We drove out of the Pacific Northwest towards Boise.
We were traveling with a non-musician driver, as none of us had a proper driver's license. She was wearing a straight-edge sweatshirt. On the back of her sweatshirt read a provocative statement: "If you're not now, you never were." This was a provocation to my band-mates, who were "not now" straight-edge. She had been contracted a scant few weeks prior to our departure, a time when the band was still musically proficient and serious about staying sober. Things fall apart slowly, and then things fall apart quickly. When it gets quick, it is like an earthquake. One looks for the fault-lines.
Still: Boise: it felt like an abandoned New York: We found a dimly-lit, yet "modern" square, and applied our skateboards to its newness. It felt like an abandoned New York: I cant believe what a rube I was, a country rube, utterly enchanted by the night of Boise, the night of Knoxville, the night of St. Louis. These empty nocturnes seemed to me so full of surprise, as if behind any and every closed door some arch-sophistry was surely taking place. As if people were drinking spanish wine and listening to white light/white heat behind every closed door, Adorno quotes hanging thick in the air, Mandelstam spread over a rosemary cracker. This remains the dream of a dream-city.
We left Boise. Our first show was in Richmond, Virginia. This was four thousand miles away. We had four or five days. We were in a kind of floating, shuddering paradise. We drove our van into the heights of Montana and Wyoming.
Then we hit a snow-storm. At this point our van's running lights died. We were lights-out in a white-out. We slowed to a pedestrian's pace for fear of sliding into a dark chasm. The semi-trucks' hell-lights emerged out of the suffocating white-out. This was especially taxing to us. As in Clouzot's Wages of Fear: we were going 5 miles per hour, as we did not have snow tires, and these salt-encrusted trucks were driving 60 miles per hour. And one particularly nefarious set of death-lights forced our skittish driver off of the highway, down the soft embankment, and onto some kind of plateau-void. I was smiling though: it was like a ride.
The driver was weeping. One of my band-mates started talking about her sweatshirt. More head-lights streamed by. All was fog and dark and night. No one dared to open a door, for one might then lurch into the abyss.
The last night's argument was re-ignited, that argument that attempted to ascertain if S and J were truly ever straight-edge, given the claim that if any straight-edge person ever has drank one fucking shot or beer, their whole legacy of abstinence is therefore annihilated into the barren wastes of void-history. Though, at this point, the driver was not rebutting any claims, but silently shaking, having seen her own mortality just seconds ago. It all had the air of a drab, dull, space movie:
-fractured crew is stuck on a desolate rock.
-small differences and personal histories are exaggerated due to close quarters and stress of emergency situation.
-external forces attack just when the crew is at its most fractured.
We heard crunching in the snow. A break in the argument, a pause in the sobbing, and then crunching. We heard a hand, or a claw, or a tail, rubbing wickedness against the side of our van. I must admit: this was no longer like a ride. We heard wails, voices in the air, soft moans. I believe now nothing, but I remember that sound. Or was there ever a sound? Who knows?
We drove five miles an hour on the side of the road. We drove for three hours. S and I had to peer out of the back windows of the van, and as soon as we saw truck lights, we would yell "truck!". Then the van swerved even farther towards the chasm. Our breath fogged up the back window. It felt good to help. I think that young men do not fear death, because their vision is too dim to see it, even when it is roaring out of the snow-fog.
In Cheyenne, Zeke the mechanic said it would cost three hundred dollars, and one day, to fix the running lights. The dawn had arrived. We ate some hash-browns and walked out into the soft cold of the dawn. We kicked a can to hear it clang against the desolation of the Wyoming gas station parking lot. We looked to the hills, still smothered in blizzard-cloud, the spine that we had just traversed. Then we looked to the East, free of cloud, full in the dawn of pink softness. There was no snow in the east, only voyage and mystery unlocked, and the first tendrils of a lone pink and then sapphire running-light, a radiance that was surely representative of Eastern knowledge, Eastern wisdom, an Earthly and yet Unearthly radiance, one that could not stand to wait even an hour for us to commiserate about the safety of our mortal husks.
Thus we drove on into the morning hue without running lights.
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We drove all day and all night and all day and by night we were in St. Louis, and then after skateboarding around a deserted city centre, we were on the outside of St. Louis. Our driver wanted to pee and to rest, so we stopped at a rest stop. All of this was so new: rest-stops where one could buy an American newspaper, gawk at a real American trucker, and maybe bump into a real American character. Canadian rubes...
Our driver went pee. She peed and then she began to walk back to our van. It was very humid in a way that I had not felt before. It was very dark. The pay-phone began to ring. We sat, sweating, and watched her pick up the telephone. We wondered to ourselves.
The man was breathing hard. He was saying things like "ooohhhh. I've got big balls." Stuff like that. Her face turned to sadness and sickness. She threw down the receiver and ran to the van. It was hard to make out what had happened through the blubber, the "and then, and then, and then he was talking about his balls, and then", but we got the general sense that the phone call was for her but not really for her. So again: S and I in the back of the van, peering through the back windows, searching for perverted headlights, searching, smelling the Mississippi and giggling.
More to come.
I am the bartender at a bar called Terry's Teriyaki Bar.
I am Terry; my name is Terry. I am not "the Terry" in Terry's Teriyaki Bar though. He hires me because he likes the name Terry. I never meet him in my dream, but he's a world-class prick. A waitress tells me this. She knows I am dreaming, and she knows I won't be here for very long. In fact, it's the one thing I can remember her saying to me. I empathize with her brevity: there are few better statements than "My boss Terry is a world-class prick."
Every drink at Terry's Teriyaki Bar has a bit of Teriyaki sauce added to it. Even a can of Pabst has Teriyaki. In my dream I crack a can of icy Pabst. Then I fire a glob of Teriyaki into the hole at the top of the can. There is a special button on that soda-shooting-contraption that bartenders use. The teriyaki button is by far the most faded. When I do this, I think of a fishing hole cut into ice, because the beer is so cold, and I see myself pouring liters of steaming teriyaki sauce into the Arctic sea. I think about the fish becoming addicted to Teriyaki sauce, ignoring their duties and their children, and committing their fish-days to the edge of the ice hole in anticipation of the next glob. I feel guilty.
Terry's Teriyaki Bar is packed full of inconsiderate men in white baseball caps. Many of these men have well-manicured beards. They all have money, and yet few tip. That's okay--my boss charges a lot for his teriyaki-infused drinks.
The layout of Terry's Teriyaki Bar is "Japanese" inspired. The place is organized into medium-sized semi-private fake-wood booths. That's it. That's the "Japanese" part.
All kinds of idiocy spews out of these booths. I hear all kinds of beastly man-yelling. I am forever hearing that long, self-assured "Aww yeah" that accompanies any faux-ribald comments from young men.
"Boo-yaw!"
"Fuck yeah!"
And when the waitress brings them their drinks, they often yell "Fuck you very much!"
And this comment incites another round of hooting and exclamation and dog-barking.
These men tax me: they do not know that is not enough, not nearly enough, to just float around in the eddies of our age. But no one can possibly tell them that, because they do not know how to listen to anyone who does not speak in their cadence.
In my dream I am half-myself. My name is Terry, and I have beautiful, rippling biceps. But my arms are too short. I am wearing a platinum necklace that I bought off of Terry for 700 dollars. I am wearing a purple silk shirt that Terry bought for me. All the lighting in Terry's Teriyaki Bar is just slightly purple, like a bathroom on Worf's home-world. Terry believes that the color purple and teriyaki are somehow linked. In my dream I do not ask my boss Terry if he means the color purple, or The Color Purple.
In my dream I am half-myself. There is no Mel. I can feel my loneliness in my dream. There is only the Terry-hating waitress, and the booths and booths of folly, and the tubs of teriyaki sauce. My loneliness slows me down, and then I breathe, and it passes.
In my dream I am half-myself. I worry. Dream-Terry is just barely holding it together. There is too much of real-me in there now.
On my break I pour myself a glass of red wine. Even though it's strictly forbidden, I do not even add a splash of teriyaki. I go into the kitchen. It smells like tater-gems, even though absolutely no food is served at Terry's Teriyaki Bar, because Terry is worried that potential customers will mistakenly assume that the teriyaki is used to flavour food. On the Terry's Teriyaki Bar sign, it specifically says "NO FOOD".
I feel so lonely. The wine tastes like a leaking battery has secretly pissed in my glass. I go back to work.
I am pouring a white-wine-e-yaki spritzer.
I am stirring a teri-gin and tonic-yaki.
I am blending a blueberry-tequila smoothie-yaki. I can smell it in my dream. At the last second, of course, I shoot a big blob of brown goo into the mix. I put it onto a tray alongside a jug of warmed teri-saki-yaki. The waitress picks up the tray, smiles at me, and disappears into the din and into the cry of soft, puffy, inebriated hooligans.
Some time passes. I am working, making drinks.
A young man walks up to me. He has blueberry tequila-yaki smoothie-yaki running down his shirt. He looks at me.
"That drink fucking sucked, bro."
And then he pukes purple-blue yaki-broth all over my arm.
And then I wake up.
*I disapprove of writing about one's dreams. It's incredibly lazy, and excruciatingly boring, especially when anything remotely symbolic is introduced. But this is just my opinion, and you can disagree. I am not unassailable.
Shitmix '96 occurred in the year 1996, last millenium.
My close friends lived in a very romantic part of our city.
Their house was close to a graveyard, close to a bay, close to a hilly, mossy rise of craggy rock. At the peak of this crag, the rock had been split in half by some mytho-poetic blast of Zeus-lightning.
The fogs rolled in, the trees turned to rust, and then to darkness. And it was wonderful to ride down to the bay, and then light a fire in their cold and nautical house. Three friends lived on the main floor. I was their guest.
And upstairs, in the grand loft, there lived a guy none of us really liked.
This guy was one of those guys: his future laid out in his sick smile. He was destined to have lattes with a business friendly eco-mayor, or sit on the committee to help the poor through surveillance and re-training.
Eco-consultant. Dean of an ESL college. Boyfriend of a thousand gullible girlfriends.
I hate that.
I shouldn't mention this guy. Why write about someone you don't like, who you haven't seen in ten years? Who cares? Self: Let the dead scales of judgement and pettiness fall from your hide.
But I was remembering all the sawing, and I started laughing a bit.
He wanted to fix the basement up, this guy, even though they were renting. I can't remember why: maybe he just liked landlords, or he liked putting plastic up. Maybe he wasn't a bad guy; maybe I'm the asshole.
Anyways. When I came over, it was never when he was there. I was there to be in the company of my friends. We drank beer together, minus future coalition-of-the-middle-left dude. Because it was cold, we hopped around in the kitchen. Then we tied a rope from the stove to the kitchen table. This act cut the kitchen in half. And I brought over a neon green volleyball, and to keep warm, we played foot-only-volleyball, as the fog spectated and spector-ed through the windows, a mono-spectator who, in its ethereal form, was devoid of claps or catcalls.
Fog of evil.
Unholy fusion of Hacky-Sack and Beach Volleyball.
West Coast.
Sometimes, after our exercise, we'd watch an ACDC movie: my favourite scene was when they absolutely destroyed a marshland, ripping it into oblivion with their various esoteric vehicles.
This could not go on forever, and I started sneaking downstairs with a saw. The basement was wildly unfinished. The stairs wobbled. There was a mound of cat-shit-dirt.
He was putting support beams up. Stapling plastic to the support beams. I have no idea why.
I snuck down there and I sawed through his support beams. And I would sweep up the sawdust, even though it fell onto cat-shit-dirt. Then I would tear down the plastic, always painstakingly removing the nails that held up the plastic. So his work was undone. And the little painstaking moves were just an extra large mind-fuck.
And then he exploded in righteous incrimination, of course, screaming at my friends. They of course knew, by the creaking of the stairs and my maniacal laughing that I was doing something evil downstairs, but still never giving me up, and always feigning dis-knowledge of perpetration.
I don't know why.
But I tell you this just so you know that I felt comfortable there.
So one day I realized that it would be interesting if I "hosted" a party, and called it Shitmix '96, and mandated a decree that all in attendance must immediately pour their spirits and ales and strawberry blush wines and mudslides and mike's hard lemonade and wild-cats into a large plastic barrel in the middle of the kitchen.
I still remember a woman who, laughing and acknowledging our good-spirited hedonism, tried to put her liquor in the fridge. I think she said, "Yeah, umm, that's kind of funny, but there's no way in hell that I am pouring my wildcat in there."
And then she put her beers in the fridge and walked out of the kitchen, secure in her belief that her liquor would not be emptied into the barrel.
Oh Zeus, what odd demons wrapped themselves around my spine in that moment! Two demons, Zeus, in my spine; one a demon of humour, of hurtful mirth, of mischief, and impish transgression.
Oh Zeus, but the other ill demon: that demon who rules the rules, who reigns over exactitude and oath, who spoke in my ear words of vengeful contract. These were words that backed the claim that any person who attends a shitmix party must forfeit their right to their individual liquor.
So, obeying the demons, I dumped her beer into the barrel, and when she came into the kitchen for a refreshment and saw the empty vessels and the bubbling slurp of the grog she started crying. I remember her mascara. I feel bad about this now. I'm sorry, Jenny.
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Anyways: the reason I am writing about this is to somehow introduce the Jaks.
The Jaks: too fucking radical for the internet.
Who are the Jaks? Do I know? Can I say? What can I say?
The Jaks are a skateboarding team whose roots stretch back into the pre-dawn of sk8 culture. They are so gnarly: even to write about them on the internet makes me world's biggest pozer. And, unlike most subcultures, they are not pining for internet exposure:
Here's a quote from TimmyJak:
forget we exist.
this is my first and last post. attempts to reply or make contact will be ignored.
the jaks are and always will be the most impossible to join most impossible to understand most impossible to recreate most impossible to tolerate skate team to ever exist. absolute music! deny knowing of our existence. ignore those who speak our name. we are us. you are someone else. it will always be so. gang no skate team yes. do not attempt to document our activities or the fact that we occupy the same planet as you. live your life and be happy. skate or don't. it doesn't bother us either way. all we desire is to be ignored. our joy is derived from absolute music. may yours be found where it lay. live your life. ours is separate.
we may love you, we may hate you, we may copulate you. either way, have a nice day.
TIMMY JAK
JAKS SKATE TEAM
S.F. DIVISION
At the risk of sounding cultural-studies: the Jaks' epistemology is so far from mine, that speaking about them is a bit like speaking in ignorance about the cultural practices of the Bedouin. It's just so tacky.
But I need to speak about them a little bit. Like how when one Jak was passed out on his mother's couch, passed out stone-cold, and his Ma somehow managed to get his jean-vest off of him, and thinking herself charitable and helpful, she then dropped the beer-infused garment into the washing machine, watching the Jaks insignia swirl around in the soapy water, hoping that she had not done something wrong, but knowing otherwise.
And when the Jak woke up, he found his being slightly lighter, and quickly realized that his most sacred possession had been stripped from his body while he slept. The now-spotless jean-vest was just coming out of the dryer. The sun was streaming through the living room window. Birds chirped. Cookies baked. His mother folded the jean-vest and lovingly placed it on her son's lap. Total silence. In her mind, perhaps, relations would get better after this decisive moment. His defiance was linked to that stinking, beer-soaked, filth-encrusted vest. He would smell the scent of cleanliness and make some life-changes; find a new crowd; stop graffiti-ing "fuck the pigs"; stop moshing, stop thrashing, stop shredding, stop gnarling.
He took a deep breath of the vest, and then he walked out of house, into the back yard.
Perhaps, thought the mother, he was going to bury the vest!
He threw the vest down onto the soft earth. Oh, she thought, hope against hope!
But then he unzipped his fly and pulled his you-know-what out of his jean-shorts, into the sunday sunshine. He then closed his eyes and drowned the vest in urine. He pissed for a solid minute. His mother trembled as some stiff tree might tremble.
Then he stooped down and picked up the steaming, dripping rag. He looked his mother in the eye. He then put the piss-vest back on, forever.
And then he walked into the kitchen, grabbed one of the old man's beers, downed it in one gulp, and stood defiant in the kitchen, dripping his urine onto the fresh-wax of the kitchen floor.
He burped.
"That's better!"
Anyways, it's true that I want to tell every story that I can half-remember about the Jaks, but they're bigger than that impulse.
Maybe I can interview Stephen McBean.
They came to my party.
I think they said, "Hey. This generation, this younger generation that seemed so fucking serious and not Jak-worthy...maybe they're all right." I think they said this when they saw the gigantic steaming barrel of mix that stood in the middle of the kitchen, commanding as much attention as the 2001 monolith might have, if it had chosen to attend the shit-mix.
So the Jaks came to my party, and I served them some cups of shit-mix, and luckily someone had just brought a bottle of Bacardi 151 so it was extra rum-tangy. And luckily no one smoked too close to the barrel. And we played some game where one throws money against a wall, and the owner of the closest money then claims all the chuckers' money, and we played this game downstairs, and when it got boring, I passed out a few saws to the Jaks and we all went ape-shit on that guys basement suite re-modeling. And when he got back from his silence retreat, he saw an empty barrel in his kitchen and he saw my home-made barfbags both strewn and used all over his front lawn.
And though I am trying to not be evil these days, I still am laughing, thinking of the damage that the Jaks must have done to all of his re-modeling. Those dudes can really get up to some house-wrecking when they want to!
And this is the story of the first party I ever threw. Please don't drink to excess, if at all.
Part 2. Part 1 lies beneath this entry. Scroll down.
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Anyways: I was making some Emo music. I made a tape with a ghetto-blaster. I listened to it. It sounded like the music I listened to. Not better, not too much worse. I brought the tape downtown. Just as D brought me out of darkness, I brought my tape out of darkness. I could feel its power radiating out of its plastic housing.
When S and J heard the tape, they asked me if I wanted to join their band. I wonder now if I hadn't made the tape for that reason, though at the time it was an unexpected invitation. Here are some musical facts about me at the time:
I couldn't tune a guitar. I couldn't change a guitar string. I didn't know what reverb or chorus or flanger or tremolo did, nor did I understand which of those effects are good, and which ones are unacceptable. I didn't really care about knobs. I just turned everything on, and everything up. I played an Ibanez Roadstar 2, a guitar only capable of producing Knopfler quacks. Dave played, at the time, a telecaster into a Music Man amp, with rich, deep tremolo, and reverb. His treble strings sung like Morricone! His low strings cut into your heart. It was a beautiful shred! And it was being replaced with a watery duck quack.
Before anyone ever heard my quack, there were Vegan riots.
"That guy who pretends to be straight-edge, and then shotguns beers? I hate that guy. And I hate his fake fuckin' abstract paintings."
"That guy just got them drunk and probably begged to get in the band!"
"What a piece of shit that guy is. He ruined our scene!"
And then, precious weeks passed, and we were to play our first show. We played in the record store, on the floor, so as to properly and forever decimate that line between audience and performers. Thus: I was singing into the literal jaws of my accusers. I was so befuddled and nervous, I forgot to turn my distortion on, an effect that simulates a sound of anger and rebellion. Quack, Quack, Quack-Quack-Quack, Quack. People were rubbing their palms on the back of their necks. I was no Wenger.
I think, of course, that S and J knew this. It was friendship that drew me to them. We would miss each other when they left. I was their new friend. Thus: a good solution was to just have me join the band. I'd figure out the music part in time, right?
Right!
The start of the tour coincided with the end of the record store. After the home-town gig, they trashed their beloved space. They smashed glass cabinets, shredded record boxes. People urinated and defecated on the carpet. We did shotguns, which means you put a nail in the side of your beer and it comes rifling out into your belly. There is sweet freedom in young nihilism. I hate smashing things though. It's too loud, and wasteful, and the stupidest, vilest person seems to take a pre-lapsarian delight in it. I describe here smiling thugs, the kind that poured out of Mussolini's palm .
Anyways: I woke up on glass, assaulted by defecation-reek. The sun was shining. People were standing over me. They looked upset. They had their hands on their hips. I was sleeping on a shotgun-can.
I was like "Ow, how did that get there." Like a lovable rogue from a teen-romp, I was. Booger on the floor.
These loomers: they were the other pillars of the scene, individuals who had not been convinced by my wrecker-mentality to try having a beer. Resistors. These were the pillars from a scene that had seemed to be thriving, even a month ago. A scene, like all music scenes, that orbited around the local record store. And now: look at it: how could one not draw inferences: wrecker, wrecker in the Augustinian sense! Or, in truth, like the one carpenter ant that has been gnawing on the posts and the beams, not one but a thousand, the one you see representing the thousand. And you now feel this thousand, weakening the platform that edges out over the abyss.
They said a lot of angry things, looked around at their once thriving nexus, shook their hands, shook their head, and then they left. I went back to sleep.
It was the strictness that wrecked this scene. It wasn't me, it was not you, it was not anyone. It was all the infernal rules.
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When you ask a person to join your band, and you have a foreign tour booked, the first question you should ask is:
"Do you have I.D.?"
I did not have identification to cross into the United States. I did not even have a birth certificate. There is a solution for those who do not have proof of identity. It is called "Money Mart."
No: only in a less prohibitive world, in the 90's, was this a solution. The cruel prohibitive government, in the early millenium, forced Money-Mart, aka "The People's Bank", to stop issuing identification. But even in the last millenium, this wasn't much of a solution. That is to say, even in the decade of the 1990's, pulling up to the U.S. of A. border with picture I.D. from Money Mart, a cheque-cashing corporation that catered to the poor and the criminal, was courting trouble. And by catered, I am smiling, for I should be turning in my thesaurus (as if !) to the word PARASITIC.
--------------------------------
Finally the day came for us to buy our van, and load our van up with our instruments, as I have done so many times since, and take the ferry to the mainland, and turn left, and go to the border.
It's not important, but I should mention that our van was bought off of an opera singer. Not a famous opera singer, but a non-famous opera singer. An opera singer that was so non-famous that he had to drive himself around our country in his grey Econo-line and sleep in his little bed, built into the back of his van. This image now endears me to this anonymous soldier of song.
We drove to the border, filled to the brim with the toxicity of nerves. I sat sweating in the back of the van. R was driving, even though he wasn't in the band. He wanted to see America too.
He passed our I.D.s to the typically T.J. Hooker-looking border guard. My flimsy, gaudy, mustard plumed Money-Mart I.D. was sandwiched into a passport, hoping to escape detection. The fishing of a Money-Mart I.D. out of a passport is a kind of gift to a border-guard: a non-dangerous fool has come to the gates, a rube from the country, a man from the country come Before the Law. I trembled, self-aware, and I awoke from my Money-Mart delusion. I would never see America!
The man at the gates held the I.D. up to the light. He looked into my eyes, my eyes captured in time, my time spent in the photo lounge of the downtown Money-Mart. My identification-expression transmitted, surely, a rooster-y belief that this was a good idea, that having only Money-Mart I.D. and trying to cross into modern Rome was a great idea, a kind of individualism and a-historical assurance that was not, in fact, so different than the country itself! Nothing expressed my individuality more than my Money-mart I.D.! Trailblazer!
"Who is Carey Mercer?"
R said, "That sweating guy in the back of the van." He said it with pure scorn. He no longer worshipped my Rayon-mojo.
"Is he retarded?"
I lowered my head in sadness and shame, but also in funniness.
"Yes."
"Does he have a warrant?" The man at the gates would not address me directly. He would not speak to me. Without R, I did not even exist.
"No. No, there is no warrant out for his arrest."
I sincerely shook my head, denying the existence of a warrant for my arrest, making sure, while I was shaking my head, to not make eye-contact with my interrogator. And then I looked up and gave him what I now call "kind eyes". It's a look that I give, a look of submission and supplication. This gesture is not wholly passive, for he who supplicates also administers a kind of psychic attack onto the aggressor: for when the aggressor does not accept the supplication and commits violence or exercises power, his or her heart is reduced to stone, he or she is reduced to a thing, something like a stone. Simone Weil.
"Well, you tell this guy, this Carey, that he might want to be careful. There are only two reasons a person might have Money-Mart identification. Firstly: he is retarded. Wrong in the head. Messed up. Not made for this world. Secondly: he has a warrant out for him."
And then he finally looked at me. He had determining that the reason for my Money Mart I.D. was the first and not the second, and he shook his head, and he gave our I.D. back to R, and he waved us through, through to America.
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Part 3 coming soon enough
