Start Gold, Pony Boy
APRIL 1st
Starting this blog was an attempt to practice writing every day and here we are post 2 and may the streak be unbroken, by and by.
The tour started with an April Fool’s kick-off in Grass Valley. I the use of an event space called The LOVE Building for a single evening by entering a raffle in the county fair. That’s the kind of wholesome, small town crap I grew up on. At that same county fair nearly two decades prior I took it upon myself to indoctrinate the good people of Nevada County, California in to the church of Led Zeppelin — a band I, at thirteen, had just heard of — by blandly murmuring “Stairway to Heaven” in an unnecessary falsetto to the other people waiting to do karaoke. I didn’t even play air guitar during the solos. Just stood there.
Any way, I had the support of the town ushering me out into the rest of the country with a comedy show featuring several of my closest friends for the first hour and the inaugural performance of CLOWNFISH for the second. A woman gave me her scarf as a blessing. I still have it, wrappeda round the jar I throw loose change into at the end of the day.
The show was part send-off, part fundraiser. I sold T-Shirts I’d had printed with a design by the inimitable Britany Ragan, and the brewery I worked for donated a keg from which to sell beer. That afternoon I loaded the keg into my Prius (the same one I was about to travel 17,000 miles in) and shut the hatch and shattered the rear windshield on the metal rim. I did everything in my power to silver linings that hazy IPA cloud. Tried to adjust my perspective. “This is like breaking a glass the first day a restaurant opens. It’s good luck!”, I lied to myself as I drove to the auto glass repair place. April Fool’s! What’s that other expression about April? The one about the …that’s right, the showers.
APRIL 2nd
In a dark and stormy late afternoon I collected my traveling companions and all of their stuff and drove down to Oakland to the All Out Comedy Theatre. This was a big deal: our first “real” show. Our first show to people that didn’t see the poster in the coffee shop where I worked when I wasn’t working at the brewery (to save money for the tour I would work one spot 9-4:45, drive 5 miles up the road and work 5-11ish). The rain abated by the time we got to Telegraph Avenue and we got ready for the show in a curtained-off section of the space serving as a green room. It had a couch that was more the idea of a couch than matter and many pictures of Jeff Goldblum on the door, which we took to be auspicious.
The entire “show” — the romper lent to me by friend Bri, a handful of T-Shirts to sell, a box of stickers, and the cash drawer — fit into a milk crate for ease of transport should we have to kick rocks in a hurry. My show is very, very queer and I was under the assumption that if someone were to take ill to that it would mean being chased out of town like them Duke boys. But this was the Bay Area. Rainbows abounded. The show was attended and none of the audience beat me with sticks. We were a-go.
APRIL 3rd
The lion’s share of the 3rd was spent removing the back seat from the Prius, dubbed Crybaby after the John Waters flick. Somewhere there is a time lapse that is mostly me and Camen bending over to try and reach a screw, then getting frustrated and standing up, then bending over again. We eventually succeeded and the rest of the afternoon was dedicated to figuring out a way to pack all of our gear and groceries. For some reason, it didn’t occur to me that other states would have buildings where one could purchase food, so we’d stocked up on Soylent and canned tuna to hopefully last us three months. Most of this fit. If anything was abandoned it wasn’t missed. We toured an artists’ residence that was slowly being Moneyfied and bailed.
In Santa Cruz we found a campsite that wanted $72 for the privilege of pitching a tent in the dirt. We laughed, turned around, and discovered they were the more affordable option. After shooting down The 1 for a bit we eventually came to a site that didn’t have anyone at the rinky-dink guard post. And we hatched a plan. We would wake up before the Forest Service staffed their checkout station and drive away into the early morning. We called this something like “enjoying the great outdoors” as a euphemism for cheating Parks & Recreation out of their fees. If my cohorts ever once felt guilty about this they didn’t let me know and I didn’t ask. Me? I relished the fresh air heist every single time.