The Unband, On & Off the Road March 20-April 29, 2000
It is a land of many villages and towns, amply stocked with the means of life. It affords good sport with all sorts of wild game. The climate, however, is unhealthy: it is, in fact, extremely enervating. Hence, the nobility of the country, who used to be men of valour and stalwart soldiers, are now craven, and excel at nothing but drinking.
?Marco Polo, The Travels
Editors' Note: Mike Ruffino is the bass player of the Unband. Matt Pierce is the guitarist/singer. Eugene Ferrari is the drummer. Steve is the tour manager. On this tour they opened for Ronnie James Dio.
Northampton, MA March 20 Day Zero We left a day late, but it had nothing to do with the fact that we tried to leave from a bar. We were having electrical problems?no directionals or headlights?and combine that with the fact that exactly none of us have driver's licenses?so we busied ourselves at the bar with purchases of poor quality ___________, and sat on the stools at ______'s and talked about hundreds of things. I think.
The evening ended rather abruptly following a late dinner at my house stained with cheap wine on a pile of broken fake antique furniture. Certain we'd leave at or about the crack of dawn.
Also, for whatever reason (which may or may not have to do with some things that happened or say maybe we did in let's say Texas that were not "good for business") things are a little Probationary right now, so there is no room for fuckups.
Of course, we make room.
Morning People March 21 Woke late. Made some tea and walked around the house bumping into things. Listened to most of the Holy Diver album, managed to get under way around noon. Matt can only communicate in insulting hand gestures.
Very special brand of punctuality displeased Steve once again, which we were prepared for?mostly. Steam was coming out of his ears and he was chucking a 100-lb. box of our t-shirts off the second floor porch when we pulled up. Efficiently, Matt wandered off to get a taco.
One thousand profanities come and go, and it is discovered that we locked our equipment in the trailer with an old lock for which we do not have a key. Giant swearing now in front of the local blacksmith shoppe, having at with a pair of bolt cutters. The violence of the project eased Steve a little, but the bolt cutters were destroyed. This resulted in the First Getaway of the tour. (Low on real danger maybe, but in these situations nobody really knows what the hell is going on, maybe not even the person who sounds the Alarm?when you hear the yelling you get in the van.) Six minutes later we're on the side of the highway completely out of gas, "Girl from Ipanema" on the radio.
Ah. Pathos.
U-Hole Electrical difficulties were resolved at a monstrous u-haul joint in Albany (kind of), but still no proper radio. Eugene and I snuck a beer at a Pizza Hut in a Dakota, as the joke about no drinks until Seattle is not so funny after all on account of that Steve was not joking, and he's got all the money. We would very much like to get to Seattle.
Driving and barely napping, eating whatever we can grab when we stop for gas. Four- or five-hour shifts, Chinese fire drill, new driver. Made extremely good time through Montana, where there is no speed limit beyond what is reasonably safe for a van full of unlicensed drivers in various stages of alcohol withdrawal dragging an overloaded kind of legal trailer on bald tires.
My Own Sicilian Idaho March 23 Woke up on the floor of the van, where I have learned to arrange myself for sleep in a way that improves on the usual method of sleeping sitting up pretzeled in a captain's chair. The sun's coming up in a mountain pass somewhere in Idaho.
I know a story that goes something like this:
There once was a man from Ragusa (with whom I share a name). He left his lucrative job as a shepherd in the hills of Sicily and pegged it for Jersey, then left his wife (albeit she sometimes a loose waitress) in typical fashion after the war, disappearing into a mist of broken English?marauding Italianly and starting families in trailer parks. He resurfaced only once, on some barely officious occasion, and appeared to his abandoned wife, sons and daughter, already a ghost. Then he went off and became, quite impossibly, the sheriff of Some Half-Deserted County in Arizona, spurs, buckles and boots. Sicilian off the boat. Two years later he's found bludgeoned to death in the front seat of an accordioned Lincoln, it having been rolled from a giant cliff in Idaho. It would do well for this range to have been his last sight. Because this is fucking nice.
Note to self: Mornings exist.
Watertown Shadows Seattle, March 23 Fifty-three hours, 59 minutes from the AAA Road Service guy in MA to the door of the club. It is an old firehouse, and the building itself has a mullet. A "Kentucky Waterfall." Our own name for the style came from years back and seems to be peculiar to the Boston area. The closest Registry of Motor Vehicles for us was in a place called Watertown, so that's where we all went to get our licenses as one must drive theah fahkin cah down wompatuck fa tha kegga. You didn't have to wait as long as at the downtown Boston office, only when you got your picture taken this strange shadow would appear on either side of your neck, making it undeniable that you wore a mullet, no matter what your hair was doing to avoid this. "The Waddatown Shadow." A good many people didn't see the problem, and others of us went to the Dedham office.
The line around the block here is up and fucking down with fucking Pulitzer-class ape drapes. I don't think there's a PA here yet. We are going for a Bloody Mary.
Incidentally, we have resolved in our way to lay back on the accouterments a little tonight, considering our current sleepless (no no it is very very different) states, though we did call _______ about the _________, and I would imagine ________ and ________ will show up, and they're usually good for a ________ or god forbid some ________, but we are still thinking maybe to repair to a motel and watch some television. Maybe. What.
Met a label rep who freely admits to not liking our music excepting "Cocaine Whore" and the Billy Squier cover. No shame. An older crowd here, naturally, who maybe don't get out that often, but when they do: They Do. And fucking a, b and c if it's Ronnie James Dio. That's an Audience. They like to get possessed. And there are women at the Dio show. Several, even. Of course it doesn't seem like a miracle that there'd be a lady at a metal show unless you'd been touring with a useless, plodding sausage party like, say?Anthrax. Unk.
No one chucked anything particularly dangerous at us, we loaded up, had a few beers and teetotaled back to the hotel with our only-half-sodden vegetable platter. Someone had scrawled DEO ROCKS on the back of our trailer.
Gonna be a good one.
Do Drugs Not Sports Aurora Ave. is a vine of filthy motels and porn shops?windowless, cement; libido death camps. However, the Marco Polo Motel is very clean because its proprietors fear God (and, it would seem, us). A pleasant enough couple, one very thin and one very not so. Not really sure what they're about beyond living from biblical obscurity to biblical obscurity and that they have this small and oddly shaved dog-type animal with its jaw wired shut who runs around making noises like a thing in the woods at night.
This is of course excellent.
The "cable television" boast on the marquee, typically enough, meant "barely UPN," so we wound up watching some lame Nick Nolte movie about baskey-ball, which is useless. Golf is less useless on account of the little drinking car.
Woke to the television. Maury Povich was "saving" a bunch of kids with Tourette's. I can think of worse afflictions. They say the right thing a couple times a day?like everything else it's all about timing. More than you can say for Maury Povich.
Took a shower, got lost on buses for some hours trying to find a Tower Records, went to excellent dinner with _________, who was talking about castles. Found everyone back at the club. They'd all been to Jimi Hendrix's grave. Eugene left him a drink ticket from the Continental in New York, Matt left him an oversized condom.
Place is totally packed (500?) and some unexpected?actually that's bullshit?arrangement came through, resulting in lots of ______. Forgot I'd already taken the _______ at that point because I hadn't wanted to travel with anything, but as we say, "Eh. Should be fine."
By some total miracle, or more likely something Steve did, we got loaded out and made it to a Motel 6 in?somewhere. Cracked another bottle of Ketel and I went for ice. And I'm perpetually going for ice in Motel 6s, but this one?not like the others?deep deep deep with rodserlingness. The screen from the window at the end of the hall had been neatly removed and propped against the wall and a hotel phone dangles over the sill like a dead thing. The carpet's jumping a bit. Around and around the halls. For a fucking hour or so. Fuck. Bloody Q-tips, Girl Scouts smoking crack, no fucking ice machine and I have no idea whatever where I am at this point and fluorescent lights aren't helping and the fucking bees and snakes aren't either, whore-laughter coming from somewhere. At the bloodstained Q-tips again the walls just melted and the hammer came down. I'm talking about some evil hippie shit in the biker drugs. I contemplated lying down until someone found me, because: (a) that's what I used to do in department stores as a hapless toddler, (b) those Girl Scouts have crack and might walk by, (c) gentlemanly repose.
Persevered and found the vending area like some find Jesus. But it's all locked up. Retethered nonetheless, popped around to the registration office?bluebirds, da da da?and asked for a key for the drinking stuff place. Shady Motel Clerk #1234 asked me which room I was in and of course I didn't know at all, so I say very confidently "259" and he hands me a goddamn key to the room. Whether or not I look a little more respectable than his usual icehunting psychotic, the word "reenactment" comes to mind (floats through the lobby and out the door). Thought about "and while you're at it I could use the keys to 146, 234, 134, and do you have anything to get bloodstains out," but I just went and got the ice. Can't believe I found the room, whatever number it was. And I can't remember what whatshisname called that stuff I took and the new Baywatch sucks.
Wind Is Passed Portland, OR Portland this morning is about Mai Tai. Mai Tai, Mai Tai, Mai Tai, Mai Tai. We try going to Hung Far Lo, but it's closed. Over to another Chinese joint, which is almost inexplicably called Vinnie's and has a porcelain Italian pizza guy out front. The hostess, lying, tells us a bartender will be happy to serve us at a the back bar. It's all pea green and vinyl and brightly lit. There's a home improvement guy on the suspended television making a balsa wood nutcracker and pretending he's from Maine. A Chinese is rapt and mumbling at that, a couple families are at table. We sit at the bar in total silence for a few minutes. (You know. Need Mai Tai.) This goes on for around five more minutes, no motherfucker coming. Steve squeezes out a fart?an unhappy little frog, that, launching off the vinyl stool and ricocheting around the room. He jumps on the bar and screams, "IS THERE A BARTENDER IN THE HOOS!?" Jumps down and shoots out the door. Somebody drops a chopstick. Our work is done here.
Across the street at a darker, better bar, there's Mai Tais. We drink them. The Irish bartender asks if our band has any "DC's" out. Um. Nope.
Shanghai'd We're on I-5 in Northern California. Need Alka-Seltzer. Spent an extra night in Portland drinking all over the place. Could've stayed there another week and been quite happy, I think. Had some kind of out-of-character but impossible-to-stop country-style jam around the corner from the Space Room (which had become headquarters because Bloody Marys) with Eugene's old girlfriend's boyfriend. Had a great deal of gin (which we are not normally inclined toward) and acoustic guitars (likewise), but whattaya gonna do. Had a few glasses of wine after the gin ran out, then went out for cocktails at the something or other. Back to ______'s apartment and finished off the Wild Turkey. Cooked several omelets for people and managed to get a Stones album on before passing out in the middle of the floor. Left around 4 or 5 a.m. I may have gotten to the van by my own power; possibly I was hauled out of there fireman-style by Steve. Filmed everything last night?everything that wouldn't land us in the chair, so we'll get to the bottom of some of it.
Gypsies, Tramps, Thieves San Francisco, CA The club is called Maritime Hall, it turns out, because the building contains the offices of the seafarers' unions and such. It's a giant, blue-gray and portholed; model ships in the lobby, lonely looking foreigners swabbing long shiny hallways, and the basement is viciously haunted.
Hospitality guy is done up like Pill Elvis. Constantly bringing carrots and beer and saying notable things like "the platypus is go" and prancing around in the crooked wig. People go fucking apeshit (this includes us), as Dio has chosen tonight to break out "Last in Line." In the end Maritime Hall refuses to pay us. We hear this is not unusual, eventually, but Steve wisely waited until we were on the road to tell us this. We would have at least done the promoters an inconvenience or two had we known. (I'm reminded of touring in an RV a few years ago and opening up its sewage drain into the front doorway of an uncooperative club in Atlanta.) Eugene wants to go back for a bit of the Ultraviolence, but we're too tired for anything but weak self-assurances that we'll see that money tomorrow, as the promoter is the same. Oh yes, Captain Deathwish, we'll see that money tomorrow.
Some dirty son of a bitch is walking around downtown Santa Cruz all day screaming at a giant rack of sub rolls: "FUCK YOU FUCK?! YOU FUCKIN KNOW IT YOU DON'T KNOW IT I KNOW IT! SHUT SHUT SHUT UP," and then taking a bite and spitting it out. Chunks of yelled-at bread all over Main St. Matt loses his laminate at a sports bar, pleads for its return to the very confused crowd. Right. If anyone finds a bag of money, please give it here. A plume of base rises. Nobody says shit.
Dio's gear leaves us about a foot square to set up in. The crew thinks this is very funny. Turns out the club had earlier decided that there would be no opening band, or at the very least if there were one they would have no PA and no money given to them. Wendy Dio tore into the appropriate people and the Dio crew spent an extra hour and a half setting equipment straight all on our behalf. Previous to this place (which is not so well-liked by many a road crew I gather) the finest catering had been at the Warfield in San Fran. On account of hippies. This tops it, on account of Asians, and we eat ourselves nearly sick immediately upon arrival at the buffet. Gorging on anything (fettuccini, ham sandwiches, Dilaudid) is a mistake before any show, but good edible food is noticeably less of a burden and you've got to eat it when you can. We play. We get paid. We sign autographs. We get our money from last night. Metal.
House of Booze L.A. There's a lot you can say about the Houses of Blueses. What I mean is: Most, now I am not saying all, but most old bluesmen do not, as is my understanding, sit on their porches in the sweltering Delta, stapling bottle caps to their furniture and finger painting, as Dan Aykroyd & Co. would have us think. And yeah, impending corporate monopolies and The Man, what have you's. But you're in Kansas with a flappy pickle thing with a bug on it drinking a pissed-in Moxie, or you're not.
Steve: "At least I know I'm not gonna have to fight for a bottle of vodka."
Another sold-out show and we get nice and messed up with a bunch of people in the dressing room until the staff gets nervous. Very nervous. Went looking for Jack Black at one point?Matt & Eug said they had spoken to him on the mezzanine, but I got sort of sidetracked because fucking ___________ took off before I could give him the _________.
What Is and What Should Never Be Picked up a copy of Hit Parader today to see what they are saying about us. It's a kind article, making quite clear that we are not playing at "rocket science." Fine. Neither is NASA. For the sixth anniversary of Kurt Cobain's undoing, they have him featured as the centerfold wearing his stained t-shirt costume, but his photo is cut in half by a pull-out poster of a band who are all wearing masks and overalls proclaiming in pullquote, "We Are Not Afraid To Be Who We Are!" Fuck.
Doing Things The sun is coming up and Los Angeles is a wet sack of broken glass. No. Wait. I am. Again. I'm sitting in a wrecked kitchen smoking a Winston, though I quit months ago?in Sweden?because fuck it. L.A.'s funny. Sometimes you black out in the Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum and get tossed out by a guy dressed as Paul Bunyan maybe, protesting that you are The World's Drunkest Man and have just as much right to be here as he wearing that fucking thing, big man where's your friggin' ox I got your friggin' ox. You do that. Sometimes.
Slept a while. Lounged watching terrible movies trying to have Robert De Niro in them until it was time for cocktails at sunset, Venice Beach. Then it was time for Twin Dragon. Figure we'll get a little messed up on zombies. Ten of us there, buzzing a little but no one's throwing soup yet. Yet. Table behind us has an Oscar standing in the middle of it. Photographer Rob grabs it and starts making a teary acceptance speech and attendant Chinamen dim the lights for him. If you win one of those things you probably should go to restaurants with it all year long asking for a table for two. Probably a waitperson would chew your food for you. It's nice to win things.
I got separated again tonight sometime between zombies and the shopping cart incident and wound up falling all over some tiki joint with people I do not know, grabbing cellphones like Tarzan. Heckled a putrid "swing" band for the duration of a drink, possibly there was a disco portion of the evening, found everyone again somehow possibly at what I now believe to be a topless club. Matt had been running more or less parallel to me with the drinking and the other, and I remember falling off a stool trying to order, I think, a mesclun salad.
Gauze It's morning now, but there is vodka left. Let's have one. In addition, I am invisible. Everyone's passed out on the living room floor of Liza's apartment (Westwood). Place looks like a mass grave.
This building was our home when we lived out here?an old L.A. art-deco number perpetually scheduled for demolition. (Shame. Like this town needs another mall.) We lived upstairs in a room lit only by candles, splitting the last ramen and hoping the oxygen didn't run out. Maybe we'd play some cards and get at each other's throats a bit. Matt and Eugene had jobs at the local theaters (they had uniforms, so I went in there and stole one one day, so we could play in them?like a dirty Beach Boys), and I would play Peter Pan with a two-year-old all day in exchange for liquor and cigarettes. It's 8 a.m., and four seconds from now I will be another heap on another couch in Los Angeles, Capital of America.
Adios, Motherfucker The Inland Empire There's a special drink made at the Crossroads Bar & Grille in Yucaipa, CA, that has five kinds of rum in it. They call it the AMF. Adios Mother Fucker. The room here's got an open roof, the sound is really really good and the people are equally so. Played tonight with a band called Unida, who are from Fu-Kyuss country. The singer wears a fine cowboy hat and they have this excellent song that is very very long with a buzzard-hunting guitar melody. Drummer's got a bit of attitude, or maybe he is deaf. The rest of them are good men. I ordered a shrimp cocktail, which was Sea Monkeys with ketchup. Seriously.
A girl told us this story:
"I won tickets on K(something) and when I got here you were playing and I turned to my girlfriend and said, 'Wow! Dio rock!'"
The other Dio played "We Rock" tonight. Ronnie good.
Anyway, five kinds of rum.
The truth is this. When a man is riding by night through this desert and something happens to make him loiter and lose touch with his companions?he hears Spirits talking in such a way that they seem to be his companions. Often these voices make him stray from the path, so that he never finds it again.
?Marco Polo, The Travels
I must insert here somewhat parenthetically, as I sit at home comfortably on the porch with tea and greyhounds, that I completely lost my mind for a period of approximately three and a half days following some mismeasurements in Southern California. Matt, only somewhat less dangerously, was completely paralytic in the back of the van for the same period. Now, I am not a stranger to blackouts, whiteouts and many species of paralyzing fatigues brought on by excess, but this was a full-throttle paranoid breakdown. Less familiar. I became a spitting succubus, hunched and swearing uncontrollably, chewing on things, talking to chairs. There was a moment where Matt and I discussed possibly not doing ___________ for a bit. That's how fucked up. Point being, I can't vouch for the next few entries, nor can I describe what happened to me or anyone else in this very strange place called the Inland Empire.
Medulla Obliterata Sharks at the nighttable. Then you sleep under the patio furniture. Hey hey what the people do. Standing still in the parking lot with a shoe in my hand and guess what, Charlie Horse, that big tuneful moon fell outta my ass.
All day at the Brian Jones (i.e., pool) in Tucson, frogs in the fountains. John Dillinger's men got it in the hotel across the street. We escaped with sunburns and a fine dinner of used fish.
Lubbock or Leave It Lubbock, TX Matt: "Even prison would be cool if you could just drink all the time." Lubbock is fucked. Spent the entire day and night at the hotel bar. (Day "off.") At some point Eugene and I had been on our way out to find the FedEx office, but we ran into Ronnie James Dio in the elevator and he was saying something about happy hour, so?off you go. The Miss America tryouts were going on in the adjacent ballroom, and there's some OPEC conference or something that is beginning to show itself in the lobby. Ronnie and his personal attendant guy named Willy (excellent, British) bought us a couple rounds. The crew started showing up, everyone hunkering down as if into the cockpit of the most powerful drinking plane in the world. There's a locomotive whistle in the distance. Marked that. We wrecked, wrecked, wrecked that hotel that night. Matt and Eugene I think stayed calm in the room. I could be wrong, but then again anyone I looked at became instantly drooling hammered?I was as drunk as five men and fucking contagious.
Had a good long chat with RJD about the state of things?about what to do when people throw shit at you (he says stop the show, I say throw it back), debated the matter for quite some time and what it comes down to is, he's Ronnie James Dio. The judges from the Miss America thing come along on account of some unexplained thing I may have been doing in the ballroom, which I hear was possibly?whatever?with some contestants and the oil guys are getting drunk by now.
Started in on a table of them about this and that. The environment probably. Tree-hugging oil barons. There was a long moment toward the end or the middle of the night when someone started doing things?and everyone believes this absolutely to have been me?and that person had to be tossed into an elevator and sent back to the fifth floor for a little "time." Probably that person ran around the halls with his pants ankled yelling, "No, I am the man on the Silver Mountain." Probably. Or something. And then fought his way back into the bar later. And maybe was seen later with a roadie spilling a giant cooler filled with beers and liquors through the lobby with unsettling fanfare.
The next morning in the lobby talking to myself or doing the crossword or fuckwhatall and these moon-eyed Amazonian 12-year-olds and the tree-hugging oil barons in 10-gallon hats are coming to me, calling me by name, and saying that was a "hoot" with the fire escape business and where'd you get those watermelons. Don't even want to know. In the end I got me a couple days on the shitlist and some nicknames.
I can highly recommend, however, tying one on with Ronnie James Dio & his crew. Highly.
The Warmth of Igloos The marquee on the club reads: TONITE! RONNIE JAMES DIO WET T-SHIRT CONTEST SIGN UPS This will be a good show.
Bring 'Em Bach Alive Dallas The Big D. Also, a day off we once again spend with Matt's uncle. Last time we were here (at his power air-conditioned ranch with a wet bar and giant television) we were up until ass o'clock shotgunning Coors Silver Bullets and playing with pistols. (If I've got a gun in my hand, I'm probably drunk.) Uncle Ken said some fucking priceless things this time in another late-night Coors thing, but he was too beat to repeat the lapdancing places and the fancy convertible tricks of our previous visit, so this was a lot of television, beervodka, steakhouse, lot of television, vodkabeerwine sleep. Steakhouse. Eugene was MIA during this, as Vanessa has apparently flown in tonight and they are renting a car and we're doing the next couple of Texas dates caravan style. Dangerous. But whatever.
So this here would be the first arena we've ever played. The lineup is Dio, Sebastian Bach, Enuff Z'Nuff and us. L.A. Guns canceled. Sold out anyway. The first guy we run into is Paul Crook?from all-time fave Anthrax?who is all smiles and remembers our names. He's been playing with Sebastian Bach, who apparently won't make Paul feel like a sellout for talking to the opening band. Guy's been on tour since that January with no break and several months to go. His guitar looks exactly like a Jolly Rancher. Now that he's being pleasant we'd hang, but we gotta go sit in the lobby and wait for the limo.
Had a bite to eat with Sebastian Bach in catering. That is a thing to do. He is constantly making as much noise as possible, stabbing at the buffet, in silver parachute pants, talking shop. Got paid $800 for selling out the L.A. Forum?Don't Trust Anybody?our song titles (HAHAHA THAT'S FUCKIN' HILARIOUS, DUDE!)?trawling bathroom tiles for _______ (we had some identical stories to trade, though less of them included Slash)?where the 80s went (to his head)?etc. etc. Seems to be faring pretty well, though, with his girlfriend managing him and "all you need is fans, man." True. Kinda. None of us remembered to ask him how it was with the Frogs. Busy just trying to keep the seared tuna on the fork.
Enuff Z'Nuff used our equipment, which looked quite funny, and then they smoked something with us later that turned me into a fucking cartoon anvil. Matt threw a pile of our glossies at Steve for making us miss "Youth Gone Wild" (which was disappointing), nearly getting a busted nose in return, but instead now it's just shitlist o'clock for the princess. Coked-up record people everywhere. Turns out there's nothing wrong with playing arenas.
Fan Antonio Is like a Greek theater. Several, several thousand people?with Budgie (whom I thought only we knew about) and a band called Legs Diamond, who are more popular than Led Fucking Zeppelin in San Antonio (they have a song that is the most requested song in Texas radio history, creaming "Stairway"). Steve and I crash the nearby Japanese gardens with Foster's oilcans?children are hurried away by upended Southern parents. The label rep is here and he is a younger guy who is thankfully full of piss. He brings a heap of well-mannered retail folk with whom I believe we had eating and drinking contests. I interview Budgie on camera while drunk as a fucking boiled owl ("Whattt arr you fuuhking doing? K? Gimme"?responded to with grace and good humor, I'll add). They have no ________ and we provide as much as we can and they prove themselves to be considerably more rock 'n' roll than most bands half their ages. Got autographs from them for the Fu Manchus. Later we go to a party where I remember looking at a table full of _______, __________, ___________, and _________ and thinking Imelda Marcos and her shoes.
Woke up in a clapboard room 50 miles away on a chaste and heavily doilyed bed staring at a felt baseball pennant and an organization of model battleships with a 90-year-old woman on a walker in the doorway saying, "Farewell. And Happy Easter," with a royal wave. To me or to no one in particular. No matter. It wasn't Easter anyway.
Corpse Us Christie Top floor hotel balcony rock 'n' roll shit. I'm face flat on the bed while a girl who looks like a Flobie model is on the house phone ordering cocaine from her stepmother. There are many or so voices in the room, but everything goes black anyway.
Later on in the night, or maybe it was earlier, I walked into a pole and messed my nose. Then there's a nightclub where I, bloodied, sign the remaining posters (which are few) for people even drunker than me, and head back to the hotel to talk bad Spanish to the night girl, film things that accidentally fall from the balcony with Tim, and pass out facedown. Again.
In the morning we drive directly to Indianapolis. We're greeted at the club by a leather security midget. Cowboy guy. Sort of. He's got beer. There's an excellent guy near the midget, or rather near the beer, named Jungle Jim, who is nine-foot-five. His buddy pulls me aside to tell me he has much to offer in the way of "video" and gives me a beeper number. I assume, "So you're the porn man?" Completely taken aback?not quite offended, but?stoned as hell, "Noooo, duuuude. Metal!"
Ozzy pushing Lemmy on a swing, a Stryper rehearsal?
Then the torrents of everything. What.