The man was not convinced. He continued to shoot me an incredulous look, then glanced over at the hotelkeeper behind the counter for backup, as if the puzzled woman might provide concrete confirmation that, protests to the contrary, I was indeed Rojas’s friend.
“Are you sure, man? Are you sure Rojas didn’t give you that black eye?” he continued.
Rojas did not appear to be a very convivial colleague. Nor did his friend. Their friendship was, at the very least, troubled. It did not take a DEA agent to figure out what line of work Rojas and his friend might be in.
“I guess that makes sense, ’cause if you were Rojas’s friend you wouldn’t be carrying that”—he pointed at my suitcase, a bulky silver-and-white number with a busy design that looks like it belongs to a wealthy dowager in a Marx Brothers movie—“you’d be carrying two fucking huge cases like this.”
He then pantomimed carrying a pair of extraordinarily, even comically oversized suitcases before finally, conclusively determining that I was ultimately not Rojas’s friend and consequently of no interest to him.
This was another kind of Phish story. An archetypal Phish tale, in a lot of ways: sketchy dude in a tie-dyed shirt and a ponytail whose mind has been blown by way too much acid and whose life is one giant fuzzy misadventure.
He’d been on the road for what appeared to be decades. It had taken its toll. During my travels, I encountered a lot of long-in-the-tooth Phish fans who, to paraphrase Gram Parsons, had grown kind and wise with age. This man was not one of them.
I took a cab to the nearest Greyhound station, in Newark, New Jersey. The weight of abandoned dreams and ruined lives hung heavy over it.
You could cut the desperation with a knife. Even Greyhound’s slogan, “Fly Greyhound,” betrays its low self-esteem and inferiority complex. United’s motto is never going to be “United: Like Taking the Space Shuttle Without Ever Leaving the Stratosphere.”
Greyhounds are a world unto themselves. They look and smell and feel like no place else. There is a strange texture to the air itself, a punishingly antiseptic quality. Greyhound buses are wonderful places for the curious and shy to eavesdrop on the gregarious and excessively public. Behind me on the Greyhound that night, a twenty-year-old white spitfire talked to an elegant older black man with a voice so soothing and sonorous it might have lulled me to sleep if the mismatched duo’s banter didn’t render sleep an impossibility.
She liked Katt Williams and Kevin Hart and Dane Cook, she told the older man as he listened attentively, but she really liked Ron White because he reminded her of her daddy.
Her daddy called her Spazz and taught her how to fight.
The older man listened patiently. He exuded an air of quiet assurance that made you wonder what in the hell he was doing taking a Greyhound bus from Newark.
Everybody who rides a Greyhound from Newark at that hour might as well wear a sign reading, ASK ME ABOUT THE HORRIBLE MISTAKES THAT HAVE LED ME HERE.
The girl had managed to pack two millennia of activity into two decades of living. At twenty, she announced dramatically, she was finally ready to settle down, if only with herself.
She’d been through it all and just barely survived. She’d been to jail. She partied, fucked around with drugs, got strung out on heroin, and kicked it herself. No rehab, no nothing. Just lying on a fucking floor and crying and shitting herself until the poisons finally exited her system. She was tough. Bitches around where she lived knew not to fuck with her, she reported sternly.
She had a reputation, she announced with pride. People where she lived knew not to fuck with her or they’d get knocked the fuck out. She’d done her time. She had her scars, literally and figuratively.
The girl said the n-word with remarkable ease and regularity despite being white and in conversation with a black man who clearly would never use the phrase himself in any context.
She said she used the word because she felt so at home with black people. To her, it was a badge of her familiarity with African-Americans. She didn’t seem to have any conception that the word was poisonous because nobody around her seemed to see it that way. She believed that the word had lost whatever dark power it might once have possessed, either through time or ubiquity or sheer overuse.
She said she smoked pot because it calmed her rages and helped her sleep. She had kicked all other drugs but she was never going to stop smoking weed.
Oh, you will someday, he assured her paternally.
No, I don’t think I ever will, she responded.
The two were flirting while continuously asserting that they were not flirting, found the practice of flirting dubious, and had no interest in each other physically despite repeatedly complimenting each other’s looks.
“You must have been a real player back in your time. You must have broken a lot of hearts back in the day,” she purred.
“I did all right,” he said diplomatically, but when he looked back at his own life he was filled with regret.
He had turned it around and was looking to make a transition from being a corrections officer to a motivational speaker and author. He spoke hypnotically of the differences between the corrupt material world and our spiritual lives.
He had reached an important place in his spiritual journey and wanted to share what was inside him with the world.
These two were as much a part of the trip as anything else; the sleeping long-haul trucks by the side of the road and the elegant lady behind the ticket counter in Pittsburgh who looked a little like a young Eartha Kitt and had her hair and nails done up perfect and played some half-forgotten soul song on a small boombox that somehow transformed her little corner of hell into Motown circa 1966.
It was all part of the experience, the weird spiritual communion with great cosmic American music and great American people.
The pair got off in Pittsburgh after promising to keep in touch.
As if on cue, a black man dressed in all white got on board. He had a thick red scar along the left side of his face the same muddy red color as the pupils of his dilated eyes, and he sat down next to me.
Scars would be a recurring motif throughout my travels. From the deeply scarred man at Hallowicked who announced that for the first time in his life he didn’t feel like a spectacle to the beautiful scar I picked up in Bethel Woods and now this man, who looked at the massive scar on my face and sensed a kindred spirit.
Pointing to my eye he joked, “I think we know the same guy.”
I smiled, then feigned going back to sleep as the deeply scarred man began mumbling in what seemed to be a cracked-out haze.
Then it happened: The slurred, semicoherent rhymes gradually began to take the form of raps.
These weren’t popular songs; they were unmistakably his own compositions.
I’m not sure the man even knew that he was rapping out loud. It was possible that he imagined that he was still engrossed in an endless internal monologue.
It was another side of the great music gestalt: the unknown, the undiscovered, the never-was whose career peaks at freestyling on a Greyhound bus at five in the morning. In his raps he called himself a young Jay-Z and a young Gucci Mane despite clearly being in his midforties.
I was impressed less by the content of his rhymes than by the obvious thought and care that went into their presentation.
I half opened my eyes just enough to see that the man next to me had pulled out a stack of ripped notebook paper and was performing the raps he had scribbled down in indecipherable blue ink.
This was the written part of his performance. At a certain point he started freestyling. I know this because he clearly demarcated which of his raps were written and which he improvised on the spot.
In its own way, it was a complete show: the established numbers, some freestyles, and some shout-outs to his boys SwaggaB and Li’l Wizel.
So Swagga B and Li’l Wizel, you can take comfort in the knowledge that your man didn’t forget you that night. You were in his thoughts. You were in h
is dreams. You were in his rhymes.
His work done, the man then drifted off to sleep. There was an almost embarrassingly intimate element to the performance. It was as if I had stumbled into the man’s waking dream.
Like all graduates of the Chicago public education system, my knowledge of geography is limited to a vague understanding that the United States might be in the Western Hemisphere (It is, isn’t it? Please check on this, Scribner fact checkers!), so I had only the vaguest notion of where Clarkston, Michigan, might be in relation to Columbus, Ohio, where Greyhound vomited me forth following that sleepless fourteen-and-a-half-hour bus ride.
After failing to secure lodging at a shitty, reasonably priced hotel—there was a big science fiction convention in town that had monopolized the vast majority of the city’s available hotel rooms—I ended up at a Hyatt far beyond my pay grade where I attempted to sleep and “eat” and orient myself and do various things people do in order to feel human.
After a deep, restorative sleep, I wandered downstairs, where corpulent Darth Mauls and teenage Klingons congregated happily in the hotel bar, giddy to be among their own. They were another kind of pop-culture tribe, as distinct and colorful in their own right as Juggalos and Phish fans.
I stepped out into a glorious summer afternoon and went to a convenience store to buy beer. The softly drawling cashier behind the counter looked at the scrawny, vulnerable-looking make-pretend Jedi in front of me in line and said poignantly while selling him sodas and energy drinks, “Treasure your youth while you still have it. It’ll be gone before you know it. And protect yourself. Protect yourself. People around here can be so cruel.”
The young man shrugged indifferently. He was, after all, a teenager.
“Where are you from, sir?” I asked the cashier while he rang up my beer.
“Oh, I’m from around here. That’s how I know that people can be so cruel,” he replied with a tragic lilt in his voice.
The next night I was back on track. I made the two-hour exodus from Columbus to Akron (mere minutes from Cuyahoga Falls, the jewel of northeastern Ohio!) via Greyhound and took a cab to the Blossom Music Center. Just before we entered the parking lot I panicked, and, convinced the cab would be searched, ate an entire gram bag of Molly before I got out.
Big mistake. Dumping such a large amount of Molly into my fragile system all at once made my body temperature rocket upward and my face turn an unhealthy shade of red. I looked like I was on the verge of heatstroke because I probably was on the verge of heatstroke.
“Stay cool, Nathan. Stay cool,” my interior monologue sagely cautioned as I set out in fruitless search of a nearby reservoir of water I might submerge my entire being into. Despite my condition, as soon as the opening notes to “Kill Devil Falls” kicked in, a surge of visceral excitement swept over me. The adrenalized, infectious “Kill Devil Falls” was always a great way to begin a set, but it seemed especially appropriate given the venue.
Even by Phish standards, the band played a spectacularly goofy set that night. Phish’s sense of humor was markedly different from my own. It was often childlike (they were, after all, a band that sometimes performed in unison while jumping on trampolines), and while I might once have listened to the comedy endemic both to Phish’s original songs and their choice of covers (that night Phish covered Allen Toussaint’s “Sneaking Sally Through the Alley” and Little Feat’s “Rocket in My Pocket,” both of which are about as somber as their titles suggest) and thought of it, to paraphrase the Onion’s description of the comical hijinks in the Star Wars prequels, as the kind of thing “fans have come to know and tolerate,” I was no longer in a place where I prized or valued my sense of humor or aesthetic or taste or sensibility above anyone else’s. Phish’s sense of humor was a huge part of what made them Phish (just as Insane Clown Posse’s antithetical but still very central sense of humor represented a huge part of what made them Insane Clown Posse), and at that point I had embraced Phish in its entirety.
The more I saw Phish that summer, the more parallels I saw between Phish fandom and baseball fandom: the more all-American a pastime following Phish became. Baseball games and Phish shows each stretched on for about three hours on average and thrived on the in-between times—those leisurely moments when a batter steps out of the batter’s box and stares absent-mindedly into the stands while swinging his bat, or when Phish explores the notes in between the choruses and the climaxes. They were all about congregating with like-minded souls, birds of a feather who flocked together to take Molly and rage out or drink beer in the sun with buddies.
Baseball fans and Phish fans each had to have faith that the same eminently fallible group of men—our guys—doing the same goddamn things over and over again, night after night, can bring tremendous pleasure even if nothing remarkable happens. But there’s also the exhilarating possibility that something extraordinary will occur, whether it’s a four-home-run game from some slugger or a triple play or Phish playing a song they haven’t played in ages and might never play again. That night, for example, Phish played a punkishly bratty curio called “Fuck Your Face” it has, as of this writing, only played five times in its history, as well as “Rocket in My Pocket,” which it had played only once before.
Both baseball and Phish fandom were about tradition, about friendship, about camaraderie, about being unhealthily fixated on the performances of absolute strangers. During my travels I’d occasionally run into men my age who were on tours of major league baseball parks with their fathers, and it always struck me as a strangely simpatico exercise to following Phish with friends. Both were, on some level, about solidifying and reaffirming bonds rooted in shared passions and histories, and both had a weirdly statistical element to them. Throughout my travels I encountered fans who made great sport out of predicting the first song Phish would play and their subsequent set list. There was a science to it, it appeared. It was the Phish-fan equivalent of fantasy baseball or Bill James worship. For me nothing took the joy out of something, especially something so primal and emotional as music, quite like adding mathematics to the equation, but for some fans this only increased their enjoyment. Where I once saw Phish fans as a homogenous mass of stoned, hippie-dancing space cadets, I now saw infinite variety in their ranks, though some folks are easier to peg as Phish fans, as my guide for the next chapter in my adventures would illustrate.
TWO FOR THE ROAD: OUR NARRATOR FINDS A TEMPORARY TRAVELING COMPANION
You can generally spot a Phish fan one of two ways: They’re either someone who looks really, really fucked up or they look open-minded, curious, and bursting with energy and excitement. The two are of course not mutually exclusive. Oftentimes Phish fans are open-minded, wildly curious, and bursting with energy and excitement about getting really, really fucked up. And oftentimes someone who ends up looking really, really fucked up began as an open-minded, curious kid bursting with energy and excitement.
That was true of a gentleman I first encountered at the Phish show at the Blossom Music Center. On my way into the venue, I locked eyes with an intense-looking young man with dirty blond hair, electric blue eyes, and a skeletal frame who appeared to be sweating violently from every pore of his body. We looked at each other just long enough to be concerned that the other person was way too fucked up. An empathetic cry of “Are you all right, dude?” may even have been uttered. Then we passed like two proverbial sickly, messed-up dudes at a Phish show. On ships. In the night.
I reencountered the man at an Ohio bus station, where I would be taking the bus to Cincinnati for that night’s show. Our individual trips had overlapped before we had even been properly introduced, though being properly introduced at a Phish show can be a quixotic endeavor, since the person you’re introduced to is probably not going to remember you. Oh, sure, they’d like to. I would love to remember the names of even half the wonderful people I met on tour, but it’s just not possible. I’m not sure if it’s even advisable. Linger too long and the moment fades.
“Yo
u going to the show?” I asked by way of introduction. He replied affirmatively.
Like mine, his summer had become one long act of incoherent improvisation with the universe. He’d lost his license after getting a DUI and was traveling light with just a felt bag and a few essentials. He was, of all things, a bill collector in real life despite being in massive debt himself, so he was riding both sides of the karma train.
Before I left for the open road that summer I had fallen into such deep debt myself that bill collectors were calling my employer with dire warnings of what might happen if I didn’t settle the situation immediately. I had fallen behind. My life was spinning out of control. It had been that kind of summer. It was the summer the debt rating of the United States itself had been slashed. We were a nation of deadbeats.
The stranger agreed that Bethel Woods was transcendent and that kicking the tour off there was an inspired choice.
We sat down on the floor of the Greyhound station next to a pair of scraggly-haired, hard-living denizens who had the grizzled look endemic to the native Ohio Juggalo.
It was this curious book in microcosm: a strange summit of the tribes, between a Phish fan, a pair of defiant Juggalos, and a strange man with scratched glasses and a black eye that took up half his face at a Greyhound bus station in weird, gothic, massive, endless Ohio.
“Man, whenever I go back to jail they know I’m a Juggalo just by this tattoo,” one of the Juggalos boasted as he pulled down his T-shirt to reveal a backward Hatchetman. “I got this backward Hatchetman for my dead friend who was killed by Juggalo Holocaust. I told him if the fuckers ever got him, I’d get a backward Hatchetman in his memory. They did, so it is what it is.”
They were both high-ranking leaders within a gang they called the Hatchets that may or may not have existed solely in their active imaginations. The gang was consequently clashing with factions of an actual anti-ICP group called Juggalo Holocaust. According to the men, Juggalos were being slaughtered en masse by rival gangs. They told tales, chockablock with Juggalo bravado, of being approached by Juggalo Holocaust thugs and letting out a “Whoop! Whoop!” to signal to their boys that it was about to pop off, of losing friends to gang fights, and buying The Great Milenko at age seven and being instantly transformed into Juggalos.
You Don't Know Me but You Don't Like Me: Phish, Insane Clown Posse, and My Misadventures with Two of Music's Most Maligned Tribes Page 13