Sandstorm

May 18, 2004

Before I begin my story, I need you to do me a favor. I need you to imagine the most humid, unbearable, red-hot, scorching, bone-dry heat your pink brain can muster. Now imagine spending your entire summer in that heat- standing in a frail, yellow merchandise tent, trying to sell albums to tens of thousands of angst-ridden, under-developed teenagers smoking cigarettes, dancing in sugar frenzies and circles of pasty fists, fighting for a corporate-sponsored revolution.
That was my life, last summer on the Vans Warped Tour, which was an outdoors all day punk rock festival; A traveling circus that took place in a new city every day in the same desolate parking lot, where insects went to die. I usually forgot we were in a different city than the day before and very little time passed before I didn’t care anymore.
My job was to set up my special yellow tent and convince a percentage of the thousands of concert zombies to buy a rap album they hadn’t heard of, among millions of CDs more commercially viable and much more punk rock.
Sometimes I would be outgoing and charismatic for my own amusement, other days I sat in my chair with my Top Gun aviator shades on, stone faced, while repetitive questions fired at me and bounced off my forehead. I was thinking of how many different ways I could end my disposable, meaningless existence.
After awhile, all the people looked the same to me. I knew what clothes they were going to be wearing; I knew the confused dirty look that would be on their rebellious, adolescent faces; I knew what they smelled like, how they talked, and the wild freedom in their eyes. I knew the dull look they wore at the end of the day as exhaustion settled over us all. I was exhaustion. I stayed in one place from sunrise to sunset on the same square of black tar or dirt or grass or black tar or dirt or grass or sand or volcanic ash.
The Warped Tour was larger than anything I had ever been a part of. Assembling this tour every day was like moving a small town and having it up and running within a couple hours. There were dozens of stages with multiple bands playing simultaneously and hundreds of merchants selling clothes, food, music, energy-drinks, water, beer, shoes, magazines and religion, and…and soul!
My bus (consisting of aerobic gurus: Mr. Dibbs, Murs, Slug, DJ J-Bird and myself) joined the Warped tour in Phoenix, Arizona. We had driven there nonstop from Minneapolis, thanks to our super-human bus driver named Loras, who didn’t seem to eat, sleep or have the need to perform necessary bodily functions that normal people do. Being that he was an ostrich and emu farmer from Kentucky, he was the last of a dying breed. We all got used to spilling out of our bunks and into the aisle while we slept, from violent turns he was making to keep our bus from plowing through the guard rail, sending us to our generic rock star deaths.
We arrived in Phoenix incredibly late. We were lost foreign exchange students trying to stay afloat in a carnival about the size of two football fields, all swarming with frantic questions and demands unanswered.
J-bird and I rushed off the bus, already behind schedule, as the others slept peacefully in bunks and aisles. I loaded my handcart with a huge collapsed yellow tent, a couple bullet-proof, over-sized blue plastic bins filled with pounds upon pounds upon boxes of music, and silver duffle bags screaming with t-shirts for sale and squirt guns for my own entertainment. We made our way through scattered crowds, cutting through thick bushes of tour flunkies, stoned before breakfast.
The air was filled with broken bursts of electric guitars and a steady hum of people pulsing all around us. We found where to set up, dumped the load and hurried back to the bus to grab the second half of our merch.
The day pushed on, and the grounds were now flooded with bodies swarming the area, hungry. I was on a chair, foaming at the mouth, shouting my sale like some stockmarketauctioneersubwaycarhustler, looking for any takers. The hard part was grabbing the attention of the MTV generation’s river of jaded eyes. The rest went by the numbers:

“Hey, I got that shirt, too! Pantera kicks ass! Hey, you heard this album? Well, you need to… Oh, your boy got that one? You don’t have this one, you can only get this one on tour… You downloaded that one? Throw us some money… ten more bucks, I’ll throw in a t-shirt…peace, have a nice day.”
Mid-day. The sun crept over my head and sat heavily on my shoulders. I heard someone say it was a hundred ten degrees. Numbers could never do that fire justice. I stood my ground for as long as I could, and then yelled into my walkie-talkie for back up. “Fuck This!” I ran into the nearest building, cooling my dizzy head. I felt sorry for the mobs that had paid buckets to bake in the sun, rationing out the remains of their wallet for over-priced water and a CD of their new favorite band, solely as a token to prove they had survived.
With a fist full of money, puddles of sweat by my feet and day one under my belt, the sun began falling and the crowds fell thin. I started packing up. It would be dark soon. The winds were filled with mercy as if some higher power was taking pity on us.
As J-bird and company began helping me take down the tent and pack up for the day, the winds began to pick up, which in return, signaled a recording inside my head: a warning of a sandstorm that would be coming soon. Now, I have never seen a sandstorm, not even in a National Geographic magazine. I don’t know if they’re caused by UFO’s landing in the desert, or if they even exist, but for some reason due to hours of exposure to extreme temperatures, I was completely convinced that we were about to be hit by one helluva sandstorm.
My pace was now frantic and absurd as I began ripping down my tent. I loaded my cart like I was on a game show, and ran through an obstacle course of meandering stage crews and groupies, blue plastic bins pouring over left and right, leaving a trail of paranoia.
I yelled warnings of a sandstorm to the people I knocked over, so they understood why I was genuinely terrified. My friends were awaiting my return with the handcart to haul the rest of our burdens back to the bus. I never came back.
I reached the bus and dumped all the bins on the ground like dead bodies, and then raced on board as if the “sandstorm” was biting at my ankles. A stranger was on the bus and nobody else. I wanted Loras to tell me that everything was going to be alright but he was not there.
I mumbled an attempt at “hello” to the strange girl on our bus and began tearing about the coolers and refrigerator looking for water. No water… just lunchmeat and bread, and this was no time for a sandwich.
I wandered to the back room of the bus and stripped down my underwear and socks, dripping with sweat. Naked and crazy, I came out to the front again, apologized to the strange girl for my appearance, then began looking for water in the same places I had moments ago, cursing under my breath.
When they found me, I was in the back, sitting on the floor, with my knees to my chest, rocking gently back and forth and rubbing my head. J-bird asked me if I was okay, to which I replied, “I only peed this much today,” holding my index finger and thumb about an inch apart.
More gibberish spilled from my cracked lips before I was persuaded into taking a cool shower. Speaking as carefully as one might in a hostage situation, they aimed me in the direction of the showers, and then dispersed into the bar-b-que, which was taking place around the neighboring buses.
Standing under the showerhead, I turned the handle and felt the cool water pour over my heat stained skin. I cleared every last person from the showers when I began making sweet, soft, orgasmic moans of ecstasy. That bothered people, apparently. That and the fact that I had not removed one article of clothing before taking the shower, not even my shoes.
I headed back to the bus, hungry. I was leaving a trail of liquid footprints and dripping from every angle of my body. It was night by this time, and the partying tour freaks watched in horror as a dark drenched figure lurched through the crowd, knocking over garbage cans unapologetically. People stopped talking, as the mysterious man loaded his plate with Chipotle burritos and chips without saying a word, just pointing at the food he desired until it was served to him.
I took the food and went back on the bus with a can of “official tour water.” I changed clothes, and then laid in my bunk. Someone asked me if I was alright and I didn’t respond. I was thinking about the other three weeks I had left…and this was no time for a sandwich.

Skip James

Sunday, September 25, 2005

It’s just me and Moe.
Everyone else is still recovering in their bunks as our bus chugs along through Montana. Moe and I are the only ones awake, or at least I hope he is since he’s driving the bus.
Now this trip feels official. Driving through those desolate landscapes with no path to your past, without any vague trace of familiarity, civilization, phone bills, prostitutes, or a reason to believe that should I wander off my trail I would return home alive.
Last night, the evening closed its eyes upon our mobile home leaving a drunken and restless Fargo, as the crowd spilled out from the bar and into the streets. That morning I awoke in my wife’s arms and in my own bed, under a surreal blanket of granted wishes. I said goodbye to my wife again and we sailed out of the Minneapolis skyline, I imagine that my goodbye’s sound exhausted. How many times can I say it with a straight face? Why am I always leaving my one true love and spending my right now, which is all any of us have, with a paycheck and a clouded dream of shadowy faces looking up at me for an answer?

Bird in a Park

If you were a bird in the park, I’d feed you in the spring
And in the summer I’d wake early just to hear you sing
I’d be lonesome when you’d leave me in the bitter autumn wind
But when winter fled, I’d be in the park, where you’d return again

Bury Me Beneath the Killin' Fields

2006
When my heart stops pumping blood
When my breath quits and I know that it’s real
Don’t carry me a-top majestic mountains
Bury me 'neath the killin’ fields

Bury me, oh bury me
Bury me, Lord, Lord bury me
Lay my soul, lay my pride where my people fought and died
Bury me beneath the killin’ fields

When my eyes fade away
When my spirit leaves and all my sins revealed
When the funeral fire gets done burnin’
Bury me beneath the killing fields

When my days don’t come no more, death comes knocking at my door
Bury me beneath the killing fields
When you hear the death bells roar from a politician’s war
Bury me beneath the killing fields
When my voice no longer sounds and my families gather ‘round
Bury me beneath the killing fields
When my heart no longer pounds and the reaper’s coming down
Bury me beneath the killing fields
Where my people lived as slaves came and left without no name
Bury me beneath the killing fields
With the warriors that came, lived and died upon them plains, won't you
Bury me beneath the killing fields

You Remind Me of a Girl I Knew

You remind me of a girl I knew
Whose hair was dark and eyes were blue
Who made me feel like someone new
Each time I saw her face

You remind me of a girl I knew
When I was young and went to school
Whose voice did carry soft and true
Her lips my fingers traced

You remind me of a girl I knew
Who saw the light where angels flew
Whom into lovely woman grew
Whose skin my mouth did taste

You remind me of a girl I knew
Who made my wildest dreams come true
Who reached below and pulled me through
Her memory I embrace

You remind me of a girl I knew.

Placenta

January 31, 2006


Born of earth and seeded soil
Return my flesh into the ground
From whence I was created

On a grey September afternoon, 12:03 to be exact, out came a confused 1980 from my mother’s womb. Inside an apartment on First Avenue, my mother expelled me from her belly with the aid of midwives. My useless and frantic father repeating, “I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to cause you this pain,” tears in his eyes, my mother responding
“Would you shut-up! You’re not helping me!” amidst the gathering of curious neighbor friends and some of their children. Blankets were wrapped around the shivering (me) and I was cleaned of fetal membranes and amniotic fluids, silent and sudden.
My mother, being of the holistic and Eastern medicine philosophy (hence the at-home delivery), decided that she was going to bury my, or, her, no, our placenta into the ground, from which it came. The Minnesota winds, however, were hard that year and the ground was already far too hard to dig up and frost looked into our windows. Mom decided to do what anybody faced with the dilemma of burying a placenta in impenetrable soil would do: she put it in a plastic baggie and stored it in a freezer until the ground was soft again.

Born of earth and seeded soil
Return my flesh into the ground
From whence I was created

Winter passed through Minneapolis and the vegetation unfolded slowly under the pale sun. The birds sang and shook the branches they jumped to and from, the neighborhood dogs sniffed each other in parks and a warm breeze rolled the empty bottles down the gutter sounding like whiskey wind chimes. It was placenta time.
The opaque freezer bag was removed and placed on a windowsill like some twisted version of mama’s home cooked blueberry pie, to thaw in the sun. A spot was picked; a hole was dug. When my mother returned for the afterbirth, it was no longer there. A quick investigation lead to the neighbor’s dog Sophie. Sophie was 50% German shepherd, 50% wolf and 100% gnawing on my placenta.
Sophie made it clear that we could fight her for the meat-patty, but one way or another she was going to have meat in her teeth. After a quick standoff, all attempts to retrieve the amniotic sack were aborted and Sophie trotted off into the sunset to finish her treat.

Born of earth and seeded soil
Return my flesh into the ground
The ground from whence it came