CONTINENT, COUNTER CLOCKWISE
(Or: Miniature Golfing with the Humpers in a Police State)
CONTINENT, COUNTER CLOCKWISE
(Or: Miniature Golfing with the Humpers in a Police State)
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We were almost done packing when the medium-size earthquake hit. It rattled the outdoor metal staircase, sounding like people running loudly up to the second floor. We took the hint and packed faster and were gone before daylight. Red arid zona desert, a little snow cresting the mountains above Flagstaff. Canyons of boulders and exposed, wrinkled rock faces. The dirt roads of New Mexico turned to mud, then hard-packed snow, with flakes spiraling like moths against the windshield, and the headlights barely cleaving into the gray throat of fog. I fell asleep in the back in my star-spattered black dress and woke up in Oklahoma. This time, the band included guitarist Melanie Vammen, bassist Awful Knawful (who was subbing for fellow Slut for Hire, Miss Ko Ko Puff) and drummer Mad Dog Karla (Controllers, Banana Squashead) and wonder road manager Ames (you've seen him helping Betty Blowtorch, Penis Flytrap, SFH, etc.), and we were mostly just pretty happy to get out of work and out of town. The sign said DO NOT DRIVE INTO THE SMOKE, but we didn't see any. Now it was clear and sort of sunny. We wondered what dragons there were here. | |
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Our first show, the previous night, in Santa Fe, it was at least exciting to see The Eyeliners get the room hopping with their Ramones'-little-sisters punk pop, but we Trains turned out to be a bummer, with all the kids hating us and me insulting everyone. But that's the great thing about touring, there's always the next show. The whole west was now hilly and rocky, with fractured wall faces where the highways had cut through. The hills were now long and low, hiding secret glens of grasses littered with faint heads of new little yellow flowers and dandelions, and trees with narrow trunks and long, straight rising slender branches, most without green leaves yet. The last of the white water carved faces of the crumbling hills collapsed into the Mississippi River at St. Louis, where the river seemed clotted and gray like the sky. The interstate was now filled with traffic after two time zones of nothingness. After we crossed the bridge, the land and horizon turned perfectly flat: a wide, even expanse of farms and low houses intercut with drainage ditch-size muddy brown slow moving streams that already looked drying up. Magically, trees with tiny pink blossoms, like tufts of cotton candy, were everywhere, looking all the more vivid against the duller other trees without their leaves. | |||||||||
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By Pennsylvania, it seemed like all the roads were under construction, driving was slow and sleep was throttled. In the east of the state, there were perfectly green hills and forests, and Dutch hex symbols painted like dissected checkerboard-patterned circles on barns. It was an early sunny morning, and all the men seemed to be out mowing their lawns. We fell out of that last long swooping hill into New Jersey, amid a sworl of exploding spring flowers, until we hit the city and forgot. Giuliani's horrific changes (making the homeless disappear, a rise in police abuses, a change in the city's entire character) were only just beginning to happen, and it was possible to wander around unaware for a few days in my still-favorite city, happy with a young Missy, or driving around till dawn with Skinny John (Reverb Motherfuckers) and Susan Moynihan (Little Pork Chop), or, with Ames, carrying a soused Melanie back to Bobby and Lizzy's apt. after our merry night watching the Humpers (great, as usual) and the Dwarves (not as wild as the real Dwarves, more like boogie metal punk instead of Germs-punk), FYP and others, a great night at what seemed to be a cool punk club in Manhattan, Coney Island High. Upstairs, after that set, we Humpers and Leaving Trains badgered DJs Alan Vega and Jayne County to talk to us, and enjoyed a cool, unknown band called Skrap, who were sorta like Blondie, but a little more punkishly, maybe like L.A.'s own The Darlings, but it just seemed like a lucky, quintessentially Big Apple experience. | |
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Of course, the next night at Coney Island high was different, although I was happy to finally see a Piss Factory reunion and a new set by spin-off band Emma Peel, a very heavy band starring Lizzie and Harri K. and ex-Leaving Trains slacker Bobby Belltower. Things got a little crazy during our abbreviated set. In short, ex-Nymphs singer Inger Lorre staged a fight with the bouncers with her boyfriend, who was thrown out (a camera crew from HARD COPY was there to film the Trains, but they left before Inger got her chance to be on TV). So Inger jumped onstage and speared the monitors with the mike stand before running off. Then the club cut the power, so Mad Dog did a rolicking drum solo and I did my best East European babushka-type Irish jig in time to Mad Dog's fast beat, then the fake-punk club called the police who marched en masse into the club and it was pretty ugly and everybody was mad at each other (though Ames and I thought it was a good show despite or because of everything). | |||||||||
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In the Lower East Side there was a sudden storm that swept through the artificial corridors of the skyscrapers, the rain at first hard and fast with thunder, then turning into hail that bounced off the outer plastic flaps of bodegas like coins, or skittered on the sidewalk like candy from a pinata. After crossing the last bridge and leaving behind the throbbing, condensed loaves of New York buildings diced into thin intersections and their nonstop parade of people, everything else seemed slow, or empty, or boring or unnoticed or half-populated. But one of our biggest highlights came in New Jersey, when we finally hooked up with the Humpers for most of the rest of our tour, and saw an enthusiastic, over-the-top show by hometown heroes The Mad Daddys, as well as a typically apocalyptic set by my favorite band, The Humpers, and we didn't feel so homesick. | |
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We had a lot of fun after joining the Humpers: racing around Delaware and the torn-up, barricaded streets of Philly just in time to squeeze in a short set; seeing the Humpers drink their way across the Midwest; the fucking crazy and wild kids in Sioux City, Iowa, where we had the most fun show; playing miniature golf with Billy Burks and Mark "Anarchy" Lee and roadie Hans of the Humpers in Columbus, Ohio outside the Humpers cheap motel, and I still think Billy cheated (o.k., I lost), and the next morning the motel called the cops, who showed up with a paddy wagon (!) ready to arrest the Humpers, who escaped just in time; hanging out in the tall little house with the Cheater Slicks in Ohio, with its stacks of dusty records and multiple jukeboxes; cool shows in West Virginia and Cleveland, and of course the final night of the tour in Denver, where for some reason the altitude always affects the Humpers in strange ways, as Scott was in his ultra-drunk phase, falling over, trying to insult all of us there by calling us "fucking corncobs," an insult that had made more sense two nights earlier in Iowa, forgetting to sing in the microphone, wandering into the audience, etc. . . . It was an utterly glorious spectacle seeing the always powerful Humpers in this sleepwalking, staggering mode, but no matter what stages of drunkeness the Humpers are in, they never disappoint and it's always exciting to watch them. It was a little sad after Scott and Jimi broke the glass wall next to the stage in Denver, and they shambled off into their tour van like bewildered circus bears, later to break down in the deserts of California after their traditional rollercoaster ride they always do when they reach Stateline, Nevada outside Vegas. | |||||||||
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As for us Trains, Melanie and Sam flew home from Denver's weird new airport with its
strange fascist imagery murals and rumors that it's actually an alien/military base,
and then Ames, Mad Dog and I drove our van home and to the grim reality of work after
our fantasy rock star terror vacation. Everything was flat until we got west of Denver,
and the road got steeper and the shoulders of the Rockies stood up unbidden, still with
half-melted stracciatella-spotted snowtops. We stopped at one place away from the road.
Snow was everywhere like a tarpaulin with trees poking through, and it was all melting
at once. You could walk over the snow, in some places it was hard enough to hop over
without sinking if you were a little light-footed, and in most places, it was like
walking into air-puffed sugar. For desert rats like us, the place was uttery magical
and timeless. We were in no hurry and listened to the snow settle inside of itself,
leaking, the sound of dripping and the clock-like ticking of the snow's heart under all
that frozen water. It was a very calm place after all that noise, and I didn't mind the
cold because I knew it was leaving and I looked up with my head cupped in my hands and
saw the darkening blue of the sky above with fast wisps of cloud that looked like steam
being waved to the east directly above us, bitten off by the mountain's teeth in the
jaw of the horizon.
As we drove lower, the snow rose up and floated away, and we drove through a long canyon
with lead-pencil colored streaks in the stratas of the rocks walls, until we ended up in
Utah, where the world turned dull brown and vacant and everything was barren and ugly
except for the river, until we hit the ocean again.
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