When I started riding, I had spent the whole previous year
touring with my band, on the road for a few days or a week, then back in town for the same, and it sucked. Most of our performances were at frat parties, or in hotel night clubs, or at bars in malls. It's hard to feel cool playing in a mall. It just is.
Most of our tours started in
Virginia Beach, about a nine-hour drive from New York, and moved south and west. We would drive down in our fume-filled bus and play two sets that same night. Then we would spend a few days hauling
all over North Carolina and Virginia, waiting around in dorm rooms or in empty bars: waiting for the sound check to start, waiting for the social chairman to give us money for dinner, waiting for the stage to be built, waiting for the other band to leave, or play, or set up, or stop, waiting for
batteries, coffee, beer, food, toilet paper, Ed. After the last show we would drive all night to get back to our couch and TV. I usually got the dawn shift.
Life at home wasn't much better. Our apartment
was like Das Boot in Brooklyn. Ten or so people to four bedrooms. The living room was full of band equipment, promotional merchandise, costumes, and whoever didn't fit in the bedrooms. The kitchen held the overflow from the living room. When the microwave
was on, the TV didn't work. When the stove worked we ate pasta. When it didn't we ate
White Castle.
We ate a lot of White Castle. What had begun as joke in college ("Hey--let's start a rap band!") had long since lost its humor, novelty, and love. The songs had become tedious, the endless promises of recording contracts had become silly, the whole thing had become a wheezing, crawling self-parody, and my clown shoes didn't fit so good no more.
In the spring, Ed-the-bass-player's mom became very ill, and a nine-day tour was canceled. Though sorry for Ed, I was elated for myself. The next day I asked my friend Joey
if they needed anyone at the messenger shop
where he worked. I was in luck. I started riding that week.
OVERSIZED/
OVERWEIGHT
: There is a maximum standard for packages at the normal rate, but I was never clear on what this was, as most of the customers had special deals with Tom that made the size and weight of their packages a non-issue. I would demand oversized status
for things that didn't fit in my bag, like huge boxes of video tapes, or super-long architect tubes.
