Forward:
I believe when people don’t have much, they welcome nice things. No, no, I’m not referring to a hot car or a flashy watch, it’s more that one wants to come home to a nice house, clean clothes, enough food, and not just the bottom shelf food at that.

I’m about to write about my coming home. While reading this, don’t think that my intentions are to come off as “punk” or “cool”, because that’s just not the case. It’s more of a disappointment, that I am compelled to write about.

Remember, people who don’t have much, usually welcome nice things.

home again

Michael J and I were the last ones to get home, the last’est ones of the entire tour, that’s 27 people. And I guess it’s not my home, it’s his, but there’s a bedbug infested couch that I’m to collapse on for two nights and I was only 2 miles away from it.

We weren’t prepared for the cold, so the shock of Boston’s sharp, biting air threw us into a survival panic. Oh, how quickly our New England skin relaxes to the warm Southwestern air.

Of course Michael J rightfully assumed I’d have the front door open by the time he latched up the trailer and locked down our exhausted van. However, with the complete loss of feeling in my fingertips, I was nothing but a fear-driven teenager in a slasher movie, illiterate in the functions of using one’s house keys. I had to reassure myself that if I kept enough pressure on my first knuckles, it would somehow relay a message to my fingertips to turn the key. This was one of the seldom moments my body was so angry with me, that it was reminding us both who was the real operator of this complex, yet silly appendage.

Like most men my age, Michael J felt he could get the job done faster on drive alone. Now stood two exhausted, bouncing, Boston boys, laughing/cursing, fumbling with their temper-testing house keys, as their half zipped up bags lay all around collecting a nice light coat of snow.

Where could I fine warmth? I found by sticking both hands in my mouth and desperately exhaling warm breath on what used to be my fingers, a small amount of blood could slip down my first knuckle and will the key slightly to the left, for a successful unlatching of the front door.
We danced in with the grace of a first year Inuit modern dance class student.

The trash was as generous as the skunk cabbage in my father’s swamp. It lay ankle to chin deep. If filthiness is ever commended, the gang I run with have given it a new talent.

Yes, there were trash bags filled, the product of a brief moment of motivation. But now they lay open, almost guilty looking, as if it were they who were accused of vomiting up the filth. My best friend Todd’s underwear and socks hung on the coffee table drenched in beer and leftovers. There was no way to tell exactly what the leftovers were. The only name that could suit it would be, chinees-freeto-pizza.

Michael J let out a long, fully sodden breath and went up to his room to inspect the damage. “Hopefully, there’s no one doin’ it in my bed”, he said, as he made his final tour exit.

Without taking my coat or my backpack off, I began to push the trash about. I grabbed one of the trash bags and began to clean off the table. The scattered change wouldn’t come off; it was coated with sugar-beer shellac. This new, powerful shellac coated the entire makeshift coffee table, eating up the covers of different magazines, playing cards, and cigarette boxes, forever documenting they’re existence.

I remember getting word from the road that the couch given to us by a fan was now, indeed, full of bed bugs. This couch was Todd’s favorite place to watch late night movies, but after getting bitten so many times by bugs, I hear he now uses the chair.

No matter, it was now 5:00am and I wasn’t about to sleep on the sticky wooden floor.

So, I looked under and behind the small couch and found the ‘smily face’ yellow sleeping bag no one has ever own up to. I then made a nice little area, free of trash, but not odor and finally lay down. Every muscle thanked me by fully relaxing and falling asleep before me. My senses, however, scanned around in disgust. They could see what my muscles could not. No matter, I was in heaven.

Sleep.

I woke around 5:30 to Todd discovering me. Todd doesn’t sleep, he never has. I thought that if I kept the blanket over my head and avoided eye contact, the 4-hour drinking reunion was avoidable.
“Buddy, when’d you get in”?
“Just now”, I said.
“Who that”, from his bedroom.
“Baby, this is my best friend, wanna Pabst, or are you going to bed?”
“SSAK”, Todd opened a can, he was having a drink no matter what I was inclined.
I was wondering if the young girls voice was the girl I had met before tour, Michele? Or could it be some new girl I hadn’t yet met. No matter, I gave her no “hello”.
“No man, I’m just gonna hit it”, I said under my warm drinking shield, “tomorrow though, we’ll hit up Charlie’s.”

Todd was satisfied; he loves any talk of an outing to Charlie’s…Oh Charlie’s is a seedy bar in Harvard Square where young people research degenerates like us.

My last view was of Todd heading back to his room and of my silly feet at the end of the couch.

Sleep.

I woke up to Todd’s girl leaving, and then, to his ex-girl friend picking up her car minutes later. It was nice to see Todd still lived dangerously.
I pulled myself up and scratched the 5-day-old beard I had grown. I spotted an old water someone had left, but not finished, I killed it. However, my throat, my brain, and my body needed more. I reached for a full bottle of cranberry juice cocktail, what a score, and took an impressive, desperate gulp. It was too late for my taste buds to relay the encrypted message that there was more vodka in the bottle than cranberry juice, but they tried as fast as they could. It was too late, I guess I was now partying.

My bare feet blackened as I made my sticky steps to the kitchen. It was as if someone poured glue on the floor and was having a laugh at me.

To make my buddy Johnny a bedroom, I poorly nailed to the kitchen ceiling an enormous blue tarp, which now drapes down, making him a kind of wall. However, the 6 extra feet at the base of the tarp sits piled up on the floor. We all talk about cutting it, but never do. I tripped on it, of course, confused, forgetting the ways of the house. But that’s just an excuse. I simply get confused in the morning. I trip on it all the time.

The kitchen looked like a cabbage patch of open trash bags. If you have even seen the movie Aliens, it was similar to the scene where Ripley found the room full of open alien eggs. I then noticed that every single dish, bowl, glass, Tupper ware product, pan, and skillet was used and then stacked. The kitchen was one big ashtray, an orgy of rotting food and cigarettes.

I opened the frig in the hope to find a half drunk Gatorade. Todd, for some reason, only drinks half of his beverages. However, when I opened the refrigerator door there wasn’t a small wave of coolness, it was a big wave of warmth and the most offensive odor I have to this day come across.

In the first 3 minute of being awake I hadn’t noticed that all the trash bags were full with rotting food and milk. The fridge had been empted for a reason I still don’t know. I found the Gatorade I was looking for on the floor next to the old broom.

Ironic, huh?

I had to get-get going, because I had a big day of going to get a hair cut. It was 4 days till Christmas and one must look nice for Mom.
However, I only had enough money for a bus ride, a subway ride, and a train ticket home.

“How was he to pay for a hair cut”, an observant person might ask.
Well, the way the underground-lower class of Bostonians work is “trade within jobs”. If I worked in a club, I’d let you and your friends in for free. In return you’d give me your employee discount if I ever needed a pair of new sneakers. Got it?

Well, Will’s girlfriend Gillian, knows how to cut hair, so I was to grab two new records of the band I’m in, and a small T-shirt to trade for a cut.
But I figured I should shower, so I don’t lose the deal on account of my offensive body odor.

The last time I had a shower was in Tallahassee and that was more days ago then I’m keen on admitting, so it was time to wash up. After tour, a long tour, the first shower home, reminds me of the old western movies when the band of cowboys stop into a towns local brothel and draw a hot bath to wash away any remembrance of their excursion.

I sludge up the stairs finishing up Todd’s Gatorade, but when I enter the bathroom I see that the bathroom doesn’t have a trash barrel anymore. The back of the toilet is now used for discarding used products. So, I let my empty bottle sled down the mountain of toilet paper rolls, used tissues, boxes of new toothpaste, pizza crusts, old beers and, I guess, someone in the house has a girlfriend now. The ‘Mountain Extreme’ Gatorade bottle rolls down and out the doorway.

The floor was coated with wet magazines and brown molded towels. That brown scum in the toilet, similar to the scum found in abandoned truck-stop bathrooms, had managed to also coat the floor, walls and the sink. A movie director would have said, that his set designers went too far trying to emulate a junkie’s bathroom.

However, my shower was divine, I stayed in there for a least 45 minutes.
In the shower there were wet boxes of old products on the floor and on the shelf. The ink that labeled each box ran and stained the shower walls and floor, similar to a crying drunk girls running mascara. I combed through the wet boxes looking for a bit of soap. Under the sopping Zest soapbox, yah I didn’t know they still sold Zest either, was a piece of soap no bigger then half a dog biscuit. That piece of soap cleaned my entire body.

After the good wash, I threw on the same cloths and slicked my hair back in a manageable 1950’s pompadour. The way Dad does.

As I walked down stairs, I eyed the crate of food that Michael J was damn smart to bring in. The crate, well I should say the smashed plastic basket, was given to us in Texas by a fan, regrettably I never met her, so I don’t know her name.

It was full of chips, cookies, and other snackable treats. But, I remember seeing some cans of Chef Boyardee raviolis in there one hungry night.
It was only seconds before I was back in the kitchen combing for a can opener. It was where I expected it to be, at the bottom of an old Tupper ware bowl, covered and camouflaged by floating macaroni.
When a can is frozen, the interior food doesn’t just slide out like we’re all used to, and the use of a plastic fork can only pathetically chip at the frozen future Petco breakfest.

All and all, I managed, and dined on warm in some places frozen in others ravioli.

I’m going to type a bit faster, for today there are things to do…
I took the 66 bus to Coolidge Corner and met up with Gillian. I asked her to cut my hair like Calvin from Calvin in Hobbs. She did just that.
It was about then that I realized I had flea, or were they bedbug, bites on my ankles, neck, fingers, and hipbone. They itch like a bitch, I mean, not as bad as poison ivy, but a bitch just the same.

I thanked Gillian for the cut and was off to the commuter rail to catch the 2:00 train home for Christmas, and I was scratching all the way.

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