleton, in the style of. Stopping to switch drivers too risky, so Eug drove throughout, Semper Fi. Matt and Wilma are making their own way, from parts unknown, and hardly imaginable.

  We were detained at the border on an old warrant of mine I’d never heard of (I swear, it’s like a magician pulling the endless chain of rags out of his pocket—and wait! What’s this behind your ear?). A couple minutes into the rigmarole, a phone on the desk rings—Dan [Burke, Toronto promoter], because he “had a feeling.” He sorted us out with the Dudleys remotely, including wiring a sum of money through some supposedly official channel, and met us on arrival. He took us over to the hotel. Another one of these rock-and-roll flophouses with carved-up dorm furniture; a ten-story hostel. Soon to be hostile.

  JANUARY 1 / TORONTO

  Show went fine. (Hot Piss, Man Scouts of America, CJ Sleez.) Eugene and I bowed out of the “countdown” event onstage with all the bands plus Wilma. Forget it—Chinatown. Got some Tom Yum from the crazy old lady, bought some cigarettes. Lit one, choked on it, lit one, choked on it, instant migraine, handed the pack off to a grateful hobo, who said, “Thanks, Elvis!”

  Back at the club Wilma cornered me in the dressing room, the after party. Matt was there next to her, hanging lemur on one of the steam pipes, out of it. Wilma was, if it even needs mentioning, was fucking obliterated, in a thrift-shop fur—fake fur, real mange—lecturing me on the Modern Recording Industry. In ca
se I was wondering what a twelfth-century gypsy with a head injury might think about it.

  “Fuck that stupid fucking record label. Fuck Lenny—they don’t know shit. And you had this amazing manager—and who ruined that by nagging about, like, twenty dollars here and fifty dollars there.” She looked at Matt. “Who?”

  Matt said, “Him did. The ruining.” (Somewhere in there was the other guy, capable of teaching a graduate course in modern lit.) His eyes were following something invisible on the far wall. Wilma jammed a finger at me. “Bullshit! All bullshit! You want to be a big ol’ businessman.”

  “Right. Obviously. That’s why I’m in a band for a dozen years. Beef up the resumé for Goldman Sachs.”

  “True,” Matt said. “Him do that.”

  “Wilma turned on Matt. “Him do what? You don’t even know what you’re saying!” She went at me again. “You’re lucky you’re in this band at all. Don’t think for a second Matty can’t do this without you. Probably better off, too, so you better watch your ass.”

  “You want to get into it, fine. The problem is that it’s fucking information Jenga all the time. Every new to-do item, however simple, no matter how delicately it’s delivered, is some huge, shocking, abomination and an affront to your fucking rights or whatever, and there’s all this fucking yammering and cataclysm that fucks up all the work people have been doing. Work being the stuff you call ‘businessy boo-shit’ and ‘mumbo-jumbo,’ and ‘not rocking,’ and people being the ones you call collectively ‘the Man.’ Who is the thing that signs the checks, such as they exist or don’t.” I’d had a couple.

  “What? You don’t make any sense!” Wilma decreed. “Blah blah blah, whatever. I would rather have Casper the Friendly fuckin Ghost handling my finances!”

  “Your finances?”

  Matt said, “Big money destroyed our band.”

  “WE’VE SOLD THREE HUNDRED ALBUMS—WHAT FUCKING MONEY?”

  “Yup! Yup, there you go. Same ol’ story.” Wilma sucked at her beer. “So cliché. Pathetic.”

  I walked away.

  “Big money,” said Matt. “Destroyed us.”

  “Yup. Stupid, stupid, stupid . . .” Wilma was saying.

  She was right about that.

  I hadn’t made it very far down the hall when she came at me, swinging. No safe choice but to take it. Faux fur flew.

  JANUARY 2

  5 A.M. Went to the usual secret boozecan but couldn’t remember the password. No matter, the door guy recognized us and let us in. Which was too bad; no good came of it.

  Word-of-mouth show at the Bovine Sex Club. Two hours straight with no set list, mostly improv, songs we haven’t played in years, and covers. The best kind of show, ordinarily. Neither Eug nor I exchanged a word whatsoever with Matt. Possibly we were as good as people said we were. Give that about as much thought Mrs. Abraham Lincoln did to that show at the Ford.

  JANUARY 25 / PARK CITY, UTAH

  Million-dollar view out of the window of the mountaintop chalet. Park City funiculars doodling up and down all over. Point-to-point Ugg conveyances. It’s good to try and picture the landscape here without all this, but you don’t need to, leave it be. The living room needed reimagining. People were still setting it up. It was all wrong. Sometimes marijuana let you in on such things. Made some suggestions to the guy in the kitchen who seemed to be directing what things people put where. He was standoffish at first but then he agreed and I helped him rearrange a lot of it. An improvement. Mainly for us, since we’d be playing in there. Same guy was upstairs later, doing something complicated on his cell phone while Eug and Peeler were playing pool. There was a mannequin in the corner modeling these white leather pants—an actual mannequin, I should say, an inanimate one, not one of the ones walking around with their mouths slightly open (fishlike, that). Peeler suggested throwing the mannequin out the window so he and Eug, or somebody, could come back later and snag the pants. The guy I’d been talking to in the kitchen looked up from his phone to glare at Peeler, then pinched the bridge of his nose and walked out shaking his head.

  “What’s his fuckin’ problem,” said Peeler.

  Eug said, “That’s Tommy Hilfiger. Those pants on the mannequin are his.”

  “The hell you talking about,” Peeler said. “That guy was already wearin’ pants.”

  The party got rolling. Hundreds of people; hundreds more in the drive trying to get in. A lot of food, ridiculous amounts to drink and entertaining ways to drink it—ice luge out back, some kind of octopus contraption in the kitchen. Somebody—us—started a flurry of kegstanding. We played. A strange hour—or was it two? If it sucked no one said so. Mick Jagger, devoid of facial expression, observed us for about thirty seconds then disappeared. Which seemed to be his thing. At one point I thought he’d actually fallen out a window he’d been standing next to.

  Later I excused myself from the plastered guy sloshing beer and little known facts about some slasher film I’d never heard of all over the stairs. What I was sure had been the bathroom door now led to a cramped closet, but that wasn’t important, Eug was in there. I closed the door behind me. Tight squeeze.

  “So, right. This is what it is. Singles.”

  “Uh-huh.” Eug agreed.

  “No album just yet. A single. For the summer. Sell it for a buck or something, but just on the computer. See? Because it’s all fucked with the Napster and this. Business model. Fucked. Noam saying? Fucked.”

  “It sure is!”

  “Gotta get a website thing, so when we’re doing something we can put a thing on there which people can go—doot—and click on, and then some other fucking thing comes up and they go, ‘Oh, hey, yeah, that’s great’.”

  “Sounds neat-o!”

  “Yeah, well. That’s the new way. Gotta do it.”

  “That’s great. In fact right now might be a very good time for you to go start on that.”

  “You think? I don’t know. What time is it in New York right—oh. Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  “Ah!” Eug clapped. “Good! We’re all here. This is Rachel. I’d say we should reconvene outside the closet, but as you can see Rachel has misplaced her clothes.”

  Incredibly, my black eye is only coincidental. Real specimen, though.

  Around dawn a few stragglers were left in whoever’s house it was we were in. Felt better to avoid the activity in the kitchen so I walked onto the back deck, where I thought I might find a chunk of ice for my eye, and interrupted a guy who, as far as I could tell, was having actual, penetrative, intercourse with the half-dissolved vodka luge. I locked the sliding door and went up and napped on the pool table.

  FEBRUARY 20 / THE COMPOUND

  Back from pre-production sessions at a studio in upstate New York, originally an old TV cowboy’s ranch. Lenny chose the place, smack in the middle of nowhere. That’s the idea—a Siberian retreat. Population: us, and studio staff. No bars to hop, no chance of summoning a circumstantially friendly Dominican in an Escalade for pick-me-ups, no significant others, not even TV. (The only video on the ranch was, of all movies, Hardcore Logo, starring Hugh from the Headstones—six thumbs up.) On arrival we converted an old laundry sink into a gravity bong, for maximizing Ivan’s premium “wheelchair weed” (buds like a toddler’s arm), and spent the first couple days trudging around the property in snowshoes chomping locally sourced ecstasy (there’s always a guy, even in the boonies of Siberia, there’s a guy), and tuning. More productive than it sounds. A series of storms snowed us in, and we let the recycled quarter-inch tape roll while we plowed through all the wine and an arsenal of creative aids (hippie drugs, pharmaceutical snacks) in a sleepless, multi-day, bender—the Hüsker Dü method. Also more productive than it sounds, though we came out with something less than Zen Arcade. Based on the resulting demos—tripped-out electric piano noodling, layers of reverse vocoder guitar, barbershop ohm-ing, syncopated farting, trumpet loops, and “beats”—Lenny is of the opinion that, while he’s glad we’re on speaking terms,
however we got there, the session was a bust . . . Maybe, maybe not.

  MARCH 7

  Last time I called Matt he actually answered the phone, but only to yelp obscenities in mock-metal falsetto twenty times or so, then hang up. Eugene still outright refuses to speak to him. Lenny called the Compound this morning.

  “So the Big Cheese has okayed band therapy for you guys.”

  “Bleh?”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “Hara-kiri.”

  “Don’t knock it, man. This is the guy who fixed Aerosmith and Metallica.”

  “‘Fixed’?”

  “Don’t worry, nobody’s gonna make you do sweeping fucking keyboard ballads. Functional is all we’re talking about here. Baby steps. I don’t wanna make it sound like a financial thing, but the label’s got an investment to protect here. I’ll set it up. Good?”

  Words failed. Except for “Okay.”

  By the way, not cheap. Astronomical.

  Eug signaled agreement, convulsing in a laugh-cry seizure, so we go to New York sometime next week. Get Matt there by hook, crook, chloroform, whatever. And chloroform refers to an actual suggestion, from Ivan (“Just say the word, gentlemen”).

  Mink called to say he’d heard from Matt. Mink is now a Boston-area radio personality, hosting promotional events, doing public appearances around the area. I stopped by one of these a few months ago when I was in town for more of the unabating court bullshit; ancient, made-up, violations, etc. Mink was bivouacked down at Quincy Market on the cobblestones, surrounded by logo’d balloons and streamers and his crew of teenage assistants—disciples, nearly—giddily handing out the station’s promo buttons, meanwhile Mink at the human limit of caffeination, usual wide paisley collar winged over velvet cocktail jacket and clacking rings, ad libbing, through a PA system that could be heard for blocks around, high-test showmanship booming through the Cradle of Liberty. Tourists stood around not knowing whether to applaud or run; either way nobody was paying attention to anything else. The mime could tug his invisible rope hard as he liked.