Clown town

April 28, 007
Coachella Valley Music Festival

ITEM! Ratgirl’s grandpa used to eat meat gravy on his chocolate cake. “It all goes to the same place anyway,” she said he’d say.

The gates have opened and the rubes have flooded in. Seventy thousand people rocked out here yesterday. Seventy thousand surprisingly well-behaved and not-totally-fucked-up-on-drugs people.

Did I mention it’s hot? Up to 104, I heard. The dogs stay chained up in the shade in camp all day while we perform and run the rides, panting panting napping napping. They’re luckier than us.

when dogs hate crowds they bite people. Us, not so much. Well, kind of, sometimes

Some days it feels like a pleasant bizarro version of a death march. Mostly, though, being in the Bike Rodeo rules.

“The flies are gonna miss us,” Bill the Junkman said at camp this morning. Yep, and there’s plenty of flies. Next week they’ll be hanging out like, “Remember Coachella? Man, that was awesome. Those people brought food, and dog shit, and tons of dirty hippies showering in a pond-runoff faucet from the polo field all day…”

The Coachella horizon looks like capitalist Burning Man. Steam engine here, Gorey-esque carousel there, geodesic dome blaring drum’n’bass there, twin Tesla coils shooting off lightning over yonder. Johnny Amerika’s piece fires off in the evening, looking like a mad scientist’s laboratory about to explode any second now for 20 minutes at a time.

In the open field amid the stages and food-court tent oases designed with Asian or Mexican themes, Cyclecide runs the midway all day under the hell-sun. Seventy thousand fresh-faced hipster kids adore our pedal-powered carnival rides. Philip Blaine, the art guy at Goldenvoice, said everyone’s raving about us. I’m sure they’re raving about everyone else’s art too. We party-throwers are becoming a viable industry.

and we look good too. right? Right??

The sideshow was short and sweet yesterday — parade of the bikes, bullfight, tallbike joust, moshpit of recklessness. Doyle jousted Otto and won, and then took a pratfall and lost to Linda on purpose. It was so hot that by the end of that 15 minutes of running around I laid on top of a pile of bikes in the finale and pretended to take a nap, just so I could get horizontal for a minute. Of course a couple people laid on top of me so it wasn’t all that comfortable.

Chicken brought up a half dozen people we hadn’t yet met, who ended up “interning” on our rides yesterday and learning the Way of the Bike Rodeo Clown. They get to be carnies, and I think they’re enjoying it. One dude Esben, a Danish bike fiend who used to be in a circus as a child, can ride the stupid Rudy bike nobody else can ride — two different ways. Rudy built it for the sole purpose of watching people try to ride it and fall down. But Esben can flip it up and sit on the handlebars and work it like it’s a tall unicycle. Should’ve known Chicken would bring a top-notch labor force.

In addition to running things, Jarico’s been toiling on his new sculpture, the Melody Maker — an interactive tower that spins a bunch of contraptions with instruments on them that play when the rider climbs up on a bicycle in the tower and pedals. The Melody Maker is nice to perch in at night — to observe the hoi polloi, the sea of heads rocking out to Peaches or Bjork or DJ Shadow.

It’s hard to want to leave our area and Johnny’s next door, though. It’s kind of like Frogger in the thorougfares — too many people going every which way. Even though we’re hams, most of us are antisocial as well, and slightly too old to run around amid the kids. Plus we just enjoy each other’s company.

And now the gates are open again, and we’re half an hour late, and Katy Bell’s dyeing Big Daddy’s and Laird’s hair clown-blue to match Moses’s. They all shaved parts of their heads clown-style, which is basically pretending to be balding, so they’ve all got fake old-man clown hair. Now they’ve got Esben on his knees with the clippers too — what a good sport — and then they’re all going to rinse in the hose all the hippies are lining up for.

They’re gonna give the hippies blue feet. Neener neener.

Again with the buses

April 26, 007
Coachella Valley Music Festival
Artists’ Parking Lot

It’s 4pm. It’s hot. My mechanic, Scruffy, showed up today. He drove Jamie Viada’s carousel down in a truck whose tire wrapped around the axle in a blowout last night. The carousel is part of Kinetic Steam Works, or KSW, the group that built the steam engine.

The steam engine runs the carousel. It also runs the Dingus. The Dingus is an old widowmaker — an electric machine that would punch holes in metal, shear metal, bend metal. According to Scruffy, now it shreds fish, stuffed animals, and bottles of ketchup (catsup?) and mustard. That’s all I know about KSW for now. I’m sure I’ll meet them later tonight.

rock and roll coochie coo

Scruffy and Laird have got the back of Jarico’s bus open, looking at its innards, conferring about its current state. The three of us are drinking water in the shade at camp right now while the rest of Cyclecide puts up the rides on the midway and shops in town. We’re still — still — waiting on Chicken’s bus to arrive with the majority of our crew on board. They broke down last night sometime when the oil filter housing got scraped off and oil spilled everywhere. Or something.

Laird just suggested we climb up on the roof of Jarico’s bus to look for Chicken and company on the road outside. But Scruffy knows all about Chicken’s bus because he drove it for years as a Green Tortoise employee. He says he’ll be able to hear it coming down the road.

Coincidentally, Jarico and company lived at the old Green Tortoise headquarters in the Bayview for a decade before they / we were gentrified out by an overeager landlord who now still pays rent on his own house as it sits empty. The Bayview isn’t gentrified yet. White folks are still afraid of the place.

Anyhoo, it’s final-setup day here at Coachella. All 500 artists are scrambling with their creations, assembling rides and engines, checking audio and video equipment, building impossible geodesic domes, test-flying tiny remote-controlled helicopters, and rehearsing dance routines in the noonday sun on a stage with no wind or shade.

All the rides I know how to set up are at home, and none of the girl-clowns are here yet, so I’ve got no skills to offer but holding it down for the Ladies’ Auxiliary. See, despite Cyclecide’s female half’s reputations — as strong women with few conventional “feminine” tendencies — the fact is, when we’re doing Cyclecide things, at least I for one always end up cooking, cleaning, sewing, and watching the dogs instead of building things and playing with metal.

Whilst preparing sandwiches for the crew back at camp today — which takes quite a longer time to do than it seems it would — I was faced with the conundrum of how to deliver lunch and beers to 10 people on a Swing Bike with no basket or bicycle trailer. And we didn’t have any cold beers or coolers that weren’t full of food. So I came up with a great junkyard Martha Stewart ™ beer cooler:

Take an empty, square 2.5-gallon plastic water jug and cut a 6-inch rectangular hole into the top front of the container. Layer the bottom with ice; place warm beer atop ice. Repeat until full.

So yeah. Waiting on Chicken’s bus. They’re still — still — at Foodsco for just another minute longer, and should be here any second now for the past 2 hours. It’s been a motherscratcher of a time trying to hold this much space in a 500-strong artists’ campground for 23 more people when everybody’s pouring in to be ready for the 11am gates tomorrow. In fact, the neighbor across the way from us is getting downright irate, and even threatened to run over one of our tents with his truck. But I just made friends with the ice guy today on the other side of us. He’s got ice aplenty and he’s willing to share. Things are good.

And so far all crews seem to be acclimating to the extreme heat in a mature fashion by not getting wasted and rendering themselves unable to work the next day.

We’re learning.

It’s been 45 minutes since I started writing this post, and Laird and Scruffy are STILL talking about Jarico’s bus.

Chicken’s bus is here. Scruffy heard its familiar rumble and perked up his ears, like a dog whose master has just pulled into the driveway. Time to rumble with the neighbors over how much space we’re going to take up.

Rousting about

April 25, 007
Coachella Valley Music Festival
Artists’ Parking Lot

Everyone’s in town at the big pre-festival shop. After a good few sunny hours spent unloading the rides and bikes onto Coachella’s midway, we at Cyclecide — half of whom hadn’t slept or eaten — went into Indio for some Denny’s and ice cream and air conditioning. Now the crew’s out at Home Depot and the grocery store, avoiding the heat and stocking up on supplies for the coming weekend.

Lest anybody be mistaken, Big Daddy would like you all to know that there is only one catsup and that is Heinz. All other brands are ketchup and they are an abomination of nature.

I got the easy job: guarding camp to make sure nobody encroached on our space while the town-errands were done. So after some chicken fried steak I dipped into the coffeeshop in Indio, where I caught a ride with a Goldenvoice worker back to the site. (Goldenvoice = the promoter = insanely organized and professional, and they sure do take care of their artists.)

This woman I rode “home” with just finished filming a “fantasy-reality show” called *Pirate Master,* which premieres on May 31 on CBS, in which she and a dozen or so others got to dress up in period-correct pirate gear and sail a real ship around the Dominica Islands in the West Indies for three weeks and search for buried treasure.

I know, huh. Lucky duck.

dis Jupiter. She’s haaaaarrrrrrrd-core

I already lost my parasol, but I found the Internet. The sun is going down and the houseflies won’t let me nap. More rich-guy RVs just pulled into the fenced-in Paul Frank lot (he’s doing all the merch — talk about bucks — but they too are super-nice people). The sound engineers are blasting Gwen Stefani and bland testosterock out of Coachella’s mammoth speaker systems at errant intervals to check the system. And some hippie standing outside his old van across the way from me right now is doing the weirdest version of yoga I’ve ever seen. It looks more like he’s stirring a couple invisible pots, or rocking the earnest lead-singer power-clench while he plays a hair-metal ballad in his mind’s eye.

Half of the SF freak-arts scene is slowly trickling in to set up camp — expertly, efficiently. Everything in its place. We’re all old pros now. Carnies.

(Jarico hates it when people call him a “carny.” He insists he’s a “showman,” and that we’re “showpeople.” I say we’re both — one when we’re performing and the other when we’re loading and unloading. But I digress.)

I’m not even sure who’s playing at this festival. I just hope somebody in the Bike Rodeo remembered to bring the clown makeup.

Chicken’s bus will leave San Francisco shortly. In theory. By sometime tomorrow morning, this area of artists’ camping will be overtaken by clowns.

Time to work all night.

G forces, flung pianos, flaming fiberglass

April 25, 007
Coachella Valley Music Festival
Artists’ Parking Lot

Johnny Amerika and Tirzah are working artists living in Los Angeles. That happens a lot down there, apparently — unlike San Francisco, where a way higher percentage of clowns like us do it for the love alone. Something about SF being the world capital of creative leisure, and Hollywood liking special effects and people that can build weird things and work long hours on inconceivable projects.

Johnny inherited the six-joystick control box for his latest contraption after creating it on the job for an … well, an animatronic animal for Mel Gibson’s *Apocalypto.* Amerika and crew will hand off this joystick box to audience members here at Coachella to let them play with the fire and make it sing. (Most of his sculptures, like Doyle’s and Rosanna’s and Micheal Christian’s and all of ours, are interactive.)

One of Tirzah and Johnny’s most impressive projects has been the Trebuchet, built originally in 2006 for a car commercial. For those who don’t know, the difference between a trebuchet and a catapult is that with a catapult, the object is flung with undertension action, the way you think it would be, while a trebuchet flings objects by counterweight. With a trebuchet, weights on the opposite side of the truss (the long straight part) sit on the high side, suspended in the air, and when it’s released, the weights fly downward and under the pivot point and to the back side, flipping the truss and tossing the object (attached by cables or whatever) in an “overhand” style.

There. Now you know.

In the commercial, the trebuchet flung a car. And then on the playa it flung a flaming piano. Now it sits at the Burning Man ranch sculpture garden until the next dirt-rave there Labor Day weekend, where it will be placed at the farthest point behind the Man out in the open playa. Where it will throw an array of crazy shit and hopefully a couple pantsless hippies. BLOWJOB! (cough)

Doyle of Black Label Bike Club is on Johnny’s crew here. The two of them often conceive of big fire-and-engine projects and then call on each other for help. Most recently, Doyle (along with Heather, Big Daddy, and Black Label Ben) created the REGURGITATOR, a simple yet complicated G-force machine that Big Daddy says looks like a big tube with a tire in one end and a pulse jet in the other. The rider leans on a lightly-padded pole and spins around super fast in a circle until their face-skin threatens to pull away from their teeth and off their head completely.

Doylie and the blowuppy thing he and Dirtyfinger helped Mr. Amerika make

In Zagreb last year, where Doyle and crew participated in a show called “Device Art” (run by a Croatian group called Kontejner), Big Daddy rode the ride for a just few seconds too long. His ears began to bleed, and the whites of his eyes turned red with blood too — I mean really red — and he stayed scary-looking like that for over two weeks. Small-town folks in Croatia cut him a wide berth on the street. Many thought he was the Devil. Linda chewed Doyle’s ear off about it, saying if Doyle accidentally almost killed Big Daddy again there’d be hell to pay.

For last year’s festival, Doyle and Heather and Johnny Amerika and Cyclecide’s Paul the Plumber built the SPIDER RIDE, an insane “carnival ride” named after Spider, the Cyclecider who got mowed down on his bicycle by a hit-and-run SUV full of shit-talking meatheads last year. (He still needs a new tooth, by the way, so please kick down on Paypal if you’re a kind soul with deep pockets.)

The Spider Ride is built from a 1965 1600cc Volkswagen air-cooled engine that spins a 52-inch, 28-pitch, wooden handcrafted propeller. This propeller creates enough air to move the one rider on the other side of a 16-foot oil-derrick-looking tower, who’s strapped mid-air into an elementary school chair equipped with a small Chinese valve-less style pulse jet. (The pulse jet, incidentally, also has been re-engineered to double as a bong.) A three-minute ride can accelerate to a force of over 6gs, causing temporary unconsciousness.

Unfortunately, the Spider Ride broke early on last year — the first time they let a ticketholder ride it instead of one of the crew — when the propeller hub casued the propeller itself to detach from the engine and hurl itself into the ground. Redneck engineering, as always. Know this: Despite all the fun-times-having mayhem, danger and bodily harm are ever-present realities within our extended circle of friends. RIDER ASSUMES ALL RISK. Don’t say you didn’t know, and don’t sue us later.

This year, all I can gather about Johnny Amerika’s fire-plumbing thing so far — called “Movement” — is that Doyle and Tirzah and Matt Williams and Conrad (also from BLBC) helped him build it in a month and a half. But that it was conceived of a year ago. And that it will burn 75 gallons of propane each night.

No wonder the rest of the world hates us.

incidentally, on the same real estate, the Cauac Twins be makin’ twin Tesla Coils to lightning up Coachella at night

BUT! Most parts Johnny and Doyle and Tirzah use are crafted almost exclusively from recycled industrial salvage diverted from the waste stream. So put that in your pulse jet and smoke it.

In Cyclecide news, I was the first one here on the grounds last night. Big Daddy and Paul Dingledine arrived at 2:30am and made me drink a beer with them even though I was asleep. Have to do what Dad says. They showed me a picture on Dad’s camera phone of the NASCAR brand tomatoes they saw in Wal-Mart.

Tomatoes. NASCAR brand tomatoes. That’s totally what’s going to happen to Burning Man if John Law lets the name go into the public domain. I think the jury is still out for most everyone as to whether that will be heartbreaking or hilarious.

It’s 9:30am, and the advance-crew Cyclecide bus just (finally) got here — they left SF at at 4:20pm yesterday, making it a 15-hour trip — and we’ve got to unload everything onto the midway before the heat of the day really starts. Apparently there was a small “fire issue” — the exhaust manifold burned a little bit of the fiberglass insulation in the back of the bus. No big deal really.

(P.S. I don’t know how to link to other pages or do anything complicated yet. Sorry. I’ve got a friend coming up to the festival who will hopefully allay my computer retardation in a day or two and then I’ll go back & post photos and link things.)

This is weird

April 24, 007
The Brewery, Downtown Los Angeles

Nobody’s running around freaking out here at the Umlaut Haus. People have been awake since 9:30, not one soul got drunk last night, and the crew worked smoothly all evening and went to bed around midnight or 1. Aside from all the electrical wiring, Johnny Amerika’s project is finished.

What I’m used to in the days before Coachella is: Swarms of clowns invading the drunkyard, acting hectic and drinking beers and cracking wise and scrambling around like geeked chickens and losing their shit occasionally and packing and re-packing and re-re-packing the bus and the trailer.

or not “packing” at all

Nobody here in Johnny Amerika’s crew in Los Angeles has raised their voice once. Not that we in the Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo verbally abuse each other and have shitty times on the road. Nope. We’re a red-nosed family of fools who like to get together to create and float in a heightened atmosphere of surreal, frenetic chaos. We’re 2 DUM 2 DIE.

Hanging out with Cyclecide can be a little much to take. Ask anyone who’s gone on tour with us. Sometimes it drives more squirrelly people to cognitive dissonance. Sometimes violence.

It’s quiet in here. Too quiet. Especially considering how many people live here, and that they all have a really big art show this weekend.

Mr. Amerika, calmly filing down something that’s gonna blow up real good

T-minus 3.5 hours to departure for the Coachella Valley Music Festival in Indio, CA. It’s a three-day camping-trip rock’n’roll blowout of epically organized and awesome proportions. Sure, I’d never go as a ticketholder — like most everyone else I roll with to this thing each year, I’m way too used to working while everyone else plays. To being one of the assholes who’s uncomfortable unless we’re making a spectacle of ourselves.

The show is sold out. Tickets are rumored to be going for $300 — for one day’s attendance — on Ebay. When I add up how much it would cost to get out there to the desert, to camp, to buy waters for $4 all day long inside the gates … well, I wonder why people don’t just go to Thailand instead. Of course, many people probably wonder the same thing about folks who attend the dirt rave in the other desert every year.

Most of the artists in Coachella’s midway are dirt-rave vacationers, after all. We know each other from that Burning Ham thing, and from the larger scene surrounding it. We’re bringing some of that to this. Some PLAYANETICS ™.

The truck will get here to Los Angeles soon. Everything’s already lined up in Tirzah and Johnny Amerika’s shop/garage, right by the roll door, ready to go. People are snacking and chatting quietly, and getting the last of their things together.

No shouting, no wrestling, no drinking at 10am, no last-minute rehearsals, no blaring heavy metal or circus music, no millions of dogs barking and getting in the way.

No herding cats.

This is weird.

this is what they’re makin. dont ask me what it does tho

Fashion squares

April 23, 007
Phoenix, AZ to Los Angeles, CA

Jesse Wack brushes his teeth with straight baking soda. He never drinks the tap water anywhere. He theorizes that while fluoride is marketed to the masses to strengthen teeth, it actually dumbs down and destroys the human brain. He says the FDA, a tool of the powers that be, allows destructive elements like fluoride to be placed into substances we consume all the time, to act as sort of a saltpeter for self-awareness, activism, or revolution.

(I’ve got another friend who, out of instinct at a young age, refused to drink the orange fluoride liquid they distributed at school. His brother and sister, who drank it, now sport mouthfuls of cavities, while my friend has nary a one.)

Jesse Wack also never consumes anything out of a can if he can help it, Or anything with stuff in it he can’t pronounce. He eats like a hippie even more than I do — there’s no way I can stomach snacking on dried seaweed or soy bars.

Jesse Wack wants to get all the fillings in his mouth taken out because they’re made with mercury. Same reasoning. Fillings emit toxic gases any time they’re disturbed, by chewing or brushing or talking or grinding or anything else besides sitting still. It’s all part of the big plan to keep us down — one small facet of a sinister infrastructure of strategies invented to muddle the minds of the hoi polloi and keep us focusing on the wrong elements of life on Earth, to prevent us from rising up and seeing that things could be done in entirely different and better ways.

wack attack surveys a painting I bought for $5 and thinks on how to “enhance” it

Jesse Wack is one of the original members of the Hard Times Bike Club, now the Black Label Bike Club, Minneapolis chapter. Not that he has time to ride a bike much any more. He’s isolated himself in Phoenix, in the belly of the beast, away from all his friends, in order to focus on his plans. Any time he’s not working on his paintings or making music in his studio in Phoenix or figuring out how to earn money in real estate and take over the world, he attends seminars and posts Myspace bulletins and researches conspiracy facts. Not theories, he says. Facts.

Even his own mother says he’s crazy. I don’t think so, not at all, perhaps because Jesse Wack thinks a lot like we all do — he just takes it more seriously. Or he’s able to look at the ugly truth for longer than we are without turning his head in disgust. In fact, as a hobby, he stares it down.

His paintings, while intricate and gorgeous, are hard to look at, too, like the inside of his brain. With more tiny lines than a career tweaker’s face, and bug-eyed imagery that flies in the space between Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and H. R. Geiger, Jesse’s work puts a microscope to the synapses of a mind made paranoid — no, not paranoid, just aware — by modern society.

Jesse Wack-style painting takes a LOT of time to do. His favorite paintbrush has like one bristle.

the man is worthy of holleration, no matter how yer slice it

The only place he could think of to tell me to meet him near his house in Phoenix was a strip club, because that’s what’s on the main road there, besides bail bondsmen, pawn shops, gas stations, and retail stores. To me, his neighborhood appears to be the least harrowing section of America’s fastest-growing metropolitan area — the “dangerous” “ghetto” area where Tempe and Scottsdale nudge up to Phoenix proper. As in, the only part of town that doesn’t look like it’s been nuked and paved into one gigantic super-mall in Vegas.

Phoenix is the worst city in the world. I didn’t know this, but I’ve heard it venomously spat so many times in the past couple days that it’s not hard to become convinced, sight unseen. Two hours spent looking for the phone-replacement store made it clear — wherein we actually had to brave a three-block-long mall named “FASHION SQUARE”, built like a casino so you can’t find your way out, full of sheeple in strong perfume and new-looking clothes roaming around with eyes glazed over and arms full of new purchases.

Which sent Jesse Wack and I into a paranoiac, delirious state of near-catatonia.

Makes a body want to try Prozac, you say? Naaa. That’s what most of the country’s recent young serial killers were taking at the time of their sprees. This Virginia Tech guy included, right? … Living in Phoenix, in this eerily square and too-clean city-sized mall, I ponder all the ways in which American culture encourages dehumanization, making the leap to mass murder easier for the already unstable.

Jesse Wack got lost driving us around looking for the place. WHAT IS ALL THIS SHIT?, he kept hollering incredulously. LET’S BUILD SOME MORE BUILDINGS, I shouted back, AND LET’S MAKE THEM LOOK LIKE THAT. Then I’d point to a square pile of stucco-covered puke, and we’d laugh insanely and have another two-sentence variation of the same conversation. WHO GOES IN THOSE PLACES?, I’d wail. WHAT DO THEY NEED IN THERE? … They live upstairs, he’d say calmly, in those yuppie kennels up there, and they come down to go to work at their job at the mall, and then they go home and watch TV, and they NEVER DO ANYTHING ELSE. THEY NEVER GO ANYWHERE.

In short, we were bitching like high-school goths.

Truly, though, sometimes, this world … the horror. Jesse’s own roommate is living that life, stuck on a single track between the house and the used furniture store down the street. Birth school work death. Work home TV bed work home TV bed mall golf home TV bed work TV bed. Repeat til opening fire somewhere eventually, perhaps in a crowded mall like Phoenix’s Fashion Square.

Coincidentally, one of the only other places “of note” Jesse Wack and I have ever visited together for the first time is the Mall of America outside Minneapolis. Which was the second most harrowing mall experience of my life, up until this one. At least the Mall of America had a Hooters and a video game place. Seriously, we couldn’t really breathe again until we got back to where the buildings all shrunk and got ugly in a different sort of way, and the streets were dotted with thrift shops and adult entertainment stores.

How much does it cost to get all the fillings in your teeth replaced?

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much, much better

I made it to Los Angeles from Phoenix with only two tire blowouts in Blinky’s Royale. Instead of hauling ass up to SF to join the Bike Rodeo, then, I parked outside The Brewery compound of art fags in downtown Los Angeles yesterday, to re-group and observe Johnny Amerika and Tirzah and crew build another big thing for Coachella that spews flames.

But first it was Johnny Amerika’s birthday, and they were ahead of schedule on the project, so there was much drinking, and a big art show and a party, and last night at 2am before everyone stumbled to bed they made an indoor campfire in their shop by pouring a half-inch layer of denatured alcohol into a drainless, stainless-steel “sink” appropriated from a TV commercial set. Then they sang “Happy Birthday” to Johnny, who sported no less than six pointy party hats on his head, and let him throw in the match. WHOOSH.

Ghetto as heck

April 20 (4/20 dude!), 007
outside Tuscon, AZ

Blinky’s the man. 20 miles per gallon, bitches. Way better than the Shart Car.

Knock wood, the Boat is holding up so far. Although take it from me: When an old vehicle’s been sitting out in someone’s front yard in the West Texas desert for at least a year, you’ll want to flush the radiator really well, and replace the thermostat and cap, before trying to high-tail it anywhere. I’ll spare you the details — something about hoses blowing up and splattering light green antifreeze on the windshield like an alien exploded under the hood. Big-ups to Martin, Paul, Joe, Tim, and the Auto Zone people for all their help. The world is ultimately a good place with kind people (is my attitude today anyway).

However, some folks are unnecessarily mean and controlling. Maybe she’d had a bad day and needed a stranger to yell at — we’ve all been there — but when I took one of my frequent roadside stops to prevent the new ride from overheating, as we haven’t gotten to know each other yet and so far it seems a little touchy in that department… on one of my stops, I filled my arms with four water vessels and went into a hotel lobby on the road out of Tuscon. Seeing nobody behind the desk, and a sink right there in front of me where they serve continental breakfast, I waited at the counter a couple moments, and then walked over and began to fill the bottles.

Long story short, the counter lady emerged from a back room and immediately decided she did not want a non-paying vagrant like me to get free water for my dog and possibly overheating vehicle. When I calmly but sarcastically offered to give her a dollar, she (loudly, pierrcingly, hostilely) demanded two. I marched out to my car, gathered $2 worth of nickels and dimes, and marched back in to smack them on the counter. I was tempted to throw them, a la Johnny Depp’s Hunter S. Thompson in the Chateau Marmont with the little-person waiter … but that’s not my style.

hey brother, can you spare a sharpie and some cardboard so I can make a sign that sez WHY LIE, I NEED A BEER

“Here, and thanks again for the water,” I said quietly. “I’m sure you’re a kind and generous person most days…”

“THANK YOU,” she screamed. One customer checking in watched the scenario, mildly panicked.

Lady, don’t fuck with me when I’ve just been driving hundreds of miles with no phone in the windstormy Arizona desert in a giant old unfamiliar car with thermostat issues, constantly eyeing the idiot light that says “HOT,” which lives right next to the brake light which is stuck in the ON position, making me squirrely as hell.

I’m the one who didn’t raise my voice or lose my cool. I win.

That’s when it hit me, though:

The majority of people who fit my profile, who do the things I do, are on drugs. She probably thought I was a tweaker. What does that say about me?

My parents are right: In order to gain respect in foreign places, it’s important to dress well. Better than I do, anyway. However, I don’t care, ultimately. I think it’s funny when people are unsettled by the unfamiliar, myself included.

I wish I had taken more self-portraits on this journey. Here I am squatting by a pay phone rummaging for my calling card in my purse with two plastic bags full of OJ, advil, ATF, and hot peanuts. Here I am washing up in a Love’s truck stop ladies’ room. Here I am sleeping in a tank-sized car in the parking lot of the Days Inn in Lordsburg, NM because the nice lady on graveyard shift in the lobby said I could because she knew by looking at me just how tired and broke I was. Here I am bumming water without asking and arguing with a hotel clerk in my baseball socks, Filipino housewife slippers, filthy antifreeze-covered yoga pants, dog-hair-covered WWJBJD? t-shirt, and a windblown ponytail that makes me look like a kidnapping victim.

Here’s me dining on Fritos and plastic cheese dip and oatmeal creme pies in a dusty “vintage” backroads gravel auto-shop parking lot while donkeys bray in the background and a Spanish-speaking mechanic peers under my car’s hood with his half-drunk, chain-smoking interpreter who recently almost sliced his hand clean off while skinning one of his dinner goats.

Cheese.

I saw the Saguaro National Forest for a minute, and the THING! in Bowie, Arizona, and the outside of the tourist-trap Old Tuscon Studios where they filmed Little House on the Prairie, among other pictures. I thought I was headed to the Hotel Congress for some Internet time when I took the “old Tuscon” exit, but I ended up at an older Tuscon than that. Roadside attractions are great; $16 entrance fees are not. I love the Congress and wanted to say what’s up to the B.I.C.A.S. kids — holding down bike culture in Arizona; look them up — and to visit the place in the tunnel where my friend Dr. Fuckoffski went unexpectedly to heaven on his motorbike not long ago. But I’ve got to get to Phoenix before rush hour.

I’m going to visit Jesse Wack. (uttered in the same tone as “we’re going to the beach tonight to take mushrooms”)

Blinky’s Royale

April 19, 007
Fort Stockton, TX

Victor never showed up. He was bird-watching, waiting for a debtor to leave the house so he could steal their car and bring it to the bank. He sent Blinky.

I totally just bought a new $300 car from a surly Tex-Mex biker named Blinky.

‘79 Oldsmobile Delta-88 Royale. V-8, 5-point-something liters. 3900 pounds. Twice as big as the engine that just melted in my other car.

Blinky said it had like 72,000 original miles on it, but the odometer says 42,000 — I’ll assume it’s flipped over once or twice. Since he just bought the ride from its original owner (who supposedly only used it to drive to and from work in town) he didn’t know the gas mileage per gallon — but from his guess, I’m going to have to clear 100 acres of land mines in Cambodia to karmically pay for the Earth points on this one.

There is no speedometer, the tires are worn, and the upholstery is falling apart. The power steering fluid leaks a little. The air conditioner doesn’t work. The vinyl top of the car is cracked from the Texas heat. The paint job has faded to a matte bone color. The cloth covering that holds the foam into place above my head on the inside of the roof (why do they put foam there? Just so it can decay and rain down later?) has started to come loose, and irritatingly brushed against the top of my hair on the test drive — until I ghetto-upholstered it with some symetrically-placed thumbtacks.

mine is a tasteful shade of ecru, or BONE… heh

Blinky gave me the thumbtacks, and a soda, and adult refreshments, and some power steering fluid. We shot the shit for a good solid hour after I handed him the cash. I don’t trust him worth a damn — I’m acquainted with enough automobile shysters — but I’ve got to get out of here.

Blinky rides with the Cossacks Motorcycle Club out of Goldsmith, Texas. The nametag on his colors reads “SLUT.” Blinky gets dialysis three times a week, which eats up a good portion of his life. Like any hardcore biker, he casually addresses his lady friend as “bitch” when she telephones him. Blinky built a “desert garden” in his front yard that includes cactii from Arizona and rock-fossils of prehistoric snails and jellyfish. One of Blinky’s many tattoos reads DEATH IS CERTAIN – BUT LIFE IS NOT.

Amen.

This is why to shop this way. This is why to spend time instead of money. To meet people like Blinky, even if you can’t find your camera back at the hotel room to take a picture of him on his blinged-out Harley beside the now-dead Shart Car in the parking lot.

Tonight I glued the rear-view mirror back and put the seat covers on, checked and filled the fluids, and rinsed the coolant overflow container and discovered it features a leak in its bottom corner.

Most importantly, this new $300 car is a BOAT. Not a little bean-bug like these plastic wind-tunnel poops they make nowadays. Pure American steel. Macho macho car.

if yr heart was built like this, ud live 2b like 200

When I sit in the driver’s seat, I feel like a little kid in a booster chair in a booth at Denny’s. The Donkey, whose fur matches the interior perfectly, almost looks small when he stands panting in the back seat. And I’m pretty sure I could fit my Ladies’ Model Tallbike in the trunk if I folded the ape-hangers down.

I will never be able to park this thing in San Francisco. It’s 400 feet long. I will now ride my bike more, out of necessity and ultimately for my benefit, if I ever make it home.

I’m pretty sure my grandmother in Memphis used to own this exact same car. Same color, too. If the smell of bananas and white powdered donuts someday pervades the vehicle, or somebody cuts a milk jug in half and tells me to just squat in the back seat’s floorboards because we don’t have time to stop so I can pee again, I might experience serious flashbacks.

I feel like the Godfather. Or Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) from Repo Man. Or Boss Hogg.

Hopefully I’ll be driving it for more than a day or two. I’ve never bought a car all by myself before. Maybe I just got fooled — but for cheapish, anyway, and it’s equally as likely that I sort of know what I’m looking at under the hood now. Little by little, I feel less and less clueless when I hang out with my gearhead friends.

I’m going to have to steer carefully in this ship, and navigate some of the terrain at night with no phone. Say a prayer for me to Gladys that Blinky’s car is as sturdy as he says it is, that I am indeed woman enough to handle this beast, and that I make it all the way back to California before showtime.

The Last Graffiti Car Show

April 18, 007
Fort Stockton, TX

I am completely at the mercy of a man named Victor.

Also, I have a cut on my finger which makes it hard to type. An injury sustained while poking around underneath the hood of my $400 no-radio-no-air-conditioning graffiti car as it poured oil like a slashed carotid artery on a loved one mortally wounded in battle. I held the bleeding Shart Car in my arms from Austin to 50 miles East of Fort Stockton, Texas — giving quart after quart of oil to the sputtering engine, trying to find the exact right speed to allay its tachycardia … and nothing worked.

At one point, when I was trying to find out what caused the smaller-to-begin-with leak somewhere under the head — the thought that the tweaker back in Needles had loosened more than one valve entered my mind — a kind man named Mackey saw me huddled with my face in the engine and offered his help.

“The engines I work on are about as big as the gas station building,” he said, “so we’ll see just how much I know about one this size.” He repairs giant farm equipment (so hot) and oil-field machines, so I’m pretty sure when he and I guessed all the same stuff and he tightened back all the same stuff that had vibrated loose (we assumed), he didn’t do anything glaringly detrimental to my car. I will choose to believe that the good samaritan who gave me 2 cans of carb cleaner and 6 shop rags in addition to taking an hour out of his day to help me is NOT the one who caused my car to dramatically throw a rod and then blow a gasket 5 miles down the road.

It was just the car’s time to go.

So here I sit in the ironically-named Deluxe Inn in Fort Stockton, Texas, waiting on a guy named Victor, who is almost seven hours late. I realize he’s a busy repo man, probably out “bird-watching” somewhere, and that people function on a different idea of what “time” actually is down here in the West Texas desert, so I’m trying not to panic.

Fort Stockton: About as exciting as this map implies

Also! I haven’t had a phone for almost two weeks. I didn’t bother driving to the nearest Sprint store 20 minutes outside New Orleans, as I don’t like suburbia and I rather enjoyed the feeling of being stranded, incommunicado, in the Bywater … so then the Sprint store in Austin somehow temporarily fixed the phone and said it was fine, the charger was faulty, so I got a new charger and then the phone BROKE ANYWAY just in time for me to run my car into the ground in the West Texas desert at sundown.

My car. My beautiful, ugly car.

Victor’s son-in-law was the first person to pull over and offer help, and called Victor for me on his cell phone. Triple A charges $4-5 a mile to tow; Victor charges $1. I checked. And I spent an hour in the cab of his tow truck conversing with him, so I’m fairly sure he’s a good guy. He works for a bank as a repo man, and has a few leads on new vehicles for me that would cost less than renting one.

I’m supposed to be in San Francisco a week from today. Not sure that’s going to happen. If it does, Bruno and I will be one-car-parading in a ‘77 Delta-88 Oldsmobile, a small van, a Geo Metro, or a pink Toyota Camry. (Pink. Ugh.)

And my trusty calico steed of the past three years will not be smashed in a junkyard and scrapped in Mexico — it will either be given to the local vocational school’s auto-mechanics class, or donated to the local fire department so firefighters can practice rescuing people from cars. A fine retirement for the old hey-cops-over-here-mobile.

If Victor ever shows up.

I’d hop on the Greyhound, if I didn’t have a dog in tow as well as enough luggage to live at grandma’s house for a few months, which I didn’t even end up doing.

Sigh. Everything is broken. The Hobo Hustle never ends.

This is what I spend. Shit-tons of time instead of money.

At least I got to sleep late, even though all morning I dreamed of being forced to hang out in New Orleans on a stoop with some street kids who were making a very serious game of shooting tourists in the back.

I’m bleeding all over my keyboard. Again (two punk points)

F*ck Katrina

April 15, 007

The Lower Ninth Ward sits segregated from the rest of New Orleans, stashed in a corner of the city like the messed up cousin everyone pretends isn’t really in the family. You’ve got to drive over a bridge and down, and take a left into the super-ghetto that snakes along the water — along the levee that holds the Mississippi River back from flooding the whole neighborhood and a good portion of the rest of the city.

While other parts of NOLA only sort of look like a second-world country, the Lower Ninth might as well be Mexico or India. There are no signs of future gentrification here — absolutely zero poor white kids will pay sub-standard rent to live in this place. I myself reside in the Bayview-Hunter’s Point area of SF, so not much scares me … but I would not put a deposit on a place here. No sir.

Since I was busy at the dirt rave in the desert in ‘04 when New Orleans first got storm-ravaged and then submerged, I only saw a few pictures and heard a few stories. No benefit of television to bring the horror home, not out there. Since rolling into NOLA, I’ve heard accounts from buddies who were here at the time of apocalypse — riding through floodwaters on tallbikes with shotguns strapped to their backs; floating around in canoes with their dogs to ogle the destruction; holing up in the Abbey bar for a three-day drunk while the rest of the city screamed in panic and shot each other over food and stabbed gas tanks with screwdrivers to siphon enough fuel for themselves to try to escape.

Those who witnessed the immediate aftermath in the Lower 9th — either visiting to witness the devastation first-hand, to scavenge through trash piles for tools and artifacts, or to work on debris-removal crews — they have decidedly darker stories. Those emergency workers who tried to help masses of migrating, newly-homeless people navigate the city streets amid skittish National Guardspeople and overworked and/or racist cops — they’ve got the darkest stories of all.

This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper — and maybe some gurgling noises.

Anyhoo, so coming up on three years later, I saw the Lower 9th with my own eyes.

Along the main road, the ratio of re-furbished houses to homes that are abandoned and completely thrashed is the opposite of the rest of the city: Hardly anyone lives here anymore. At all. We turn into the hood, and a few kids playing basketball at the only house with any life in it on the block wave at me, friendly and smiling. Maybe it has something to do with the graffiti-covered car; maybe they’re just happy to see someone who’s not dripping gold jewelry in a tour bus or an air-conditioned SUV.

The levee towers above the neighborhood, overshadowing all that lies at its base, an ever-present reminder of the dangers of trying to play ball with nature. Nature bats last. For the Lower 9th’s erstwhile residents, the subtext, of course, was this: You’re too poor to live anywhere else besides a place that’s sure to go down. Death is imminent at all times, so fuck everything.

I’ve heard stories of houses slammed upside down on top of other houses; cars sitting in trees on top of coolers and vacuum cleaners; one foundation and an empty concrete porch among the ruins with no missing / corresponding house in sight.

The part I didn’t expect, since I came to the place long after the demo crews had gone, was a flat, massive stretch of land that would remind me of a messier Crissy Field in San Francisco … except rather than all grass, there are concrete foundations. From the distance it looks like a downtrodden dog park — but it used to be entire blocks of houses, now gone. Lots overgrown with weeds, strewn with trash, forlorn and abandoned and everything terrible and oh my God the sadness. Kanye West was right. George Bush does NOT care about black people.

Look at this. FUCKING LOOK AT IT

Another friend told me of a third potential theory of what happened that fateful day. In addition to the supposition that either the levee just broke and the barge floated through it, or the barge was the thing that broke the levee … there’s also the very ugly but wouldn’t-put-it-past-this-administration chance that the National Guard BLEW THE LEVEE themselves. The Lower Ninth might well have been the sacrifice to the gods of weather … because if they flooded the Lower Ninth, then the rest of the City — the richer parts, farther away — would experience far less flooding. Only the poor people trapped on the artificially-stopped-up bank of the mighty Mississippi would die and/or lose everything.

Also, the same friend said the powers that be are currently endeavoring to eminent-domain that entire area, to prevent anyone else from moving back there — to re-purpose the land to build… who knows, probably a casino and riverwalk shopping monument to capitalism or whatever. Makes sense not to move anybody back to the L9 though, I told the friend. That place is screwed. Yes, he said — but you and I like things on the dangerous side too, and p.s., tell that to someone who’s lived in the Lower 9th their whole lives.

It’s kind of too much to take.

Of course there’s the charity outpost, in the form of one makeshift tent with hand-painted signs that read SHAME ON YOU, TOURIST, FOR DRIVING BY AND NOT STOPPING. We drove by without stopping. Inside the temporary shelter, a white man with a ponytail clutched a brochure and talked to a tableful of hippie kids with backpacks and Guatemalan clothing.

My companion sighed and rolled his eyes. ”Here comes Whitey,” he said, “to save the black people.” Good for them for trying, I said — but I wish some “liberal activists” would learn that opening a dialogue with the words ‘SHAME ON YOU’ is not the most enticing way to get people to listen to anything you have to say.

The weirdest thing I’ve seen in New Orleans since I got here: Amid the rubble and destruction and shittiness down there on the football field that used to hold blocks upon blocks of loving families and crime and chaos and joyful second-line parades and the smell of barbecue and secret Caribbean-derived religious rituals and blaring hip-hop and bouncing tricked-out cars and heart-of-the-block barbershops and corner groceries and bucketloads of SOUL … we heard the unmistakable sound of a lawnmower.

Lawnmower? Lawnmower. We drove toward the noise … sure enough, one muscular bald man in a neat white T-shirt and pressed khakis was mowing his lawn.

No house there, to go with the lawn. No houses around his lot, either. Everything else all rocky and weedy and trashy, and here was this man mowing his fucking perfectly manicured lawn. Brought the mower out in his truck to his old place and made sure that even though George Bush does not care about black people, he sure as hell wants to let everyone know he cares about himself, and his property, and his neighborhood.

I’m sure the Sissyphean nature of the task was not lost on him.

On the way back into the Bywater, I pulled into the gas station to fill up, and parked behind a bumping SUV full of attractive, good-time-having people George Bush does not care about. When I got out of the car, my ears picked out the chorus of the song they were blasting:

EVERYBODY SAY ‘FUCK KATRINA!’ (fuck Katrina)
‘FUCK KATRINA!’ (fuck Katrina)
‘FUCK KATRINA!’ (fuck Katrina)
‘FUCK KATRINA!’ (fuck Katrina) …

Well said.

(Turns out it’s a bounce song by 5th Ward Weebie. Buy it on Itunes now, if you can’t do anything else charitable…)

New Orleans crud

April 14, 007

I got the vapors.

Yes. Literally.

Fainting spells in bars where your friends work can be embarrassing. However, it’s always good when a couple just-off-duty nurses happen to be drinking at the establishment, so they can pick you up off the floor, carry you to the couch, and proceed to give you a frighteningly wide and specific range of potential diagnoses. Abject mortification can at least be tempered by the three or four good people who hover around like ladies-in-waiting for a Southern belle whose whalebone corset stays got cinched too tight.

Thankfully, the bar had a couch. When The Vapors started to come on, in a limp effort to avoid looking like the drunk girl passed out on the sofa when customers walked in, I’d staggered from the table to the bathroom — but as the nurses hustled me to a horizontal position, meters away from the bar’s windows to the street in the French Quarter, the joint’s affable bartender explained it to me thusly:

“Girl, please. This is New Orleans.” (Shrug.)

where the view is nice, no matter where y@

After the visit to the doctor’s, hypoglycemia and diabetes were ruled out. Humidity and sea-level living don’t bother me at all. Nothing to do with self-induced toxicity, either, since these days I ingest only hippie food and kombucha while the old familiar boozy devil on my left shoulder recoils in silent horror. And it’s probably not a tumor, or anemia, or internal bleeding, although apparently aspirin — specifically, BC powder and Goody powder — contain insanely high doses of blood-thinning agents that can really fuck you up.

A virus, they said. What kind of virus? The New Orleans virus, the doctor said. Well, what are the symptoms? It’s different for everybody. Some get flu-ey, some congested, some exhausted, some nauseous and pukey, some display symptoms of the common cold.

Ever since I got to Louisiana, my body’s engine has acted like it’s running low on oil — but I thought it was because of stress and whatnot. Now I find out several of the punks in the million-houseguest house where I’m staying have experienced or are experiencing a similar cruddy feeling too. Here we are in one of the most unique and soulful and breathtaking cities on the planet, but it’s hard to want to do anything but lay around and watch movies and be lightheaded.

but at least I get to ride around in this DED SLED. Seriously is it the best car ever?

We’re kind of suspicious it’s something in the tap water. Whether it’s muck left over from the storm and seeping in through broken water pipes, or something more governmental and sinister, nobody knows. Airaq told that after Katrina, when the municipal services got turned back on, every time he took a bath his eyes burned from all the chlorine they had to put in the water supply to make it potable.

The “virus” could be something in the air, too. No clue, the doctor said. Comforting, right?

Well, fuck it. Whatever it’s called and whatever causes it, I see this “virus” as a rite of passage. A vaccination to make me resistant to further poisonings on my next visits to this jolie-laide city. Now I’m ready to come back, and I haven’t even left yet.

I don’t want to leave.

I feel boring.

Whew. I need a nap.

===

Big giant important P.S.:

Here’s another fucked up thing I learned at the doctor’s. Pay close attention, especially if you enjoy the company of dirtbags, or go on tour a lot, or thrive in communal pile-of-puppies-type situations like I do.

Meningitis is coming back.

Yes, MENINGITIS. It strikes first where poor people live on top of each other. In the past few years they’ve started vaccinating college students who live in dorms. After the nice doctor figured out a little bit about my lifestyle, he became quite insistent that not only should I find a way to get the shot, I should also tell all my dirtbag friends.

You can die from this. Very quickly — as in a few hours after you begin to display the mundane symptoms (headache, chills, etc).

So if you can’t spring for a vaccination — I hear they’re expensive as shit — find the public health clinic in your area who might give it out for free. Do it now. Ain’t no fun havin’ meningitis.

Children of the s(hotg)un

April 5, 007
New Orleans

At this place where I’m staying, a dude lives there whom we’ll just call “Tiffany” — not only because he in fact embodies the diametric opposite of a “Tiffany”, but also because if he ever reads this it’ll piss him off, which is really fun and not hard to do.

Tiffany’s life gets ruined every day all over again when another dude in the house throws on “Children of the Sun,” an obscure, freaky musical-theatre soundtrack from the ‘70s some acidhead produced at a small theater somewhere (the housemate assumes) and then quickly fell off the map, or the deep end, or both.

“Children of the Sun,” therefore, has been enjoying almost as much air-time on the communal sound system as The Sword’s Age of Winters. Too bad for Tiffany, who told me about this stereo-war soon after my arrival in town — about how much he loathed this corny space-rock-odyssey soundtrack of his housemate’s, and how much he would fight that CD if it were a street gang.

Apparently, a week or two ago, a paramour of the housemate’s became upset when Tiffany strode to the kitchen with his shotgun in his hand, removed the CD from its cradle, and took it out in the back yard and shot it. Twice. As usual, nobody could tell if Tiffany’s rage was sincere, or played up for the entertainment of others.

Paramour was driven to tears. Housemate quietly returned to his cave and burned another CD of the soundtrack from his hard drive. Tiffany smiled a rare smile to himself, and re-loaded and re-stashed his shotgun.

Today, something else happened.

After breakfast, the housemate produced a newly-burned CD and placed it in the kitchen’s player for show-and-tell. After half a song, it dawned on me just what this music was, and what might next be done.

Where was Tiffany? Either elsewhere in the house or at the bar next door. I became nervous. Yet, with “Children of the Sun” blasting in the kitchen, I found myself hypnotized to the point of immobility — musically transported on the wings of a flying V guitar to some sort of hair-metal K-hole filled with a spandex-coated orchestra and terribly contrived “modern” dancers. Overwhelmed by glam-cheese, I retreated to Tiffany’s room to compute.

I don’t know how I missed Tiffany leaping over me to grab his shotgun from its hiding place — musta been computing pretty hard — but I should’ve paid more attention to the flurry of boots stomping and keys jingling through the single-house toward the back. BLAM! BLAM! — stomp stomp jingle jingle. A victorious Tiffany, gun still smoking, marched with square shoulders back into the room, grinning evilly as he reloaded.

I missed it. (sad face)

“shotgun” in New Orleans means more than 2 things

In the back yard, another just-arrived visitor explained to the neighbor lady what that noise was — what in the world?… — apparently sometimes, when the sun gets really hot, the tubes inside your bike tires will spontaneously explode. Really? Yes, really. Just from the sun? Yep. Weird huh. Oh well, I’m used to it. Time to go get the patch kit…

(It should be noted that New Orleans had experienced sporadic rain all morning, and the temperature hovered around 60 degrees. It was not hot. Tubes do not explode from bikes hanging on the fence when everyone’s wearing jackets and hats.)

Later that day, Tiffany received a phone call asking why a bunch of cops and National Guardsmen were currently swarming the street in front of his house. Something about gunshots — that’s all the caller knew.

Yikes. Tiffany, sketched about tenuous landlord relations and mightily averse to prison, called the house immediately — and learned that a neighbor down the street had just gone off his meds and started running around the neighborhood waving a shotgun. Not shooting anybody — just freaking out, kind of.

Whew.

–

(Q: When’s the last time a story’s happy ending included a crazy person brandishing firearms?)

(Also, what if a THIRD burned copy of the “Children of the Sun” soundtrack, booming from the system once again after Tiffany left the house that day, ended up triggering the neighbor’s psychotic break? … that’s so totally going to happen in the script later)

Babes in boyland

April 3, 007
New Orleans

Dogs run wild in and out of the single house. Right now there’s a band practicing in the other room. A couple more bands who were supposed to be going on tour are staying here for the moment — passing out each night in vans parked out front, on the couches, in the captain’s chair on the kitchen floor, and splayed out on rugs or in the back yard.

Two evenings ago, we all sat on the front porch as a steady stream of visitors from home and away came through and rapped awhile, and I sat in a wheelchair and listened to The Sword on a janky cassette player — over and over and over again. Any time the music ended, a near-roar erupted from the throngs swarming the steps and the sidewalk out front to rewind the tape. Next door at the bar, every day it seems, arguments both verbal and physical keep breaking out, but are quickly resolved as everyone knows everyone else. Fights occur with the frequency of any group not known for sobriety or glossing over things.

see that one on the left? that’s Honee Princess of Darkness. Bruno’s gonna make an honest woman outa her someday

The contents of the ashtray in the kitchen could be re-constituted into 4 whole packs of used cigarettes. Walls are covered in found posters and art by friends and artifacts fished from the New Orleans waste stream. Dog hair and dishes are everywhere. The bathroom smells like Southern mold and Irish Spring. Two drowned cockroaches the size of hummingbirds float in the toilet; one more lies squished and left at the threshhold. Tubs don’t get cleaned very often. Half of all property in the house is communal, half precious and handmade; some is borrowed, both with and without asking. Some are out busking on Royal Street to make enough money for dinner.

At least one person here has the Fist of Gonzo tattooed on themselves. Once again I enjoy the reverse freakishness of being the only houseguest out of a dozen who sports ink-free skin (except the one dot). I sit at the kitchen table and compute in the glow of Christmas lights, listening to boys play blistering sludge-metal in the middle bedroom. Also, I feel silly for putting makeup on. Nobody notices; nobody cares.

Mmmmm, testosterone.

X marks the spots

April 2, 2007

Sitting on the stoop at the house I’m staying in in New Orleans, I noticed some graffiti I’d spotted earlier while getting lost near the Superdome … seemed to be tagged on the front of every house in this neighborhood too. My eyes picked up on it because it looks so much like the old Hard Times Bike Club (now Black Label) logo — an “X” with the letters written in all four spaces.

Here, the “X”es have a more elaborate code than just “HTBC” or “BLBC”: it turns out they represent which of the rescue crews checked the residence after Hurricane Katrina, and whether or not there were any trapped people or dead bodies, and how many. On the street I’m staying, the bottom space of the X on all the houses directly around us (the dead body space) is blissfully empty … but I’ve heard when I go drive around the Lower 9th Ward sometime soon, right where the levee broke, I’ll see 7s and 8s and 9s in that slot as often as I’ll see nothing.

the house at st. ROCK. This is the chair where you listen to The Sword and say “how ya doin” to everybody who walks by

Also, a Yat local at the bar last night told me the reason the levee wall broke was that some folks working on a barge parked there just panicked, and got out of town and left the barge — and during a big swell in the water, the barge knocked the wall in. That’s how it happened. That’s when the water went rushing into the Lower 9th like a tsunami in a bad Japanese sci-fi and drowned housefuls of people before they even had a chance to think about whether or not they could swim.

Talk about shirking responsibility in the name of self-preservation. I’m sure there’s some other (good) reason they didn’t move the ship, but still … if that’s a true story, I’d be surprised if those barge workers haven’t offed themselves by now.

This town is not the same. It’s going to survive, and flourish again, of course, but there are little nuances of apocalypse prevalent in the Quarter / Marigny. Many street lights are broken; street signs are gone. And there are no more grocery stores in the Quarter — if you’d like crunchy California stuff like I’m used to eating, like kombucha and granola and N-Acetyl Cysteine pills (for hearing loss, liver cleanse, blood sugar regulation, radioactivity, and heavy metal poisoning — a catch-all supplement for our kind, I’d say) you’ve got to go uptown to the Wholefoods.

Interestingly, housing prices spiked after Katrina, since a good percentage of domiciles in the heart of NOLA are uninhabitable, thanks to black mold and foundations rotting and whatnot. Prices have leveled out some, and I have at least one friend who’s trying to get a loan — with no credit, no credit history, and only a paying job to his name — to buy a house down here and flip it. It can be done. Otter did it already.

It’s already blazing hot here, and hurricane season hasn’t started yet. Otherwise I’d think about it. There’s something about being surrounded by the spectre of death that makes life more vivid. (yeah, that’s cliche as hell, I know, but it feels true right now…)

O, black water

March 31, 2007
outside Columbus, Mississippi

I kinda wish I lived here again, sometimes. In the country. Looks like Sonoma County, but flatter and swampier. And more God-people, whom despite yesterday’s rant I think are much preferable to crackheads and gangbangers.

Being a snotty art fag in a one-step-above-state-run nursing home facility in north Mississippi is kind of like being trapped in a short film by a snotty art fag who’s trying to rip off Terry Gilliam but falls a little too short on laughs and a little too heavy on the mercilessly fucked up parts.

“HEEEELLLLLP!”, the woman down the hallway screams nearly constantly. Others in the corridor call for assistance too, strapped as they are into wheelchairs or wearing boxing helmets for the fall-down spells. The aged Southern belle who shares a room with my beloved and spry Mamaw watches TV the way other people blink –channel-surfing with the frequency of a drunk, male, thirtysomething sports fan.

To add to the attention-deficit vibe in Mamaw’s home of the past half decade, various nurses and attendants walk by, drop in, distribute meds, and make frequent announcements on the facility’s loudspeaker.

“Attention ladies and gentlemen, I need a nurse in the dining room stat. Nurse in the dining room stat.”

Five minutes later, I go outside to answer a phone call, but can’t hear because of the waiting ambulance’s diesel roar. So I go back into the air conditioning and sit down with Mamaw to sew, and to try to listen to some of the country music I brought to sing along with. Except the other lady’s TV is on. Loud. Click. Click. Click. “HEEEELLLLLP!” …

Through it all, my Mamaw smiles at me, smiling smiling smiling, because I am here, finally. Most of the time she’s probably bored to death, watching her “stories” and making internal-monologue jokes to herself that I wish she could somehow tape record for me.

Still, they are well taken care of, the old folks here. It’s like a college dorm, but with … old folks. The staff are friendly and mellow, and the food rocks — they gave me some.

I don’t think I’ve hung out exclusively with humans over the age of 70 for an extended amount of time, ever. These past three weeks have been a lot. I’m sure I’ll find they were just what needed to happen, though — even if right now all I want is to blast the Melvins or make a pop culture reference or say a cuss word or play flaming redneck soccer.

Sigh. I love Mississippi though. Last night at my cousin’s house, I cursorily explored the work shed, where Cousin and his boy have placed three deer’s heads on the roof to let nature take its course before they mount the nine-point and 2 8-points on the wall somewhere in this film-worthy turn-of-last-century home. (Yes, hippies, they ate/will eat the meat.)

Despite efforts to the contrary, when I got back to the house from the nursing home last night, my shoulders were tight, tight with anticipating death and being surrounded by the ends of lives all day. Then I answered my friend’s call on the phone by saying this:

“Hang on — lemme go sit on the front porch swing so I can talk to you and listen to the crickets and look at the pond in the moonlight before I walk the dog in the hundred-year-old graveyard over the hill.”

Oh yeah: Aaaaahhhh.

And on to New Orleans. I’m finally leaving the land of the old ones… to hit up an ancient and post-apocalyptic wonderland where things are slightly faster, and more colorful and populated, and a sexier kind of ugly.

Get me the flock out of here

March 29, 2007

Favorite bumper sticker ever:

“MILITANT AGNOSTIC — I DON’T KNOW AND YOU DON’T EITHER”

——

I left Memphis yesterday and came down to Mississippi, to see my Mamaw and stay at my awesome cousin’s family’s house. (Both family and house are awesome.)

Religion down here is insane. Or should I say, the level thereof.

I mean, I grew up soaking in it like a two-headed calf in a mayonnaise jar of formaldehyde, so I don’t know why it’s shocking me so. I bet if Jesus were to come back right now, not only would He be smacking the foreheads of the self-righteous until his hole-in-the-middle palms were blue and purple, He’d also probably be embarrassed about all the attention — or rather, the displacement of attention from His words and actions and onto far more vengeful ideas.

Most Christians are very nice people, and many of them are even very smart and warm and responsible and respectful and funny. Exhibit A: My whole family. I’m not talking about them, the way when they talk about liberal wingnuts they’re not talking about me, but about the douchebag in Berkeley with no pants on, carrying around a big sign that says “DON’T” and hollering chants with terrible breath about freedom of expression and trying to give out free patchouli-scented hugs.

No. I’m talking about the anti-liberal wingnuts.

With the worst of His followers, it’s like we’re all at the same mind-blowing free concert, but while the band’s playing, they’re spending the entire time running up and down the concession lines outside, bragging to everyone about how they’re on the list.

The most unthinking ones remind me of how goldfish forget where they are every 15 seconds. What?…PRAISE JESUS. I should prob…PRAISE JESUS. Hey, someone left the stove o…PRAISE JESUS.

I watched a sermon with my grandmother’s caretaker two nights ago — on WBUY, the Christian TV channel (yes, those are the call letters, insert any number of sarcastic remarks here) — which pretty much sent me sprinting to pack my things and head South the next morning: Some fat, polyester-clad windbag with a face like a potato in bifocals and a combover was thundering imperiously about 2007 as a “year of destiny” — meaning we were all going to Rapture, really, for real this time, any minute now. I can’t remember all the points of his rant, but some of them went like this:

There are four horsemen of the apocalypse (which I knew, but please don’t quote me on the rest of this because I’m not even fact-checking it). One is white, and is the Antichrist I think … One is red and carries wheat in one hand and OIL in the other (and the preacher didn’t even say SHIT about the oil thing!) … One is black and carries scales … and one is “pale” (which, I didn’t know, actually translates from the original Greek “cloros” or something not as off-white, but a sickly decaying zombie-green color).

The pale one is responsible for the death of 1/4 the world’s population. When I took a break to run to the phone to get some empathy from my best friend in the middle of being as fascinated with this sermon as I would be an eye-surgery program, she pointed out that — if any of Revelation were true and not the product of some Biblical-times beat poet who ate the funny mushrooms he found in the pasture and got crazy with some stone tablets one night — the pale horse might very well represent methamphetamines. Or heroin. (Don’t ride the white horse?) …

Anyway, the point is, the preacher said, there’s a lady in Revelation. Who is this lady?, he asked rhetorically. Why, she symbolizes Israel, and that’s how come we as Christians have to get behind whatever Israel does. Fuck everyone else. We’ve got to support Israel because they’re the only folks in that part of the world who are on our team. It’s us versus them, people. This all was followed closely by a commercial for a gathering to that effect — something about Christians for Israel.

yeah, when i take mushrooms I see God too

I started to feel like I was in the middle of an X-Files episode, staring into a crypt or an ancient text, or the heart of freaking darkness itself, about to figure out something big. But alas, it was just the same old revelation (get it?): THESE PEOPLE ARE CRAZY.

Then the angry potato talked about how during the Apocalypse, Jesus is going to come down and Rapture all the Christians, and then when the Jews don’t believe he’s Jesus, because they haven’t believed that Jesus is the son of God for years and years, he’s going to raise up his shirt and show them the stab wound in his side and go “neener neener neener! It’s me, SUCKERS!” … and all the Christians get to float in the air and watch while this is happening, and then their homey Jesus says “let’s ride” and they all fly up to Heaven and sing praises and space out and pass out some more crazy pills. While the rest of us are consumed in fiery pits and blah blah oooooh I’m scared. Now I’ll say whatever you say and sit here quietly until I die, I promise.

Hi. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE RUNNING OUR COUNTRY RIGHT NOW.

THEN! THEN. Then the preacher told a pointless story about how he and his wife encountered a woman in New Orleans in the lobby of a hotel … she came up to him and said “I know you!” … “Who is this woman?,” angry potato’s wife demanded. “I’ve never seen this woman in my life!,” he said. “But I love you,” said the strange woman. And she turned tail and fled.

The preacher did well to note at this point that the “young, attractive blonde woman” was “clad entirely in black clothes, and wearing a pentagram pendant around her neck.” So he “knew she was demonized, and I told my wife, This woman is obviously demonized, and the demon within her recognizes me and is calling to me.”

I couldn’t tell at the end of this story if the man was kidding or not. There was a little bit of laughter from the audience, but not enough to really tell. My first instinct, and my best friend’s, too, was — he fucked her, right? He goes to her strip club every time he’s in town, and his wife has no idea. Demonized woman realized his wife was standing there and bounced before her trick got in any more trouble. And now he’s telling this story in public to nip something in the bud. Methinks he doth protest too much, etc.

Maybe it was a joke. But if this was meant to get laughs from his flock after laying such a heavy trip on them about how they’re the winners and they get to watch the whole planet go to Hell, then he’s a terrible comedian. Or his audience was too frightened of their version of the truth, and too believing of their spiritual leader’s every word, to be able to figure out whether or not he was joking either.

They say that those with the most self-importance are the most easily offended. In my religion, if you take yourself or anyone else too seriously, you lose.

Also, if you stand at the velvet rope with your clipboard and tell certain people they can’t get in — EVEN THOUGH NOBODY HIRED YOU TO STAND THERE WITH THAT CLIPBOARD, SO STOP ACTING LIKE THEY DID, AND YOU BROUGHT THAT ROPE YOURSELF — then you are the first in line for Hell, my friend.

I thought about all the times I’ve been looked at in the past two weeks down here, in country gas stations and podunk thrift stores, and considered to be “demonized” because of something silly I was wearing.

Of course, when I look at a dude like the angry potato, I think I see a demon, too. So who’s right?

I’m going to Hell this weekend. It’s called New Orleans, and it’s awesome.

squeal like a pig

March 24, 2007

Memphis, still.

I forgot something else about the Mid-South: Sunrise, when whatever the name of those birds are that swarm the trees like bats under a bridge all wake up at the same time and start chattering. Not chattering, really — much more of a gossamer noise — like all the stars in the universe falling at once, or the sound lightning bugs would make if they could talk.

All the women I know out here (and a majority of those I don’t) still hot-roll and style their hair every day, and put makeup on every day… even if they know they’re not going to see anyone from morning till night.

I’d love to go on a paddleboat cruise while I’m here, or to Handy Park or the Pink Palace or Shelby Forest for “steak nite and live banjo pickin’” or the Hi-Tone and other places I hear the hipsters hang out here in Memphis… don’t know if that’s going to happen.

But I also love sitting with my grandmother and quietly humming along to the Louvin Brothers and the Carter Family and Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys and everyone else my Grandaddy used to sing me to sleep with. Old-timey stuff they used to gather ’round the radio with their families and listen to after a hard day of picking cotton in Alabama.

this is how Grandaddy got skin cancer

At night the caretaker and I watch either O Brother, Where Art Thou?… or the documentary concert film to O Brother, Where Art Thou?

She and I can’t agree on much else, culturally, but we sit together contented in the bosom of the music that pulls at our heartstrings and, despite our vast differences in every conceivable way, makes the both of us feel spiritually whole and grounded on this Earth.

The next door neighbor whom I’ve known my whole life, whose kids used to play with my mother and her brother, who has shared the past 50 years with my grandmother and grandfather, came over last night to watch OBWAT for the first time. She’s a Yankee, but we’ve always loved her anyway… and when she started talking shit about “Southern movies” and “Southern music” and complaining about everything onscreen for much of the movie, both the caretaker and I looked at each other and silently entertained the incongruous notion of asking an 80-year-old woman to leave the house.

If one more person tells me to “be sure not to take any canoe trips” while I’m down here — I’ve never seen Deliverance, but I know what they’re talking about — I’m gonna put my foot so far up their ass it’ll take an entire team of truck-driving rednecks to extract it.

The other neighbor lady I met for the first time on Saturday — really nice woman, toted over some banana bread when she came to call — brought another entire loaf for me on her way to church the next day when I jokingly told her not to come back unless she had some more.

She died yesterday.

Last night I ate the heaviest piece of banana nut bread I’ve ever eaten in my life.

I am spending today appreciating my health, youth, and vitality, and honoring my elders. Even if some of their opinions on things make me want to throttle them. I’m sure mine upset them just as much.

Life is so slow and lonesome right now, in so many ways. And stars fall from the trees every morning, and they make the most beautiful sound…

time warp

March 17, 2007

Memphis.

WMC-79 … AM radio “country gold”

shag carpeting

old folks coming to call on Sunday after church

TV as background noise

DVDs of sweaty earnest white people with lots of hairspray singing hillbilly-derived songs about God

o, come, angel band – come and around me stand – o bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home

pulled pork sandwiches with cole slaw, baked beans, fried okra, sweet tea

white bread — is there any other kind? … oh yeah, banana nut bread

humidity

landscaping … everything square and trimmed

miles and miles of nothing but cotton fields, and half-dead-looking trees crammed together like candles on a birthday cake

plastic plants, fake flowers

absolute denial about global warming (“they can’t prove humans are the cause” blah blah SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP)

“so Summer … when are YOU going to get married?” (see also: SHUT UP)

no escape — they cut down the tree that leads to the garage roof, where I’d disappear to for hours at a time

slipping back into the accent of my birth, all the way into it, like pajamas after a corset

the sweet/shitty smell of the mighty Mississippi River

pictures of me as a child, the only child, everywhere in the house

with no TV, all quiet but the sound of clocks ticking

East bound and down

March 16, 2007

Russellville AR (deep in the Ozarks)

Big rigs: Totally omnipresent on the blank stretch of I-40 from Arizona to New Mexico to North Texas to Oklahoma to Arkansas. They come out at night like thugs, crowding the highway and making little wittle cars tremble and falter and search for a safe warm parking lot somewhere to hide until the big scary rumbly things have gone away with the sunlight. Or at least petered out some.

I crossed four states two days ago, and one yesterday, only growing uneasy and pulling over to find a cheap-ass motel when I’d had enough of the shoulder-tightening effects of the roaring vehicles of a free market society at work. Momma ordered me not to drive at night — nor do I want to, really. Not anymore, not since October 14, 2004. I’m a nocturnal person, but it was in the pre-dawn hours when Cyclecide was slammed from behind by a drowsy truck driver going 85 miles per hour. We were going 55. I was sleeping in the benches with my head to the back.

I won’t say my life was ruined for the next 2 1/2 years, because I’m alive and so are all my best friends and we escaped without any major, major injuries. But still … yeah, I’ve got this little sign on the wall at my house that Redwine DJ TOPH ONE gave me that has an outline of SF’s Sutro Tower above the fog, with the words QUIT COMPLAINING elegantly spelled in cursive. Also, there’s nothing like a brush with death to make you gloriously happy every morning to wake up and still be alive.

Plus, I’ve been nervous around tractor-trailers ever since I was a child and my paternal grandmother (“Mamaw”) put the fear of God in me, tensing up and slowing down every time one cruised up beside her on the highway. Then speeding up or pulling over or doing whatever she had to do to get away from it. I wonder what kind of post-traumatic stress disorder she was harboring about bigrigs. I’ll have to ask her when I see her in Mississippi.

Not to say trucks, and commerce, aren’t wonderful. I’ve got mad respect for anyone who drives for a living — my dad does. Not trucks, but still. It’s hard. I feel sorry for the guy who hit us. Most likely he was overworked and trying to earn some extra cash, just like the rest of us.

I passed a billboard in Amarillo that read “YOU NAME IT – A TRUCK BROUGHT IT.”

Indeed.

Speaking of billboards … certain portions of my 11 hours’ driving yesterday on the 40 reminded me of the final scene in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

And speaking of people who drive for a living … when we’re on tour, Jarico, Cyclecide’s fearless bleeder, also doubles as our ship’s captain (second in command: Laird, Big Daddy, Jeremy, and Kris). At the helm of the bus, late at night, Jarico will invariably drink way too much coffee and smoke way too many cigarettes and rock back and forth like a person with neural damage or a developmental disability. We gently make fun of him for the rocking thing — or we did, but I won’t, ever again, because now I know why he does it. White line fever is a bitch — and the lines don’t hypnotize you quite so much if you rock, because they start moving in gentle waves and circles.

Over the 40 and through the rigs, to Grandmother’s house I go.

Cars suck / cars are awesome

March 14, 2007

Albequerque. That’s where the Shins are from, right? Also, they have decent drinking water. Important to a gal like me who doesn’t drink hardly anything but, who’s trying to save money by doing all kinds of food-packing and vessel-refilling activities in between making sure my $400 car doesn’t flatline.

Yesterday in Needles (“needles inn” – make yr own jokes) it quickly became apparent to me that the auto mechanic’s favorite thing to do there was gouge travelers. With the help of my trusty mechanic — with whom I’ve been in constant phone contact since departing — I niggled the cashier-owner lady down from almost $400 to change a FREAKIN THERMOSTAT to just over $100. I woulda done it myself if I’d brought my tools, which I left at home b/c I didn’t want them to get stolt.

Of course, the lady had absolutely no crescent wrenches or 9/16″ anywhere in the store. Now, I’m not super great with cars, but I’m learning — and I know enough to know if you’re an auto fixer who’s out of crescents and 9/16″ wrenches with the Napa parts supply coming to you twice a day, you’re up to something.

Anyhoo, later on that day, somewhere around Winslow, Arizona (tiny baby Jesus, please get that song out of my head, please, I don’t care if you put “Say Hello To Heaven” or “Route 66″ back in, but get the Eagles out of my brain please Lord) I began to hear a knocking. Pulled over for some chicken fried steak at the Hopi rest stop and discovered all the oil was gone from the engine. All of it. I’d just filled it back in Flagstaff.

I don’t want to think the tweaker mechanic — fat, pupils dilated, greasy fingers shaking as he showed me the gunk that caused my old thermostat to malfunction — was given instruction to mess up my car on purpose so I’d throw a rod ON THE WAY TO SEE MY DYING GRANDMOTHER because I’d fervently haggled with the lady to not pay $400 to do a half-hour job with a $5 part. I don’t want to think that.

But why would there not be any hose clamp attaching the thing to the other thing on the thing? Why would my trusted mechanic back home have overlooked something that huge? Why would the hose choose to jar itself loose from the head, causing a major oil leak underneath the thing where most other skinny girls in cop-friendly flowery dresses couldn’t see it?

i STILL can’t get over the fact it was called “Needles Inn”

Welp, I diagnosed the problem myself. I fixed it myself too. In the rest stop, in the trucker-parts section of the store, I gained the respect of two semi-driving Southern boys who thought I actually drove a rig because of the grease on MY hands, and my authoritative stance in front of the hose clamps.

Now I know why the Cyclecide boys talk about cars and trucks and buses almost constantly while we’re rolling on tour. To fix a small and potentially lethal problem on a machine that big gives one an immense sense of pride.

Stop me if you’re sick of car talk, friends back home, but there’s not much else going on, currently.

Meanwhile, I’ve got to get out of Albequerque before the high-desert allergies that kicked in hardcore last night take me down completely.

Did I mention I have no air conditioning or a radio either? I guess I’ll be singing Eagles of Death Metal songs again all day … hopefully not just the plain Eagles.

DAMMIT. I was standin on a corner in Winslow Arizona AAAARRRGHHH SOMEONE GIVE ME AN ICE PICK WITH WHICH TO STAB MYSELF IN THE BRAIN.

Love yall. Write me! P.S. You’re welcome for the shitty song infection

“they sure gotcha, didn’t they?”

March 13, 2007

(… sitting with the dog in my $27 room at the Needles Inn, on the CA/AZ border, waiting for the mechanic down the street to change the thermostat, which started malfunctioning last night. Not even out of CA and already with the. Meh, it comes with the territory.)

My 1987 Plymouth Reliant was painted a shitty white when I got it, with dents and rust and half-torn-off stickers everywhere from being a City vehicle in the late ’80s and then salvaged from a junkyard. So for HELL ON WHEELS, Cyclecide’s awesome 2006 Halloween event last year at the SF Bike Kitchen / Cellspace parking lot, I commissioned BUTER and JASE to each paint one side of it and collaborate on the roof, trunk, and hood. (They’ve both been featured in JUXTAPOZ and designed shoes for Reebok. They no joke.)

That’s when a regular junkyard car became my pride and joy.

The new “shart car” clearly read “CYCLECIDE” on both sides, in stunning “urban” lettering … until a friend borrowed the vehicle and, in an altered state, left it in the Tenderloin overnight to be vandalized by a couple mouth-breathing taggers who wrote their initials in white paint on one side and just made a scribbly mark on the other.

Fork those guys in the A-hole. I hates them. Still love the car.

Many regular folx on the street still assume this paint job was done without my permission. Sometimes I evangelize about graffiti art; sometimes I just smile and say “yep.” I have a feeling there’s going to be a lot of that in my near future. The “yep” side.

Can’t do anything illegal in this beast. No sir. Hey, cops, over here …. Kids on buses in the greater Los Angeles area apparently like to throw rocks at cars, and yesterday on the 10 I was a big, multicolored moving target. Half an hour later, some sarcastic hoodrat yelled out his window “2006 RULES!” … the artwork is signed and dated “2006″ … well, I guess like all graffiti it needs to be covered over with other graffiti eventually. If I make it there, I’ll see if someone in NOLA has cans and feels like fancying the old gal up with a fresh coat of glorious urban blight.

Roll with the changes

Monday, March 12, 2007

“The art of rolling.”

That’s what it says on the outside of Rizla packets. Today, more than usual, it applies.

I’m suddenly going across the country in a graffiti-covered car. Right now. It’s the only car I have, and I don’t have an attorney, so please do not mention the words “fear” or “loathing” … This is a heroic and sad last-minute job-leaving road trip to be with my mother and my dying grandmother in Memphis. But I’m going to make it as fun for myself as possible.

Road trip!

the Donkey is SO ready — he’s a road dog

Call me a hippie and I’ll crack you in the teeth, but I must say: This might be it for the road trip, for all but the elite and the super-determined. The Long Emergency is here. Gasoline supply on this Earth started waning for good in the ’70s, and despite repeated attempts by our belligerent and self-serving government, the region it comes from will not stabilize. The planet is mad at us, and like a running car in a sealed garage, it doesn’t care whether we live or die. So as a fairly responsible citizen of Earth as well as a member of the Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, I feel guilty about purchasing excavated dinosaur ooze to zip around the U. S. of A. in my 2-ton coccoon. But I want to see my Nanny, and my Mamaw, and then New Orleans and other stuff after that, and I hear a plane ride costs just as much anyways. Energy-wise. I may never have the time or resources to do this again.

When the time comes … when we’re finally readying the house for vacancy, doing taxes and looking through pictures and packing away Nanny’s clothes, I’m sure Momma will call a session to re-draft our wills. If I’ve got any cash at all when I die, I’d like to allot enough to rent however many mango trees in India (like Coldplay did — bland band, good hearts) that’ll make up for all the hot energy I’ve ever consumed.

Right now I’m at my friends’ house in Playa del Rey, Los Angeles County, after taking an afternoon drive from San Francisco. Waiting for the opportune moment when the heat abates and the rush-hour traffic hasn’t yet started. Then I’ll make my way down the 405, to the 5, and over the Palm Desert, and as far into Arizona as I can get before I either grow sleepy or get pulled over for the broken taillight I patched with red duct tape out front of the Cyclecide drunkyard yesterday at 5pm.

Pray for me. Pray to Gladys, the patron saint of parking and traffic, that I can make it to Nanny’s bedside to sing “Amazing Grace” and “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” to her, in harmony with my momma, one more time before she goes to see her loving husband and the God to which she spent a lifetime in ardent and infectious devotion.

stage/coachella 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – March 29, 2007

CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO plays Coachella AND Stagecoach!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — THE CYCLECIDE CLOWNS ARE COMING… AGAIN.

The only artist to be invited to perform at the Coachella Valley Music Festival for six years running, San Francisco’s HEAVY PEDAL CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO returns to the grand music festival in the desert — and its new country-music twin the following weekend — with some BIKE-COPHONY of its own!

Once again, the most interesting shade on the festival grounds comes in the form of CYCLECIDE’s awesome (and world’s only) traveling PEDAL-POWERED CARNIVAL MIDWAY … participants can and will enjoy the breeze provided by the 12-rider BIKE CAROUSEL, the two-person FLIGHT OF THE BUMBLEBEE, or the mighty, four-swing, pedal-powered CYCLOFUGE. For FREE, ladies and gents. All the rides are free.

Yes, folks, the PSYCHOTIC BIKE RODEO CLOWNS OF CYCLECIDE will show their dirty tutus again this year to pie unsuspecting riders in the face during the brief, thrice-daily sideshow performances featuring our punk rock mariachi band LOS BANOS … to war with coolers full of WATER BALLOONS as gawkers watch their friends fly 20 feet in the air on the world-famous pedal-powered FERRIS WHEEL … to encourage participants to hurt themselv– er, try their luck on our bendy SWING BIKES, the messed-up WRONG-WAY BIKE, the lawn-mowing SUBURBAN INTRUDER … or to JOUST on our infamous TALLBIKES …

and the ROCKET BIKE will BURN DOWN THE DESERT!

Also and furthermore, Cyclecide’s “fearless bleeder” Jarico Reesce conceived of a theme for this year’s art and performance — BIKE-COPHONY — after listening to a bunch of hippies at Coachella banging on a metal sculpture with sticks at all hours of the day for the past two years. “How can we drown that out?,” he asked himself.

The answer: The MELODY MAKER, a brand-new interactive kinetic sculpture that creates music! This MELODY MAKER is made entirely out of pre-cycled urban detritus — and as its six riders pedal at the base of the structure, every revolution will cause windmill-like blades on top of the tower to turn … which causes guitars to strum, percussion instruments to bang, and other instruments such as xylophones and washboards to create a musical BIKE-COPHONY entirely controlled by the contraption’s participants!

And finally, this year, no more Hollywood douchebags will be tolerated on set: CYCLECIDE HEREBY CHALLENGES ANDY DICK TO A TALLBIKE JOUST. The gauntlet has been thrown. We’re just saying. We hate that guy.

SAN FRANCISCO’S HEAVY PEDAL CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO: More drunk clowns. More carnival rides. More franken-bikes. More idiotic skits. More interactive sculpture. More BIKE-COPHONY.

No brakes, no problem. 2 dum 2 die.

Pedal Monster SF – July 21-23, 2006

BY MAYORAL PROCLAMATION — no, really, we’re not lying, the paperwork’s done and Gavin Newsom said so — THE WEEKEND OF JULY 22-23, 2006 HAS BEEN DECLARED “CYCLECIDE WEEKEND” IN SAN FRANCISCO!!!

No really.

San Francisco’s Heavy Pedal CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO presents: PEDAL MONSTER!
July 21nd – Poker Run, Zeitgeist bar, $5. Arrive at 8pm, ride at 9 SHARP.
July 22, 2-10pm; July 23, 2-8pm – Mission Village Market, 18th and Alabama Streets, San Francisco.
Poker run participation $5, 21 and over. Carnival is all ages; $7-10 sliding scale. RIDER ASSUMES ALL RISK.

San Francisco’s CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO is, as always, 2 DUM 2 DIE — and ready to get hitched at City Hall, regardless of handlebar shininess or headtube length. In the wake of their countless tours across the country, insane and successful hometown shows, myriad television appearances, documentary films, festival headlinings, international fashion magazine modeling spreads (no really), and cultural blah blah and interactivity thus and so on and the “for the Kids” every which way, the Honorable Gavin Newsom and the City of San Francisco do hereby proclaim July 22-23 to be CYCLECIDE WEEKEND.

And in return, Cyclecide is proving its eternal love to the City and to the culture of the bike with a freakish, pedal-and-contraption-centric carnival of stupid and epic proportions. Mutant Bike Clubs from all of the U.S.A. will descend upon San Francisco — from as far away as Seattle, Reno, and New York — to carouse and joust and make out with local hotties. The Cyclecide Bike Rodeo will run around like a chicken with its head geeked off. There will be bands, shows, games, and general cacophony, the likes of which San Francycle has rarely seen. Accept no imitations — CYCLECIDE REMAINS THE WORLD’S ONLY BIKE RODEO AND PEDAL-POWERED CARNIVAL MIDWAY! Even the mayor agrees.

Fri/21:
POKER RUN. Starts at darkish. ZEITGEIST BAR, Duboce and Valencia St.s. Wherein mutant bicycling fans and feisty cyclists are all invited to throw in $5 to participate in a multi-bar POKER GAME involving DRINKING and BICYCLING. There will be prizes and very probably some pie-fighting and light pavement-wrestling

Sat/22-Sun/23:
PEDAL MONSTER Festival takes over the Mission Village Market. (P.S. the market is slated for destruction soon after that. Bye-bye, lovely Mission weekends searching the flea market for thrifty treasures. Sniff.)

Featuring:
-Cyclecide Rides & Sideshow, with Skits, Mutant Bikes, Rodeo Clowns, and punk rock mariachi band Los Banos

-An Only In San Francisco Circus Midway, with Wrong-Way Bike Games, Ornery Clowns Doing Incredibly Stupid Things, and Hot Utra Gypsy Bellydancers Selling Raffle Tickets for Mutant Bikes and Other Prizes.

-Interclub Tallbike Jousting, as seen on TV and in the 2003 film-festival hit documentary Too Dumb To Die — contestants include Neanderthals from out-of-town bike tribes, Doyle the 2005 World Tallbike Jousting Champion, and Gorgar the Vain and Belligerent Urine-Eating Monster

-Pervitadora Records’ Glen Meadmore — the Hot, Horny, and Born-Again Singing Cowboy

-The Life-Size Mousetrap — the Rube Goldberg-inspired creation based on the children’s board game but instead of a net at the end there’s a 2-ton safe that smashes things. With three-a-day performances by sexy mice, cranky blue-collar clowns, and the one-woman-band Esmerelda Strange

The Disgusting Spectacle — a Giant Head Sculpture that Picks its Own Nose with an Equally Giant Pointy-Fingered Hand, Powered by a Human-Sized Hamster Wheel

BMX Ramp Competition and Flatland Expo Presented by First Rule

Kielbasa, the Accordion-Playing Lunch Lady

The Slow Poisoner

The Outlaw Country of Hellbound Glory

Flower Frankenstein / BikiniKat

DJs Toph One, jef leopard, Renessa, & Big Daddy

Emceed by the Reverend David Apocalypse

More acts TBA.
More details at: www.cyclecide.com

Cyclecide Mayoral Proclamation

Believe it or not, this isn’t a joke… this is an actual transcript. Spider arranged it; I wrote it; Gavin signed it. You can almost smell the hair gel on the parchment.

——–

July 10, 2006
San Francisco, California

MAYOR DECLARES JULY 22-23 TO BE “CYCLECIDE WEEKEND”
July 22-23 is Cyclecide Weekend, by Mayoral Proclamation

——–

In recognition of the Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo’s decade-long career promoting artistic exploration, cultural activism, and tireless commitment to the glorification of the bicycle, the Honorable Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco has proclaimed the weekend of July 22-23, 2006 to be “Cyclecide Weekend.”

WHEREAS in 1996, founder Jarico Reesce created the Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo in order to vaunt the bicycle as an artistic medium — to modify, to make more surreal, more useful, and/or more entertaining — and Reesce’s vision metamorphosed into a lifelong surrogate family and worldwide cultural institution;

WHEREAS the members of Cyclecide Bike Rodeo provide the planet’s only traveling bicycle-themed sideshow and pedal-powered carnival midway, and whereas they continue to make a substantial contribution to San Francisco’s unbelievably diverse and creative underground arts scene, as well as criss-crossing the country and positioning themselves in the media to represent San Francisco’s renegade do-it-yourself spirit all over the globe;

WHEREAS Cyclecide promotes the virtues of re-use, offhanded environmentalism, and “pre-cycling” by searching out cast-offs that our wonderfully disposable society throws away, and then modifying said cast-offs — both for fun and to provide examples for lessening humanity’s impact on the environment;

WHEREAS the Bike Rodeo makes bike culture entertaining and alluring for both chidren and adults — referencing the bicycle’s history as a source of populist freedom, sublime engineering principles, efficiency, and ongoing role as a worldwide ennabler of change, easy mobility, physical fitness, interactivity with one’s surroundings, and silly entertainment;

WHEREAS Cyclecide consistently and creatively does its part to promote the universal idea that life on Earth is better when adaptability trumps consumption, and when a carefully-fostered atmosphere of interactivity breeds cooperation, understanding, tolerance, and improved quality of life;

WHEREAS Cyclecide Bike Rodeo are not afraid to take risks, even in the face of insurmountable odds, extreme impracticality, and pies to the face — and whereas the Bike Rodeo will continue to put a clown nose on the visage of life, and to bravely and comically embody its motto, “2 DUM 2 DIE”; now

THEREFORE IT BE RESOLVED THAT I Gavin Newsom, Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco, do hereby proclaim the weekend of July 22-23, 2006 to be “CYCLECIDE WEEKEND.”

Archives Now

Feb. 1, 2005

Re-posting in the new century.

Welcome to my Cyclecide Fall Tour ‘04 Diary site. We went out across the country for almost 3 months this past autumn, knocked people sideways and off their bicycles at the Tour de Fat, got rear-ended by a semi, everything sucked, New Orleans was fun, nobody got arrested (for long), and nobody tore anyone else’s eyes out (almost). Now we’re back home, battered and bruised but not beaten. All in all, most of the Rodeo Klowns and Roustabouts agree that this was the worst tour we’ve ever done, as far as the fun-to-drag ratio, but still I’d rather do this than blah blah blah, and chaos provides yada yada, growth only from conflict, phoenix rising from the ashes whackety shmackety.

Here you will find a complete chronicle of the chaos we clowns encountered on our circuitous circus route. Up until New Orleans, that is, whereupon my best friends flew in to meet me and everyone flew in to meet everyone and we all just stayed drunk and hung out with hobos and art-freaks and I wore my tutu for 6 days straight, and our nation “elected” the Shrub again and there were definitely ghosts in Christine’s friend’s attic in that apartment in the Quarter, and who’s got time for writing in the middle of all that. Now I’m safe and sound back at the farm, and working on stuff and things and how are YOU?

As for Cyclecide, we just filmed a commercial for one of the most gargantuan companies on Earth (don’t want to jinx it yet, and IT’S NOT SELLING OUT it’s cashing in and your broke ass would do it too for $500. Yes you would. Yes you would.) and apparently our Monster Nation episode keeps getting repeated. Also the Power Tool Drag Races are coming up on Discovery Channel I hear. Most of Cyclecide is in that too, including a big portion of my ass which will be hanging out of some really Jon Bon Jovi-length Daisy Dukes. I’m sorry about that in advance.

diggin thru dumpsters for mutant bikes and racin’ power tools in the junkyard. GOD we’re rednecks

Oh yeah and we’re also booked for Coachella again this year, where we will debut our new, totally insane THREE PERSON FERRIS WHEEL. (We’ll borrow a truck and hopefully this time it won’t break down and strand 30 of us for 2 days in a parking lot in the hot sun in the middle of nowhere in a town called Shafter like last year.) This new ride is so sick it makes me want to puke. It was the big round thing at Burning Man where people were pedaling around the playa all high in the air and flipping over and freaking out. Yes, the big bright-colored one. The boys made it to where it doesn’t roll any more (because if it did it wouldn’t fit anywhere, in any gig we ever did) and we had a successful maiden voyage, for that and for Laird’s new “Bumblebee” ride both, at the junkyard a couple months ago. We made all the Cycleciders who didn’t go on tour set up the rides. Ha HA!

Basically, we’re still idiots. But we might’ve been blowing up right about now like all the other idiots getting famous, like those America’s Next Top Model bitches or that Cirque du Soleil thing, except for that whole destruction of property and whatnot. THAT’S THE ONLY REASON. So meanwhile, we’re all in Winter Quarters, begging for odd jobs and making rides and costumes and lame shit you’ll hopefully get to see eventually.

CYCLECIDE – 2 DUM 2 DIE. The Bike Rodeo will rise again. See you at Coachella.

Honk honk,
Summer

Clean Me

Nov. 16, 2004
Phoenix, AZ (on the way home)

Please, someone bathe me. Someone exfoliate every inch of my body, and wash my hair four times and give it a deep-conditioning treatment and then even out all the different shades of red and blond and brown in this tangled, dessicated mop of what used to be hair. Someone scrape the fuzz off my teeth and clean them like a dentist, and floss them too, and fill the cavities that I’m sure I’ve accumulated since the days when I had health insurance. Someone pluck my eyebrows, soak my hands, push my cuticles back, paint my nails, and microdermabrate and moisturize my face. Someone give me a hot tub and some yoga classes and at least 10 massages, because I haven’t felt right since the wreck.

Someone get rid of my sinus infection, bronchitis, stomach pain, back pain, cuts, scrapes, headaches, and extreme, unending muscle soreness. Someone put me on a juice fast, pump me full of vitamins, teach me meditation, and wash my liver out clean and re-install it. Someone give me a nice, hip, sexy outfit to wear. Someone remind me how to put non-klown makeup on, and put me in some high-heeled shoes, a short skirt, and opaque tights to hide the bruises. Someone give me some lipgloss and a reason to dress up and go out anywhere else besides a bar, a fellow carny’s junky house, or a parking lot.

I feel like a cake that’s been left out in the rain.

I’m not complaining. I’m just saying.

my best side

Until the End of the World

11/2/2004
election night

Alright, so we’re in the Big Easy, and we’ve been here for a week. We’ve played three shows, and did I mention it’s New Orleans on Halloween? … As you might’ve guessed, this is not a situation that’s conducive to me squirreling away for some alone-time to update my Weblog. Sorry for all who have checked back and found no new news … wait for the novel someday, and don’t hold your breath.

I could write some today, if it weren’t for the fact that our nation is in the throes of the most important election of my lifetime and I’m glued to the television. All I can say is, I’m scared.

mais bien sur, il faut que laissez les bontemps rouler

St. Looey, Misery

Oct. 23-26ish, 2004

It took a while to adjust to the RV thing. The piece o’ shit began to slowly disintegrate the minute all 12 of us climbed aboard, and though we were bulls on our best behavior, we were a wee bit salty (at the Sleepy Trucker) that we had to spend the rest of the tour in a china shop. It couldn’t be helped, of course, but I think the lesson we all learned is that if you’re going to buy an RV, don’t buy a new one. They’re held together with tape.

Cyclecide didn’t spend more than 2 days in St. Louis, I don’t think. Business as usual, pressing on, et cetera. We hadn’t gotten to see much in the way of touristy stuff at all — because of the wreck, we had no time to go to Dr. Evermor’s Forevertron in Wisconsin, and boy was I sad about it. This was by far the workingest, not-sight-seeingest tour of all time. Until…

I don’t think I even have to tell you readers out there what St. Louis is famous for. A most beautiful beacon, a true American icon built of brick and steel… Some say it’s a pointless, sinful building, a total waste of money, a monument to excess. Others say it’s a sublime historical artifact, a working example of American industry at its finest, a paean to the cleverness of humankind and the kindness of God.

(cue sound of angels singing)

Yes. The Budweiser flagship factory. We drove past this arch thing to get there… Actually, Laird, who was driving the RV with Jarico following in the truck, hijacked our collective, Jarico-decreed errand to the hardware store to get drywall (why would it take 12 people to get drywall?) and drove us straight to the Mothership, with Che navigating in the passenger’s seat. Jarico threw a mini-fit, then understood our longing. He and Linda and Fox went to the hardware store (why would you not want to take a tour on Budweiser’s home turf?) while the rest of us worshipped. I put on my red vest that I’d covered in cut-apart Budweiser cans for a “Beer Can Can” skit with the Can-Teens of Cyclecide Ladies’ Auxiliary — my fancy Budweiser clothes — and Shotwell and Che got out all their Budweiser gear too. Properly dressed, we went into the golden hall.

The place was packed — part museum, part advertisement, and wholly the best brewery tour ever. Nobody really appreciated my vest, or either they were scared to make eye contact with a small red-headed chick surrounded by large, scruffy, pungent and dirt-covered men. The factory itself is beautiful — a one-stop spot to ooh and aah over antique St. Louis brickwork — and we got to meet the Budweiser Clydesdales, and the dalmatian even let me pet it, and the lady let us keep a piece of beechwood that had really been used to make their delicious beer.

At the end of the tour, after many a Strange Brew joke, we scammed more than twice the free beers we were allotted, and the police were almost called on various members of our party on three separate occasions. I think that’s all the details I should go into. Let’s just say we came away with a couple unofficial souvenirs from the Budweiser factory.

we left before they could kick us out. I mean RIGHT before. They were too fat to run

Since our show was the next day, it was determined we should flyer the hip college section of town and then sleep in the park where the Tour de Fat was to be held. On the way to hip-town, we drove through one of the most picturesque and desolate ghettos I’ve ever seen — rows of artfully-crafted, abandoned brick buildings with intricate metalwork, peeling paint, and the ubiquitous, humid smell of barbecue. We all stared out the window in reverent silence, wondering how cheap these gorgeous fixer-upper buildings must be, and fantasizing about gathering a grip of friends to take over the neighborhood. Nobody else seemed to be using it.

We parked the RV-and-box-truck combo in a lot behind the street where local university attendees shopped for overpriced thrift clothes and coffee drinks. Instead of flyering, though, most of us sat in the parking lot while Linda and Big Daddy cooked us a delicious spaghetti dinner. Some young punks on their way to a U.K. Subs show spotted our franken-bikes and came over to say hello. It turns out some of them knew some of us, through mutual train-hopping friends and whatnot. They asked us for spare change at first, but after we told them our sob story, they brought over their last 24-pack of Keystone Ice and gave it to us. (You know your crew is hurting when gutterpunks take pity on you.) One of the boys brought out his acoustic and we all drank beer and sang classic punk songs in the parking lot. Cops circled and circled around us in their cars, but never said anything.

Then Laird and Koit and Moses and I went on a bike ride to check out the park — and it was one of the most breathtaking (and large) plots of civic space any of us had ever seen. To drive the “wow” point home, as we cruised down one of the park’s well-paved bike paths, a volley of 4th-of-July-caliber fireworks exploded directly above our heads. It turns out that’s what they do in the STL for weddings, and there were three weddings that night. So, three fireworks displays, one right after the other. Awesome. I got separated from the boys, who found a surreal bird sanctuary somewhere. I meandered back to the RV and bought Linda a drink at a sports bar with Nelly posters all over the walls. Some game like the World Series was going on, and we were the only ones in the place not looking at the TV screens.

Laird found our show’s location and we took the caravan to go sleep in the park. “Our” venue / parking lot sat at the top of a big hill, overlooking reflecting pools, fountains, and a wicked night-time cityscape. One of the firework-weddings’ receptions was still raging in the building beside us, so Moses busied himself casing the place, trying to blend in, stealing beers, and flirting with the bridesmaids. He found some sizeable parts of an ice sculpture that the catering staff had thrown out, and he and Koit and I took turns coasting down the steep grassy hills on blocks of ice until 3am.

this hill

Daylight confirmed that the St. Louis World’s Fair Pavilion was the most glorious place we’ve ever played, with a myriad of fountains, hills, bridges, creeks, birds, and other landscape-nature things we couldn’t see the night before and couldn’t go to now because we had to set up the show. This was our last Tour de Fat performance before branching off on our own (now-to-be-abridged-because-of-the-damn-crash) tour, so we wanted to make it a good one. Again, everything took longer than it should’ve, because we were all still sore, and the truck-packing thing was new. We hung all the blankets and futons out to dry that were still wet from sitting outside at the Minneapolis show where it snowed and rained and sleeted all day. If there was any doubt that we were the ghetto stepchildren of the Tour de Fat, a bunch of dirty laundry being aired on the security barriers surrounding our midway rides sure did hammer the point home.

Spandex-clad person after spandex-clad person ascended the hill we’d slid down, armed with fancy bikes and helmets and those hard-bottomed clicky bike-riding shoes, to assemble for the morning Tour de Fat ride. It turns out that St. Louis is a cyclist-filled town indeed. And everyone was inordinately cool, friendly, and cheerful at 8am, too. That always makes me suspicious.

Some people called the Banana Bike Brigade showed up, and immediately we felt a kinship. Cyclecide takes junked bikes to make crazy alter-cycles for people to hurt themselves with, but these people manufacture one-person parade floats. They’ve got bikes dressed like flamingoes, hot dogs, loreleis, unicorns, and rolling picnic lunches — with rider costumes to match each bike. They’re the “us” of St. Louis — bike-rapers with wild creations and tallbikes, too — but they’re much more convivial. For example, they ride in tons of parades and do things for charity. We don’t. Also, their jousting poles are made from a stick and a long piece of foam … designed to let people get off easy, not to eff people up. But we like them anyway.

The best part of the day was when the Handsome Little Devlis, after another badass performance, told the audience what Cyclecide had been through in the past two weeks — and then announced that all their pass-the-hat tip money was going to us! … Linda and I were sitting in the RV at the time, putting on klown makeup, and our eyes involuntarily welled up with tears, smearing our whiteface. So we had to re-apply, but we were joyous at the prospect of actually having enough gas money to get us to New Orleans. God bless those Devils.

The punks from the night before came with more punks, and rode bikes and rides all day. The rest of the crowd appreciated our show, but weren’t too interactive, and the Banana Bike Brigade ended up helping us greatly during the performance. Mike, who we’d dubbed “The Chicken” because of his silly fuzzy yellow pantsuit, jousted Jarico and lost bravely, with quite a melodramatic thumb-wrestling match at the conclusion of the joust. Then, at show’s end, he and his friend-girl offered us an empty house to stay in — the “playhouse,” as she called it, located right behind their own home. Woo hoo! (They’re investing in real estate and remodeling old homes. Houses must be cheap there.)

We went to the BBB’s neighborhood (I forget the name), which they likened to Brooklyn or Oakland — a with-it enclave of art-minded people who’ve mixed in with the poor folks and bought up some unwanted properties. The “playhouse” was a comfort to our travel-weary posse, not just because we had a whole house to ourselves, but she’d painted and designed every inch of it like some sort of thrifty hipster’s dream-home. Plus, there was a fireplace. We made dinner and shot the shit with the Handsome Little Devils. They were off to Japan the next day, where tons of earthquakes were rocking the nation and evicting thousands from their homes. We realized we didn’t want to leave the Tour de Fat, or leave each other, so we all stayed up late, by turns sad at our parting and giddy that our next stop was New Orleans.

New Effing Orleans. Yahoo. Time to fluff our tutus, leave our sponsor’s nest, and get dirty in the Big Easy…

Hard Times Hangover Club

Oct. 18-19, 2004
Minneapolis, MN

The Hard Times Bike Club began one long winter over a decade ago, when some bored gearheads from Minneapolis named Jake Houle and Airaq Shook drove a ridiculous home-made chopper named the “Golden Cow” into their friend Per Hansen’s shop to fix it after Jake rode it like a jackass and broke it. The boys went and got some Black Label beer, busted out the tools, thought of some other odd designs, and months later, they emerged with a gaggle of junked, re-constituted bikes — mostly tallbikes. They unleashed the beasts on the unsuspecting public, riding them around and causing traffic accidents. They gave a few extra bikes to friends, and others came by the shop to make their own alter-cycles. A Minneapolis institution was born.

In 1992, the boys made the group official, naming themselves the Hard Times Bike Club after the cafe where a bunch of them worked. Taking the “ooh, scary bike club” joke one step further, they all made themselves some “colors” — uniform, handmade biker vests with the club’s logo on the back. Some would say that these colors looked more than a little similar to the colors the Hell’s Angels wear. Soon, and on more than one occasion, various Hell’s Angels the Bike Club ran across got seriously pissed about it, going so far as to corner HTBC members, take their colors off their bodies at gunpoint and destroy them, and threaten to break kneecaps if any suspiciously similar colors were worn again.

Bike Club members who once enthusiastically embraced both the club and the joke became intimidated, and some even dropped out of the scene — until someone suggested they change their name to the Black Label Bike Club (after the cheap and delicious beer they all consume like mother’s milk) and change the colors along with it. This brought all the members who’d grown afraid of the stupid Hell’s Angels bullshit back to the fold, and made everyone excited again. The Black Label Bike Club grew rapidly, even going national: they now have chapters in New York, Austin, San Francisco, Montana, Tokyo, Reno, and “Nowhere” (for all the nomads).

Reno chapter’s pretty fun

They joust, they drink, and they bleed; they ride bikes, they destroy cars, they help people in need. (These are reported to be some of their secret commandments. They even have a commandment-bearer, who guards their secret commandments. How gay is that?)

Palmer’s is the Bike Club’s official watering hole. It sits on a patch of asphalt in MInneapolis’ West Bank neighborhood, right around the corner from the Hard Times Cafe. Bike Club members regularly make up a large portion of the Palmer’s staff, so like any other self-respecting herd of broke kids, the HTBC go where they can get hooked up with cheap booze. Also, here’s another selling point for the bar: The cocktails there can kill you. A Palmer’s shot is the equivalent (depending on the bartender) of three to five normal-people shots, so the act of having a few Jack and cokes — a seemingly innocent venture in most watering holes — will, if you drink at Palmer’s, most likely land you in jail, the hospital, or the back seat of a strange and beautiful person’s car by the end of the night.

I’d been talking about going to Palmer’s since we set foot in Minneapolis, but hadn’t made it there even though we’d been in town for a week. I desperately wanted to go with the rest of the Bike Club crew after our Minneapolis show, but by the end of that blustery day, I was too tired and frozen to ride a bike anywhere. It’s a good thing, I guess, because the folks who did brave it out to Palmer’s that night reported back that we’d taken too long to strike and load the show — everyone in the Bike Club who was waiting there for us had already gone home to pass out by the time the Cyclecide contingent arrived. Well, we had all been drinking since noon.

The next night after the show, we finally scored a ride across town, and an outing to The Bar was planned. As a pre-party to Cyclecide’s big field trip to the home team’s endrunkening facility, we were invited to Jake and Luke Houle’s house for a Bike Club / Scallywags / Cyclecide burn-barrel party in the back yard.

“The Big House” is a typical bachelor-gutterpunk-style lair, with beard-hair in the sink, empty beer cans, crap everywhere, f’ed-up pictures and graffiti, and spotty modern conveniences. The Houle brothers live there together (Jake’s the BLBC president; Luke’s a something else important in the club, I can’t remember what). Jake and Luke Houle both cut a square shadow — stocky, smooth-faced, corn-fed farm boys who are half “Indian” (as they call themselves), half white, and together, half the size and weight of an army tank.

When we rolled up on the Big House, younger brother Luke was holding court with some Scallywags in the backyard while older brother Jake played the drums inside their dirty, smelly, junky, Punk Rock Animal House house. We all grabbed a Black Label out of the case and sat around the fire, Jarico telling war stories from the road, and Luke and Koit trading tales of growing up on their respective farms in the Corn Belt.

I asked if there were any tallbike-building clubs out of Minnesota before the Black Label Bike Club came along. Luke said he didn’t think there were — but that Midwesterners all know of someone who knows someone who’s built weird bikes before in their barns during the long and boring Minnesota winters. Vehicle customization is a product of cabin fever, I think.

We looked at the piles of bikes beyond the fire’s glow in Luke and Jake’s backyard. Tandems, trikes, tallbikes, a two-person trike, frames upon frames and parts upon parts, and behind it all, leaning up against a tree … the famed World’s Tallest Tallbike, a red-and-white monstrosity that’s 15 feet high at the seat. I’d heard about this giant before, and it was a rare and beautiful experience for us Cycleciders to witness it.

our fathers, who (make) art in heaven

This five-or-six-frame behemoth must be mounted either by scaling up the side while four people hold it upright, or by climbing out a second-story window onto the seat. It’s been featured in several HoliDazzle parades in the Twin Cities, and always serves to freak people out. The Bike Club got mad when they found out someone else made the Guinness Book of World Records with the supposed “World’s Tallest Bike” — and not only was this other dude’s bike made out of poles instead of bike frames, it’s also shorter at the seat. Only the handlebars are taller. So all the Bike Club has to do to get into the Guinness Book is slap some ape-hangers on that monster and fill out an application.

Luke rode Jarico and Linda on a special romantic date in his rickshaw bike through the park to Palmer’s, and the rest of us piled in cars (I know, but it was too far in the cold) to go to The Bar. There were plenty of familiar faces there, and my fellow Whisky Ho, April, was slinging drinks. (I actually knew the bartender at Palmer’s. I felt a weird mixture of dread and glee.)

I only had two cocktails — or was it three? — and then we all went to the Hard Times Cafe for a late-night bite. I’d been to Palmer’s before, but this was my first time at the Bike Club’s namesake eatery — and I can barely remember any of it. I know the cafe is cute and junky and open at 2am, and there’s a cool big outside covered patio with a giant table where we all sat down to eat and I fell asleep on Koit’s shoulder. I think we caught a cab home. Or maybe someone gave us a ride. All I know is I woke up the next morning with a severe headache and a sense of thankfulness that all I did after a night at Palmer’s was doze off.

That next night, we fulfilled a perverse touristy requirement by venturing out to the Mall of America. For those who don’t know, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota is the #1 visited attraction in the United States, with over 525 specialty stores, 50 restaurants, 7 nightclubs, 14 movie theaters, an indoor amusement park complete with rollercoasters and water flume, and one Hooter’s. It is a nightmare, and a city unto itself.

nuke and pave!

A few Cycleciders stayed home in disgust, but the rest of us were chomping at the bit to see how our more consumption-oriented brethren and sistren entertained themselves during the long Minnesota winters. We came, we gawked, we strolled around in the belly of the beast for about an hour, splitting up into gender-specific browsing herds. We paused to stare at the full-on indoor carnival, then quickly freaked out and had to regroup in the bar where Christina’s brother Robert works. He’s a kitchen manager in the arcade-restaurant next door to Hooter’s, and he hooked us up with the only backstage pass to this pantheon of consumerism that people like us could tolerate: Free arcade games and bowling for all of us for three hours. It was awesome.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Jarico and Laird searched and searched for the magical transportation solution that would allow the Bike Rodeo to continue its tour. They finally settled on the RV-and-box-truck combo, and shopped around for the perfect RV (or at least for a company that would let 12 klowns live on one of their RVs for a month and then drop it off halfway across the country). They found one, and brought it over to Gino and Christina’s — and the Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby it wasn’t. A modern, flimsy cardboard box on wheels is what it was, and there was no way it was going to fit all 12 of us comfortably. But it was our only choice. We all reluctantly packed up to head down the road to St. Louis.

We used to have a ritual when leaving a town to go to the next venue, back in the days when we had the bus: One of the Bicas boys in Tuscon gave us an obnoxious noise-toy during the ‘03 spring tour — a toddler’s noisemaker shaped like a farm silo that lights up and plays a tinny, whiny version of “Old MacDonald,” complete with pig noises, cow moos, and a rooster crowing at the end. As the Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby pulled away from whatever house or venue at which we were staying or playing, Jarico would blast “Old MacDonald” over the loudspeaker — a sendoff; a farewell; a final blast of Cyclecide-style irritainment for whoever was waving goodbye.

Since the wreck, the Old MacDonald toy had been packed away, and it felt funny not to have it anymore. But on the way out of Minneapolis, chaos provided a new noise-toy for Cyclecide’s next phase in life: While the salesperson was showing Jarico and Laird around the newly-cleaned and serviced RV before Jarico drove it off the lot, she lifted up one of the benches to show the storage compartment underneath, and what was in there?

A rubber chicken. And not just any rubber chicken — a rubber chicken with an open mouth and a surprised look on its face like a blowup doll’s. When the chicken’s stomach is squeezed, it makes a horrendous, long, drawn-out, gasping-through-blood sound, then emits a simultaneously high-pitched and guttural squealing noise that more closely resembles a pig being slaughtered than a chicken being choked. Ack, that noise … combined with the look on that poor chicken’s face … this thing was begging to be made a permanent member of the Cyclecide show.

“Oh jeez, I’m sorry,” the saleslady said, embarrassed and trying to find a way to dispose of the chicken. “I don’t know how THAT got in there.”

“Oh, no,” Laird said to her. “That settles it. This is definitely our RV.”

…. next installation: St. Louis, Missouri….

P.S. MORE FACTS ON THE MALL OF AMERICA

• Mall of America is the largest fully-enclosed retail and family entertainment complex in the US.
• Seven Yankee Stadium would fit inside Mall of America.
• Mall of America’s 13,300 short tons of steel is nearly twice the amount in the Eiffel Tower.
• Walking distance around one level of Mall of America is .57 of a mile.
• Spending 10 minutes in every store would take a shopper more than 86 hours to complete their visit to Mall of America.
• More than 1,500 couples have been married at Mall of America since opening in August, 1992.
• Mall of America is located on the former Metropolitan Sports Stadium which was home to the Minnesota Vikings and Twins. Home plate can be found in Knott’s Camp Snoopy.
• Knott’s Camp Snoopy – Peanuts creator Charles Schultz is a native of St. Paul.
• There are 30,000 live plants and 400 live trees planted in Knott’s Camp Snoopy.
• The nice waitresses at Hooter’s will sometimes trade shirts with you in the ladies’ room if you like the one they’re wearing better than the one you just bought from the Hooter’s store. (Invariably, after this process, all the boys at your table will amuse themselves by pretending something much more steamy than chicks trading shirts just happened in the ladies’ room.)

Poorest Attitude Ever

Oct. 17
Minneapolis, MN

Sometimes, when a Hard Times Bike Club loves a Cirkus Redickuless, they get together to form an expression of that love. They have a baby. And they name it Cyclecide.

The Bike Rodeo’s fearless bleeder, Jarico Reesce, first discovered the tallbike-jousting, beer-guzzling, fake-menacing charter chapter of the Hard Times Bike Club as a teenager in Minneapolis. Recently transported against his will from Los Angeles to the wintery Twin Cities, an ever-angsty Jarico, already a rabid fan of the bicycle, spotted a couple punks riding tallbikes down the street. Needless to say, he befriended them instantly.

Skip to Jarico’s move to San Francisco 7 or 8 years ago, when he and Johnny Joyce decided to make that mutant-bike, joust-and-bleed thing a bit more idiotic by adding a traveling circus sideshow, a live band, klowns, skits, and carnival-ready midway rides. Behold: Cyclecide.

behold: johnny joyce. a man with poop tattooed on his arm and 2 DUM 2 DIE on the inside of his lower lip. he is your God

During interviews with the press, Jarico always gives the Hard Times Bike Club (also now called the Black Label Bike Club) the credit for planting the Cyclecide seed. When they coast through San Francisco, he gives them a couch to sleep on. Through our intricate web of friends that spans the states, many in Cyclecide and the HTBC also count each other as dear friends and ex-more-than-friendses. So of course we — in particular, Jarico — wanted our Minneapolis show to be good, to pay our respects to our family.

The show was to take place downtown at the 1 on 1 Bike Studio, a shop nestled in an alley among high-rises, in an area of the city that’s probably ghostly quiet every weekend, even when the temperature isn’t close to freezing. The 1 on 1 bike shop itself was no bigger than a trailer — a couple benches, some bike tools, one or two customs on display — but downstairs below it lurked a junkperson’s bike Valhalla: a dark basement that ran the length of two buildings, filled to the brim with bicycles and bike parts diverted from the waste stream. It was hard not to drool.

When we arrived in the morning in our new box truck and Gino and Christina’s passenger van, other folks in the Twin Cities bike community had already busied themselves setting up tables for a swap meet, at which they traded their unwanted and overstocked bike parts and gear. We at Cyclecide promptly improvised a “We Got Rear-Ended Garage Sale,” where we sold expensive beers (we drank the cheap ones), bike tires, and a couple trinkets from the bus that some wanted to see gone, but others couldn’t stand parting with. Fox, it turns out, really meant it when she said she loved that red-and-black stuffed snake that’d been wrapped around one of the hammock poles on the Shoo Shoo, serving little more purpose in its existence than to knock people in the head when they sat down. I tried to sell that snake for $1 and she nearly throttled me.

Of course, the Black Label Bike Club came out in full support, and ended up setting up most of the show for us. Not only were the Bike Club boys and girls not suffering from rear-ended disease, they’re also far heartier, and used to the dreadful cold. We all caught a serious case of Flag Envy when they rolled up: on the back of Jake Houle’s beautiful black super-tallbike flew a large, expertly sewn, canvas-and-leather Black Label Bike Club banner. Linda looked to me, owner of a sewing machine, and gave me a wordless order: Make us a flag. And make it good.

The Scallywags came too — a Christian bike club who frequently rides with the HTBC but looks to be as gutterpunkish as their heathen counterparts. One would assume the Scallywags have different attitudes about the ingestion of substances and the stealing of girlfriends and boyfriends than the HTBC does, though. It was refreshing to meet Christians who weren’t all up in everyone’s grill about being Christian, and they became instant family too. I wonder if the Philistines and their ilk thought Jesus was a gutterpunk back in the day when he was hanging out with hookers, turning water into wine, and kicking over tables in the temple.

The clouds grew darker overhead and the weather got colder throughout the day. Let me explain something here: I was born in Mississippi, and lived my whole life in the South until I moved to San Francisco. I’m not underweight, but I am small, and there is usually a good amount of beer in my already-thin blood. Therefore, I have absolutely no defenses against any temperatures below 50 degrees. Cold weather, in short, makes me angry — angrier than a 10-percent tip; angrier than people who say “Noo-kyoo-lur” instead of “nuclear;” angrier than the superfluous use of dwarves in film. I HATE the cold, the way neo-conservatives hate everything but themselves. Then it began to drizzle — and even before our show was to begin, the weather poetically ranged from rain … to sleet … to snow.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one with a poor attitude — Linda hails from Texas and Los Angeles, so I had a partner in my grumpiness. Everyone else was still plenty sore from the wreck, and soreness and cold don’t go very well together. Even as Linda and I were setting up the props to do the show, we were trying to reason with Jarico that since there were only 30 or so people there, they wouldn’t mind if we just ran the rides. Would they? Couldn’t we just skip the show? It was too cold to wear our klown outfits, and I couldn’t run around anyway. What if the band just played and people rode our bikes around? … There was no way, though. Jarico’s mind was made up, and in retrospect, he was right: Minneapolis is home. The show must go on.

The hardy MPLS souls who braved the frigid afternoon to wait until our showtime thoroughly enjoyed themselves once we got up off our asses and did the thing. Thank goodness. Minneapolis is the one city where our audience would agree with Jarico’s philosophy about Cyclecide: the bikes are the stars, not the people. The klowns gave a half-assed performance, that’s for sure, but nobody noticed, because everyone from the HTBC and 1 On 1 Bike Studio busied themselves riding and riding around the parking lot. They traded Swing Bikes; they fought over the Wrong-Way Bike; they tried repeatedly to run each other over. If a junky bike crashed, as far as this crowd was concerned, it was fair game to mow it down with one’s own bike, wrestle the unskilled (and/or drunk) owner to the ground, and dogpile on top of the whole shebang. In the snow. God bless those thick-skinned Minneapolis freaks.

Of course, in this the homeland of tallbike jousting, the show’s tallbike joust was epic. Luke, the current president, pitted himself against this HTBC member named Mikey who’d broken his thumb during a tequila blackout the night before by punching someone in the face, and as a result wasn’t in peak physical condition. At least that was Mikey’s excuse. Luke Houle climbed atop his tallbike like a ninja ascending stairs, and rode that shit with the most grace I’ve ever seen one of the burly Bike Club boys possess. (I’m told that Jake Houle, Per, Airaq, and Skitch of the HTBC are four of the other jaw-droppingly fleet-footed tallbike riders ever to pedal on the planet.) Anyhoo, Luke pummeled Mikey in two or three matches, snapping the pole of his beautiful HTBC flag in the process. Needless to say, with the Bike Club there, my accident-prone ass stayed far away from the Moshpit of Recklessness at show’s end.

that’s der Big and der Lil, but only one can make frybread which will make u weep

I don’t think it overstating to say that load-out was a miserable death march. Rain and snow had combined to make a slushy mess that plopped on our windburned skin in big heavy drops. It was Jarico’s first time organizing the bikes and rides in a new setup, so everything had to be scrutinized, discussed, and methodically planned. This amounted to a lot of clowns standing around in the freezing rain doing nothing. The 1 on 1 folks, now totally hammered and on some gleeful otherworldly childlike plane, continued to ride and ride. They rode their bikes over other bikes, they rode into each other, they played war-ball with leftover tires, they tried to hoop each other with tubes, they threw tires on the roof and back down again. I could only glower at them, jealous of their energy, their thick blood, and their weather-appropriate clothing.

Johnny Feral, lead singer of local rock powerhouse The Ferals, had shown up to help load, and we stood shoulder to shoulder, waiting for Jarico’s next order, rain dripping down our noses and our breath making fog. By this point, the cold had settled into my bones like a fried hamburger in a fat kid’s stomach. I was in a near-catatonic rage.

“Well, Summer,” he said, “Now that you’ve finally experienced a taste of Minneapolis in winter, perhaps it’ll give you a better insight into our general temperament and attitude on life.”

So THAT’s why all those Minneapolis kids stomp around, snarl, commit crimes, overindulge in substances, hate stuff, break things, and get into fights all the time.

Oh, to have that vigor in the cold.

Cocooning

Oct. 14-23ish, 2004
Minneapolis, MN

The first night after the Shoo Shoo’s demise, we stayed in two rooms in a crappy hotel near the impound lot in Lincoln, and parked the truck full of all our tourly belongings behind the hotel. We couldn’t actually see our new vehicle from the rooms, and this made us quite uncomfortable — even more so when a man knocked on our unlocked door late at night as we were watching television, then opened it (I was in pajamas, post-shower, brushing my teeth) to step in and announce to the men in the room that he was “ready to party” and he “got the goods.” I can’t remember my exact words to our uninvited guest, but I think they were along the lines of “CAN WE HELP YOU?” And I think I shouted.

Che, ever the facilitator and conflict-preventer, deftly maneuvered the large, intimidating hoodlum back outside to share a cigarette and explain to him that we’d had a very bad day. “The goods” in question turned out to be a very young, petulant, scared-looking woman sitting on the stairs, surrounded by Homey’s friends. She didn’t seem to know any of them personally. Homey told Che he hailed from Oakland, and had just flown in to “do some business.” Homey invited Jarico to join the party, then after some negotiation, finally gave up and moved along to the other rooms to pimp his “goods.” His friends and the goods sat on the stairs right outside our door for hours. Needless to say, our collective views of a brutal world and the general suckiness of things grew stronger through the night.

chapter 1: demoralizized

Minneapolis, though, is a second home to many Cycleciders, and cherished by all the rest, as it’s home to the primary chapter of our “parent” organization, the Black Label Bike Club. It’s definitely a more inviting place to regroup than a pimp-riddled freeway motel in Ne-F^cking-Braska. Laird was supposed to fly into Minneapolis and meet us there, but because of the wreck fiasco, and the restrictive rules of car-rental companies, he had to rent a passenger van and drive 6 hours to Lincoln to come get all of us. When he arrived in the morning, he asked Jarico to take him to see the dead bus with his own eyes. Fox went along for the ride to the tow lot, needing to say her goodbyes to the Shoo Shoo just one more time.

We all felt weird on the drive up to the Twin Cities. We were separated, and there was no place to take a nap or run around or cook food or play Hot Dice or swing around a handrail pole. Linda and Jarico followed behind us in the box truck, communicating with the van via two of Che’s walkie-talkies. This new transportation arrangement made us feel like we were on our way to a suburban soccer game or a church mission trip. Of course, the only other time we’d all ridden in a passenger van together was two days before, when the Minister from Milford drove us from destruction to cleanup.

We traversed Iowa, Koit’s home state, for the majority of the drive, and its variegated landscapes, black soil, picturesque farmhouses, and natural, surprisingly-strip-mall-free beauty warmed our spirits like a hot toddy after a sudden blizzard. Koit kept dropping science on us about corn and corn products, and we discussed all the people we knew with corn tattoos. Apparently, if you’re from the Midwest, it’s a big thing to sincerely love corn, even if you’re a misfit. We got chased around by security — again — at a rest stop built in an old red barn, but we didn’t mind.

Gino and Christina might be the most well-adjusted and grown-up goth-punk couple I’ve ever met. A longtime friend of Big Daddy’s, Gino speaks softly but carries a large rap sheet. He’s a self-employed laborer with a beat-up motorcycle jacket and a nice streak a mile wide. Christina is his longtime girlfriend, a darkly beautiful princess of the underworld with long, flowing black dreadlocks, ivory skin, and deep grey eyes. She loves bats, and is currently going to school to study them and make them her life’s work.

Gino, Christina, and Christina’s personable brother Robert proved excellent hosts. Their clean, stylish, comfortably shadowy house, which was to be our home for over a week, sits on a regular Minneapolis street where normal people live and other people sell and buy crack sometimes. The interior decor straddles the fence between macabre and Japanese, and their entertainment center with surround-sound made us all salivate. Yoshi and Amuck, their two dogs, could melt the coldest heart with a big fluffy fireball of sweet-cuteness, and their black cat, Hellbat, just might be a jaded person trapped in a feline’s body. In the large side yard sits Christina’s erstwhile home during bat-studying summer school last year: a popup trailer where half of Cyclecide slept for the next 8 or 9 days. On a tall pole attached to the chain-link fence outside, a pirate flag flies high above the house.

Minneapolis would’ve been a great town to go riding bikes every day. It’s beautiful there. But what with our soreness, soft-tissue damage, and shell-shocked near-catatonia, the next days blended together in a lazy orgy of TV, napping, and indulging in simple pleasures like Black Label beer ($10 a case!) and Old Dutch dill pickle chips. Thankfully, the weather cooperated — constantly bitter cold and rainy — so that we wouldn’t feel bad for staying inside and being couch slugs.

chapter 2: incapacitatetizized

Soon after arrival, we had a drag of a day in the hospital. That was our first order of business, though — to get ourselves checked out and X-rayed and get Shotwell’s wound cleaned up. Christina and Gino shuttled us over there, and we all limped in the emergency room, black-clad and grimacing and stiff. I immediately overheard from the nurses that the old couple sitting in the waiting area was there because the wife was having chest pains. I prayed silently that the grimy vision of Che, Big Daddy, Jeremy, Shotwell, and the rest of us lumbering to the reception desk like zombies wouldn’t give her a heart attack before she could get back to see the doctor.

We all lined up to give the friendly, matter-of-fact E.R. nurse our names, then sat down and waited. Nurses called us into the E.R. lobby one by one to get our personal information and check our stats. I flinched when the lady touched my shoulder, so she slapped me with a neck brace and told me I had to wear it for the rest of the day. Great. I told her I’d be fine without it, but she wasn’t having none — so, humiliated, helpless, and intensely aware of the ribbing I was about to recieve, I walked back out to the waiting room like a dog with a cone on its head. After laughing at me, Big Daddy got one too. Ha ha. I had to give mine back for some reason, but he got to keep his. Jarico would later — and often, throughout the week — wear B.D.’s neck brace on top of his head and sideways to entertain guests. He even brought it to his sister’s wedding rehearsal dinner.

We spent at least an hour in the waiting room thinking of ways to incorporate the neck brace into our stage show. Koit also decided that the E.R. lobby was as good a place as any for me (in my neck brace) to finally comb out the dreadlocks he’d accidentally accumulated in his hair over the past couple months of here-and-there hygiene. He joked to those gawking at us in the waiting room that the truck rear-ended us so hard it tangled his hair up and turned him into a hippie.

All day long, other emergencies more pressing than ours kept popping up. I overheard the nurses talking about an incoming Medevac that contained a man with a perforated stomach. Yikes. We were there all day — about 10 hours. I, like many people, hate hospitals — I’m glad they exist, but I don’t like to be in them or think about the suffering going on in all the rooms around me. I have utmost respect for those who can not only deal with that kind of drama on a daily basis, but also know how to put people — live people — back together when they’re torn or deteriorating. It’s all so heavy for a melodramatic Capricorn like me. The only upside to the day was getting prescriptions for Vicodin, which we ordered from an entirely automated and freakish “candy machine” in the waiting room.

chapter 3: hospitalizized

We distracted ourselves by watching the presidential debates, embarrassed for our country and the man whose regime stole the leadership of it, and more hopeful than ever that Kerry would win the election. Koit said he thought Kerry looked sick — Linda told him that people with too much white showing on the bottom half of their eyeballs had something wrong with them, something unbalanced in their bodies. I meant to ask the doctor about that theory once I saw him, but I forgot. Whatever Kerry’s imbalance might be, at least his eyes and face register emotion. When he laughs, he doesn’t just push out a “heh” like somebody’s squeezing him. And when he smiles, he’s not just showing his teeth. That Shrub, on the other hand — I’m pretty convinced he’s a Reptilian.

So our days in Minneapolis were filled with pleasant cookouts, conversations around burn-barrel fires in the yard, reunions with old friends, and many many movies on Surround Sound in the living room. The only places we ventured out were to the cafe down the street and the corner store where they sold delicious $2 Vietnamese sandwiches. Koit and I lucked out in the sleeping-arrangement department, inheriting our dear friend Jesse Wack’s “hole” in the basement, complete with real twin bed and TV and VCR. We did laundry, spread out our clothes and stuff, and re-packed it all nicely — such a comfort — and we overslept each day (thanks, Vicodin!). The wreck might’ve sucked mightily, but the post-crash coccooning was sort of nice.

Jarico was always on the phone at Gino and Christina’s — struggling to rent vehicles, talking to lawyers, haggling with the insurance guy, finding hospitals, handling business for his sister’s wedding, and generally figuring out what to do next. Everything had to be discussed, and discussions between twelve people take a long-ass time. It got to the point where we were all totally fed up with talking about stuff — but nevertheless, it provided a good example of how much dialogue needs to happen if an organization has one fair and loose-reined wrangler with a democratic collective, rather than a straight-up autocrat with a posse of unpaid workers. It’s an effective style of leadership Jarico learned from Chicken John in the days of Cirkus Redickuless — it’s chaotic, loud, messy, and uncertain, but it works. “Chaos provides,” as Chicken always says.

Linda and I helped Jarico polish up the speech he was to give at his sister’s wedding, and when it came time to give it, he aced it. The wedding occurred on the Mississippi River at a public building near a bunch of pretty boats. The ceremony was to take place outside, but since it was October in Minneapolis, it’s a good thing they had a sealed tent with heaters inside. Guests assembled in the rows of white folding chairs. Jarico’s sister — small, cute, and just as explosively charged as he — walked down the aisle, the picture of pint-sized resplendence, and Jarico officiated the ceremony. When he pronounced them husband and wife, as a surprise to the couple, Shotwell and Che orchestrated an impressive fireworks show outside on the grass as the couple kissed their first married kiss. A gaggle of geese that had been grazing on the lawn, startled by the pyrotechnics, flew up and away in formation. It might as well have been a commercial for something.

The wedding budget didn’t include feeding twelve Cyclecide clowns, so we sat out in the tent during the dinner inside and ate leftover food that Linda wrangled from some compassionate caterers. During the reception, as a band called “The Wedding Band” played and we drank lots of wine, we all made friends with Jarico’s 10-year-old half-brother, who break-danced for us on the waxed wood floor. Outside in the tent, now the smoking area, every time that little B-boy would come out to kick it with some Cycleciders, whom he could tell were the most freakish people at the party, his mom herded him back inside like we were a rabid pack of dingoes and he was a bunny. What? It’s not like we do drugs or give kids cigarettes and booze. Ah well, if I were a mom, and I didn’t know us, maybe I wouldn’t let my kid hang around us either.

Later that week, some of us watched the Cirkus Redickuless documentary down in the basement. Linda and I hadn’t seen it in 7 years or so, not since we first met the Cirkus and she first developed her crush on Jarico. He hadn’t seen it since then either. He looked a bit younger and misbehaved a lot more in those days, and the video shows just how disorganized that first Cirkus tour was, how many shitty vehicles they had to travel in and break down in, and what a disaster that whole trip turned out to be. The Cirkus tours after that weren’t much better, I hear. We saw just how good we have it in Cyclecide, and at the same time, why Jarico thinks we’re doing really well when sometimes the rest of us think we’re just scraping by. “At least we’re not eating beans and rice or ramen,” he’ll say, or some other topic-appropriate war story.

After a few years with the Cirkus, though, Chicken got sick of all the drama and cat-herding and hung it up for good. The troupe dispersed and he became a showman on his own. I hope that won’t happen with Cyclecide.

I don’t think it will. I think we have more job security than that. Jarico can’t possibly set up all those rides all by himself.

The Aftermath

Oct. 14, 2004
Lincoln, NE

The hard-working folks at the impound lot on the outskirts of Lincoln, NE couldn’t have been very amused that morning when they drove up to clock in.

“Oh, great,” they must’ve thought. ”Why are a dozen hoodlums sitting on our sidewalk at 8am? … Are they prisoners in transport, or rock stars on tour? And why are they drinking beer at this hour?”

The red sun rose over Lincoln, and we sat in the church van, torn between trauma-induced catatonia and meditations on the fact that we were lucky to be alive. At the impound lot, the Cyclecide crew said goodbye to the kind Minister from Milford and waited for Jarico and the rest of the towing team to bring the vehicles. We all wanted to stay with the wreck and watch the experts figure out how to pull the bus and the trailer apart, but the highway proved too dangerous an observation platform for a dozen klowns. So we got a lift to the impound place, sat on the sidewalk in a daze, opened some Fat Tire beers, whipped out our cell phones, and started calling everyone we knew. The bus and trailer pulled in, each towed by different trucks. It felt like a funeral, though noone had died.

Once again, we were going to have to rely on the intricate web of freaks that we call our extended family to get anywhere beyond the fence of this lot. Without hesitation, we centered all our conversations around continuing the tour — not on the quickest and cheapest route back home to San Francisco. And we needed “obtainium” to press on. We’re used to getting things through this process called “finding,” instead of the usual “purchasing” — but this was a lot to ask of anyone on the fly. How do you transport a dozen klowns, 60 bikes, five carnival rides, band equipment, luggage, kitchen stuff, and bedding around the country?

i mean, Augie can fold into a suitcase but this is the smallest bike we have!

How, for that matter, do you replace a vehicle like the Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby? Where will we all sleep, and cook, and hang out and play dice while we’re on the road? How do we get back all that labor that made junk into original, rideable, beautiful vehicles? How can we watch our bicycle circus ringleader witness everything he’s worked toward in the last 7 years get crushed by a groggy trucker and *not* want swift and just retribution?

How, for that matter, do we make sure we don’t get screwed by insurance companies on this, the darkest day of the Bike Rodeo?

Lawyers were called, people with buses were called, people who knew people with buses were called, people who knew people who knew people… And then there was the discussion as to whether we should try to rent two passenger vans to get on down the road to Minneapolis, or one passenger van and one moving truck for all the stuff… After only a few phone calls, it was evident it’d be cheaper to buy a used bus than to rent two new vehicles. There was a clean, pretty old schoolbus in the yard there, but Jarico said no, citing that it wasn’t the “right” one — small tires, not a diesel, etc. (I think Jarico couldn’t have stomached driving away from his dear departed bus in a “younger model,” so to speak. Plus, despite what the impound-lot owner said about its condition, it might not have even gotten us 20 miles down the road.) Then there was this little problem where the Rodeo had about $200 cash.

(Did I mention that the policeman didn’t even give the trucker a breathalyzer test or a traffic ticket? … “I never give tickets for accidents,” he said. Hello? Ever hear of “failure to maintain a safe distance”?)

All plans and decisions carried an extra sense of urgency, since Jarico was slated to officiate his sister’s wedding in Minneapolis that Saturday. For health and insurance-claim purposes both, we should’ve stayed put until the claims adjustor could come out the following morning and see the wreckage the way it was. The impound lot owner regrettably informed us we weren’t allowed to sleep in our totaled bus that night while we waited — and by law, anything left in an impound lot overnight becomes the lot owner’s property the next morning. The people who worked there didn’t seem to like us too much, so we couldn’t take that chance.

So even though we were stunned, sore, bruised, swollen, and sickened, we had eight hours to rent vehicles or otherwise find a way to Minneapolis, unpack and untangle all our shit, re-pack everything on a new truck, and get Joe to the hospital. We had to build a new life by the end of the business day.

CLEANUP

The trailer got dropped in a separate part of the impound lot across the street, and we all took a walk over there to see. It looked more like an accordian than a horse trailer, but damn if that piece of box tubing that almost trepanated the trucker wasn’t still sticking out straight as pie. Jeremy pried open the trailer’s back doors with a “Texas toothpick,” and we all stood slackjawed at the snarl of bikes and rides inside. For extra dramatic effect, the paint can we’d used to decorate the “Ramp of Death” had been knocked with such force that the top flew off, splattering red slashes of paint all over the scene like Hollywood blood.

Upon lawyers’ advice, I won’t go into detail about what was lost, but let’s just say that it was a difficult scene. The only thing sadder than seeing a couple men almost cry over lost tools and labor-of-love circus rides is seeing a few other men whose bikes are the center of their universes untangle and cradle their dead two-wheeled babies.

I, for one, started to get scared we’d never have our shit back the way it was — that the Rodeo would look at all the work we had ahead of us and just give up and never recover. I marveled at our stick-to-it-iveness even in the face of such disaster, and thought of all the other litigious-minded crybabies out there who would probably sue the insurance company 10 minutes after the accident, hire a fleet of movers on their dime, kick back in a four-star hotel while some low-paid immigrants took care of the mess, and then ask for a couple million dollars for “mental strain” or some shit like that. Us, all we want is for things to be the way they were before that sleepy trucker hit us.

“Bus Toss” is a Bike Rodeo term that refers to a near-daylong activity wherein, after a few weeks on tour when the Shoo Shoo has become scattered with peoples’ random possessions and everyone’s lost stuff and the smell is worse than we can stand, we remove EVERYTHING and sort through it all. Usually, the words “bus toss” are uttered with a certain amount of giddy, spring-cleaning anticipation. The promise of newness brightens spirits, even though there’s always whining, and a completed bus toss proves better for Cyclecide’s morale than two free cases of beer. This time, though, in the impending rain and underneath the hateful eye of the tow lot secretaries who couldn’t disapprove of our lifestyle any more without actually carrying placards and marching in protest — we had to do a bus toss, and we weren’t going to put our stuff back on the Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby ever again.

To top it all off, we’d run out of beer.

we salvaged the poster of our first ever show … it was taped to the fridge that HAD NO BEER IN IT

In the pre-wreck days, it was a mathematical challenge for the boys to pack all the bikes and rides on the top of the bus — two-wheeled carousel bikes first, then one-wheeled, then flat stuff and poles, then Suburban Intruders, etc. — but the boys knew the sequence, down to the last spoke and pedal. Now, they had to learn an entirely new loading pattern for whatever vehicle we got next, and take care to pack things in order of least to greatest importance. Jarico pulled up around 4pm in the 24-foot box truck we’d finally located to rent, and the boys sorted and piled up all our worldly possessions inside, carefully but hurriedly. More than once, an employee or customer of the tow lot strolled by, ogled at the morass of crap on the asphalt, and asked in amazement, “Yall fit ALL that stuff on that bus?”

Meanwhile, since not everyone can load a truck at the same time, some of us busied ourselves clearing out the last left-behind possessions and little mementos from inside the Shoo Shoo — the hammocks; the “Lost Parakeet” flyer; the John Cusack poster; stickers and handmade art we’d collected on tour; Cyclecide Ladies’ Auxiliary stencils; our pee-apron; the quacking duck Silke bought Jarico for the New York trip; the bobble-head evil clown that sat on the front dash; scattered Camel Cash for Laird (who doesn’t smoke); a toy soldier buried under Jarico’s box of maps; and finally, after everything else, our “LOST” list that was taped on the front windshield, with Sharpie-scrawled items like “ Headlamp”, “Gentle Fawn rhinestone pin”, “Che’s Leatherman”, and the latest entries — “ENGINE” and “WILL TO LIVE.”

The impound lot owner had no interest in staying past his bedtime to watch over us, but he graciously extended our exit deadline to 2 hours past close. We had a lot to figure out, and even though we were going as fast as we could, we exceeded his request by a wide-ish margin. We felt bad, but helpless too. While packing and cleaning the last of it, we took turns walking back up the stairs to the Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby one last time to say our goodbyes. We wrote messages on the bus’s interior, signing her like a yearbook as if it would somehow freeze the moment forever, and took little bits of her to remember her by. On the spot by Jarico’s driver’s seat, where he captained us back and forth across the country and down to Mexico from rodeo to rodeo — right under the stencils signaling the deaths of five power lines and three bunny rabbits at the hands of the Shoo Shoo — Jarico drew a heart with an arrow through it and wrote, simply, “Good Bye, Baby.”

Reluctantly, we tore ourselves away, looking back at the bus until the impound lot’s fence closed, waiting outside the gates to take turns to get picked up in the box truck to go to a nondescript hotel near the highway. Fox and I caught a ride with the tow truck driver, whose big, rumbly, dangerously heavy and unwieldy rig had no seatbelts for us.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous in a vehicle in all my life.

The Wreck

Oct. 12, 2004
20 miles outside Lincoln, NE

All I remember is waking up in the air. I thought I was dreaming the sound — as if Godzilla were ripping the bus apart — and then there was quiet for a surreally long minute. “Shit!,” Jarico said, and flung the doors open and stomped outside.

We were traveling at our usual 55-ish mph on the freeway 20 minutes outside Lincoln, Nebraska. It was the middle of the night, but all our lights and reflective tape on the back of both the trailer and the bus were in perfect working order. That didn’t stop a semi truck driver from falling asleep at the wheel and smashing into us at 80mph in his 40-ton hunk of steel.

I can’t remember who first corroborated the news — we’ve been rear-ended — but Fox had a front row seat to the proof, as she was sleeping next to the back window. She woke up to find that the trailer was 2 or 3 feet closer to her than it usually was. We called out to each other, making sure we were all still alive.

Jarico trudged back to the Shoo Shoo and paced, cussing and grabbing at his hair. THWACK! He kicked the bus door — a rare moment of our Fearless Bleeder losing his cool — and put a spiderweb-shaped chink in the glass.

“The bus is totaled. Everything’s totaled. Shit,” he said. Then something about “there goes my life,” but I can’t quote him on that.

rose’s painted lady is now smashed

Sensing doom and protracted chaos, Big Daddy arose, limped over to somewhere near the fridge, dug around in a secret spot, and opened his “Emergency Pabst.” There was no cheap beer in the cooler, so jealousy temporarily superseded our groggy trauma. As for me, I got up, patched the window-chink with some duct tape, and began to sweep and clean the front area of the bus. Everything had flown everywhere, and for whatever reason, my first instinct was to polish the brass on the Titanic. Eventually, we rodeo klowns stumbled out in the chilly, pre-dawn Nebraska night to see the metal carnage.

With psycho late-night truckers whizzing past us like comets — for cinematic effect, and also to remind us just how fucking fast this dude must’ve been going — we filed around to the back of our ex-bus-and-trailer-combo. The trucker sat in his death-rig, rubbing his head, groggy as hell. Jeremy, who’d talked to him face to face, theorized he might’ve been more than tired. Poor truckers, I’d been thinking earlier that day on one of our long between-gig drives — they’ve got totally shitty, grueling, savagely tedious jobs. They spend weeks away from their families, and deal on a daily basis with extreme pressure to risk life and limb to make deliveries of soap powder and plastic vomit from here to there to keep America shopping. No wonder they just want to get the job done so they can get home. Little did I know that my bored ruminations would emerge out of the darkness to bite us in the ass later that night. (OK, sorry. Bad pun.)

The trucker could only tell Jeremy and Jarico both that he “just didn’t see us,” and that he was “in a white sleep,” whatever that means. He’d gone and taken a nap at a rest area not far back down the road, woke up (sorta), had a sandwich, and revved up again to make his deadline, only to find his truck stuck halfway into a busload of miscreants and freaks. His wake-up call was fiercer that this, even: while the Eastbound Rig of Doom smashed our new, festive, red-and-white trailer almost to half its length, a 10-foot piece of metal box tubing we’d salvaged to make repairs with, which was strapped to the trailer long-ways against the top driver’s-side corner, punctured the trucker’s windshield — coming within inches of impaling him in the head.

His semi truck obliterated not only the trailer, but almost everything inside it as well. True, we make most of our bikes and rides out of “pre-cycled” material — but the trailer is where we keep (kept) all the most expensive custom bikes, tools, BMX / road bikes, and the newest, shiniest carnival rides. (You know, so we wouldn’t mess them up by handing them up to the top of the bus like the rest of our thrown-together stuff.) So all the Rodeo’s bike casualties are (were) both the most lovingly crafted and factually expensive things we’ve ever collectively owned. As Homer Simpson says, irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.

The bus also got killed. As most readers know from previous posts on this site, that vehicle is more than our home and the transportation for the entire Bike Rodeo, rides and all. It’s a character *in* the rodeo … a well-preserved ‘66 schoolbus, painstakingly converted (over much time, in accordance with the letter of the law) into an RV … then further customized into a certifiable piece of art. Hell, when we did our New York tour last year, and we towed the Holy Dogminican Order of Manny, Moe, and Jack behind us — we *were* the art, just driving down the road. Rose’s painting on the back door of the bus — an exact replica of the art on the side of the WWII plane that Jarico’s grandfather flew, and the bus’s namesake — is gone too. Monster Garage’s jocko-mobiles and Xzibit’s shiny pimped rides didn’t have nothin’ on the Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby.

Dad used to paint this stencil on the driver’s side every time we killed a powerline. Never again

Fox busied herself taking pictures of the wreck. (Spose you’ve figured out by now I don’t have access to a camera.) Che shined the flashlight on the spot where the trailer hitch should’ve been, and the tongue of the trailer had pierced through the bus’s body and literally sliced the engine in half. Bell-housing, oil pan, oil pump, pulleys, drive shaft, crank shaft — all smashed into an unrecognizable hunk of metal. The “Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby” would never drive again. Only soft-tissue injury and a giant pool of used motor oil prevented me from kneeling to weep.

Jeremy pointed out that were it not for the trailer, which absorbed most of the energy from the impact, none of us might be talking to each other. The spare tire mounted between the trailer’s body and hitch also probably helped with the “slight bouncing” motion we experienced in addition to the “powerful collision” thing. It was also quickly surmised that had the semi driver swerved at all, or otherwise hit us from any angle rather than straight-on, it would’ve sent us toppling and rolling end over end, and on into Rodeo Clown Heaven. I called 911, and the cops came.

Linda and others were convinced that the tiki pinata that was stolen at the Fat Tire party and stashed on the bus had become our cursed equivalent to the Brady Bunch’s / Simpsons’ “Monkey’s Paw.” I countered that we’d been blessed with protection from serious bodily harm because I’d just bought a $3 black-velvet Jesus portrait (hand-painted in peaceful blue hues and eerily Chola-perfect brush-strokes by a man named Angel) at the Denver thrift store and hid it under the bed so Jarico wouldn’t yell at me for having too much thrift stuff. You know you’re a generational cliche — or is it just bored, or searching for meaning — when a stolen tiki pinata and a black velvet Jesus are placed with the responsibility of either sabotaging or protecting your and your best friends’ lives.

We called folks and called folks — insurance people, tow people, rental-car people — and nobody wanted to tow a bus and a trailer, much less transport a dozen shocked and dirty clowns anywhere close to a city center. Finally, a kind Baptist reverend from Milford (the next town over, make the hot-mom jokes yourself) was summoned by the police department at 7am-ish to pick us up as a Good Samaritan favor to the universe. He swooped in like a gentle-voiced angel and drove us in his church van to the impound lot where the Shoo Shoo was sentenced to die. The whole ride there, three things were on my mind: 1) what this amazingly nice guy must have been thinking, picking us up, looking at our “FUCK WORK” stickers and dreadlocks and whatnot, and having the kindness and/or restraint to bite his tongue and make pleasant conversation; 2) how (like Anne Frank says) most people are good, Christians included — it’s just the fearful and immobile people in any society that suck; and 3) it’s really weird to ride in a van, with air conditioning, that doesn’t lurch, or stink, or only go 60mph tops — or feel like home.

Pending settlements encourage me to refrain from fiurther details of the accident, including exactly who all was hurt and how — but it’s a certainty that we are all overcome with a wash of conflicting emotions: (first) our luckiness to be alive and (way second) the total loss of our home and substantial loss of property. “Too Dumb To Die” is our signature motto, but this time its cadence seems a little spooky … like if we invoke our battle cry too often, maybe our luck will run out. Or maybe the invocation will continue to protect us from (major) bodily harm. Or maybe I’m just hopped up on Vicodin and trying to grasp ideas out of the fog and write for the first time since after our lives were quite literally tossed up in the air.

Right now I can’t remember which famous writer said it, but someone once put forth the proposal that all artists, dreamers, and free-thinkers are “protected” throughout the course of their lives on Earth. Uber-philosopher Joseph Campbell noted similarly that people who “follow their bliss” (yecch, what a new-age way to put it) often find themselves being “helped by unseen hands.” I for one would like to give an almighty shout-out to whoever those unseen hands are attached to. We owe them our lives, over and over again. If they had bodies, we’d take them down to the bar and buy them some drinks, that’s for sure.

So that’s the story of our Day of Infamy. Sorry for posting a full-on 15 days after the fact — neither total life upheaval, nor Vicodin, nor lack of Wireless while speeding down the highway lend themselves to timely Web-logging. In the next post, I’ll tell about the aftermath, and Fort Collins, and Minneapolis, and New Orleans. OK?

i’ll write about the wreck as soon as i can

Oct. 15, 2004
Minneapolis, MN

Lots of stuff going on. Hopefully by Monday you’ll be able to read all about Fort Collins, and then about this little thing where a truck driver fell asleep at the wheel and we got rear-ended by a semi and it put the brakes on everything. Everyone’s mostly OK so don’t worry. OK? We are very lucky to be alive, in very good spirits (especially considering the benefit that our family is throwing for us back in SF, yahoo) — and determined that the show must go on.

Too Dumb to Die, (and for real this time,)
the Cyclecide Staff

The Bad Kids

Oct. 10, 2004
Fort Collins, CO

New Belgium Brewery gets its name, indirectly, from bicycling. The fledgling company’s young CEO Jeff Lebesch, an avid bike rider, took a cruiser ride through Belgium a few years ago, and drank lots of delicious beer brewed by monks and such. He came back with an idea to start a brewing company of his own, and called it “New Belgium” in homage to the suds he drank on his trip. He and his wife Kim Jordan started making beers at home, commissioned a neighbor to design the labels, and distributed to stores from the back of the family station wagon. Jeff named one of the company’s first brew-strains “Fat Tire” — as a tribute to the bicycle in general, and the cruiser in particular. (“More beers, less gears” is a phrase I often hear when socializing with the Fat Tire crew.)

Rather than go the mainstream-advertising route by clogging the air around us with commercials and print ads, New Belgium decided to establish their beers’ reputation strictly by grassroots-ing and word-of-mouthing it. Jeff and Kim’s company quickly grew from a basement operation into a full-blown Fort Collins powerhouse of a company. (See? sometimes the good guys win.)

our first show with our ennablers…. uh, our kind sponsors…in SF’s Golden Gate Park

So far, New Belgium have stayed true to their mom-and-pop PR style: sending employees to make friends with local bartenders, hanging neon signs in select establishments, and organizing a traveling bicycle-and-beer festival each summer called the “Tour de Fat,” at which they sell their brands for $3 a pint and give all the proceeds to local bike charities. This is where Cyclecide comes in.

New Belgium Brewery writes Cyclecide’s paychecks, at least for the first leg of this tour. For the past two years, the Bike Rodeo has had the pleasure of showcasing its pedal-powered carnival rides, junk-made freak-bikes, and rodeo klowns of dubious moral character at this otherwise wholesome cycling event. (Think enviro-bike booths, vintage bike displays, healthy food stands, beer tents, raffles, win-a-bike contests, and hippie bands). We Cycleciders huck pies at spandex-coated people with unblemished livers, and we make their kids throw up on the carnival rides. We stick out like sore (junky, loud, ragtag, frequently unwashed) thumbs, and we get in trouble for stuff. Although the Fat Tire employees we’ve met have assured us that this is mostly fine with them, sometimes we wonder.

Oh, who are we kidding. We usually think we’re on the verge of being fired.

they already knew about the pie fights tho

Take for example the “Fort Collins Incident of 2003.” Last year was our first trip to “the Mothership,” and the New Belgium folks welcomed us with open arms. They invited us to stay in the parking lot of their (beautiful, wind-powered, environmentally-dreamy) headquarters; they let us abuse their employee showers and high-tech coffee machine; they gave us a private tour of the brewery and a beer tasting; they invited us to their Thursday Night Cruiser Ride and bought us drinks afterwards. Our New Belgium liaison, David Kemp (or D.K.), listened to all our zany stories, facilitated every culture-clash situation we encountered, chided us gently when we needed a good nose-swatting, and otherwise watched over us like an attentive date on prom night.

But after the Fort Collins Tour de Fat gig last year, at the end of a long post-show drinking episode, this one clown (who, it must be emphasized, is no longer a member of the Bike Rodeo) thought it’d be nice to CLIMB THE NEW BELGIUM BREWERY TOWER in the middle of the night “to look at the stars.” Security called the cops, and the rest is probably better left un-written. The remaining rodeo klowns were mortified, Jarico was furious, and we all spent the next day in court. Miraculously, New Belgium invited us back to tour this year.

Needless to say, we wanted to be on our best behavior, to show our respect and appreciation for our gracious hosts.

It’s hard to be a rodeo klown in Fort Collins anyway. The cops tend to harass us at every turn, and some of them can be hostile. It’s little wonder Fort Collins’ Finest can be jumpy and a tad bit mean at times — last year when we were pulling into town, driving down the main street, we saw FOUR fistfights within two blocks. It’s a college town, after all. The Cyclecide crew got pulled over the next night for driving our weirdo bikes on the street, too — and then after this lady-cop hollered at us for 10 minutes about how she “had better things to do,” she gave us tickets for having our bikes on the sidewalk. No fair. But police brutality or no, we weren’t going to let another arrest tarnish our New Belgium report cards.

Well, the night before we got to Fort Collins, while some folks (me included) stayed behind in Denver at Mary’s mountain mansion, others went down the road to Boulder to go on a bike ride that Fat Tire helped organize, as well as an after-party with awards, drinks, a band, and a pinata. And someone — I’m not saying they were in our company, but I’m not saying I don’t know who it is — stole the pinata before the party even started. The woman who was hosting the affair got pissed, and the culprits feigned innocence.

(In our world, pranks like this are the norm — but something tells me the party host wasn’t the type o’ person to know to retaliate by, say, pretending to fire us and then say she’s kidding, or stealing our jousting sticks to put them on display at the New Belgium Brewery front desk.)

Later, when the culprits stashed the pinata on the bus — a tiki head, which made it spooky — the others in our crew smelled the bad karma all over it. We cursed our more mischevious (irresponsible?) friends for sabotaging us once again, and waited for the hammer to fall. Maybe they won’t think it’s funny, not one bit. Maybe we’ll really get fired this time. But hey, we’re Cyclecide. Right? Ya gotta expect such things. After all, they don’t pay us to give massages and pass out ice cream.

This year’s Fort Collins experience, I’m dubiously happy to report, included no arrests and many high spirits. Our sponsors mothered us and praised us comfortingly, and we behaved ourselves. Sort of.

The day of the show, it seemed all the New Belgium employees were cutting loose and celebrating their company’s version of New Year’s Day — and we drank along with them. We weren’t ready to go until the last minute, but the show, though sloppy, was a success. Koit’s whole family came, other clowns’ friends showed up, the Handsome Little Devils helped us with our performance after they rocked their own, and we all had a wonderful time. And then —

During our last skit, the Moshpit of Recklessness — I’m not saying who, but — someone in our crew brought out the dreaded tiki pinata from underneath the bus and dragged it to the middle of the Pit. Someone else lit the Chupacabra, our fire-breathing bicycle, and rode straight into the pinata, torching the whole thing. Unbeknownst to both the crowd and most of Cyclecide, the tiki head had been stuffed with a massive string of Chinese firecrackers.

When the Chupacabra breathed on the tiki head, the fireworks didn’t go pop-pop-pop in rapid succession for a long time like they were supposed to — they pretty much detonated all at once. WHOOSH! With a flash as bright as a welder’s torch and a noise like a 20-ton truck dropped on a mountain of bubble-wrap paper, Cyclecide once again found itself in trouble with Mom and Dad.

Since D.K. went off to college, our new New Belgium liaison, Chris Wynn, has proven himself on this tour to be just as much of an incredibly nice and patient man with a good heart, a strong constitution, a cheerful disposition, and an infinite propensity for polite diplomacy. Bless his heart, that day he found himself once again on the Cyclecide bus with his hands in the air.

Apparently, surprise surprise, others in the company were not only mad that we were the ones who ended up with the tiki pinata, they also thought the fireworks weren’t all that cool — especially considering that it was kinda written into our contract after the 2003 tour that Cyclecide wasn’t allowed to use pyrotechnics in the show at all. We shrugged and looked sorry, and Jarico apologized like the dickens, and then Linda cracked a joke.

“This is nothing, Chris,” she said. “You don’t even know how easy you have it. You should’ve seen what D.K. had to deal with last year, before we didn’t even know what we weren’t supposed to do.”

We were sure we were history with these people. But then all these other New Belgium employees kept coming up to gush about how they loved us and wanted to run away with us. Jody loved us, Mike loved us, Katie loved us. They said stuff about how “edgy” we were, and how great it was for the company that we were their “Team Vicarious” — that we did all these things they weren’t allowed to do; that we were the bike geeks out there living the way they wanted to while they were stuck working. And other stuff about pushing boundaries and all that. We felt pretty punk rock, and at least halfway job-secure again. I guess every community needs some “bad kids” around – and for the people who write half our paychecks, we’re them. (Yahoo! Go Team Vicarious!) No more climbing on the building, though. We swear. Fireworks though? Can’t promise anything.

Later that night, the Rodeo packed up and headed to the Surfside, our favorite Fort Collins bar, to meet some of the New Belgium folks who didn’t want to smack us in the greasepaint with a cruiser tire. On the bike ride there, Linda and Koit and I got pulled over by a cop who followed us for 10 blocks. But she was nice. “I already talked to Jarico,” she said when she rolled up. “Just make sure you wear a front and back light, walk your bikes on the sidewalk, and stay out of traffic.” Whew. We didn’t have lights (of course), so we walked.

We strolled up the street in the direction of the Surfside, where a constellation of blue-and-red lights flashed right outside the bar’s front door. “Uh-oh,” we thought. Some other Cycleciders had already gone ahead to the bar. Thankfully, the melee in question was across the street at another club: in the middle of a three- or four-car cop conglomeration, at least 10 police officers, guns drawn, surrounded two guys hogtied on the pavement. Seemed like overkill, but who knows what happened before we rolled up. I did a panicky head-count inside the bar, and all klowns were present and accounted for. So we gawked.

Devil Dan, one half of the Handsome Little Devils, was to meet us at the bar. He approached us on the sidewalk hesitantly, rubbernecking at the too-violent scene across the way. Dan’s the type of guy who’s always smiling, but his face now registered dread.

“That’s not one of you guys, is it?,” he said.

Rocky Mountain Try

Oct. 6, 2004
Denver, CO

Colorado scares me. I know it’s a gorgeous place, full of exquisite landscapes and nice, well-educated people who do good things for the planet. The Centennial State also seems to be one of the world’s headquarters of weapons design and construction and, one would assume, includes a good percentage of people who have negligible attitudes about the unsolicited cancellation of human life. NORAD, which controls the missile defense systems and airspace protection for America and Canada, looms up in the mountains near a humongous Lockheed-Martin production center in the town of Littleton, CO. And we all know what happened at that one high school in Littleton. Yes, the Colorado countryside is breathtaking, but the cities, I’d rather just drive through.

Denver is quite a beautiful metropolis, aside from the ever-present layer of yellow smog so thick on the horizon that Koit (who lived there until he ran away with Cyclecide last year) was compelled to name the noxious cloud “Larry.” Once again, as in most cities, we landed on the part of town where beleaguered shop owners do nothing all day but guard their merchandise from down-on-their-luck loonies who smell of piss. The “pre-gentrified” areas, if you will.

We parked on the hardscrabble street where the Bike Rodeo first took a vote and picked up new-guy Koit and all his worldly possessions almost exactly a year ago, and we spent the morning at a delightful coffee shop called “Oh My Goddess!” Jarico called the venue where we were to perform the next day — an underground skate/cycle-people warehouse — and discovered that its tenants had been evicted by the landlord the day before. So our show was cancelled. Since we were there, and we didn’t have to be to Fort Collins until Saturday, we decided to try to set up another show. The gregarious, self-professed witch who ran the coffee shop sprang into action and phoned everyone she knew.

While we were inside, yet another car accident happened right next to the Shoo Shoo, in which two Goth girls got rear-ended pretty hard and sat there for an hour not knowing what to do until Jeremy went outside and discovered them. One chick had about 100 nasty razor-slices and self-scars on her arm, and neither of them were nice when he fixed their car in under five minutes. They drove away without saying thank you. “Low self-esteem is a bitch,” Jeremy said later. “It seemed to me like they didn’t even think they deserved my help.”

“Maybe they were on acid,” Moses offered. Jeremy shook his head. “They would have been more lively,” he said.

well, i guess it IS a little disconcerting to pull up beside us

We heard of an anarchist collective a few miles down the road called the Derailleur bike club. There’s one o’ those in every town — a nice group of young folks with self-styled haircuts, threadbare and studded black hoodies, and years-old Carhartts patched up with leather and dental-floss stitching. They compost their own trash, they grow their own food, they attend meetings and rallies, they teach bike mechanics to whoever wants to learn, and they give away bike parts without asking anything in return. When Cyclecide is on tour, these people are our best friends. Goddess bless them.

We biked up to the Derailleur’s old house — picturesquely fenced in by rows of junked bike wheels — and introduced ourselves to a couple punks sitting on the front porch eating oat bran and reading The Sexual Politics of Meat. They suggested we try another underground warehouse called Monkeymania. We biked back, and Jarico went to check out the venue and meet the leaseholder, who gave the thumbs-up to an outdoor renegade show in the for-pay parking lot next door that she didn’t own. Again, the show would go on. Until the cops came, at least.

The Handsome Little Devils, a phenomenal, Denver-based vaudeville act that we’ve befriended on the Tour de Fat, invited us to chill at their place for the night. The real-life brothers, Handsome Mike and Devil Dan, turned out to be even more multi-talented than their stage act lets on — the immaculate house they decorated themselves featured art they made on every wall and furniture they made in every corner. It was one of those homes where the few things in every room were all well-chosen and incredibly pretty. If I didn’t already know they were straight, I would’ve thought otherwise.

the Handsome Little Devils: they’re made of awesome

The Devils’ garage and practice space out back looked like a gym, but with neat rows of juggling clubs and balls and other Vaudevillain paraphernalia where the free-weights should be. Devil Dan climbed up into the crawlspace and emerged with a sturdy yellow 6-foot-tall unicycle he’d fabricated and didn’t need anymore. When he invited the boys to cut it up for their own alter-cycle-making purposes, they drooled and began formulating plans. Meanwhile, in the living room, Linda and I coveted the Devils’ press-kits, which were so glossy and fastidiously constructed that we (as the Cyclecide press officers) felt like amateur dorks. No wonder the Handsome Little Devils are going to New Zealand this winter and we’re not.

Koit spent the evening on the front porch, catching up with his brother and his old friends Kirsten and Drew. Drew showed up in a Grateful Dead tie-dye, for which we all razzed him mightily, but he stood his ground, citing his born-and-raised Colorado Hippie status. Kirsten, his girlfriend, offered her grandmother’s house in the mountains as a place we could rest after our performance. Alas, when we woke up the next morning, the forecast for Denver — which is sunny 300 days of the year — called for thunderstorms. So the show got cancelled anyway. Koit’s friend Sean (who’s in a punk band called the Taliband, hee hee) took us thrift shopping, and security guards chased us around the store the whole time.

Fearful of overstaying our welcome, we packed up in the afternoon, said goodbye to the Handsome Little Devils, and headed for the mountains and Kirsten’s house. We were glad to keep away from Fort Collins for as long as possible, considering what happened last year (see next entry). Lucky for us, Kirsten’s awesome grandmother Mary, in the course of her life, had married into money. We went from the rainy Denver ghetto to the lap of mountain luxury. Koit took me to Mary’s garage, where under a dust cover sat a Cadillac that was once owned by Elvis. I saw the documents and everything. Mary’s late husband bought it at an auction just to have it, and he rarely ever drove it. All the Bike Rodeo clowns took turns worshipping at the ‘Lac — possibly the most prestigious gas-powered vehicle we’ve ever seen.

Mary gave us a brief tour of the almost-mansion and then said goodnight and went to bed. We tiptoed and whispered, but Kirsten and Drew assured us Mary was thoroughly used to mobs of loud freaks invading her stunning home. Turns out Kirsten’s mom used to go out with Mark Slaughter (yes, of heavy metal B-listers Slaughter). There was even a picture of her as a baby being cradled in Mark’s arms in an early ‘80s issue of Hit Parader.

uuuuuup alllll niiiiiiight, sleep alllll daaaaaaay. THAT’S RIGHT

For supper, Che made his special: Baltimore-style beer-infused franks and beans. It was quickly decided that we should have a beenie weenie formal dinner in the fancy-schmancy dining room. We wouldn’t touch the massive silver and china collections, of course, and we’d make special effort not to knock anything over or spill beer on the floor or swing from the chandeliers. Linda and I busied ourselves setting up extra chairs, getting the expensive runners out of the way, and setting the table with paper towel placemats.

Then some of the twelve bulls in the china shop dressed for dinner. Koit wore his new thrift-score Halloween gangster suit hand-painted with white puffy-paint pinstripes; Linda donned the hat to a new kids’ fleece Care Bear costume (blue, with ears), and I sported my new red felt fake-tuxedo front, a yellow and orange tutu with red feathers, and a sequined something or other in my hair. Others who hadn’t had the privilege of getting stalked by the fine employees of the Denver Savers that day dug through their bags for the nicest things they could find.

Dinner was served, and Che tried to say grace, but the bad-mannered boys dove into their meals in the middle of the non-denominational prayer. Hippie Drew took some pictures, and we all ate our franks and beans and felt fancy. Things were awkwardly quiet for a long minute as we chewed — none of us were used to eating at a table, much less one like this — then Big Daddy pointedly put his fork down, wiped his mouth, and cleared his throat. “So, how was school today?,” he said.

Che asked to be excused. He said we were seriously freaking him out and that he wanted just to go watch the movie on the big-screen TV in the other room. So we excused him. Not two minutes later, he came back in and sat down again. “Y’all makin’ me feel guilty and shit,” he said. “I missed y’all, too. This is weird, man.”

“See, Che?,” Linda said. “It’s fun to hang out with Mom and Dad. We’re a fun family. Right gang?”

Big Daddy let out the biggest, longest, loudest burp I’ve ever heard him execute (and that’s saying something). The silver tea sets behind my head rattled, and everyone paused, waiting for a punchline.

“Now that,” said Shotwell, “is grace.”

The Woo People

Oct. 3, 2004
Flagstaff, AZ

Our Flagstaff show with the New Belgium tour landed on the same weekend as Northern Arizona University’s homecoming day. It did last year too, and in addition to the nice, mellow, bike-riding crowd the Tour de Fat usually attracts, our 2003 Flagstaff experience included far too many altercations with drunken frat boys, pugilistic sorority girls, unattended children, and slurring dads. One poor girl even fell off the Carousel, got run over, and left the party in an ambulance. New Belgium’s records show that in Flagstaff, they sell about 10 times the beer they do at any other stop on tour. (By the end of today, the volunteers at the beer tent had poured 900 brews in just 3 hours.)

This year was to be no different (except no ambulance this time). I spent the morning begging and hustling the proper fencing for the new and dangerous Cyclofuge, as certain too-drunk assholes were sure to duck under caution tape and try to jump on one of the swings while the ride was moving. The possibility of a lawsuit in a college town plagued with accidental drinking deaths encouraged our sponsors to assist us a whole bunch during setup.

Security fence finished, I went to the library next to the park to make photocopies of our “business cards” (i.e., tiny white Xeroxes with the Cyclecide logo and Website address). Upon exit, I heard a thousand-fold chorus of wooing, and walked up a block to see a throng ahead that I cared not to venture farther into. LInda and Fox came back from getting coffee to report that the wooers were participating in “Tequila Sunrise” — an annual tradition where the bars open at 6am and everyone’s shitfaced by 9. While we were setting up, a cop asked Shotwell to pull his pants up higher, threatening to give him a ticket if he didn’t. Sure, Shotwell’s always got plumber-butt, and he bends over a lot, but we collectively wondered why the cop was concerning himself with a laborer’s overcrack rather than the potentially manslaughterous mob down the street.

and they had the nerve to tell us to stop humping the kegs, on account of it being a “kid-friendly” show?!?

Then some guy asked me to show him my tits when I was standing in line for the bathroom. Mind you, I was in my clown outfit and full makeup at the time. I turned to his friends, who, it must be noted, seemed embarrassed on his behalf. “Why do you hang out with this guy?,” I asked them. “Is he the one who buys everyone drugs?”

Another man elbowed me in the face during the Parade of the Bikes. He wasn’t even on a bike, either — he just ran across the rodeo area swinging for clowns. Another harassed Linda and I from sidestage throughout the entire show, and begged our Tour de Fat cohorts the Handsome Little Devils for eggs to throw at us. (The Devils do a thing where they juggle an egg, a club, and a running chainsaw.) Then, during tear-down, we discovered that one of August’s hand-painted sideshow banners had gotten stolen. She worked on those banners all summer, and some stupid jerk thought it’d be funny to clip the zip-ties and crib some original artwork from the rodeo freaks. None of us in Cyclecide can be said to be vengeful people, capable of rage — but at that moment, we were close. And we were powerless.

All in all, it was a good show with a seamless breakdown, but needless to say, we were in low spirits. The yahoo factor takes the wind out of a klown’s tutu in an entirely different way than the punk-rock, seat-of-yr-pants type shows do. Completely exhausted, we scored probably the two worst hotel rooms we’ve ever stayed in: a Bush-Cheney sign in the front “yard,” home-bums sleeping in the doorways, humid fleabag bedrooms with no phones, and restrooms with towel racks ripped off the walls, no hot water, clogged drains, and bubbled-up plastic bathtubs with water trapped underneath them so that one had to “surf” in order to get clean. I made a “STOLEN” flyer for August’s banner and we fell into bed.

if you see this up on someone’s wall, take it down, kick their ass, and mail it to us. (the banner, not the ass)

We took our day off in Flagstaff the next day, which we sorely needed, but which would have been better spent at some national park or historic landmark. Instead, we stayed in the town we would rather have left, hung our STOLEN posters everywhere, sat at the Pay’n’Take, argued about which movie to go see, and rushed back to the bus to go see one. Linda was cooking an enchilada meal with Fox on the bus and they were having a dance party when we all stormed the Shoo Shoo — half the crew hollering that it’s too late for the movie, and the other half hollering about how bowling is more interactive anyway.

So we went bowling. Most of us suck at bowling, but our enthusiasm outweighed our competitive urges. Then we went and drank some more at a saloon next door that had taxidermy and carved wood and full-on trees all inside of it. A man who works there got off his shift and sat at the bar, doing shots and glaring at us until we thought his trucker hat would blow straight off his head. It’s always a shame when square folks hate or suspect anything that isn’t immediately within their schema. It sucks even more when they decide the only way to make themselves feel better about their reality being upset is by beating something up.

I can’t remember the details, but it turns out this jocko was really angry about his girlfriend being a slut, and Linda and I spent a good amount of time trying to appease him so he wouldn’t pick a fight with one of the boys. He just kept getting madder, and in a more unfocused way, so we all left. Linda decided to trot back inside to just climb *one* of the trees real quick to do some static trapeze stuff, and I wrestled her out of there and onto the pavement. I pinned her down until she promised she wouldn’t go back in. I let her up, and she ran back in. And repeat.

So everyone took out their Flagstaff aggressions by getting tipsy early, and we all ate enchiladas. Most went to bed, but I spent the rest of the night talking to Jarico and Jeremy, who were supposed to trade all-night driving shifts but neither of whom would take a nap. Jarico is a wealth of information when it comes to politics and war — this history buff reads the New York Times every day — and I told them some stuff I was reading about pirates. Funny that — we Cycleciders all have a thing for pirates, but in a sense, yesterday, we were the ones who got marauded.

Anybody got information on the whereabouts of August’s “Suburban Intruder” banner, or if you’re the one who stole it, please contact Cyclecide headquarters. No questions asked — we just want it back.

Like Mosquitoes to a Zapper

Friday, Oct. 1 2004
Phoenix, AZ

Jarico was on ESPN Bicycle Radio last evening before the show. That’s probably the only reason 40 people came through the Icehouse door. Otherwise, it might have been just us, the promoters, and Pablo and his family.

The clowns weren’t feeling so collectively hot that day anyway. We were all pretty hung over, and the Earth’s atmosphere in Phoenix resembled that of a pre-heated oven. Koit had “caught the dumb” from the 2 concussions he’d suffered the night before, and couldn’t keep 2 thoughts in his head at once.

Some of us spent the day running errands, buying groceries, and setting up the show. The band stayed behind and practiced with Fox, our new trial-by-fire drummer who hadn’t hit the drums in seven years but was asked to play with Los Banos that night. Moses successfully taught himself how to ride the Wrong-Way Bike after practicing it for about 8 or 10 hours straight. He is now one of the only people in the world who can ride that thing.

koit and moses. two plus two equals one

We drank beers as we set up the rides. During our pre-show meeting, Laird kicked Koit square in the face — playfully, but why I still don’t know — and split the inside of his lip wide open. So the guy with two concussions also gets a boot to the teeth. Brilliant. Blood poured down Koit’s chin for the entire Klown Konference. Folks ran the rides, the scant crowd was thankfully enthusiastic in trying them out, and then we started the show. We found out quickly that Linda had given everyone a different setlist. Like most of us, she’d gotten into the “Clown Water” a bit before we went onstage.

Sometimes during the more underground and underattended shows, we let ourselves get a little lax. The klowns and I share the theory that in case of poor attendance, we should always perform as if 15,000 people were there. And it’s always an unspoken agreement that it’s in the best interest of Team Cyclecide to get drunk enough to do so — we take some Liquid Loosener Uppers so we can go a little more nuts so the people that *are* there are more impressed with our enthusiasm, at least. We improvise some of our best new skits when we’re hanging onto the show by our floating teeth. Also, if the show goes badly, it’s all a blur to us anyway and we don’t care if we suck.

Jarico started into his shpiel and the band rumbled awake. “We suck!,” I shouted. Other klowns took up the chorus. “You suck!,” the crowd shouted back. There — now they couldn’t say we didn’t tell them so.

At some point during the performance, while getting props, Linda lost her footing and slid into the backstage area like a butter-shoed batter into home. Minutes later, she face-planted into an upright bass that the next band had propped up against the wall behind the stage. Thankfully, she didn’t break it. I was reminded of an episode from earlier in the day, when Koit and Linda and I had ridden to get ourselves hangover-burritos: We cruised past one of the many junkyards on the wrong side of the railroad tracks in downtown Phoenix. In this junkyard, a big dog and a small dog frantically chased back and forth after our bikes behind their cyclone fence. The little dog, yapping and running his little ass off, tripped on some junk, ate pavement, and executed a full aerial flip and roll, only to right himself quick as lightning and keep going like nothing happened. That was Linda, all right.

Shotwell also got wasted during the course of the show. He’d groundscored a new knife in the parking lot, and while cutting something, he accidentally stabbed himself in the stomach. (“Like any good wasteoid,” he later noted, “I knew what to do. So I went to bed.”) None of us was injured by all the fireworks that Shotwell decided to fire off intermittently during our show except Shotwell himself. So he burned and blistered his leg, and then he stuck himself with his sharp new buck knife. Boy, are we geniuses. I don’t want to jinx myself, so I’m not going to say that I’m glad it’s not me getting hurt for once. Especially since I spent part of the night gleefully riding the Swing Bikes around some hay bales and a giant open flame.

The next band played, and they were good in a Portishead-abilly-ish way, and Fox got out her sax and blew and made them sound even better and dreamier than they did before. Linda arm-wrestleld some girl again, who lost, and then snarked, “It’s a shame you care so much about winning that you can’t have fun.” Linda retorted, “You’re wrong. The only thing I care about is WHERE’S MY BEER!?” and ran off.

After the band finished, we went on a bike ride to see fellow metal artist David Therien’s jam-packed-with-cool-stuff warehouse. The minute we got there, while we were all gawking at Therien’s pack-rat’s nest of electronics and sculptures and weird things, Jarico failed to watch his step and fell into a 6-foot-deep “ghetto quicksand” cesspool of trash and dirty water. Che had to pull him out.

Now it’s morning, and Shotwell just casually puked into a trash can and then gave me the thumbs-up sign. His wound was festering, so Che made him clean it. Moses, who headbutted the pavement last night sometime during the show, now has a huge scrape across his cheek — and he’s dumb like Koit was the day before. After we pack up and get on the road to Flagstaff, I’m going to make a new T-shirt stencil for Moses and Koit and whoever in our paying audience wants to be next in line for a concussion: I’M NOT STONED — I’M JUST DUMB.

Addendum:

On the highway from Phoenix to Flagstaff, we were chugging up the side of a mountain at 20 miles per hour with the rest of the traffic-choked Friday-afternoon herd when CRASH!!… A man unwisely tried to get out from behind us in the slow lane during a traffic jam, and he must’ve forgotten he had a trailer behind his truck — because it broadsided the lady next to him in the fast lane. She spun all the way around, the truck fishtailed beside us and came to a stop on the left shoulder … and the Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby and its horse trailer emerged completely unscathed.

As we pulled to the shoulder and waited and Jarico made sure everyone was OK and talked to the cops and did all the above-the-law things, some of us couldn’t help thinking the cops were going to try to pin it on us. We also felt a tad bit guilty ourselves, in a nebulous way… I dunno… Sometimes it seems like we cause chaos even when we don’t mean to.

Swing Bike Jedi

Sept. 30, 2004
Phoenix, AZ

In 1976, a bicycle manufacturing company out of Logan, Utah set out to crack open the heads of little adventurous children all across America. The makers of the new-fangled “Swing Bike” promised that “with SWING BIKE, you can invent wacky maneuvers which leave everyone else bug-eyed in amazement!”… From a distance, the Swing Bike looked like a regular ‘70s Stingray-ish chopper-thing, but when the rider unbolted it, a springloaded coupler unhinged under the seat, and the bike became double-jointed… and doubly hard to ride.

The presumably Mormon “Swing Bike” company wasted no time in marketing their soon-to-be-bone-crunching creation by enlisting their religious little brother Jimmy Osmond as their spokesperson.

The Swing Bike previewed for the adoring public on the Donny and Marie Show in late 1976. (Jimmy Osmond even sang on a promotional “Swing Bike” record with an instrumental theme song!) At $119, it wasn’t a steal, but when all seventeen towheaded children and their five mothers screamed for the most prestigious Christmas present that season, tons of Mormon (and other) fathers forked over the dough. Of course, it wasn’t long before little tender brains were spilling out across Utah’s and America’s well-paved roads. Lawsuits ensued, the Swing Bike was discontinued, and one of bicycling’s first novelty creations was mostly forgotten.

(Cyclecide’s own Jingles the Klown supposes that the Swing Bike might be the precursor to BMX and other kinds of widespread trick-riding activity. The Swing Bike came with special instructions as well as suggestions for “swing bike rodeos” — complicated exercise maps that encouraged the rider and his/her bike to do the hustle, in a sense. Yes, vehicle customization is as old as vehicles are, and penny-farthing tallbike hellions at the turn of the century engaged in their own brand of thrillseeking — but the Swing Bike might’ve been the first bicycle that implicitly suggested pedal-powered things can do more than run races or carry bodies from point A to point B. The Swing Bike was one of the first mass-marketed bikes-for-the-sake-of-itself — a bike that played more than the rider. At the least, it encouraged idiot-bike culture; certainly, it embodies an embryonic version of Cyclecide’s philosophy.)

Skip to the late 20th century, when some oddball bike mechanics in the the Heavy Pedal Cyclecide Bike Rodeo decide to re-create the Swing Bike, come head injury or high water. The guy who originally designed it patented it in the ‘70s — US Patent number 3,801,1301, to be exact — but technology is now so different, and Cyclecide’s two Swing Bike designs are so much simpler in style, that Jingles reckons the patent wouldn’t even hold.

take jingles’ advice: steer with yr ass

Actually, I’ve encountered a couple of the original Swing Bikes at some Tour de Fat shows. In my opinion, they were pretty, but they sucked — too heavy, too large, too tall, too unwieldy, and too hard to ride, with an f-ed up center of gravity too far in the back. Jingles says the original Swing Bike’s fatal flaws were: 1) the spring, which caused limited turning ability and which forced the rider to jerk the handlebars off-kilter to start trick-riding, and 2) the coupler, which gave the sometimes-regular rider a false sense of security. Cyclecide’s simple, streamlined Swing Bikes contain neither spring nor safety bolt, so the rider must rely solely on balance and skill.

Though I have been in Cyclecide for a couple-few years now, I don’t ride tallbikes, nor do I ride hardly any other of the trick bikes. I’ve had my share of Cyclecide-related accidents — a fractured foot, a concussion, then a shattered foot, then a couple more mild concussions — and my injuries have made me more physically tentative in general, and not as light on my feet as I once was. Suffice it to say that I only have “calamity” health insurance, and I don’t want more savings-eating surgeries, so I have to watch my back. I’ve started, out of necessity, to err on the side of caution.

However, I had a bit of an epiphany when we got to Phoenix and unloaded the bus: I looked around and realized that most people on this Bike Rodeo tour know how to ride the Swing Bike. Even though those two hinged fuckers have given Cyclecide their own share of concusisons (even on this tour already — see previous weblog entries), and the bikes *will* strike again, and I might be the one they strike, I must master the beasts. I risk being a poser of a rodeo klown if I don’t know how to ride either a Swing Bike or a Tallbike, and at least the Swing Bikes are low to the ground. It was time for me to stop thinking of myself as a fragile, nerdy, “indoor-kid” klutz. I had to teach myself to ride the Swings, to prove to myself that I’m a well-balanced cyclist with good reflexes, moderate talent, and continued bravery despite injury.

So after everybody went to bed at the Icehouse — quite weird how early, too, I might add — I vowed to master both Swing Bikes before my head hit the pillow that night. I’ve only ever ridden the green Swing Bike a few times. Of those times, I was mostly shaky, and the time I rode it best I was drunk. I was sober that night, and determined to ride it as such. The only advice I’ve ever given audience members who try out the Swing Bikes is to steer with the ass. Beyond that, I had no pointers.

I picked up the green Swing. Of course, it was broken. Koit and Jingles were practicing their homoerotic ass-slapping Swing Bike skit earlier that night, and one of them ran into the other one’s tire and tacoed it pretty good. Again. It turned out that Jingles was awake, and he offered me his assistance. As he stood on the wheel to straighten it out, he told me that with the green-and-orange one, the rider should pull the handlebars to the side for balance, but with the red-and-blue one (a different construction entirely) the rider should push. I noticed they replaced the green bike’s seat with, ironically, the metal-flake banana seat from my old ratty French bike that folded in half for storage.

I listened to Jingles, and then I rode. Sure enough, the best way to steer is to hold your hands in place and point your crotch in the direction you want the bike to go. The first run, I wobbled and footed the ground, but by the second, I almost had it. Invaluable advice — to pull the handlebars to the side. I didn’t do any turns until later — I didn’t want to get overconfident or press my luck. Every person I’ve seen get conked on the Swing Bikes did so during a turn. Then I tried the other one where you have to push. I actually aced the shit out of it the first time.

After only a couple figure-8s around the parking lot, my shoulders and pecs felt worked. I spent a good hour or so switching from one Swing to another. By the time I was done, my stomach and back felt tight, too, from all that pivoting and leaning over. Matter fact, riding both Swings could have been the best workout-on-a-bicycle I’ve ever had, since I woke up the next day with a greater variety of sore muscles than I’ve ever experienced after a bike ride. I also woke up with a smug sense of Jedi accomplishment and a trite-but-true metaphor for life: The more you think about riding a Swing Bike while you’re doing it, the worse you are at it… and in order not to fall, you have to let yourself go.

Head Trauma and Stockholm Syndrome

Sept. 29, 2004
Flagstaff to Phoenix, AZ

OK, so we didn’t go to the Petrified Forest or the Painted Desert. Well, we did, but it was in the middle of the night, it was closed, and there were no rest areas or truck stops with bathrooms for us to park and wait it out until morning. So Jarico drove 20 miles down the road to a gas station parking lot where we slept. Rather than backtrack, we eased on down the road to Flagstaff.

We were scheduled to have a day off and away from the bus, but once we got to Flagstaff (where we’re playing on Saturday), many of us didn’t go anywhere for a while. We didn’t even get down our bikes and ride. I think that after traveling for days on end, we had a touch of the ol’ Stockholm Syndrome — sitting inside our wheeled captor, eating lunch, drinking beer, and looking at each other dumbly, not knowing where to go now that the gates were open. We finally cut the cord, split up, and unleashed ourselves on the tourists and college kids in the tony downtown district. Me, I went to the Pay’N’Take and spent the afternoon drinking wine (Wine! Fancy!) and doing Internet stuff.

Of course, since we Cycleciders are pack animals by nature, everyone ended up at the Pay’n’Take eventually, and we all sat around drinking Pabst and thinking of new skits for the sideshow. As always when we formulate new skit and bike ideas in a group, people talk at the same time and everybody’s vox volume gets turned up a few dozen decibels. The other mellow cafe-goers in the Pay’n’Take had no choice but to shut up and eavesdrop.

“No wonder people hate carnies, man,” Linda said. “We’re totally dirty and loud and obnoxious, and we never talk to anyone but each other.”

i mean… why WOULDN’T people like us?

After Jarico cooked dinner and did an interview with a reporter from the local paper, Jeremy pointed the bus toward Phoenix and we all sat around telling really bad jokes until sleep-time. I awoke the next morning with my ears ringing and a pounding headache — we’d dropped 7,000 feet in altitude through the night and my melon felt like a pressure cooker. I blew my nose, and my ears squeaked and then exploded. Good times. We deposited Metal Mike at the airport — “I feel like I’m getting out of prison,” he said — and lurched through the streets to the Icehouse.

The Icehouse in downtown Phoenix traps coolness. It’s a big, empty, brick-and-mortar alternative arts space with cavernous rooms, metal workshops, a couple live-work spaces, and a labyrinthine basement with hallways and offices. It landed on the Phoenix Historic Property Register and the National Register of Historic Places in 1929, and back in the days before electricity and fridges, it was an ice storage warehouse. Now, the old, enormous L-shaped building — owned by a very highly esteemed and gifted mathematical physicist — sits behind an artful fence made of rusted metal sheets in a deserted neighborhood. Looming over the parking lot where we’re going to set up the rides, a 30-foot-high trompe l’oiel mural of clouds at sunset broadcasts serenity even as it points to the hot, blank-blue sky above it. Though we’re most likely going to lose money on this gig, after taking a look around the place and realizing it was to be our home for the next 3 days, we still experienced a collective and profound sense of yayness.

The college kids never leave Tempe, so we drove to the ‘burb to try to lure them out of their shells. We found that, instead of the hippie-arty enclave we always heard Tempe would be, the town has been nuked, paved, and completely overrun with chain stores in the past 10 years. We were taking our first real bike ride since we embarked on tour three weeks ago, and we didn’t exactly want to sight-see in Applebee’s-landia, so after flyering all the tattoo shops and record joints, we cruised to some abandoned railroad tracks behind a gravel hill, threw rocks, broke every glass bottle in sight, and discussed strategies about the best way to climb inside the abandoned grain elevator towering over us. But we had to go grocery shopping and then get back to unload the bus. Linda and I cooked a “Teenage Wife Dinner” (tomato soup, grilled cheese, and spinach salad) while the boys unpacked bikes and re-welded the bumper on the bus.

Che made a wonderful discovery — a “church room” in the back of the Icehouse, 50’ by 50’ and completely empty except for a white Victorian bathtub with a custom-made metal “claw foot” base — the “feet” being either eagle talons or dragon claws, not sure which. So Che dragged over the garden hose and declared himself the first in line to take a “Goth Bath” in the full moonlight. All he lacked for his Goth Bath was soap — and I’m fairly sure this was a worse-than-it-sounds coincidence, but none of us had any. Almost everyone took Goth Baths, and when it was my turn, it was time to go “flirt and flyer.” I vowed to get my Goth Bath on the next night.

that’s about how bright the moon was, too

We went on a long bike ride to the hip downtown Phoenix bars with our host Johnny, who not only bought us rounds of shots all night long, he also gave me $2 for the jukebox so I could have myself a high-school heavy-metal party while everyone else played Fooz Ball. Jarico arm-wrestled a girl, so Linda arm-wrestled *her* for touching her man’s hand, and then Linda arm-wrestled me and I actually beat her both hands, which surprised me since she does Russian calisthenics and static trapeze. The boys watching us arm-wrestle bought us drinks. “I’d already taken down three people before I got to her,” Linda bragged to them. She then demanded a rematch. “Later.”

We met this guy named Pablo who was half Irish and half Mexican (“so I’m angry all the time,” he quipped). He makes freak-bikes here in Phoenix, he told us. After buying us a round, he reached under his seat, produced a small vintage Samsonite makeup case, opened it up, took out some scissors and empty El Pato hot-sauce cans, and made Linda and I both some custom El Pato bracelets on the spot. What a champ. We learned that his four-year-old daughter tragically drowned in a swimming pool this past spring. Despite his extreme heartbreak, he still seemed noble, mellow, even-tempered, and generous — like a cholo leprechaun Buddha. We begged him to come to our show Thursday and bring his bikes.

I soon got the news that as a result of Koit and Laird being gay with each other on the swing bikes — racing around in tight double-helix circles on the street, trying to smack each other’s asses — Koit jackknifed at a high speed, fell on his head, and got a concussion. (During the course of the day already, while riding, he racked himself twice and, because his bike has no brakes, ran headfirst into two different bushes.) So the rest of my night in the bar was spent watching over him until we went home. He kept nodding off, and I kept tapping him and asking: “Who’s our president?” His answer: “You mean the real one, or the one they put in office?”

On the ride home, we lost Koit again when he raced ahead of us and straight past the Icehouse without noticing we’d stopped. We sent search-and-rescue teams, but to no avail. He finally showed up an agonizing 45 minutes later — he’d gotten lost, jackknifed the Swing Bike again, hit his head even harder than the first time, lay dead-like and unconscious in the middle of the street for he doesn’t know how long, and then somehow found his way back to the Icehouse. I sat him down out in the parking lot while the clowns rodeoed around and around on various bikes and other people gonged on an enormous metal fire bowl in the asphalt yard. Koit slumped over and passed out. I shook him awake, and then he puked. That’s when I took the WINNER medal off my neck and awarded it to him.

In the Fishbowl

Sept. 26, 2004
Durango, CO to right past Gallup, NM

We’re sitting at a rest area just over the New Mexico border into Arizona. We just ate some soup that Big Daddy made (delicious despite the onions), and now folks are outside in the crisp night air, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes, and settling their various squabbles in the dark at the picnic tables on the perimeter of the grounds.

Cylclecide’s always got a dozen or so big personalities on tour, and sometimes when we haven’t had proper down-time away from the bus — group bike rides, tourist days, window-shop strolls, and visits from old friends — we can get a little prickly. Some of us more than others, and on other days, the others more than the some.

when in doubt, wrestle it out

Not that I know a great deal about patience, but today, other than being a little peevish about onions being in our food every time I don’t cook (They hurt my contacts! They give me a headache! Etc.) I’ve been removed from the day’s mini-dramas, observing and pondering the ins and outs of bus-munal living. I think I made up some simple bullet-points of advice to give any newer Cyclecide tour member who’s growing tired of Bus Life, experiencing a conflict with someone, having feelings of being underappreciated, or just generally clenching up into a cranky, whiny little bitch:

1. When you come on tour, say goodbye to your ego.

2. Try as best as you can to be self-sufficient — and sensitive to the consensus — at all times. If you see something not being done, start doing it and others will guilt themselves into helping you. Lead by example.

3. State your objective, your mood, or your beef to whoever needs to know or hear it in the most humorous and self-deprecating way possible. Stand your ground and confront the person you need to confront directly and in private.

4. The object of the game is never to get pissed off or riled up, no matter what. If you take something personally, you lose.

5. If a situation arises that you know is well within your area of expertise, and nobody’s listening to you anyway, stop talking, hang back, and either
A.) wait for them to realize they should ask your advice or
B.) smirk, put your headphones on, and trust in the power of “I Told You So.”

6. If all else fails, put the offending party in a headlock at the truck stop, or better yet, challenge them to a tallbike joust for the next show. Things that serious are best settled by making each other bleed.

There’s no big juicy gossip on the (cramped, always-moving-this-week) Cyclecide bus today, nor if there was would I tell it in specifics. But let’s just say that all Bike Rodeo and no play makes Jack a dull clown. Tonight’s been the dealbreaker, though, and I feel sure that tomorrow when we go do a Tourist Thing and see the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest on our way to the Phoenix gig, we’ll all be singing and clapping our hands and rocking the bus like the Partridge Family and shit.

they can’t drive 55 either

While we ate dinner a few minutes ago in the rest area parking lot, one trucker dude stood at the front of our fishbowl looking in, feet planted into the asphalt and arms folded on his chest. His gaze was icy, like he wanted to make eye contact and/or kill someone in our bus. We wondered for a minute if he was the tweaky semi driver from who, earlier today, gave us the aggro-honk as he flew by us on the desolate, butte-dotted highway. Jarico honked back, and our horn was louder.

Tweaky Honker started screaming on the CB radio all kinds of blue-clouded epithets about the “sissy hippie bus” that should get off the road if it can’t go 55. So we took turns taunting him on the radio — which I’m sure he assumed we didn’t have — then sang him a rousing group rendition of “I Can’t Drive 55.” Maybe this angered him so much that after pretending to blow past us and out of our lives, he’d spent the whole day stalking us, and now he was amped enough to enact his own crazed-trucker-and-a-group-of-traveling-young-people horror movie scenario.

Whew. He just drove away. Not him — or is it?

Anyhoo, today’s been another day of driving driving driving. I made us a big Southern breakfast after checkout, and then Jarico decided we should get down the road to leave plenty of time to drop Metal Mike off at the Phoenix Airport by Tuesday. He’ll re-join tour in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, Los Banos (the Bike Rodeo band) can live without a lead guitarist for a couple of dates, but who’s going to obsessively play quiet, soothing metal and blues riffs on a classic Gibson SG while we roll down the highway?

Nobody let Linda near the Scrabble board today. The boys, it appeared, had a different method of cheating that they preferred to hers. She pretended to read the New York Times but I think she was eavesdropping most of the time.

Once out of the mountains and into Northwestern New Mexico, we gleefully took Highway 666 (now lamely re-named by superstitious Jesus freaks as “Route 421”) and gawked at the surreal Navajo Country landscape. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a butte before. Mesas, maybe, but never a butte. I think.

Also, I didn’t know that Navajos had personal sweat lodges on their properties the way others have swimming pools or two-car garages. I wish I could go in one. Wish we all could, as a matter of fact. Lord knows what kind of shit we clowns would hallucinate on if we sweated out all our toxins.

Also, since there’s almost nothing here, everything turns purple and pink at sunset.

I finally got the WINNER medal back in Albequerque. Fox awarded it to me in the Atomic Cafe after we’d tried to get tacos for dinner, and the place was closed so we went to the Atomic and watched bands and drank instead. All I did to get the WINNER medal was to say that I might not be able to walk in a straight line on the way home. I don’t think I deserved to be WINNER at all. I think Fox just wanted to get it off her own neck and saw an opportunity. But it matches my outfit, so I’m keeping it until someone else deserves it. Moses had the other WINNER medal for a few nights in a row before that – both because he combined beer with Vicodin for his shoulder injury, to hilarious and sometimes offensive effect, and because the man can do an excellent crack-pigeon impersonation.

We performed in Durango for the Tour de Fat on Saturday. Durango people love their Fat Tire beer, and to a far lesser extent, Cyclecide. The kids foamed at the mouth all day long for our rides, and at least they were blown away by the show. The adults, maybe not so much. Linda thinks she heard a few “boos” at the end of our performance. My ears didn’t pick up anything but the scattered applause of an audience who’s collectively turning to run toward the beer tent for another round before everyone else gets there.

thank you, we’ll be here all week

We tried out a new skit — Bike Sabbath — in which Che finally got to showcase his badass, unrideable-for-small-people, black-and-chrome death-chopper. Che got into a post-show altercation with a lady who felt very, very strongly that he’d squirted too much ketchup in her general direction. Fat Tire management had to eventually intervene on our behalf, and they gave her the same basic argument that we did: You sat in the front row at a Bike Rodeo show. Thank you for coming, now go home and wash your pants.

Jeremy parked the bus by the gurgling Animas River last night after we striked the rides and cleared out of the park. I woke up to the sound of the Durango-Silverton train chugging past on the riverbank beside us. The beautiful, black mining-train-cum-tourist-trap hooted its horn, which startled some other people awake who weren’t quite as happy as I was to have the sound of a real live steam train be the day’s alarm clock.

One of the Cyclecide boys, who farts loudly and often as a matter of course on this tour, almost lost the Poop Or Fart game last night as the rest of the bus slept. I won’t go into details, but I think it might be karma.

All in all, the Durango show was successful, if not exciting. New Belgium styled the Rodeo with one hotel room afterwards, and a few of us sat in the hot tub until it got cold, then joined the rest of the bone-tired crew to watch a weird reality TV show where some B-list and has-been celebrities try to live together in a mansion for a month.

Judging from what little we’ve seen of the show (i.e. one episode), the few ex-celebs who have managed to keep good heads on their shoulders (or is it out of their asses?) during their respective rollercoaster-rides down the red carpet are simply no match for the Difficult People on the show — pampered, ego-poisoned and/or painfully ill-socialized window-lickers the program’s producers have thrown into the mix like a squirt of lime juice in a glass of cream.

I bet none of those pussies would last a day on tour with Cyclecide.

Fake-Word Scrabble

Sept. 23, 2004
Somewhere between Albequerque, NM and Durango, CO

It was raining buckets when I woke up, and a tin roof symphony clattered low and high on the bus, the bike pile on top of it, and the trailer out back. Outside, everything was as grey as a dying heifer’s eyes, and I splooshed out the Shoo Shoo’s back door in a slip, bomber jacket, and some flip-flops to go find a place to pee. As I walked, my sandals flicked mud up onto my vintage periwinkle blue slip, leaving brown grease-spots all over my backside.

Last night it rained too, and some water got into the converter box. The bus blinkers broke first, and then the connection to the trailer’s lights shorted and took out the whole system. All the lights went out. Jarico and the boys pulled over to the side of the highway and temporarily fixed the problem, and got back on the road. Jarico was still driving when we all went to bed. Sometime in the middle of the night, the lights broke again, so he pulled us over into the muddy back parking lot of the Cattlemen’s Ranch outside Amarillo, Texas. By the time I put in some eyedrops and grease-flecked my slip, Shotwell had already crawled under the bus in the mud and fixed it. That man likes to get dirty.

The Cattlemen’s Ranch is a northern Texas icon — a brightly-painted and excellently-decorated hotel / restaurant / truck stop / horse stable that’s most well known for serving the “Big Texan,” a meal so huge that if you eat it all, you get it free. If you take the challenge, they even sit you up on a raised table in the center of the taxidermy-coated dining hall so you can feel like a overeating rock star while you do it.

The catch is, most people are too overconfident in their potential to be the day’s poster child for gluttony, so somewhere in between downing a dinner salad, roll, shrimp cocktail, baked potato, and a 72-ounce steak (that’s 4 1/2 pounds, which is enough meat to feed the entire Cyclecide crew TWO spaghetti dinners), they either give up or throw up. That’s when they have to pay the $53.14 they owe the restaurant and get rolled out of the place.

I felt pretty confident that Bottomless-Stomach Koit could take on the Big Texan and still have room for dessert, but I wasn’t about to gamble $53.14 on it. Since it was 8am, we all just got coffee. Even though we didn’t buy anything at all in the store, the employees gave us our coffee for FREE! Yay Cattlemen’s Ranch. We continued the 287 miles to Albequerque, and it took all damn day.

One thing that touring with the Bike Rodeo has taught me is that Scrabble sucks. It’s a game from the “temth” circle of hell [see below], where grammarians and linguists must be strapped in three-legged chairs and forced to argue about the Hawaiian word “aa” (type of lava rock) and whether it’s “playable” (because it’s in the Scrabble dictionary) or not (because it’s technically a word from a foreign language).

Linda and Tuula met in static trapeze class. Being the two “rock chicks” in the otherwise serious-ish circus school, they soon paired up and discovered that not only did they share a love for subverting the feminine, uber-flowy static-trapeze stereotype with a few well-placed gross-out theater props — they also both enjoyed using the English language as a playground for their sick and perverted board-game amusement. The only rules they play by (and distort) are the ones in the official Scrabble dictionary, which is as much of a “dictionary” as a Big Mac with large fries is “part of a well-balanced diet.”

Tuula is a tall, beautiful Finnish metal goddess with her own band and near-future plans to get a tattoo on her upper arm that has the word “CHEATER” spelled out in Scrabble tiles. Tuula and Linda were the ones who originally introduced me to Scrabble last year — strangely, even though I am a word freak, an excellent speller, and an editor by trade, I’d never played it. Let’s just say that those two language-mangling hellions are the reason I’d rather deal myself some solitaire or smash myself in the hand with some vise grips than play that infernal game of stupidity and base cunning.

Indeed, every time the Scrabble board is brought out during one of Cyclecide’s long drives, it’s a sure bet there will be a bullshit fight that almost gets serious. Today, the source of everyone’s word-rage was my addition of “REDVINES” to the board. I asked before I played it, because another thing I also hate is licorice, so I have no idea if “redvines” is a standard word for “red licorice” or a brand name. Plus, I didn’t give a shit.

Since we didn’t have a Scrabble dictionary, Linda’s hands were tied, and she couldn’t challenge me as she’d made a couple dicey word-choices herself. Big Daddy, another despicable Scrabble freak (and known cheater, I might add) was beside himself that someone had let a proper noun — *that was two words, not one* — get onto the board. Then he played something else on “my” word that he didn’t want to allow, and he and Linda got into it.

This is when I gave up for good, vowing only to play Scrabble again if we could exclusively play words that we had made up ourselves and invented definitions for. So that’s what we did.

Behold the beginnings of the new Cyclecide Fake-Word Dictionary. (Words are listed in chronological order, starting with those falsified at the game’s inception.)

GLURKING – (v.) To hang around in the bushes waiting for gay sex. (From an ancient tribal German word meaning “to rip or tear”)

PIGMAXI – (n., slang) A sanitary napkin for extremely overweight women. (See also “double-wide red-tide slide.”)

FNAST – (adj., slang) (abbr. of “fnasty”) A contraction of “fat” and “nasty”. A derogatory term. (See also “FNASTO,” a person who is considered to be both fat and nasty.)

(This is where the object of the game became to get rid of all your Scrabble letters as quickly as possible, without regard to spelling or wit. I tried to re-explain the loose set of “rules” I fabricated on the spot — you know, just do something like in the New York Times word-making-up contests, or blue-collar comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s redneck dictionary — and I was met with instant derision.

“I can tell exactly what kind of kid you were in school,” Linda said to me. Fair enough — but that comment goes both ways. If I wasn’t an only child, I probably would have killed at least one sibling for being a “NOBITERD,” which according to Che and Linda means “That’s Some Corny Shit.” Anyhoo, the game continued. It was Moses’ turn.)

JIFNIBLE – (n.) A quick bite to eat in a hurry.

(“But ‘nibble’ has 2 ‘b’s,” I said weakly, futilely. “Not when you have to eat *this* fast,” Moses retorted. “Now that,” I said, “is the way to play fake-word Scrabble.”

“But NOBITERD is the best word *ever,*” Linda said, a propos of nothing. Yup, she was one of the kids I always carried during school-group projects with my huge brain, the brain that wouldn’t even fit into the largest cowboy hat they had in the gift shop at the restaurant in Texas this morning where their main attraction is a steak the size of a small car. It’s my turn, and I can’t think of a better word than:)

EDASS – 1. (n.) A person that is widely agreed to be an asshole for trying to edit a fake-word Scrabble game. 2. (n., alt.) An asshole who’s only in special-ed class because he or she is too lazy to be in regular school and would rather get passable grades on the backs of nerdy overachievers. 3. (n.) The morass of existential loneliness and/ior societal alienation in which one occasionally finds oneself as a result of habitually pointing out grammatical discrepancies that our illiterate society perpetuates by default, causing said “edass” to feel like a wet blanket despite his/her best intentions and usually Zen-like attitude toward the confusing problem of illiteracy, even among the supposedly overeducated.

(I got mad arbitrary points from this word and its definition. I was happy again. Koit kept the game rolling by coming up with this one:)

TARWREN – (n.)A tar-covered rock that flips off one’s bike tire and sticks to one’s back, neck, ass, or shoulders.

RAPEALE – (n., slang) Malt liquor.

WUAEEE – (n.) In Tahitian folklore, a vampire who only gets blood from people’s shit.

ZOOLS – (n., pl.) Drooling fools who belong in a zoo.

OIEEEON! – (excl.) 1. What onion-haters say when the chef puts onions in the bus food. 2. The slurred, loudly-exclaimed call one makes when one wants to go to “The Bar” (Odeon, SF) even though one has already gotten way too drunk at home to go out anyway.

UGOLAY – (adj.) 1. Too ugly to date, but just fine for a sport-f^ck.

GODRUN – (n.) A beer run which miraculously results in 8,000 free beers.

HIDEVAN – (n.) A pre-90s vehicle which, by virtue of its lack of windows, gas-guzzling engine, and overabundance of customization, looks as if a child molester or criminal lives inside of it. (See also “chomo van.”)

HIDEVANI – (n., pl.) a nomadic tribe of people who hide in vans and do stuff.

TAUDI – (adj., adv.) The act of being late to a meeting because one chooses to cruise around trying to pick up bimbos (or himbos) in one’s new sportscar.

KWATCH – (n.) Notorious wabbit-hunter Elmer Fudd’s nether regions.

TEMZOOLS – (n., pl.) The kings of the Zools. (“There’s tem of ‘em,” Moses says.)

We stopped keeping score right around “Zools,” but we finished the whiskey and took a nice nap. It ate up a good 3 or 4 hours of our day. Even though certain members of the Bike Rodeo couldn’t help heckling and competing anyway, fake-word Scrabble is still way better than the “real” thing. At least you *admit* you’re making up words. Any overzealous, non-real-dictionary-having Scrabble-heads out there who want to challenge me can jifnible my edass kwatch.

Cockroaches 2: Hobo Dilettante

Sept. 17, 2004 (posted Sept. 22)
Some highway in Nebraska

I have not lived in a house of my own since May of 2003. I haven’t couch-surfed or mooched off anyone, either. I’ve just spent most of my time sleeping in things that roll, and otherwise exchanging work for beds on land. It’s been a fairly successful — at times stressful — experiment, a swap of money spent for time spent. I don’t need much cash for anything anyway. I’ve been living off my meager savings, working on a couple writing projects, and finding cheap or free recreational activities. As a Hobo Dilettante, I have less time than I woulda thunk to pause hustling and consume entertainment. Life and work have merged completely for me. I haven’t earned any money, but I believe I’ve learned a lot.

the gloriously luxurious primary residences. control is an illusion; everything is temporary; comfort is overrated

Sometimes it feels like Koit and I spend most of our days doing what we like to call the “Shit Shuffle”: Whatever we’re looking for is always packed away, spread out, under heavy stuff, at the other place, or broken and in need of fixing. Everything requires advance planning, even as our schedule remains wide open and fluid. I’ve discovered that it’s possible to feel free, and yet never well-rested, for more than a year without dying of exhaustion.

The payoff is excellent — getting to go on Cyclecide tours, sleeping wherever my van lands, meeting all kinds of people, doing different stuff every day, learning how things work and how to fix things, and never really dealing with authority. But sometimes I feel quite feral, and find myself wishing I had shiny hair again. Now and again, when Koit and I ride bikes through our San Francisco ghetto neighborhood and we come upon a roadside conglomeration of crackheads and their RVs, I get nervous that my identity is closer to that desperate, dirty, lost-soul scene than I’m leading myself to believe. Koit reassures me that it’s not the case. He jokes that we’re probably the most attractive, sane, drug-free homeless couple in San Francisco.

Sometimes I miss my lifestyle from a few years ago, when the girls and I would all dress in short skirts and ridiculous shoes and go to punk rock shows and art openings and semi-fancy dinners. These days I’m always in my coveralls or something practical, and I never wear makeup anymore. I dream of having a house that’s not likely to get broken into, where I can arrange all my stuff under one roof, find what I’m looking for, listen to my CDs, watch movies on my TV, plant something green, cook in a kitchen with a full-sized fridge and stove, and shower in my own bathroom. I will again, certainly — but not right now.

Now I’m content to live in — depending on the day — a vintage Dodge van with five transmission replacements to its name in the past year (we did them ourselves — turns out there was a kink in the line);

a loft above the kitchen in a smoke-and-boy-filled house with a bike junkpile in the backyard;

a hand-me-down RV with a thrown rod in the engine, a leaky roof, and a new interior paint job;

a second-story shipping container that overlooks: an art-metal shop, a junkyard, an illegal cockfighting ring, a gargantuan power plant, one of the most notorious gang-infested hills in the country, and the San Francisco Bay;

a 12’-by-12’ single-room tank house next to the milking barn on a fourth-generation dairy farm in the Central Valley;

an old, dilapidated sharecropper’s house (the “Country Fight Club”) we keep trying to renovate and secure even though the crazy tweaker … who used to squat there for 8 months without power and water until he finally got evicted for harboring a mentally disabled teenaged girl … keeps stalking us, waiting for us to leave, breaking in the house, stealing things like carpet padding and extension cords, and taking a crap on the floor;

and on the Cyclecide bus. Home stinky home.

hey, who farted? Oh — everyone

After Durango and through the next few weeks, Cyclecide has to drive all the way back to Arizona for shows in Phoenix and Flagstaff, then over to Denver and Fort Collins, CO, then from there, over a THOUSAND miles to Minneapolis, MN and down the Mississippi River before we go back across the Southwest and up California. There are some other ridiculously long drives that I think Jarico’s withholding from us in order to preserve morale. I asked him for specifics the other night as he was poring over the atlas. He scoffed. “The Donner Party didn’t go through what we’re going to have to go through,” he said, and returned to his maps.

I think that after the thousand-mile drive (average speed 40mph) I might wish a little bit for a Lease of One’s Own. Or maybe all the claustrophobia, clown-herding, breakdowns, wait-arounds, and alone-time deprivation will push me into such a hobo-monastic state that I’ll come home from tour and go find a shopping cart and a nice cardboard box.

(Just kidding, Mom.)

We’re All Winners

Sept. 20, 2004
Omaha, NE to Wichita, KS

Today we left our beautiful hotel in Omaha and drove to Kansas City so Jarico could deposit our Omaha Tour de Fat performance check in his account. His roommate’s a deadbeat, so his leaseholder status compelled him to cover the loser’s rent on the Cyclecide headquarters. We were headed to Santa Fe for a midweek show at the Warehouse 21Youth Center before our Tour de Fat date this coming Saturday in Durango, but the show got re-booked for sometime in November on our way back West. Everyone was tired and docile during the drive out of Nebraska, as for the third night in a row, many of us stayed up until the wee hours of the morning drinking cocktails and having a TV party in the rooms.

The Shoo Shoo cruised down a highway flanked by cornfields and green grass, with red barns and black cows and white grain elevators peppering the Midwest landscape like quaint oases of Americana in a strip-mall desert. Koit told me that the dust from harvested corn is just as volatile as dynamite when it’s floating around in the grain elevator during the corn-drying process, and sometimes a spark from a dryer fan ignites it and causes an explosion that blows a big hole in the cement wall. When he was in high school in Iowa, one of the town’s grain workers, a friend of his dad’s, was walking out the door just as some dust detonated, and all his skin got melted off his body. Two other people died in that explosion. (Farming is gnarly.)

We pulled up to the Bank of Murka in Kansas City, MO — quite a pretty town, from what I could see from the bus window, and I hear it was the original gateway to the Wild West — and sat chatting in the bus while Jarico transacted his biz. My compu-tore found a Wifi antenna in some nearby office building and I lounged in the back of the bus with Koit, waving at gawking passersby and surfing the Internet for celebrity gossip.

Across the street, in an uneven parking lot, we noticed a dirty pigeon walking in tiny little circles, turning and turning and turning counter-clockwise, occasionally rolling over like a dog when the wind blew it down, spreading its wings out, lying on its back, looking up at the sky, falling over some more, and righting itself in order to pace its teeny invisible racetrack again. Occasionally, it’d pause to peck at the ground, sometimes resting its beak on the pavement for a few minutes with its wobbly feathered ass in the air when it got the spins, then standing back upright to circle some more.

This ghetto bird, we realized, was most likely on crack. It kept angling for the white rocks during peckage. Maybe it found a stray rock from a strung-out, blue-lipped fumbler’s vial, and now it was channeling Chris Rock in New Jack City. I felt guilty about how funny it was. But playing in a dirty pigeon coop caused my mom to go partially blind in one eye when she was a tot, so I was raised with a bias. Dirty, vile creatures. Rats of the sky, all of them.

You know you’re a hobo when a cracked-out pigeon serves as your primary entertainment for the day.

You also know you’re a hobo when you figure out you’re in a State in the Union that doesn’t sell alcohol in the stores on Sunday (crime!), so your group’s choice of cocktail for the evening is: Two parts ice in the hotel ice bucket, one part water, the last bit of the gin off the bus, and three scoops of powdered lemonade, served in personalized Tupperware cups with everyone’s name written on the side in Sharpie.

and when your main forms of entertainment include dice drinking games and writing on yourself

And you know you’re a hobo when you and your girlfriends go thrifting in downtown Omaha, accidentally walk through the drug-and-crime-infested part of town (again), encounter an empty liquor bottle on the ground, and think before you can catch yourself: I wonder if there’s anything in that?

Back in Nevada a few days ago, when we got to Wendover at the border right before Utah where things get a lot less lawless and the beer turns to 3.2%, we went to the gorgeously garish and blinky Rainbow Casino for a last shot of Nevada-ry (a pre-Mormonlandia exercise I like to call “Bendover the Rainbow”). As we were walking in, four greasy, nappy-headed, soot-covered tweakers on their way out of the place were all “Heyyyyy!” like we were their compadres and shit.

They followed us through the parking lot, they gave our bus the thumbs-up; they smiled obsequiously at us with ruined methamphetamine teeth; they introduced us to the poor, beleaguered cat they had living with them in a squalid old van. They hinted they wanted to join us on tour. They asked us if we were holding any weed. Then, when we said no, they asked us again. (Rule number one: No drugs on the bus! Also, get your own weed, tweaker!) We were all left with the same comically uneasy feeling: Why the hell did the meth-hobos think we’d want to befriend them? Do they think we’re their “people”? … We don’t seem that bad, do we?

Hells no. We’re not drug fiends. This is part of the reason we get along so well — like it or not, hard drug habits cause drama. We Cyclecide clowns are “Alcoholists” — alcohol enthusiasts — and all we want is to pal around and get tipsy and ride bikes. Nobody gets wasted (except for every once in awhile, when some college-town bar has $1 well drinks or a certain Bike Rodeo show demoralizes us so much that I make everyone really strong Tanqueray and Lemonades on the aftershow bus ride back to the hotel), but we all have a fondness for making sure we’re loose enough to avoid breaking bones in case we fall. Heh. Silly tweakers — bikes are for drunks!

heyyyYYYYYyyyyy…. wheresh the pedalsh go?

So yeah. Tanqueray and Lemonade. Back in Rawlins, Rose went into a 99 cent store and came out with a plastic “WINNER” medal on a red-white-and-blue ribbon… and a plan: Whoever gets the drunkest tne night before is the “WINNER” the following day, and has to wear the medal around his or her neck until — since Rose is leaving tour for a while to go do her Ultra Gypsy bellydance stuff — the “WINNER” deems someone else to be the “WINNER.” Today, Rose awarded Fox the medallion of shame (or is it pride?)… but I think Che deserves it more.

Yes, Fox was with Che when he tried to go into the hotel bar dressed in only a towel and a T-shirt… all three times he did it. Fox was there when Che somehow scammed himself an extra hotel room for free. But Fox did not run from room to room distributing the remaining gin as if it were water in a desert, knocking again to exalt about how The Mack (“the greatest pimp movie of all time”) was on TV, calling us repeatedly from the “new” room to tell us to check out this or that scene (as if we weren’t watching it), and finally passing out without giving up the rest of the liquor bottle. I don’t want to override Rose’s rulling since it’s her game, but I think Fox is the runner up. In my opinion, Che’s last night’s clear WINNER.

On the drive to Kansas tonight, we made up a new idiot game for the “you know you’re a hobo when” entry list. “Ghetto Beach Ball” is best played in a windy bus, and all it requires is an empty plastic grocery bag and a whole lot of swinging, flailing, and knocking people’s drinks over. Good times.

Hey, Rube!

Sept. 18, 2004
O-mooo-hoo-ha-ha-ha, Nebraska

As recently as 100 years ago, most people in America lived and died without ever traveling farther than 40 miles from their homes. In rural areas, folks were too busy and exhausted to figure out much in the way of entertainment beyond barn dances, church on Sunday, card games, moonshine-related hijinks, hunting, and listening to the radio. Back in the era before television and movies, the average family was uneducated, simple-minded, and mono-cultured. The one time of the year regular folks ever encountered anything different, unusual, or foreign was when the circus rolled through town.

or mowed down the town, depending on the strength of the sideshow

Circus sideshows, as everyone knows, spotlighted people with deformities (real and fake) and foreigners (for better or for worse). Sideshow owners were also among the first entrepreneurs to introduce audiences to exotic animals from halfway across the globe (giraffes, tigers, elephants, etc.). And the carnies — the people who set up the rides, performed on the midway, sold the overpriced food, swallowed swords, and talked from behind tall podiums, trying to get the rubes into the tents — were considered to be both the dregs of society and an endless source of fascination for God-fearing yokels. Carnies were treated like outcasts, and as a result, behaved as such — drinking, partying, thieving, and fighting. They isolated themselves, mentally and physically, from the rubes, both for protection and peace of mind. The rubes, in turn, looked for reasons to pick fights with the roustabouts who, given the chance, might make off with their daughters or steal their wallets.

Linda and I (and most of the Bike Rodeo) share a fascination for all things circus. When we were kids, she in LA and I in Tennessee, we both wanted to run away and be a part of some sideshow or another, the way other kids aspire to be veterinarians or astronauts. After the Omaha show, at one point when were all breaking down the rides, running to and fro, lifting things, finding tools in the grass and losing them again, picking up trash, and over-discussing which bikes go where on top of the bus and in what order, Linda froze, caught her breath, and looked to the heavens with a fed-up sigh.

“I finally feel like I could wear a cotter pin around my neck and not be a poser,” she said. “Any carny gives me any lip about it and I’m going to punch them in the face.”

Carnies wear cotter pins on chains the way gay people wear rainbows and pink triangles. And yes, I agreed, we deserve to wear them too. On show days, we work just as hard, and we put up with just as much shit. Pedal-powered or no.

“I feel like an ant,” she said. “Can you mention in your weblog how hard and irritating this is?”

Our major altercation of the day came when some drunk jerk-off crossed our safety line at the Cyclofuge, almost got his head kicked off by a rider in the seat, and then had the nerve to 1) get belligerent as he 2) refused to move and then 3) finally stomped off, threatening to “smoke us,” at which point I chased after him to ask him if he was serious, and he 4) verbally abused me while denying he even said or did anything wrong. His poor wife — she stood at his side, looking at me with hangdog eyes that said, “Yes, he’s hollering at you now, but I have to live with the bastard.”

He had Fat Tire gear all over him, so we got a bit nervous that he might be a jackass exec in our otherwise wonderful sponsor’s company — but still, we were in the right. Our rides, our rules, rider assumes all risk, and do what we say before we have to call you an ambulance. Thankfully, the Cyclo-Douche was just a shitty random guy who spent a fin at the Tour de Fat merch table and covered himself with their branding.

There’s always one fight. Every show. It makes me sympathetic to the carnies of old. Most people listen to reason, but sometimes, the rubes can make you feel like getting stabby.

The park we performed in in Omaha was nice and grassy, with a clay pigeon shooting range right next to it and a shockingly friendly groundskeeper named Randy. We set up the rides the night before — the first time for us to extend our setup time like that — just so we wouldn’t have to wake at 5am and start on the Cyclofuge. (‘Tis a beautiful ride, but it adds 2 hours to our setup and strike times.) We got ‘er done, locked up the show bikes, and Shotwell celebrated our early start by busting out “Timmy,” a rather large firework he’d purchased in Battle Mountain. BOOM! …

Ten minutes later, we heard a thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk. A cop-shop helicopter rose above the trees, spotlight shining, and proceeded to case the entire park for the next 20 minutes. Yeah, Timmy was loud, but it wasn’t bomb-style loud. Who called the cops? We all made sure we looked busy. We’re just the help, officer. We wouldn’t do anything like that. Right? … Thankfully, the cops were too far up in the sky, and the day’s light already too faded, for them to see what hoodlums we really look like. I mean, we’re not the kind of chip-on-shoulder carnies who start fights and mainline crystal meth and pick pockets — we’re just idiots who like to ride weird bikes and see stuff blow up.

By the time we got to the hotel — yay, hotel! Showers! Finally! — the swimming pool and hot tub were closed. We fought back tears, drank beers, and crammed into the 2 rooms to hose ourselves off and watch cable. Some of the boys tried to go to the hotel bar downstairs, but the security guards wouldn’t let them in because they looked too scruffy.

The next day at the show, the crowd was a little dead — probably because it was hot enough to sweat the makeup right off a klown’s face. The new “spaghetti western” skit didn’t work, our stand-in drummer didn’t really know the songs (or how to play with a band at all), Moses hurt his shoulder pretty bad when he jumped the Ramp of Death, and the jousting was tamer than tame. Omaha was alright, if a tiny bit demoralizing and dehydrating.

Right after the Linda-and-me cotter pin discussion, some other guy drove up, screeched his van tires on the grass, and almost ran us over, red-faced and screaming at the top of his lungs that we sabotaged his car by tying a rope to the steering column. He was lit too, and way madder than the Cyclo-Douche. We all tried to reassure him that we were too busy to ruin a stranger’s day on purpose, but he was inconsolable. Though we’d almost finished striking and totally impressed ourselves with our well-oiled machine status, we were all down. Plus Chris, our Fat Tire angel, had such a hectic day that he forgot to give us our post-show beer.

That’s when Jarico told us that the super-nice Fat Tire regional-rep guy we met that day had gotten us four — FOUR — hotel rooms at the same place we slept the night before. Woo hoo! We thought we were going to have to sleep in the park. We rejoiced, rushing back to try to finally get in the pool before it closed. We had 10 minutes before closing, and we made the best of it. We jumped from hot tub to pool and back again and ran around and splashed in the water like monkeys. We were so hyper that people came out of their hotel rooms to watch us freaking out at getting to go swimming. Klean klowns.

In this information age, the midway isn’t needed as much as it once was, but there are some things you can’t be satisfied with looking up on the internet or watching on TV — like being hit in the face with a pie, flying through the air on a pedal-powered ferris wheel, or jousting a monster on a tallbike. Come one, come all, to the dumbest pedal-powered show on Earth.

Once we get to Colorado, Linda and I are going to look around and see if we can’t get us some silver necklaces and some cotter pins.

Free Dumb

Sept 16, 2004
Exit 65, Nebraska (between Sidney and Ogallala)

My dad is totally obsessed with the funnel. When I tell him I’m going on tour with Cyclecide, he has trouble conversing with me about anything much beyond how gross the idea of the funnel is and how much the bus must stink with all the grimy rodeo klowns on it. He’s a traveling salesman, a convenience-is-necessary, different-hotel-every-night man who’s always clean and handsome and groomed and sprayed with carcinogenic, suppoedly-smellgood unguents. He’s a good old boy, a man raised in squalor who valiantly pulled himself and his family out of the Mississippi mud and into a proud and comfortable life. He can’t stand the thought of people pungent with the odors of humans who have been working instead of primping. He’s also a polite Southern gentleman who would rather stab himself in the eye with a barbecue fork than take a whiz in front of a dozen of his best friends, and the thought that his only daughter might do so makes him agitated to the point of speechlessness. I don’t think he even knows what it is we do in our show. It’s always funnel this, stinky that, and then change the subject to something less incendiary.

See, on the Tour de Fat, Cyclecide does weekend gigs with long, long, long drives between each one, and on the drives, we drink a lot of beer. (And water and coffee and lemonade, but mostly beer on traveling days.) If Jarico or whoever is at the wheel were made to pull over to a rest area every time someone needed to answer nature’s #1 call, we’d never get anywhere. So, at the front of the bus where the steps and the exit door are, there’s a funnel hooked to the front heater with a tube that goes down through a hole in the bus floor and spills out onto the highway. When it’s “that time,” we have no choice but to feed the road with our urine. It’s not ideal, but that’s the way it goes. I try to tell my dad that the Bike Rodeo Ladies’ Auxiliary has its own demure apron stashed in the glovebox for this kind of thing, and that nobody can see anybody else’s body parts during these sensitive incidents, but this gives him no consolation.

I guess I should avoid telling him that in the past year, I’ve only peed in toilets about 1/4 of the time. Toilets in houses, even less. Usually, it’s in a truck stop bathroom, in a Porta-John, or (mostly) on the ground somewhere behind something. Sorry, Dad — I’ve just not been around traditional porcelain gods very much. Plus, pissing on the ground is what homo sapiens were meant to do anyway. It’s *really* not that gross.

and we eat good too

Some political bike folks take issue (jokingly or not) with the fact that the Bike Rodeo rides around the country in a diesel-guzzling schoolbus. For those cycle-socialists who see the bicycle as a subversive tool in the war against the dominant paradigm, our method of between-gig transportation represents an impurity in the “bike people” argument. We’re supposed to be the clowns who make bicycles look fun, the ones who add lighthearted entertainment value to the propagation of the idea that All Should Pedal — and not only do we not wear helmets or Say Anything in our show, we also use the juice of old dinosaurs to power our circus from town to town.

But the thing is, 1) we’re not political, and 2) cars are awesome. Bikes are great for interacting with your surroundings, making yourself an active participant in your life, getting exercise as you commute, feeling like a kid again, and all that stuff… but in a country this big, a vehicle that allows you to move about the States of your own free will at 50-or-more miles per hour is a pretty big necessity if you ever want to do something besides see your own neighborhood and wherever the trains and buses go.

Yes, it’s true that big oil and the petrochemical industries just might be the number one reason that the earth, and our country in particular, is fuxored at the moment — but if you want to be all social-Darwinian about it, crude oil is just another resource that the human race is going to mine the shit out of until it’s depleted.Then we’ll have to find something else to prop up the middle-earth’s ex-dinosaur pools, and some other fuel to power our good times.

ever tried to ride the whirl ‘n’ hurl? destination: nausea

Everyone knows there are already cars in existence that run on electricity, water, hemp oil, fast-food grease, lemon rinds, and bong smoke — but that info’s going to keep getting pushed into the background by the big-oil companies that run the world until they themselves can figure out a way to corner the market and say they’re the ones that have come up with the idea. Until then, I’m going to refrain from feeling guilty about driving around in my 12-miles-per-gallon ‘73 Dodge van when I’m not on tour. The way I see it, I’m fast-forwarding evolution. At least I don’t wear Nikes, right? (P.S. If you’re going to post some hippie comment or another about big oil and sweatshop this-and-that, please don’t. I don’t care and we’ve all heard it before.)

The van, in addition to being my primary individual mode of transportation, serves as one of my other homes. On tour, the “Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby” is our nap room, our kitchen, our bar, our drawing room, our moving truck, our chill space, and our home. This weblog entry is long enough, so maybe tomorrow I’ll tell you about all the places we live and what we do to them to get them liveable.

At any rate, I think what the Cyclecide rodeo klowns have going for us here is true, absolute freedom. Dirt, breakdowns, late rent checks, grifted soft drinks, scrounge-change casino sprees, cockroached clothes, ghetto cocktails, no paychecks, pantyhose fan belts, and all the rest of it — even peeing in a funnel. Free dumb!

P.S. RIP Stevie. I didn’t know you, but I knew enough to know you were beautiful, in all the ways a human can be. Have a peaceful journey, watch over us Dangerous People Working once you get up there, start up a burn barrel, and we’ll see you by the fire in the by-and-by. The circle will be unbroken.

As for everyone else: Take some time to get to know the people who intrigue you — the people you somehow just know you should know. It will benefit you in this life and the next.

Selections from the Cyclecide On-Board Library

(and by “library” I mean “cardboard box under the seat near the kitchen of the bus”)

This Is Burning Man – Brian Doherty
Steal This Book - Abbie Hoffman
Really the Blues – Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe
Bushwhacked! - Molly Ivins
Hollywood Babylon – Kenneth Anger
Tesla … Man Out Of Time – Margaret Cheney
Lobotomy … Surviving the Ramones – Dee Dee Ramone
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them - Al Franken
Hell’s Angels – Hunter S. Thompson
Maxim – Buncha Meatheads
Weekly World News – Buncha Like-Minded Shit-Starting Freaks
A Burroughs Compendium – Calling the Toads – various
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
Beer Drinking Games and Beer Games II – Andy Griscom et al
Billy Budd – Herman Melville
The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury

wooooo! Teslaaaaaa! i totally hope he plays “Faraday’s Law of Induction”

Cockroaches Like Us

Sept. 15, 2004
Rawlins, Wyoming

It’s really hard to fit all your worldly possessions you’re going to need for the next 2 1/2 months into one plastic crate.

Some people prefer to bring giant duffle bags on tour, most of which are shoved underneath the 7-by-10-foot bed area in the back of the Shoo Shoo, but with all the beer and other drinks that are spilled off the 2 RV tables in the middle of the bus on a regular basis, I’ve taken to putting all my stuff in a plastic bin under the front bench.

A few days ago, I spent a good 5 hours in a room with all my crap spread out everywhere, trying to decide what all would fit in the crate that I absolutely needed. It ended up like a Fight Club list of clothing and supplies: one pair pants, one pair shorts, one short-sleeved shirt, one long-sleeved shirt, one jacket, one clown outfit, etc. Then I also have a toolbox full of toiletries, clown makeup, sparse jewelry, contact lens stuff, and other essentials. Packing for tour is always a challenge, made all the sweeter this time by Koit’s idea for a new game: Thrift Scoring Across America.

The game is pretty self-explanatory. While the Bike Rodeo kids are allergic to malls and mainstream shopping (other than coffee, tools, and auto parts), we fiend on thrift stores and junkyards when we tour. The first thing we do, after settling in, pulling the bikes we want to ride around off the top of the bus, and making a plan to promote the show we’re about to do, is to find a thrift store or three. Koit and I have decided to collect a new wardrobe while we cross the States (as if I don’t have enough thrift clothes already), mailing stuff home if we have to in order to make room in the crate for our new threads. The rules are to keep a written track of what we buy and for how much and in what town, and to only buy stuff that we don’t think we could exit the store without regretting leaving behind. Me, I’m asking the universe for a black bomber jacket with a fur-lined hood, and for matching majorette outfits for me and the other klown-girls to alter and Franken-ify as our “formalwear” for when we’re eventually asked to make jackasses out of ourselves on Letterman or something.

malt liquor is SO last season

I quite like being part of a generation (or subculture, whichever) that takes pride in living off free stuff, discarded stuff, and other people’s stuff. Almost as a knee-jerk subconscious reaction to the blatant, rampant, non-participatory consumerism that keeps our giant and varied country the richest and most powerful in the world, some of us have turned instead to thrifting clothes and house stuff, dumpstering food, using old buildings in neglected urban and rural settings, seeing the beauty in ancient landmarks and machines, using discarded stuff people used to love, and generally reacting favorably to things that are broken and falling down. We take pride in the cheap, the customized, and the original rather than the pricey, the uniform, and the depersonalized. We like to fix, to penny-pinch, to MacGyver, to get stuff for less than we should. It’s the opposite of the consumerism — call it cockroachism — and for this, in case of apocalypse, I think we might be the last to survive. The ones the Gap Kids will turn to when the fecal matter comes into contact with the rotating wind machine.

Sometimes it gets to me — irregular showering, less-than-perfect hygiene, lack of health care, no fancy clothes or food, et cetera. But for every time the bus gets fetid because we’ve been traveling for four days straight without the benefit of showers or hotel rooms or any other mod con, there’s some beautiful reminder that we’re not lashed to a salary and health insurance plan, trapped like a cow, fattening in a pen/cubicle until finally succumbing to our predators. (Yes, I know this is cliche territory, but sometimes cliches are cliches because they’re commont truths worth pointing out, no?) The predators I speak of — the Man/Men at the top of our commercially-driven society’s hierarchy — are of like mind as the veal in the pens, more concerned with grabbing than sharing… but they’re bigger, more cunning, and more adept at survival (in the realm of capitalism) than the veal are. Poor things, all of them.

and it’s amazing how u can walk around dressed like this in broad daylight, and quirky Cajuns will just GIVE u oysters cuz they admire yr bravery. or something

I enjoy capitalism. It allows me to choose which kind of toilet paper or potato chips or magazines or apples I might buy in the grocery store. But I also enjoy being able to find ways around living entirely within the system, or living on its fringes, or whatever it is that I and the rest of the Bike Rodeo are doing. For us “one percenters” — and by that I mean anyone who’s chosen to exist outside the proscribed roles of Our Great Society, be they cowboys or artists or hippies or pot farmers or train-hoppers — we are the highest on our particular food chain, with nobody to answer to, suck up to, get checks from, or otherwise impress. (No predators except the cops, for those who mess up or have criminal records, and the drug-addicted thieves, who take what isn’t theirs from people who don’t deserve getting stolen from in order to answer to their own master/predator, which is a chemical and not even a person, which makes drug addicts the saddest people of all… along with TV addicts, psychological invalids who only wait for death, and money freaks, who spend all their time grifting and hustling for something one shouldn’t really care about too much. But I digress.)

I’m also proud that we — Cyclecide Bike Rodeo — are fully functional and self-sufficient members of anti-society, bringing smiles to kids’ faces even as we let their parents break their bones on our alter-cycles and pedal-powered circus rides. Plus, there’s the whole thing where we tout the benefits of human-powered vehicular motion and interactive transportation. And the fact that we make all our bikes and rides out of “pre-cycled” bikes that our wonderfully disposable society throws away. Blah blah blah. Preach preach preach. Like Jarico says, “In the beginning, it’s just a pile of bikes, and in the end… it’s just a pile of bikes.”

Sure, none of us make any money at all while we’re on tour. We hustle in the off months to scrounge up enough cash to see America with the rest of our dear friends in an entirely original and entertaining way. Jarico, meanwhile, spends all his non-tour time setting up shows, working odd jobs, collecting bills (or not) from his roommates, building rides with the crew, and generally worrying his head off about where our next meal / gig / new ride money is coming from. But when we’re on tour, we’re all so happy. Everything is worth it. Anyone who’s ever wanted to take off and see America with their best friends — or run away with the circus — would likely agree with me that our lifestyle is the bee’s knees.

The cockroaches of the world might be laid back, but we don’t have it so easy. Being a functional hobo is hard. (Oh, screw it. More on that tomorrow — enough high-and-mightyness for today). The point is, after stopping for lunch in Rawlins, we went to a thrift store and spent an hour trolling for treasure. Even though the place had a lot of moderately cool shit, Koit and I didn’t find a damn thing. Linda, however, scored big. Guess what she bought.

A bike! ($5)

MacGyvering at Broke-Down Mountain

Sept. 14, 2004
Elko, NV

After the requisite stock-up sesh at our favorite fireworks store on the planet, the Cyclecide bus pulled out of Battle Mountain in the afternoon to make our way to Wendover, or Wells, or somewhere on the far side of Nevada, by nightfall. Our goal was to wake up and then drive through Utah’s famous Bonneville Salt Flats (site of countless land-speed races and the Russ Meyer classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) during the day so we could see ‘em. Alas, not half an hour outside the Armpit of America, we heard a SNAP! and blue smoke started pouring out of the underside of the bus.

tiny baby Jesus, and birthday party clown, and vending machine prize people, please help us

Jarico pulled the “Shoo Shoo” over to the shoulder of the road and all the mechanic/welder-type boys filed out and around back to the engine. Linda and Rose and I, longtime bike rodeo klowns familiar with the routine of our converted ‘66 Gillig schoolbus malfunctioning at least a few times during each tour, knew that the best way to help would be to continue lounging out of the way in the back of the bus with our fashion magazines and sewing projects. We would find out soon enough what was wrong.

Turns out the fan belt had snapped. It was nearing the close of the business day, and in order for us to get a replacement belt and get back on the highway, someone was going to have to hitch a ride to Elko, a major town about 30 miles down the road, to get the part at an auto shop before it closed. Shotwell volunteered, since he was both a mechanic and was familiar with the area, and he caught a ride with two not-so-menacing truckers who pulled over to help. Meanwhile, the other mechanics were to do what they could to get us to Elko. Of course, this being Cyclecide, the boys immediately sacrificed Linda’s pantyhose (along with some duct tape) to fashion a temporary fan belt replacement. As Shotwell had predicted, the nylons snapped after only a few feet of driving, because Linda’s tights already had a bunch of holes in them. Punk rock klown tights do not a fan belt make.

Next, the boys found some braided nylon rope and put it where the belt should be, tying knots into it every inch or so (so the rope would catch) and Super-glueing the knots afterwards (so it wouldn’t stretch). This MacGyver maneuver got us maybe two miles down the hightway before the rope broke and got all caught up in the other belts and made a horrible racket and an even worse mess. A good amount of time was then spent picking the rope out of the bowels of the engine.

A nice feller in a big rumbly truck pulled up and asked us if we needed some assistance. We were stopped at the lamest rest area in the world, but it was dusk and the pink and purple dying sun shone on the hazy Nevada desert mountains like airbrushed, chem-trailed cotton candy, and then the stars came out in full force and we saw secret jet fighters from nearby military bases sneak-flying all around up there in the night sky.

Ron, the rumbly truck feller, drove Jarico about 30 miles to his house (well, trailer) to get a spare fan belt he had on a truck in his yard — along the way cutting off his lights and veering dangerously off the road and into the bushes when he saw some cop lights flashing down the highway. Turns out the cops were after someone else, but Ron stayed jumpy. Jarico didn’t ask why. Ron told Jarico that’s how they always evade the cops in this area — the locals have got the roads memorized to where they don’t even need lights at night.

meanwhile, back at the bus, we all prayed to Jesco White, the Dancin’ Outlaw, to protect Jarico from getting shot, eaten, or traded into Nevada’s hillbilly sex-slave industry

Ron’s domicile flanked a creepily abandoned ghost-town called Bowie, which in its Wild West heyday housed thousands of miners and a houseful of whores, but now was down to a population of about 30. Probably half of those people must have lived in Ron’s clump of trailers, which according to Jarico resembled Brad Pitt’s gypsy family caravan in the movie Snatch. There were kids everywhere, cars on blocks, tons of four-wheelers, 10 dogs, 20 cats, missing teeth, and general backwoods chaos. Jarico didn’t know whether to be scared or charmed. I think he was both. He keeps saying what nice people they were. I wish I could have seen the ghost town — I’ve lived in California for 7 or 8 years and still have yet to come upon one.

Well, Ron and Jarico measured the belt wrong, and when they got back and tried to put the replacement belt on, it was an inch or two short. So Ron bid us adieu and took off, and the boys, ever the innovators, removed the fan’s housing and shifted the fan itself over on the engine to where the belt would fit around it. It worked!

We rode on our gimpy belt to go get Mr. Shotwell, who was inexplicably dropped at a truck stop in a small town called Carlton or Carlin or something. He was stranded there alone for five hours while the fan belt drama ensued, and we couldn’t reach him and he couldn’t reach us because there was no cell phone service in the area. He won $50 on the slot machines but he was panicked, thinking we’d left him and gone on to Elko. He also spent $100 on a “truck service” there that took 2 hours ($50/hr) to look around for our size of fan belt and tell him they didn’t have it after all. We finally pulled in the gas station around midnight and Shotwell practically launched himself onto the bus like a rocket, plopping down in the seat and pulling his hat over his eyes. “Just get me out of here,” he said. Something about being flirted with by ugly, horny, indiscriminate and pushy truckers for five hours straight. We didn’t pry.

If it were really cold weather, the gimp-belt and fan could’ve stayed like that indefinitely, but since the housing directs the air a certain way that prevents the engine from overheating, and since we’re going through another desert and up a really steep grade to Salt Lake City today, we had to fix it the right way. So here we are in Elko, checking email, spending more nickels on slots at the casino, making PB&Js, and getting coffee while Jarico moves the fan back over, puts the housing back on, and hooks the engine up with a proper belt from the auto parts store.

It’s sorta fun when the bus breaks down — not for the boys fixing it, but for everyone else. Last night we watched Bubba Ho-Tep and Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood on my laptop while a couple of the boys wrenched away. We only had 6 beers left, so we saved them for the mechanics. We drank straight vodka instead, and everyone had a good night’s sleep.

Reno 9-11

Monday, Sept. 13, 2004

Yee haw, people. The Bike Rodeo is back on tour for the first time in almost a year. We’ve been invited to do the New Belgium Brewery Tour de Fat festival dates again, and then after that’s over we’re going to do another leg of club shows on our own. Two and a half months in all. When I joined up with Cyclecide a couple years ago, I never imagined we’d have two documentaries under our belt, countless articles and picks-of-the-week, and even some national TV spots: Sometime this week, on the Discovery Channel, we’re going to be on a new show called “Monster Nation” (though I doubt we’ll see it as we have to make the long-ass drive to Omaha) — sort of a mix between “Monster Garage” and “That’s Incredible.” Their TV crew came out to film us for the Saint Stupid’s Day Parade this past April, and we almost accidentally burned off the cameraman’s face when he was getting a closeup of the Rocket Bike. The next day, his entire face was red and scaly except for the camera-hole part around his eye, but he was more psyched to get a “great shot” than he was pissed that we hurt him. Lucky us. Again.

We’ve only had one official injury since the tour started. The night before our Reno show, while we were setting up the rides in the parking lot, August got into some whiskey and then tried to ride the Swing Bike on our mission to flyer the bars. She’s usually quite skilled at the Swing Bike, but good old Jim Beam caused the damn thing to jackknife, and she split her head open on the pavement. She went to the emergency room against her will, got belligerent while they were putting stitches in her head, insulted the nurse’s choice of outfit (“Tie-dye is so out”), threw up on Jarico’s shoe, and finally had to be restrained in a wheelchair until she gave up. And she doesn’t remember any of it. August is usually the most docile and sweet of the Bike Rodeo clowns, which is why this story is hilarious. She watched our show the next day from the bed in the back of Laird’s van with an ice pack on her head.

if you see these men in Reno, either ask them where u might get matching and compatible frames to make yrself a tallbike, or run run RUN

The Reno performance at the Record Street Cafe kicked ass. (Thanks to our friends in the Black Label Bike Club for setting it up!) Cyclecide has lots of friends and extended “family” in the Reno area this time of year, and they were all in attendance. Personally, I’d rather perform in front of 10,000 strangers than even a couple of my friends, but I think they liked the show. The pie fight during the bike spoking races was spirited, to say the least, and Moses almost lost an eye to a Roman Candle during the especially chaotic and pyro-packed tallbike joust. We’ve got new klown outfits, the band sounded great, the rides have been gorgeously re-painted, and our new ride, the CYCLOFUGE, is so big and complicated and fast and adrenaline-heavy and fun that it’s making us feel like a real live legit and gin-u-wine pedal-powered circus. The only one in the world, to my knowledge.

After the show, the Black Label boys and girls threw us an after-party where we got to hang out with all the folks we hadn’t seen in a year and/or wouldn’t see again for a while. There were kegs, there was a burn barrel in the backyard, and there was, after a time, a person in attendance that proved to be such a giant buzzkill that it was all anyone could talk about the next day. This girl named Whitney, a pinched and angry blond with a fake smile and fire in her eyes, decided to throw a hissy-fit when the owner of the house cut her in line for the bathroom. It quickly became our own private COPS-style reality TV show experience: she screamed, she ran around the party trying to rile everyone up, she insulted the party’s hostess with racial stereotypes that made even the most calm folks in the group want to throttle her, and she spewed such a stream of nonsensical, tweak-induced sewage out of her mouth-hole that some peeps gave up partying and went to bed. Buzzkill finally threatened to call the cops, and since our hosts have a young child, this was not cool at all. Rather than knock her unconscious, the party sent one of the designated peacemakers to try to calm her down alone — and after a few minutes, they came back to check on the progress and found Peacemaker sitting on top of Buzzkill and slamming her head repeatedly into the couch. That’s what an asshole this girl was.

Peacemaker finally let her up, and Buzzkill responded by kicking her in the ribs and stomach a number of times. Folks tried in vain to shove Buzzkill out the door — this was an ordeal that lasted about three hours total — and at one point, Buzzkill grabbed a sword off the wall and tried to stab her boyfriend, who in turn slammed her against the door and choked her until she turned purple. (To be fair, he was choking what we were all thinking of choking.) Another nice-guy peacemaker in our group finally got Buzzkill and Boyfriend out on the front lawn, where he called them a cab and watched them wrestle around with each other on the grass for 45 minutes in a grade-A display of white trash domestic violence. The cab finally came, and Peacemaker 2 gave the Drama Couple $60 of his own money to pay for a hotel room where they could kill each other in private and maybe think about other parties to go ruin. At least P2 *thought* it was $60 — but instead of three $20s, he realized the next day, it was two $20s and a hundred dollar bill. Since P2 had already been “beer-elfed” because he passed out with his shoes on, he did all this nice-guy stuff with a giant penis drawn in Sharpie on his face. This is the only thing that makes me sad that I’m one of the ones who went to bed and missed the drama.

So now that Cyclecide has laid waste to Reno, we’re currently stopped in Battle Mountain on our way to the Omaha show. A few years ago, the Washington Post called Battle Mountain the “Armpit of America,” and since then, they’ve held a screw-you “Armpit Festival” each year that honors the much-maligned body part. Alas, we’re not here to see that, but we’re having a grand old time in an RV parking lot behind a truck stop with a sad little casino attached to it. Last night after we pulled in and most folks went to bed on the bus, Koit and Linda and Jarico and I went on a nickel-slot adventure in the Colt Casino, where we met a cowboy named Quint who told us that although he thought we were funny, there were some folks sitting around us who just would rather we leave and never come back. We get this all the time. F’-in rednecks, eh? What is it about a vintage bus with bicycles all over the top of it and 12 dirty punks inside that scares people?

i mean look, just like you, we’re taxpaying, God-fearing Ameri… wait, nevermind

Aside from our high-rolling casino spree last night with the loose change we found in the bottom of Koit’s backpack, he and I have not spent any money at all in a month. It’s become kind of a game to us, to see how much we can get by on charm, barter, and shared goods and services. At the casino we won big on video poker — enough to buy us a cocktail to split — and we were officially broke until this morning when I found 73 cents on the futon in back. (Hey, if you wake up in the morning without retrieving your pocket change, then finders keepers, buddy.) Koit just went to get us a Mountain Dew from the casino, as he remembered that there was a coke machine inside that had cokes for 65 cents. Wick had told him the night of 9-11 that he ought to be more observant of his surroundings: he hadn’t noticed while the two of them were sitting on the couch by the burn barrel that the giant fat drunk guy beside them was alternately sleeping with an open knife and waking up to stab the couch over and over while he threatened to “snap that little bitch [Whitney]’s neck for messing with his sister”. Koit considers himself somewhat of a watchful, protective, Strider-like perimeter guard within the group — Wick is the king of this — so Koit felt like an asshole for falling down on the job, and has been practicing being observant ever since. Murderous, inebriated giants with sharp weapons are a bit more of a red-flag item to watch for than highly caffeinated drinks, but since I’m sleepy, I’m thankful for Koit’s resolve.

He just came back with a paper cup full of Dew and a straw. “There was no coke machine anywhere in the whole entire casino,” he said sheepishly, “but I made it happen anyway.” Apparently, he told the cashier lady that there was a diabetic out on that freaky bike-covered bus who was about to have an episode and could she help him out. She gave him the soda for free, and now we still have 73 cents. I feel a little bad that he bent the rules and conned her with a lie, but since the ex-cowgirl behind the bar last night during our casino binge was frostier than a snow-cone to us, I don’t feel *that* bad.