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.
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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
