Rest stops

for anyone looking for info on ordering a copy of "failgivers, volume one", please go to the november 7th, 2007 entry
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7/02/07


For me, getting in a van to begin a tour is almost as if you dropped a child at the open gates of disneyworld and just said, "have at it....go get 'em tiger."

It's that awesome.
It's even more awesomer (yes, i know....deal with it) when you haven't been on tour in a good four years. And, for it being the first tour in four years, the short, ten day stint ended up being a perfect amount of time. I could have gone twenty days more once we started, but I was just happy to do it again.

You forget that feeling of driving up to a club / house / space, etc. That moment of watching the haggards standing outside that kind of give you the eyes of judgement. You forget starting to load in and having to say, "excuse me" in repetition with every cab brought in, trying to make someone listen and move slowly like cattle out of the way because you are holding a very heavy item and you'd rather your arm not fall off.

And, you forget all of those glorious, glorious rest stops and travel marts.

These momentary (and probably unintentional) amusement visits are priceless.
There's no real way to describe it....everything is much more exciting when you can park, take a piss, refill on coffee, and do the time-honored rest stop tradition of people watching. Believe me, there is a rest stop culture and code of honor. It involves babies crying, school buses of random college sports teams stopping for lunch / dinner, and families on road trips on the brink of breakdowns (my favorite).

You also have to walk into these places knowing full well that if you are dressed all in black, with neck and throat tattooes about six people deep, you will have one of two reactions from every person in there.

1- disgust and slight fear
2-overuse of cheerful interaction to show you are okay with them.
really.....this is true.

It may be personal experience, but that sums up the two most memorable responses.
Unless, of course, it's new york and new jersey.
In NY and NJ, they don't give a fuck who you are, they hate you and want you to leave.

So, anyways, rest stops.
There are quite a few vivid memories I have of certain stops, but the best are the following:

- On a particularly long drive inbetween shows (okay, particularly long doesn't even cut it....we drove from houston, texas to san diego, california.......straight. straight straight. except for blowing a tire....we stopped for that.) we had the chance to visit many a rest stop and mart ourselves up with said ridiculous snacks all for the sake of eating to pass the time. This was in the dead southern heat of august we were in a battered grey van. The driver's side window did not roll down. There was no AC. There was, however, a leaky sun roof that managed to completely drench the driver whenever the brakes were pressed. It was, by any explanation, a piece of shit. I'm not sure how we survived almost six weeks in that fucking sardine can.

So, on this long drive we stopped at one particular backwoods texas chainsaw massacre looking gas station. One by one, piss breaks were taken, and you would hear one person say to the next,

"you should really go to the bathroom now....".
Fuck that. I was tired and heat wrecked...this was at about three in the morning. Finally, after everyone had gone on thier bathroom trip, I was told again, "dude....just go to the bathroom."

me: "i don't want to....i'm good."
them: "no, really.....you NEED to go to this bathroom"

If I had any will to argue left, I probably would have. But I didn't, so I went.
Inside the stop there was that old, twangy country music you would expect to hear right before your arm gets cut off by a mutant wearing overalls and weilding a butcher's knife. I think that's why I liked it so much. It gave me that grindhouse feeling.....to die amongst jars of pickles and aisles of beef jerky on a wooden floor of an unfrequented deathhouse deep in the south just sounds so brutal / intriguing.
I ask the elderly woman behind the counter politely to point me in the direction of the restroom. She heads me to the door and lets me go do my thing.
The door is fine. It's a door. Great.

So, i step in......and there, in the mirror, I see the reflection of a women fully clothed, sitting in a bathtub. This, expectedly, scared the living shit out of me. My eyes focus, and then I realize that there is a propped, full size mannequin in the bathtub, basically put there to scare the living shit out of idiots like me.

It was amazing.
Even trying to go to the bathroom next to this plastic human was frightening.

And that's when I came to the revelation that I needed something to remember this by.....something concrete.
Or, in this case, something synthetic.
I took her wig.

Without even thinking, I grabbed that wig off of her head and stuffed it down my pants. Thinking back, i"m not sure where that wig had been, and I'd rather not know. I left the bathroom and said my thank you to my elderly escort and briskly walked outside so that we could leave before I'm accused of stealing a nasty wig off of a fake body in a bathroom in the dead of wherever the fuck we were. Though, if I did get arrested for something as ludicrous as that, it'd almost be worth it.

I got in the van, wig still in my pants, and we all laughed for a good five minutes while driving away about the sight we had just seen.
I waited about fifteen minutes before I finally said, "hey guys....guess what I got?..."
At this time, everyone had had the excitement wear off and had settled back in thier seats.....
no one really cared.
That's when I pulled the wig from my pants, and for a brief minute or two, I was treated as if I had masterminded the ultimate heist and was holding the mona lisa. There was an unsaid, but much needed, moment of jubilation and hysteria as we realized we had ourselves a token of appreciation from the road hell gods.
The wig made it's rounds the rest of the tour....we all took turns wearing it at the most inopportune moments.

I'm not sure where it ended up.
I'm hoping I end up back at that stop at some point (i have no memory of exactly where it was....) and that there's a fresh new piece of fake hair for me to shove down my pants.

-The other memory is not so much a story as just moment. On that same long drive, we pulled over drunk on road travel and wandered into another store. This one was more a neccessity....gas and new beverages not warmed to room temperature by the microwave we called a van. We bought our dumb shit....one of us travelers felt the need for a new mesh hat and found himself with a camouflage cap that said something along the lines of "texas is fantastic". I bought my jalepeno potato chips. That was it. We got back in the van, and one of my favoite partners in crime was heard saying,

"pecan pie......pecan pie. I bought a fucking pecan pie. WHY did I buy a pecan pie?....."

long pause.

".....I don't even LIKE pecans."

Five years later, and it still is considered one of the funniest things I have ever heard said in my life.