Long Past Stopping (12 page)

“Listen, you didn't do anything wrong. It's just a lot of work taking a kid on the road, and…well, actually, it's even harder dealing with your mom. We've all got too much going on to be able to talk to your mom every day, and frankly, it's not so easy to tell whether you're here because you want to be or because of her.”

I stared at her, trying to figure out the answer to that one. Not my answer, but the right answer. In that moment it seemed as if the rest of my life depended on it.

“Of course I want to be in the circus. This is what I do. I don't have anything else.”

Leticia looked at me dubiously. “Okay, but we've all been under the impression that if it wasn't for your mom, you'd be doing something else. I mean, you're a great juggler but…. Listen, this is what we'll do. You can't come on the road with us, but we'll keep you on for the local shows. Okay?”

I was still seething when I smiled and said thank you. It was only a few minutes before I found myself wishing that they had just kicked me out. I didn't want to spend fourteen hours a day with these motherfuckers, who didn't want me around anyway. Assholes. Come to think of it, I did hate the circus, but I really wanted to live at The Farm again during the next season.

 

T
O MAKE MATTERS
worse, my mom, Kyle, and I moved to Berkeley, shortening the commute to San Francisco considerably. When spring came around, and we started rehearsing again, I didn't get to live at The Farm anyway. Mom decided that instead of waking up at 5:30 in the morning, I could just as easily wake up at 4:00 and take BART in to the city. Every kid's dream.

It was another six months of unrelenting physical pain, and if I thought I was tired before, I was now always on the verge of exhaustion. I was lucky if I made it home by ten, but no matter how tired I seemed to be, I would get insomnia from thinking about the various problems I had with almost everyone I knew: Leticia, for being a bitch; Robert, for his unrelenting abuse of my armpits; and of course my mom for waking me up at four every morning after not sleeping because all these people were out to get me. It was getting harder to hide my discontent, except
for those couple of hours when I put on my clown makeup, leotard, and tights and did my best to pretend I was enjoying myself.

I was becoming more and more drawn to The Farm. The punks, hippies, anarchists, and other indefinable weirdos held a strange attraction for me. I didn't have a room there anymore, but I was able to talk Andrew into letting me sleep in any available corner of the place, rather than come back and forth from Berkeley. I usually slept on or behind the stage, but when they started having more punk-rock shows in the main space, he gave me a key to the preschool downstairs.

It wasn't the best arrangement, considering the stage was directly over my head. It was so noisy I couldn't sleep at all, but in the beginning I was too afraid to go upstairs. Judging from the characters drinking and smoking outside, it didn't seem to be much of an atmosphere for kids. After the third night of trying to sleep through one of these shows, I gave up and went upstairs to see what was going on.

There were hundreds of people up there. The most insane people I had ever seen. Mohawks, leather pants, tattoos, nose rings, and one guy who had shaved most of his head except for two very realistic devil horns that he had sculpted out of his hair. These people looked how I felt. Pissed off. I liked them even though I was completely invisible. No one bothered me up there except Andrew, who spotted me and asked, “Aren't you supposed to be sleeping?”

“How the fuck am I supposed to sleep through this?” I yelled at him.

“Listen, I don't care what you do. I'm only bringing it up so if your mom asks me why you fell asleep in the middle of your show tomorrow, I can tell her I told you to go sleep.”

“Don't worry about it, I won't tell my mom. What's going on in there anyway?”

“These guys are called the Circle Jerks. What do you think?” he asked, grinning.

“It sounds like shit,” I said, leaning close to him so as not to offend anyone. As much as I was drawn to the crowd's look and demeanor, the music was terrible.

Like most white music, the stuff lacked any soul whatsoever. So much so that it almost seemed intentional, as if a whole lot of effort went into taking every ounce of soul out of it. How did people dance to this stuff?

I found out when I walked into the theater. At ten years old I was still a foot and a half shorter than most people there, and they were packed in
like sardines. It took me almost five minutes to get ten feet into the place to see what was going on. Insanity. A circle of spectators was watching fifty or so people running around in circles and beating one another up. Every few seconds someone would climb onstage and jump out on top of the audience. I'd never seen anything like it.

I watched for as long as I could, but without any warning I kept getting slammed into by these huge, sweaty, leather-clad punk rockers. I made my way to the bleachers in the back of the room, hoping to find a safer place to watch from. Even though I had to wake up in a few hours, put on my leotard, and juggle for the kids, I decided to hang around. The circus seemed lame compared to this, but why did the music have to be so shitty? No wonder everyone was flailing around, hitting and kicking each other.

The next day was brutal. I had stayed up for the last band, Black Flag, and didn't get more than three hours of sleep. I was glad I saw them, though, because watching the singer of Black Flag run around in his underwear like an asshole made me feel slightly better about having to wear my fucking leotard the next day. I was over it. Sick of commuting, sick of waking up at 5:00 a.m., sick of wearing my hideous clown outfit, and most of all, sick of pretending to everyone and my mother that this was what I wanted to do with my life. I was fucking tired of the whole thing.

This time I knew I wasn't going to be asked back, which was fine with me, because I had a secret fantasy of going back to school and being a normal kid for once in my life. I didn't know more than one or two other kids my own age, and the people I called friends were ten to fifteen years older than I was. I couldn't wait for the season to end, even though it meant no more hanging out at The Farm. In the meantime, I decided I would go to as many punk-rock shows as I could, regardless of how tired I was. It turned out I really could juggle in my sleep, but the backflips and tumbling were hard. Aside from clearing the park of dog shit, I had pretty much stopped helping out with any of the setup. I told Mom I wanted to go back to school, and she agreed that it wasn't a bad idea.

C
AROLINER PICKED ME
up at seven in the morning in an old '64 stretch Suburban airport limo. There were five of us in the band, so, with two people up front, the other three got their own bench seat. It was more comfortable than touring in Eli's old Datsun. I decided to take the first stretch up front and see how nuts this Grux was for myself. Not that there was any rush. I had a whole month to get to know these guys.

“Grrrrrreh,” he said as I climbed in.

“Hey, I'm Oran.”

“Grux,” he responded, but it didn't sound a whole lot different from the grunt he had greeted me with. We drove in silence for a long time. There was no doubt the guy was kind of strange. He had obviously made his own clothes out of God knows what, and he was wearing a pair of homemade cardboard sunglasses with long sharp angles that shot out all over the place, covering everything from his cheeks to the top of his forehead. All of it—clothes, shoes, sunglasses, and probably even his underwear—was covered in Day-Glo paint. I couldn't help thinking that if he had been wearing regular clothes he would have been absolutely unnoticeable. Almost invisible.

After about an hour or two, he said, or rather grunted, without looking at me, “So what's your deal?”

After all that silence, it didn't seem like a few more awkward minutes would hurt.

“What's my deal?” I eventually said, hoping he would figure out that it was a stupid question.

“What do you do? What do you listen to? That kind of thing. Your deal.”

“Well, I'm not sure what my deal is, but yeah, I play music, and I listen to it, as well.”

He waited for more, but I left it at that. It was his turn to look at me as though I were crazy, which is what I was going for. Then he called back to Jeremy.

“Where'd you say you found this guy?”

Jeremy was asleep, so we drove on in silence for a while longer. I had pegged Grux as being just as uncomfortable and awkward as me, only he had developed a different system for getting by in a world that he didn't understand. It was pretty clever, really. Where I acted cool and indifferent in order to keep people at arm's length, Grux's method was to wear Day-Glo-covered homemade clothes and communicate through a series of grunts and yells.

“Seriously, though. What do you listen to?”

Again I decided it was a stupid question, so I decided to give him a stupid answer.

“Nirvana…” I said, coming up with the most unhip band I could think of in the obscure noise world. “Pearl Jam, shit like that.”

“Fuckin' cool, dude. Wow, you're really cool, man. Hey, Jeremy!” he yelled back again. “I thought you said this guy was perfect. Where the hell'd you find him again?”

Jeremy wasn't waking up for anything, but Thomas, the guitar/banjo player–leader in absentia, yelled back. “Leave him alone, Grux. He's fucking with you. Don't worry about it.”

“Ergh,” he grunted, giving me a weird look, then focusing back on the road.

At the first gas stop, I switched seats with Thomas to try to get some sleep.

Before we got back in the Suburban, Thomas told me, “Hey, don't worry about Grux. He's just not used to talking to people who don't worship him. You're throwing him off.”

“Don't worry about it. I'm having fun up there. I just need to get some sleep. I was up all night trying to get my shit together to leave.”

We had an eleven-hour drive to Salt Lake City. I mostly slept. When
we got there, I was definitely feeling dope sick. I wanted to ride it out as long as possible before I started tapering off. I just needed to drink as much as I could before the show, then do just enough dope to feel well before playing. I went up to the bar and ordered a drink. When the bartender came back with it, I asked him if the band got any drink tickets.

“Oh, you're in the band? No, sorry, I can't give this to you.”

“Fine. How much is it?” I always got pissed when they wouldn't even give you a drink.

“No. I can't sell it to you either. I can't serve you at all,” he said, taking the drink off the bar.

“What are you talking about, you can't serve me?” I stared in horror as he poured the beer in the sink.

“Utah state law. Bar and restaurant employees can't drink on the job. According to the state, you're officially an employee of the bar tonight, so I can't serve you, period.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I asked.

“Not at all,” he said without the slightest tone of sympathy.

“Well, is there somewhere else I could go?” I asked, but I knew from the drive that there was nothing remotely in walking distance.

“You could, but then I wouldn't be allowed to let you back in because you would be intoxicated while on the job. Believe me, there's no way around it.” He had clearly been through this conversation a million times before.

“Holy shit. I have never heard of anything so insane in my life.”

“Welcome to Utah.”

“Well, Utah fucking sucks.”

“Yup.” There was no argument there.

“How about after I play? After I've done my job.” Some fucking job. Drive twelve hours for this, and so far it didn't seem like anyone was even going to show up. I was looking for any loophole at all.

“I could serve you after you get paid, but that usually happens after we shut down the bar.”

I walked to the bathroom pissed off, dejected, and nervous about playing my first show with these guys after only two rehearsals. By accident, I snorted more of the dope than I should have and ended up getting pretty high. I had to be careful. The whole point was to make it last as long as possible.

When I came out, the other guys had started bringing the equipment in, so I went to help out. They had told me the shows were something of
a production, but I had no idea to what extent. After we brought our instruments inside, Grux climbed up to the roof of the Suburban where he had built a wooden box that was about six feet wide, by three feet high, and fifteen feet long. Once he got it open, he started handing down all manner of…I didn't even know what. There were laminated posters, backdrops, strips of cloth, Day-Glo-painted stage props, crumpled-up balls of what could be costumes, masks, long strings of black lights, boxes of duct tape, clothespins, thumbtacks, and all kinds of other shit I couldn't describe except as piles of Day-Glo-painted crap. One thing looked suspiciously like a three-foot-tall by three-foot-wide Day-Glo boot. Maybe that other thing was a hat? It took about forty-five minutes just to bring it all inside.

Since I had no idea what to do with all this stuff, I watched as the other guys transformed the stage into a neon Day-Glo alternate universe that looked like some sort of bad fever dream. The only recurring themes seemed to be cows and pioneer wagons, but the colors didn't seem to fit unless the pioneers had gotten smallpox or eaten some moldy bread or taken some peyote from the Indians. I guess a lot of shit could have, and probably did, happen to the pioneers that we would never know about. There was also apparently a lot of shit happening in San Francisco for the last sixteen years that I and—judging by the size of the crowd—no one else knew about.

After one local act, which was some kid screaming over a drum machine and rolling around on the floor for fifteen minutes, Jeremy handed me a costume sewn out of painting canvas with intricately designed patterns drawn all over it and a mask that might have resembled a deformed bull-person if you were on acid—or had snorted too much heroin in the bathroom, as I had.

The show was a disaster as far as I could tell. I had written notes all over my drumheads in order to remember the songs, but the holes in the mask didn't even come close to lining up with my eyes, so for the most part I couldn't tell what was going on. Eventually I found a way to hold the mask in position with my teeth, so I could look out through the mouth hole, but the colors onstage were now so vivid and disorienting from the black lights that it was still nearly impossible to read my notes and watch for the visual cues at the same time.

Grux didn't seem to be faring much better than me. On the occasion that he entered my field of vision, he seemed completely tangled up in wires, tripping over the three-foot boot he was wearing on one foot, knocking over amplifiers, and falling off the stage. He may have been
singing, but I couldn't tell. Mostly he seemed to be trying to get off the ground, only to trip over something else and end up back on his ass. There were only five people in the audience, and they stayed as far away as possible, where it was safe. It was more like a dress rehearsal than anything.

By the end, the only two people left were the guy we were staying with and the kid who did the opening set, so we decided we might as well use it as a rehearsal for real, and we went over a few more new songs.
What a fucking mess,
I thought, although I had been thoroughly entertained by the chaos of it. Wearing the mask had the amazing effect of making me not give a shit what happened. After the show everyone agreed that, aside from me fucking up a few of the changes—which was understandable given the circumstances—it had been a total success.

“Hey, Jeremy, where'd you say you found this guy again?” Grux yelled. But this time it seemed to carry a whole different meaning. He confirmed it by asking me, “Where the hell have you been?” He was clearly incapable of making direct compliments, but I could tell he was trying in his own way to show approval. I got out of my costume as quickly as I could, hoping to get to the bar for a drink, but it was too late. The bartender had shut it down.

“Did we even make any money?” I asked him.

“Nope. I guess technically you were a volunteer. I don't know what the law is for volunteers.”

“Jesus Christ. Utah fucking sucks!” I said with more gusto than the first time.

“Yup.”

 

W
E HAD A BLOWOUT
the next day in the middle of Wyoming. Grux was nearly decapitated when he went out to inspect the damage. The iron lock ring that held the tire to the rim had popped off and chased us down the highway, missing Grux's head by less than a foot before smashing through the back window a few minutes after we pulled over. It was extremely unnerving to think that this inanimate object had been following us for that long without us knowing it.

I'm not normally superstitious, but Grux had been talking about the founder of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey. The story was about how when he was cleaning out LaVey's basement after he died, a huge swarm of flies had appeared out of nowhere in order to thwart Grux's attempts at moving LaVey's stuff out.

“So what do you think they were doing there? You think it was Anton reincarnated as a swarm of flies?” I asked, humoring him.

“I don't know what they were there for, but they seemed pissed that I was fucking with his shit.”

“What'd you do?”

“I was scared. The air was black with buzzing flies, man. I ran upstairs to tell his daughter, Karla, and she told me not to worry.
They're just trying to scare you, but they don't have any power anymore. If you ignore them, they'll leave you alone.
That's what she told me. Freaky. When I went back down, they were gone.”

After all this talk about the supernatural goings-on around the recently deceased founder of the Church of Satan, it was hard to shake the idea that this iron ring was trying to kill Grux. For what, I had no idea. I didn't know him that well yet. We were apparently going to meet another high priest from the Church of Satan when we got to Denver.

We arrived late. At least that's what they told us when we pulled in. It was Goth night at the club we were playing, so we had to be done by eight. I still didn't know what was going on with the whole stage setup, but I pitched in as much as I could. We only had an hour and a half to set up and put on our 1800s Day-Glo pioneer show before we needed to clear out for the children of darkness. It was pretty dismal, but at least they let me drink.

Jeremy spotted me at the bar and came over to tell me, “You know, Grux doesn't like it when we drink.”

“What are you talking about? Why would he care?” I asked. This was the first I had heard of this, and it didn't seem like it was any of Grux's business.

“He hates drugs and alcohol. He's never had anything, not even a cup of coffee.”

“Maybe that's why he's so crazy.” I wondered if Caroliner wasn't somehow the result of not having the luxury to drop a hit of acid every once in a while, like us normal folk.

“Yeah, well…anyway…I would just try not to let him see you drinking. He can get kind of nuts about it.”

“Don't worry about it, Jeremy.”

He was acting so nervous, but what the fuck? I come out with these guys on three days' notice, and they're going to give me shit about drinking? It doubled my resolve to drink as much as possible, which was proving to be problematic anyway since we were so busy setting up and then playing before Goth night got rolling. I slammed that one beer as fast as
I could, but we were in such a rush, we had to go right onstage after that.

There was no opening act and maybe ten people showed up, which was an improvement over the five we had in Salt Lake. We ran over schedule despite only playing a twenty-minute set. Afterward, we had to tear down immediately, while a line of angry Goth kids waited outside to come in and do whatever it is that Goth kids do. Unfortunately, we had to load out of the same door that they were lined up at, and each time we came out with a load, they let us know how displeased they were by shooting angry glares at us. Their consternation was exponentially more effective through all the eyeliner, mascara, and black lipstick they wore.
How did they turn out like that?
Maybe their parents loved them the way they were, but we wanted to get the hell out of there.

Driving away from the club, I asked Grux if the Satanic priest had ever shown up.