I got up early though.
This way I could make the shuttle to the PRF BBQ on its last day.
And wouldn't have to worry about my precious mommyvan being graffito'ed by Sooge Knight and all those crazy Humboldt Park G-funk El Rukns out there on the west cizzoast.
It was a quiet Sunday midday when the PRF shuttle pulled up, and I joined two guys on the way to the venue. We were the first to arrive, and helped clean up after last night's festivities.
Apparently I had missed a great night. All the bands proved their worthiness while actual crowd surfing occurred, both by the audience and members of Police Teeth. Then during Bottomless Pit's set, Steve Albini arrived, fresh from a 14th place finish in the World Series of Poker. He karoaked some Cheap Trick (I think, I wasn't there).
But the cops arrived, too. Apparently the neighbors didn't appreciate the flash photography coming from the roof of the BBQ.
Some people don't like being photographed by outsiders.
Other people don't like feeling as if they are part of a zoo.
Still other people don't like when outsiders bring the cops into their neighborhood.
So sometime in the middle of the night someone threw a brick through the window of the venue.
The guy who owns the venue arrived to find us cleaning.
He's a tall, coiled wire of a man with Minor Threat tattooed on his ethics.
When he found out about the window, he made us clean more and constantly and now.
Suddenly I found myself on a day off being forced a broom and ordered to sweep.
I swept a hallway that hadn't seen a broom since the Korean War.
Others mopped floors for the second and third time.
More people trickled in, carrying snacks, meats, and beers.
Their hungover grins became quizzical stares as they were put to immediate work by the 2.13.61 drill sergeant.
After sweeping 14 pounds of dirt, all created last night by the PRF BBQ, I sat down with a beer and a root beer, ready to relax at a barbeque.
The owner spotted me and handed me a mop.
"You wanna help out?"
By now, I had watched five other people mop that floor.
But I did not wish to be the BBQ asshole.
So I wrapped my tongue taut around my mind like a tourniquet, and learned the honor of discipline from a scattered, stressed out, art space owner with misplaced anger issues.
And I mopped that same floor again.
Knox from The Columbines, carrying some sort of workload, noticed my handiwork.
"You look like the saddest person in the world."
Meanwhile Karkoa soundchecked, a yard away from the wettest, most clean, unclean floor in a ghetto art space.
Because I was two-fisting root and beer, it also looked like I was picking up errant cans to throw out. While hiding from the fucking wigged out owner in the equipment room, the tattooed tornado eventually found me and some other guys. He handed me some more cans to throw out, full of beer currently being used.
"We gotta get some order in here! Who's a musician in here?!"
Most people escaped, but he was able to lasso one unlucky soul with yet another broom. I think the poor kid was even visiting from somewhere far away. The bands were ready to start playing any minute. Then he turned to me.
"Are you a musician?"
Yesss.
"Which of this stuff is yours?"
None of it.
"Then get out of here!" And he annoyingly shooed me away.
Thankfully the bands started playing and the concept of fun cautiously emerged for the first time all day. The owner remained by the front door, scrubbing the walls furiously. Occasionally, he would pull aside the PRF organizer in order to scream at him.
I got the fuck away from that miserable miserable creation.
Upstairs sat the coziest lair, a low-ceiling lounge of couches and poker. I spent some time up there drinking beer and watching the poker entertainment. I drank a lot of beer and now can't remember some of the great conversations I had with people from all over the board.
I do remember The Columbines set. They played my favorite Columbines song "Letter From Omaha" and dedicated it to drunk me. Then a marvelous 12 year old girl got behind the mic for a Cramps cover that made every band I've ever heard look silly in comparison.
It's fun being drunk and hungry. So I ate a sausage. It was spicy. I kept drinking. Then I fell asleep in the lair on a couch. Alan tugged my foot from a hallway through a hole in the wall.
"It's time to play!"
The Bitter Tears would be closing the barbeque.
I had the best stupid idea for a costume. I would drape a shirt and pants to the front of my body and duct tape it around my joints. Kind of like a paper doll.
Unkind of.
Meanwhile John looked dapper in his Clockwork Orange get-up and Alan looked like a Queen Elizabeth Jimmy Buffet zombie centaur. Mike recycled his winter cabin pajama theme from yesterday. I remember sweating and feeling fat. These were accurate feelings, as I later had to untag Facebook photos of me from the night.
Completely useless after the set, I shared a strange slot in John's car adjacent to his cumbersome 88 key Rhodes. My haircut absorbed headlights in the back window while my ankles hung limply out the passenger window. I looked like a pissed-on pile of hay, smelled like a dead mouth full of spat chaw, and felt like a rebuilt transmission leaking fluids again.
But as Glenn Danzig once said in Passaic, New Jersey on Christmas Day in 1981: "Fuck it, I had fun."
Verdict: Win
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