My vacation, part 1.

[revised]
Okay, Coachella. Let's see how much I can remember now. I managed to wake up at about 11am. I was expecting the rental car to be here and all the short trips (Danielle needed to go to the store and to her father's) to be taken care of. I'd packed everything I needed the night before, so I was ready to go. Ian showed up sometime later and of course started dragging his feet. He said getting the car took 2 hours. Okay, fair enough, but we need to hit the fucking road. Ian and Danielle have no clue about planning or keeping to a schedule. I had this problem with them when we moved. We had to drive to Danielle's father's house, then to a health food store. I picked up some beer and soda, Danielle got stuff for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, some fruit, water, and a few other things to keep us fed. She is really broke at the moment, but offered to pay for food for us. Of course neither Ian nor myself mind vegan grub. It was like 3 by the time we made it out. I was kind of pissed. I wanted to leave early enough to get a campground. We’d be stuck in San Bernardino for the night at this rate. Whatever, we'd all be kind of cranky at some point on this trip. They had this bright idea that taking I15 to I10 was going to be too busy so we went south towards I40 along some small state highway. I got to see Hoover Dam, at least. Not much of it is visible from the road, but we saw some wonderful sculptures around the entrance. Rural Nevada and Arizona are creepy, like abandoned cars and empty trailers everywhere. I started to get nauseous from being in the car. They understood and we stopped every hour or two for me to rest my fragile equilibrium. We stopped at a small store somewhere in Arizona. The woman working had a noticeable southern accent and a trailer park face. She looked at me as I was buying some gum and said "nice shirt". I'd forgotten that I was wearing the Pet Shop Boys shirt I got when I went to see them with Spuds. It has "closet homosexual" printed on the front. With the black bandanna on my head and my purple nails I could only guess what she thought of me. We passed through some cities that I’ll never see again. Bullhead? I don’t even remember now. We got into San Bernardino around 9pm or so. We were stopping to visit my friend Mat. We were supposed to have made it to Joshua Tree that night to find a camping spot. I haven't been in this city since I left for Santa Cruz in 1995. I haven't seen Mat in about 2 years. He's come to see me twice in Vegas, but I haven't managed the strength to return to the cesspool of San Bernardino. We took the Highland exit off of the 215, but we were still in Rialto, a bit off of our target. We stopped after wandering for a few and called Mat. He wasn't home yet; his mother answered the phone. The apartment used to be hers, more than a decade ago. Mat slept on the couch in the living room of this small one bedroom. She left to go to Carson City for a job, and Mat took it over. She became unemployed and moved back in, setting up a bed in the dining room. She asked who it was; I answered "Jim". She responded "Oh, Jim the Obscure?" I haven't gone by that nom de plume since I was emceeing a poetry reading in '92. She gave us directions to get to the apartment from where we were. Driving down Highland, I saw where Vance used to have his used bookstore, now abandoned. Waves of memories are difficult to bear. I remember at the bus stop across the street, the guy who ran a comic store accosted me; he was psycho and always yelling at Vance for some imaginary offence. For some reason, I got the brunt of his heat that day. We pass houses made into stores next to boarding houses; I think this town has no planning commission. It's dirty and smells bad. I got us lost again by making a wrong turn. We’re just a block or two away, but still can’t find anything. We walk around for a few moments before calling again. We find Mat’s apartment around 9pm, just after he got home from work. His complex is small, almost dorm-like, except surrounded by a very tall security gate and paved with dirty concrete. There is a group of porch monkeys howling in the center veranda. Well, it’s not so much a veranda as a small pool that’s been cemented over. I’m thinking of how a realtor would sell this; “intimate”, “Old World charm”, “starter”. We worry about parking the rental car here. Mat speaks with the complex’s manager to get us permission to park around back. Gathering our gear, we make the final approach Mat’s. Opening the door, I notice an extremely strong cat smell. I’m not allergic or anything, but I think he needs to change the cat box. Maybe it’s due to him living there for more than a decade. At any rate, we settled in with a few beers and started chatting. Ian and Danielle seemed more or less at home with him. Mat and I started where we’d left off last time I’d seen him. After a bit, Ian and Danielle needed to sleep some so I went on a car ride with Mat. We drove by my old high school and the house I used to live in. We went by the Copasetic Cafe, where I used to do poetry readings. It was rather depressing. We drove for a time, then went back to his place to crash. I don’t remember what time we got up, but it was again too late to find camping. We headed for Indio and Coachella. The route there seemed simple enough, but somehow I managed to forget the maps I’d printed out and wound up getting us lost again. We stopped for a bit for a rest and I hopped into a document/shipping type place that has internet terminals and got the directions again (of course stopping in the grocery store for beer while we were there.) I don’t know how many cars were going to the venue, but with 50,000 people paying to get in plus bands and support staff, there were a lot. It took some time to get in. Fortunately, We didn’t really miss much. We first caught Erase Errata in one of the tents. It was so fucking hot in there, I didn’t want to stay for the whole gig, and after all there was the beer garden to get to. We wandered some and got some beer in us before trying to catch Beck. He was a last minute addition and was playing in the smallest tent in the venue. There were more people trying to get in than could. Ian and Danielle decided to opt out and returned to the beer garden. I stayed and pushed myself forward. I figured I could sneak in through the side. When Beck started to play, the crowd ripped off part of the side of the tent so I got much closer than I thought I would without much effort. Well, it took a lot of effort to not pass out from dehydration and heat exhaustion. He didn’t play long, which was good for my dire condition but unfortunate since he’s such a good performer. We sat in the beer garden for much of the rest of the night. The main stage was mostly inoffensive. We tried to listen to Trail of the Dead but they blew. I missed the Evens (an Ian McKay project, apparently Flea played sax for one song.) I pushed forward for the Pixies, getting within a dozen or so feet of the stage. The Pixies are my main reason for going and nothing is going to get in my way for this one. They put on a mean set, clocking in at about an hour. I’d love to see them do 90 to 120 minutes. Who knows, maybe if they keep talking to one another. They didn’t have much time to talk to the audience, which is fine. They had to fit in as many of their popular songs as possible. One good surprise was Kim singing the “Lady in the Radiator” song; normally Frank does it. You could tell that the audience was nothing but love for the band, even those that were just pushing forward to get closer to Radiohead. We’d agreed to meet at the beer tent after the Pixies’ set to watch Radiohead from farther away. We listened to a few songs and I decided to leave so we could get as close to Kraftwerk as possible. Someone named Mark Farina was playing the tent when we got there. This guy is an ego case from hell. He was bumping his head up and down with the beat rather vigorously with his name superimposed over pictures of himself playing over and over again on the monitors flanking the stage. Whatever the shit he was spinning was nauseating; not to mention the white boys trying to dance to it. I hope at least some of them were on MDMA and wound up dehydrating and dropping before Kraftwerk came on. It was easy to push by this crowd, nothing but doped up ravers (isn’t that redundant?) I got in close enough to Kraftwerk, about as close as when I’d seen them the first time in LA. The crowd here was very different from the LA one, however. In LA, I was surrounded by cold hipsters, not the fuzzy hippies of the festival circuit. I was surrounded by more Germans and Japanese than Americans that first time. Here, people didn’t hold Kraftwerk on quite that same cold, distant pedestal. The band looked the same as always (their stage set hasn’t changed much in the past 30 years) with the same costumes as before and that eternal starship bridge setup the four take on. One (large) difference was the background. All the synths and equipment they had in LA was gone, replaced by a keyboard (synth) and a laptop. They played some new tracks for us; the new version of Tour de France and Aerodynamic are the first ones I remember. Ian and Danielle said after that the way I described the show was almost dead on to what they saw. There are three huge screens behind the band when they play. They project basically a music video for each song as they go along. I think “the Model” is my favorite, but they didn’t have time for it. They should have played that instead of the shortened version of “Autobahn” I think. When I’d described the previous show to my companions, I think I’d stopped at “Robots” but of course the band stops with “Music Non Stop”. They’d started to leave a little too soon. I’d gone outside (but still had a view) during “Robots”. It was just too hot and I was worried about where we were going to sleep that night; a thought that had been nagging me since Friday afternoon. We headed to the car (after a brief rest) as soon as Kraftwerk’s set ended. Normally, they let the ending to “Music Non Stop” linger for over a half hour, but they didn’t have that luxury here. I thought that if we drove back past Palm Springs we might be able to find a hotel. Ian was our only driver, however, and he was somewhat tired. After reading other people’s reports, we should have slept in the car for a few hours before heading out. I was worried about security, however. We headed out, and of course got lost again. We tried a few hotels along I10 to no avail. I saw a limo with some high school age kids in it. Must have been prom night for some schools. We’d have no chance in hell of finding some place to sleep. We pulled over somewhere before Yucaipa (Banning? I can’t remember.) I was nervous about sleeping in the car, but my friends said they’d done it before. I was getting sober and upset, but I had no choice. We tried a parking lot in front of a Stater Brothers (the local grocery store) but it was closed and the employees were staring at us. I think I pissed Ian off by making him drive more, but we headed down the road a mile or so and parked behind a very small one room library. I think my living room is larger than this thing. I managed to fall asleep for a few hours, but woke up before 9am. It was murder trying to sleep there, I was suffocating in the stuffy car. I sat down outside and smoked for a bit before trying to wake my companions. We had the bright idea to visit Danielle’s grandparents not far away in 1000 Palms. Air conditioning and a shower sounded great. We didn’t really want to see any of the early bands on Sunday so being late wasn’t a worry. Her grandparents are cool; they live in a prefab on a golf course! Such a cute place. We got showers and ate some before they invited us to spend the night instead of going through the nightmare of the night before again. We of course consented. We got back to the venue later than we’d hoped and missed Muse, oh well. I made my way to the beer garden for refreshments and to wait for the Flaming Lips and the Cure. I would up talking to a real estate agent just a few years older than I am. She seemed 20 years older to me. Still, she had a nice rack. Too bad about the kids and the cop husband. She bummed some of my cloves. There’s still hope there, I think. Thursday came on and sucked ass, so we wandered the venue some. There was an art exhibit near the center with these “refurbished” bikes. Some were welded together in and ersatz carousel. Ian and I jousted with PVC pipes tipped in padding and duct tape. It was exhausting and fun. I stopped for some food, hitting up an Indian stand. I got a nanwhich, some flat bread with some orange shit and peas on it. It wasn’t too bad. I think as I become more exposed to Indian food I’ll be able to tolerate it more. We headed back to the main stage for the Flaming Lips’ set. They seemed to have some difficulty setting up; some tech had to climb to the top of the lighting setup (very high up, I hope he got hazard pay for that one.) After quite a delay, Wayne, the singer, came out in a big plastic bubble (he told us to say that he descended from space in it!) and walked across the audience. After he’d made his way back to the stage, they started playing. They’re so much fun live. Good music and good performers. The Cure came on last that night, also delayed. They were worth the wait. I’d seen them twice before, and it’s always a good show. I think this night beat the previous encounters I’d had with them. They played a good mix of old and new, and went over their allotted time by a bit. We laid back on the grass, admiring the dozen huge spotlights meeting somewhere in space over the grounds. I don’t think we left until after one in the morning. We made it to the Grandparents’ house fairly early in the morning and got to sleep in. They put us in a back bedroom since they have a loud bird (it says “time for drinks” every day at 4pm!!!) and get up early themselves. We hung out for a few hours, since we’d planned to meet Mat again in San Bernardino and he didn’t get out of work until 9 or so. I had a few beers and we played some old board game (Sorry! Of all things!) We ate a little, repacked the car, and headed out. We got to Mat’s and headed out on the nights journey. He wanted to stop by a friend’s house to smoke out and pick her up. We had to be so secretive going in, we had to go around the back of the house. Why live someplace where your friends aren’t welcome? Or maybe they were just worried about the pot. The three of us weren’t in the mood to smoke so he shared it with the girls we were visiting. We took one of them to this sweet dive bar a few miles away. It came complete with ash trays, something I’d have a problem with in San Francisco. We thought we’d stay till 10 or 11, of course it was 2 by the time we made it out. It was karaoke night too, of all things. Of course I got roped into singing. I did “Fortunate Son”. Ian and Mat also sang some songs. Mat’s Jim Morrison impression is quite accurate. We drank a few pitchers and shot the shit for a few hours until it was finally last call. Along the road back, the three of us got tense again, but fortunately Danielle and I went to sleep fairly quickly. I think we rolled into town around dawn. I just wanted to sleep, but we still had to unpack the car and Ian had to get it back to the rental place. Lucky him. His efforts toward the trip far outstripped any reason I could have for being angry. Well, that about sums up the first part of my vacation. I’ll work on the SF leg later.