It was 8:00 p.m. on a Saturday.
Through the dirty, cracked windshield of the van, I saw the sun lackadaisically descend beneath the horizon of the Nevada desert. “Death or Glory” by the Clash permeated the tense atmosphere as we rumbled and rolled down the highway. We were shoulder to shoulder, but everyone was lost in a universe of their own thoughts. No one was sure what fate would introduce to us in the following days. Occasionally we would make jokes, assign nicknames, politely pretend the dread in our bellies wasn’t there. Truth be told, the only thing that kept any of us going was the hope for a brighter future.
We had left the room in pairs that night at the Plaza. Once we reached the street, each of us went our separate ways. We didn’t want to be alone, but we didn’t necessarily want to be together, either. Not at that moment, anyway. Some went to gamble; some went to pace; I went to the convenience store and bought ChapStick. Luckily, I ran into Coolo when I stepped outside. Coolo and I were both outsiders to the group in our own way, so we knew that ultimately, we were along for the adventure no matter what. We never discussed it at the time, but I always felt that having the other one there made the hard times a little easier for both of us.
By the time the dust settled, and we met up again, we learned that Justin and Boggs were having a private state of the union discussion, with Monkey acting as their mediator. They spoke for two long hours as we waited in anticipation. I wanted to concentrate on literally anything else, but any time I veered away, I would be inevitably jolted back to reality with increasing impact. An impossibly loud cover band blasted out ‘80s pop hits while I waited for word that a resolution had been reached. Much to my chagrin, they never quite reached a decision, and the drawing board remained blank.
We reconvened in room 2011 and went around the room volunteering what we would do if endowed with making the final decision. Everyone was thinking the same thing, although no one wanted to be the first person to say it out loud. The fundamental element of trust had been broken. This was no longer a tenable situation in which the band could survive. We were stuck inside of Vegas with the conman blues again.
The way Justin saw it, the only way that made sense in those early morning hours, we had three options.
Option I: Go home as failures. Risk ruining the band’s reputation; deal with the fallout later.
Option II: Throw caution to the wind and try to make it nearly 1,000 miles to the next show in Colorado on $100, a wing and a prayer.
Option III: Go home, miss the first week of shows, and figure it out from there.
All of us met for breakfast the next morning, although no one ate. The band asked Boggs to meet them at the casino to discuss Option III. Unbeknownst to us, Boggs had been on the phone all night with anyone who owed him a favor or a few dollars. He was determined to make it right and provide everything he had originally promised. He had worked himself into a lather, but when he saw us coming, his demeanor noticeably picked up. We sat facing each other, our backs to the slot machines, in an isolated corner.
“At this point, I can’t afford for any more money to come out of my own pocket. I literally don’t have anything left,” Justin said after a while. “We’re going to need between $1500 and $2000 of support to realistically have a shot at this tour.”
Boggs nodded along, seeming to earnestly take it all in.
“There’s a fire in Ft. Collins right now, so we would have probably had to cancel that show anyway,” Monkey offered, “And even if just one show after that got cancelled, or we didn’t get our guarantee, we’d be fucked.”
The conversation went back and forth like that for a long time, but eventually everyone agreed that going home to regroup was our best option. Boggs would use that time to come up with the money he had promised, and Justin would arrange a trailer for the van, to alleviate some weight and reduce risking further damage.
I can’t remember what song was blasting from the speakers as we crossed into Barstow, just that no one was listening. Sometimes, when the sweet taste of victory is knocked out of your mouth by the heavy hand of defeat, silence is the best medicine. We drove on, full bore into the darkness.
Boggs had claimed several times so far on the trip that the Damn Rascals—our rumored co-headliners further down the road—were so popular, we could go into any record store in America and trade their albums for cash like an ATM. Those damn records (totaling about a half ton in weight) were the biggest reason the van was in such poor shape, and as it turned out, the cost of printing them is where all his original tour support money had gone. During the long, cold silence of our drive back to California, we passed by a massive soccer emporium in Hesperia. Noticing this, someone finally spoke up to say:
“Hey Boggs, how about I take some Damn Rascals records in there and trade them for cleats … so I can kick you.”
By the time we crossed into L.A., we were running purely on fumes. Whether we had it in us to soldier on another inch or another mile, it didn’t need to be determined tonight. Tonight was for succumbing to the glorious flu of exhaustion. Everyone was dropped off one by one until eventually it was down to me, Justin, and Chi Chi. It felt like we had been in Vegas for three weeks rather than two days. A couple of miles before we reached Justin’s place, we saw police tape measuring out the perimeter surrounding a fresh body. It was the first dead body I had ever seen outside of a funeral home. My reality might have seemed bleak in the moment, but at least I still had a reality.
The next night, we had a gathering, everyone sitting around the fire pit sharing their perspective of what had happened.
“It’s like going to Disneyland,” Justin said. “It’s like someone saying they’ll pay for your tickets and your food, and then meeting you at the gate with nothing.”
“I don’t trust him anymore,” Monkey said, staring into the distance.
“Honestly, I think he had good intentions. I think he just overestimated what he could give us. He’ll make it right,” Justin replied, but I heard something in his voice that suggested even he didn’t believe that.
…
Before any one of us would willingly cross the California state line again, there had to be a reserve of cash on hand. We were facing a 30-hour drive from L.A. to Fort Wayne, Indiana, a daunting task under the best of circumstances. It wasn’t anything that hadn’t been discussed to death back in Vegas, but it was important to the band that they have the conversation one more time, recorded on tape for posterity. We all met with Boggs in Monkey’s moms partially screened-in back porch as a cool ocean breeze swept past and a fat black cat stalked the premises.
Boggs claimed to have amassed around $5000 from a credit union. He said he would hold onto the majority, with the understanding that $2000 would stay inside a locked box to which only the band would have access. It was strictly for emergencies, to make it home if we had nothing else. Boggs also agreed to spring for a two-night hotel stay in Hannibal, Missouri. We would drive for three straight days, relax in Hannibal, then catch up with the tour in Indiana. From the outside looking in, perhaps to the perspective of a true romantic, it seemed like things were finally back on track. Sitting with them, though, nothing truly felt resolved. It was more like putting a band-aid over a gunshot wound.
One of the last things we did before we left was christen the trailer with a handmade Mark Twain stencil. Justin had made it after Boggs agreed to the hotel stay in Hannibal. Justin was a massive Mark Twain fan, and Hannibal was the real-life inspiration for the boyhood adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. He explained to me that, even if Boggs failed to deliver on everything else, at least we would get to see Hannibal. After that, we started calling it the Mark Twain Tour.
In my experience, levity always follows soon after confrontation. As human beings, we crave that release. Maybe we were desperate for any hope we could hold onto, but spirits were high when we gathered back at Monkey’s house to load the van and try again. Everyone agreed that things felt better than they did the first time around, or at least that’s what we kept saying out loud.
The van itself was considerably more comfortable now that the gear was clunking along in the trailer behind us. Everyone was laughing together again, a welcome symphony considering the terror barely in our rearview. When we stopped in Kingsman to refuel, in the last fleeting moment of the cool dark of night, Boggs informed us that his bank card was declined when he went to pay for gas. He said it almost with a shrug, as if to imply that we should have expected it to happen. Before any of us had time to react, though, Monkey had climbed all the way from the back bench and was outside the van in Boggs’ face, insisting that this time they try it together.
“You guys will never believe this!” Monkey said with a caustic amount of sarcasm when they returned, “It’s working just fine now!”
It kept going like that, every time we stopped. Boggs looked as if he was punched in the gut every time he reached for his wallet, hands almost shaking. While the rest of us would stand around outside the van in a circle, always together, always laughing, Boggs would find a faraway corner of the parking lot to stand alone with a cigarette. The way he looked at us was eerily blank, like he hadn’t decided yet whether he would befriend us or wear our skin. Between that and all the drama so far, no one particularly wanted to be around him. Monkey became his defacto babysitter, I think mostly because he was the most physically intimidating of all of us.
What I remember most clearly from this part of the trip was how difficult it was to sleep. All of us were so physically and mentally exhausted from the stress of trying to hot glue the broken tour back together and then driving all night over multiple state lines. Any time my eyelids would get heavy enough, I gave it a shot, but there was always a piece of van poking into my back the inescapably gross feeling of quietly basting in my own sweat. There’s also something unshakably disorienting about falling asleep in the parking lot of one gas station and waking up in the parking lot of another, hours away. It’s like being kidnapped by a bandit with an overactive bladder. It didn’t help that Boggs and I had both volunteered, separately, to sleep on the van floor.
Finding entertainment was its own unique challenge. Even when there’s camaraderie and silliness, endless hours on the highway tends to make things fade to boring faster than you might assume. Chi Chi would makeup nonsense sing-song slogans of towns we were passing (i.e. “Lawrence, Kansaaaas! Where basketball stuff!”). I proved to everyone that I could rap all the words to “Party and Bullshit” by The Notorious B.I.G. Coolo was reading a book called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon at the behest of his girlfriend back home.
For some reason, all we kept talking about was making it to Albuquerque, New Mexico. That felt like a proper landmark, one that measured significant progress. Who can speculate as to why, probably solely because it was a town we had all heard of or remembered being referenced in Bugs Bunny cartoons. For me, if Hell is the absence of God, then there is no place in the continental United States where God is more absent than New Mexico.
As soon as we reached the other side of Albuquerque, the van broke down.
None of us were mechanics; guesses were ventured but nothing diagnosed. Instead, we waited on the side of the interstate, against the guardrail. If any one of those cars whipping by us had veered of course, we would have all been killed instantly. All of us had come too far on this adventure to die in New Mexico, though. When we were finally able to scrape along to the next town, we were told that we would need a new radiator. It didn’t necessarily need to be addressed immediately; they could bandage it together long enough for us to make it to Missouri, but they insisted that we had to take care of it as soon as we got there. They gave us a free jug of coolant, instructed us to drive slow and let the van rest as much as possible, then sent us on our way.
Looking back, we should have turned around right then and marched our happy asses back to the Pacific Ocean. How much clearer could the universe deliver signs that this tour wasn’t meant to happen? Instead, we drove into the twilight and straight on through Tucumcari.
Around that same time, Boggs started opening up to us, whether we wanted him to or not. I don’t mean to paint any of the rest of us as prudes, because we certainly weren’t choir boys, but we also collectively grew up watching Ghostbusters and listening to Weird Al. Now here we were, listening to this caricature of a man aggressively attempting to hold court with tales of prison stints and sex workers. I couldn’t tell—and I’m still not sure—if they were even real or if it was meant surely for shock and awe. All I know for sure is that the rest of us silently agreed not to encourage him further.
The next morning found us in Tonkawa, Oklahoma. Between the stress and the exclusively fast-food diet, Justin and Coolo were obliterated. While they exorcised their demons, the rest of us paced around a gravel road and storm clouds rolled in above us. Looking back, I should have known things were fracturing for the band. The Scarred I met as a teenager never would have agreed to a slapdash situation like this one. Yet, somehow, here we were. It brought me back to a conversation Justin and Monkey had just before we left for the second time.
…
“This is starting to feel like a renaissance festival,” Justin had said. “Everyone is dressing up and pretending it’s something that it’s not.”
I remember knowing even in that moment that he wasn’t talking about the tour, not really. This was something that had been simmering for a long time, finally ready to boil over. He walked in circles and continued.
“When you’re in a small band, it’s like playing craps. Maybe someone will find you, like you, and put you on the cover of Rolling Stone. If they don’t, how long do you keep going before you become Anvil?”
“Back in the day, it always felt like we were doing this to get somewhere better,” Monkey added, thoughtfully. “It feels like that time has passed, now.”
“We need to rethink the way a band operates. It’s always an album, then a tour, album, tour, album, tour. We’re stuck in a box,” Justin continued. “We’ve always been told that the best way to get our songs out there is to put out a record and charge money for it, but we just want people to hear it, to feel something. This tour should be our farewell to the box.”
“Know why I want to do this tour?” Monkey turned to ask me. “Because it’s the only time in my life when I’m not only allowed but encouraged to go crazy for an hour a day.”
“I’m looking for a way to do what I want to do, but make it more sustainable,” Justin said. “I just want people to tell me if a song meant something to them. I’ve had people paint my face on the back of their jackets, and that’s fine, but I don’t want to be Jack Sparrow every day.”
…
After all those endless hours rolling down the highway in a sweltering hot box, seeing the gentle fleeting beams of sunlight pour over Hannibal was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. We were all looking forward to sleeping in a real bed; we needed that at least. After a celebratory drink at a local pub—and a quick jaunt to Wendy’s to get Coolo’s blood sugar back up so he wouldn’t Hulk smash the rest of us—we finally pulled into the parking lot of the hotel. I remember us taking a beat to look at it together, collectively, through the windshield. Maybe it was because anything would have looked like a palace after living in a van for a week, but just staring at it felt healing. When we were ready to make camp for the night, everyone turned to Boggs, who fell just as deafeningly silent as he had done in Vegas.
“I’m just gonna sleep in the van,” Boggs finally said, looking at the ground.
“No man, it’s cool, don’t do that,” I said for everyone.
Boggs had a way of wearing down your nerves, and obviously things hadn’t been perfect, but he was still in it with us. He had agreed to replace the radiator, and after a full night’s sleep in this hotel he agreed to spring for, we could trade him and his boxes of records off to the Damn Rascals and breathe a little easier. It was time to throw him a bone, to let him be a part of the group, if only for tonight. He had earned it.
“You can crash with us, man,” I continued. “Hell, I’ll even crash on the floor so you can have a bed. I’m not driving; I’m not in the band. it’s totally fine. After all, you’re paying for it anyway. You should get to experience that AC!”
“Who me?” Boggs asked in horror and confusion.
I can remember Monkey vibrating with anger.
“Yes, Boggs, you,” Monkey said. “You’re paying for the rooms, remember?”
“Nah man, I don’t remember that. I don’t have any money. I just figured y’all were gettin’ your own rooms or something.”
Everyone started screaming at the same time. Then we all started going in a round, letting out everything we had been keeping inside since the beginning. I’m reasonably sure Boggs thought he might die that night. He disappeared for a while, ultimately returning with the news that his mom had gotten us a room down the road at a Super 8 Motel. One room, specifically, for all of us. I also remember him asking if we knew where it was, even though, like him, we had never been there before.
I will never forget sitting around the picnic tables outside of that Super 8 Motel in Hannibal.
Boggs eventually ambled his way back over to us with more bad news. The first week of shows wouldn’t have guarantees because double booking the Scarred with the Damn Rascals had caused immense confusion. He also admitted that he couldn’t cover any further van repairs, hotels, gas or anything. The money he had gotten from the credit union back in California was gone. Whether he got less than he said, or somehow spent it all, none of us will ever know. The only thing we knew for sure was that we were stranded 1,800 miles from home with $300 between us.
You never realize until the chips are so dramatically and hilariously down that you’ve taken certain things for granted. Things hadn’t always been seamless, but my life had always had a certain amount of structure and safety nets. I had been in school since I was 5 years old, and now, at 21, I was still operating within a system designed to see me through if I followed the steps correctly. Starting this trip, I believed I was a man who could handle anything in stride. Now, staring down the barrel of being stranded in the Midwest with nothing but a broken van and a brotherhood of guys just as screwed as I was, I realized that I was still a kid playing dress up. When Justin and I had a moment to speak quietly, I told him I was planning to take a Greyhound bus to Atlanta and trek home from there. I missed Georgia, and I felt like everything would be OK again when I crossed the state line.
Justin talked me out of it.
It didn’t take long for Boggs to say the words we all knew were coming. There was no way this doomed caravan of misguided dreamers could afford to soldier on any longer. You can’t fill a gas tank with good intentions. We sat together in the hot, sticky air, shoulder to shoulder like magnets. The Mississippi River was strong enough that we could nearly feel it from where we were sitting, and the Cicadas screamed into the void all around.
“It’s over,” Boggs said finally.
In that moment, we went from renegades to orphans. One by one, all the guys left to call home, until eventually Justin and I were the only ones left. He didn’t need to say anything; I could tell by his face that it was the beginning of the end for the band. It was their third major tour to go down in flames before it even left the runway. It would take years to earn back their reputation, years they couldn’t afford. I remember trying to tell him that there were successful bands who only released records and didn’t tour, but he waved me off. There was no need to straw grasping, not that night. We all knew the score.
The next morning felt like life on its side. All of us felt better after a full night’s sleep and a hot shower, shades of normal, but there was no escaping the melancholy lingering in the air. There’s no way to succinctly describe the feelings that follows wanting something, loving something, believing in something so much only to have it die in front of you in a motel parking lot. What could we do but keep living. We toured Hannibal, learned about Mark Twain’s life and smoked hand rolled cigars on the Mississippi riverbank. Boggs had arranged a flight for himself out of Quincey, Illinois, just over the border, so we drove him to his gate at dusk.
“I’m sorry for how everything turned out,” Boggs told us, “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen; I take full responsibility.”
Then, to the surprise of all of us, he took the lock box full of our emergency money out of his duffel bag.
“Use this to get home,” he had said. Funny thing was, no one had even known he had taken it. I don’t know if he was planning to steal it and guilt got the better of him, or if he was worried Monkey would track him down like the Terminator if he went through with it, but he handed it over like it was a heroic act. When we opened it, though, we discovered immediately that it was far less than we had all seen go in originally.
There we were, five lost souls in the middle of nowhere with barely enough to get by and less between us. We could only travel by moonlight, otherwise risking overheating the van. There were no provisions, save for a bag of gummy worms. All we could do was drive on.
So that’s what we did.
To Be Continued …
