TO LIVE AND SHAVE IN LA

 When I was 18 I was gonna open my own donut shop. I had worked in one from when I was 15 and now I was gonna open a new one of my own in this awful Massachusettes town called Marlboro. Before we were gonna open it I had a dream. In the dream I was an old man serving the same DPW workers who I hated. I got out of bed at like 5am, put the keys to the donut shop on the kitchen table and drove to L.A. I remember driving around until the bank opened at 9am. The whole time I was paranoid that my boss was looking for me. I took out all of the money in the bank and dove to LA. 

I was somewhere in New Jersey at night and I saw a sign for Route 66. I figured this was the same Route 66 that they sang about so I took it. It was not the same at all. I drove around a couple hours in midnight New Jersey. I got back on the highway. Three days into the trip I stopped in Indiana and called my mother. I hadn't told anyone anything, I just had just dissapeared. My father put out a fucking APB on me. This is how you end up in jail. Anyway I told my mother I was driving to LA and I would be back. She hung up the phone and told everyone I had moved to California and that I would get residency and go to college there. This was not the plan at all but my mother told everyone that. 

It took me four days total, I basically never stopped driving. I totally got road fever. This is a real thing. I drove around Chicago and St Louis but I didn't stop anywhere. I remember approaching Las Vegas, the plan was to check it out.

 I was in the desert. It was fucking pitch dark but I knew Las Vegas was nearish. At one point I crested a hill.  I got to the top, and a sea of lights opened up before me. This was fucking cool. It had been total black and then an endless sea of lights. These were just the barrios leading up to the strip. This took an an hour at least. When I got to the strip finally it was literally everything I had seen on TV. It lived up to that. I parked and went into a casino. I will never forget that sound. I slept in my car. 

The next day I got to LA. I remember being on the highway going into LA. Everyone was going 85 or so. Suddenly all traffic stopped. The people behind me hit the car directly behind me. Fucking scary. I drove around until I found an adult book store. I went into it, they had a fucking new Traci Lords movie legal and everything. I couldn't believe my luck and bought it. So basically I drove to LA for porn.

I got a hotel room in a chain called Travel Lodge. There was a Guitar Center back on Sunset Blvd, I went to it. The salesman acted like a hungry wolf going for its prey when I walked in. He convinced me to buy a gold top Les Paul. I went back to my hotel room to get the money for it, I realized this would be all my money left so I would be homeless with a sweet guitar. I did not go back to Guitar Center because I felt guilty about lying to the salesman. I left LA and drove to the fucking Grand Canyon. 

I was at the Grand Canyon for about a minute before I got bored and drove out from there. I was headed to Memphis, Tennessee. I wanted to go to Sun Studios and Graceland. For some reason they were both closed even though it was daytime. I did drive by them and looked in. From there I went to Washington, DC and saw the Smithsonian, Lincoln Memorial, the giant monolith, the White House, everything. Then I drove home. 

My mother had told everyone I had moved to California and all my shit was in storage and there were people living in my room. 3 weeks later, I was in the driveway shooting baskets and my boss showed up. He said if you didn't want to open a store you could have just said so.

ROADIE-ING FOR AIRPLANE MAN

In 2004, these two girls I had heard music from in Boston visited. While they were here they asked me to roadie for them on a tour of the west coast. They were playing in San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and LA and they needed a driver so I gladly said yes. This was a 2 piece band, a drummer and a guitar player. Both girls. When we had jammed we played Mona by Bo Diddley. Me and the drummer were laughing because it was so fun. I laughed until I cried. She didn't miss a beat. They played some garage rock but also a lot of Howlin' Wolf covers. They had fucking just seen Junior Kimbrough .

I drove them from here to Vancouver, Canada and then down to LA. They played shows the whole time. Roadie-ing is fucking fun. You become part of the band. I had two days with the van after they flew home. I spent it at these two bars in Echo Park. One was called the Short Stop and the other had no name. These bars were awesome and I love LA. 

One of the things I forgot to mention is that before one of the shows in LA we went to a diner and met fucking Billy West who was a friend of the drummer Tara. The internet was still new so I didn't know what had happened with Ren & Stimpy. He had taken over and he told me the story of how John Kay got eff'd. He just said he had been fired, he didn't say why. He said they needed someone to do Ren. Later I heard Billy West on Howard Stern but before then he had just been a guy from Boston. Now he's my hero.

To be honest he was always my hero. When I was a kid, he had characters on the radio that were hilarious. Fucking WBCN. Every day at 5 minutes past 5 they would play 5 minutes of stand up comedy. "Thanks to morons, psychopaths, and mental defectives." It was funny. And then Billy West would do his developmentally disabled character Duane Glasscock. Later when he was on the Howard Stern show he came out and did fucking Larry Fine. It was incredible. This was back when Howard had homeless Jeopardy and it was on Fox, back when Fox TV was a cool TV station.

I also need to mention that when I spent two days at the bars in Echo Park I wrote my name on the board for pool. By the time I finally came up I was playing a beautiful Latina girl. The Gypsy Kings version of "Hotel California" came on the jukebox. Talk about perfect timing.