Everybody Panic
Ah, the open road. Symbol of opportunity. Bearer of great fortunes. Giver of take.
For me, there's nothing like getting out there into our great big America, to take a chance at seeing how my good old home-tested chops play in a completely unfamiliar venue. Not being a big planner, I usually let road trips come to me. In terms of touring buddies, Seamus is my go-to guy. Not surprising for someone who loves the hospitality industry, he's become very adept at finding hotels, restaurants, and bars along the trails to good music.
Much earlier in the summer (back in May, I think it was) Seamus told me I was going on a mini-tour with Widespread Panic. (If you've never heard of them or--gasp--if you don't like them, you're lucky I'm not around, because I would ask if you were paying attention, begin taunting your mom for giving birth to you, and slapping you repeatedly in the face. Well, maybe I wouldn't go that far, but I'd be extremely shocked, at any rate. Widespread is awesome.) Given my devotion to the band, and considering it was my Summer of George, I told him that I would make it happen.
And happen it did. As I previously offered (albeit, through a drunken haze) only the briefest hints about the first portion of the tour (Sunday's Grant Park Panic show and Monday's Cubs game), I'd like to focus this post on the last leg of the journey, during which Seamus and I traveled with our favorite band to Cincy and Indy. Brace yourself.
After falling asleep at 4:30 the night before after a long, long detour after the Cubs game, I awoke at 9 a.m. on Tuesday--still pretty much drunk--to find two bacon-egg-n-cheese biscuits and hash browns from McDonald's lying on my chest. I muttered, "What the...?"Seamus jumped into my room and shouted, "Eat up, shower up, and sack up, you mother fucker! We're hitting the road! Panic tour, baby, yeah!!!"Since he'd wisely left the bar early and got to bed at a decent hour, he had been awake for hours and was raring to go. (I'd honestly meant to follow a similar course of action, but I inadvertently got tequila shitfaced into the wee hours. Such is life.) Though I was woozy and disoriented, we got our shit together, stopped by my Starbucks, and started the drive south to Cincy. Needless to say, Seamus was handling driving responsibilities.
Seamus made me promise that I'd stay awake until we got on the highway to Indy, and I agreed. The problem was, by the time we got into Indiana, the adrenaline was counter-acting the booze and sleep deprivation of the night before, causing me to be completely wired. It didn't help much that Seamus kept laughing and reminding me what a retard I was for forcing the drunken issue on the eve of two days' driving. Surprisingly, given the number of tequila shots I'd had less than 10 hours before, I was overcome more with tiredness than nausea, and I found myself in a strange state of exhaustedness and glee for the rest of the day. We joked the whole way that we were going to tell people that we were Nick Lachey, because he's the only famous person we could think of who's from Cincinnati. We stopped once for gas and snacks.
The drive to Cincy is not bad at all--about 5 hours--and southern Ohio is a very pretty part of the country. Cincy is a river town, so there's this sudden splurge of hills all over the place, all very green and rolling and beautiful. The town is a series of clusters of buildings organized along the hills slanting down toward the river. The town designers have done a great job of planning. Every city in the Midwest wants to compare itself to Chicago, but I found Cincy to be more reminiscent of parts of Lower Manhattan, with small parks placed in the middle of four-lane boulevards. There are a few tall buildings, but no massive skyscrapers that would stand too prominently in a big metropolitan skyline. The center of the city possesses a certain quaintness and friendliness that's 100% appealing.
We ditched the car on the first floor of the dark garage attached to our hotel, the Garfield Suites. As I sought my lighter, iPod, GC, etc., I was annoyed at the darkness inside the garage, which leads me to believe that I may or may not have turned on an overhead light. I was so tired, hung-over, and punch-drunk at that point, I don't remember whether or not I turned on the overhead light. It was totally irrelevant at that point, as our drive to abandon was suddenly overwhelming.
We entered the lobby down a strange and winding concrete passageway, through the underbelly of the hotel. After some confusion in tunnel land, we at last found our way to the front desk.It looked like any other front desk at any other hotel: staffed by three people who don't really care, all wearing suits, all with a slight sneer. Seamus usually handles these situations, as my tolerance for stupidity amongst service staff is rightly known to be terrible. I did, however, have to turn over my credit card for deposit, which I did not at all mind considering how little time or effort I'd invested in planning the trip. The guy at the counter was all fake-smiles as he turned over our room keys and the surprise bonus of a couple of 2-for-1 drink cards.In our just-off-the-road stupor, we wandered from the check-in area directly to the bar--which was obviously closed, to the point that the television sets and overhead lights were all turned off. We said something to the effect of, "What the fuck?! Give us beer!" The guy informed us that the deal was only good from 8 to 11, which did us no good whatsoever. We made some dick comments about the weakness of a hotel bar that's sometimes closed, and hopped onto the elevator.
As it turns out, Seamus really scored on booking the hotel. The room was almost comically humongous for our purposes. We had a full 2-bedroom apartment with a great view of downtown. The room had a huge den, a huge porch, a huge kitchen, a huge bathroom, and 2 huge bedrooms, for only $100 per night. I stated upon entering that I felt guilty for having so much space that was likely to go unused. Predictably, we ditched our shit, had a quick smoke in our non-smoking room, and took off into the intense sunshine.
Now, as I have gotten us as far as Cincinnati, our immediate destination point, I must pause for a moment to tell you something extraordinarily crucial for understanding this tale. The weather in Cincy was hotter than you could possibly imagine. The thermometers read 105, but that's not the half of it. Mercury doesn't appreciate such things as "pollution" and "heat index" and "hot-ass wind". Cincy was suffering the effects of all of these, to a stupefying degree. I thought it was as hot as it could be in Chicago the previous Sunday, but I was wrong. It was even hotter in Cincy. It was literally hotter than hell. Between the hot air and the moisture, I felt like I was walking on the bottom of a giant Jacuzzi.
Upon leaving the hotel, we were able to make our way exactly one block down the street. The heat was taking such an immediate toll that we nearly stumbled into slow-moving oncoming traffic. I told Seamus, "Fuck them. If we get hit by a car and die, at least we might stop sweating." He agreed.The heat was driving us completely oblivious to our surroundings. It became so overwhelming that we abandoned our original destination (a place Seamus had heard about from his cousin), and instead we steered into the closest open bar. For the life of me, I will never remember the name of the place, but it's mostly inconsequential anyway. It was so hot out that we simply needed to get inside, and any place would have been just fine. Any place, in this case, turned out to be rather okay.
By any measure, the place was cool. They'd obviously spent a ton of money in recent months to spruce it up--flat screens, recently varnished wood, new glass behind the bar areas, hot waitresses in black bowties, all that good stuff. Whether or not it had been a bar for a long time doesn't really matter; it was a bar on July 26th, and that was good enough for my purposes.Seamus and I sidled up and started double-ordering the usual: Miller Lite and tequila shots. On account of Panic in Cincy, we were missing a Cubs-Giants installment of the Night Game Challenge, so we talked baseball for a short time to make up for it, including many extrapolations about why Dusty's such a crack head.
We must have had four or five rounds each before the bartender asked, "Are you guys from Chicago? What are you doing in town?" He happened to be an alumnus of Deerfield High School, a few miles north of my hometown. As luck would have it, he also happened to be in my class year. I mentioned to him that I'd gone to one of the greatest parties of my life in Deerfield, senior year, at a guy named Ben's house, and he froze for a second. Seamus looked at me like, 'What the fuck did you just say to him that made him brain fart?' But the guy just smiled and said, "Were you the guy that puked all over the subwoofer, and then felt up the host's girlfriend's boobs in front of the whole party?" With a modicum of shame, I answered affirmatively.
With that, the conversation began to flow as furiously as the (suddenly much taller) shots of Cuervo Gold. Seamus started talking about the New Trier-Deerfield sports rivalry, especially football. The bartender stopped keeping track of our tab, so that by the end of our stay we owed them practically nothing. We suddenly turned 'pre-show drinks' into 'getting drunker than fuck.'In the midst of the escalating shit show, I called my G-Man buddy and told him to leave me the number of our friend Joel, who went to law school in Chicago and moved back to Cincy about a year before. Freddy said he'd call me back later with the number, as he was busy at the office.
After this long hour of heavy drinking, another of the bartenders heard about our need to go to Riverbend and offered to arrange us a ride, as the venue is located several miles outside of the city. We were so very thankful for the help that all four of us did a shot together. I then ordered Seamus and myself two more shots and two beers apiece, and headed to the bathroom, upon which I dutifully left my mark. When I stumbled back to the bar, I took a deep breath and pounded all four of my drinks in one cigarette--about five minutes flat. It only slightly dawned on me at that point that drinking so heavily on an empty stomach was probably not a great idea. I told myself I'd eat something starchy as quickly as possible once we got to the venue.
I am, unfortunately, loathe to follow my own best advice, unless the situation deals with raw survival. As it happened, the situation did happen to come down to a slightly less extreme level of survival, but I ignored my best instincts regardless, foolishly opting to soldier on.
The conversation on the ride to Riverbend was dominated by our cabbie, an unfortunate occurrence when you consider that he had been here for about a week and spoke virtually no English.
Side note to those of you living in major metropolitan areas, under the impression that your foreign cab drivers speak little to no English: you are probably unaware of the fact that those cabbies have actually been here for at least a couple years, which were likely spent in various smaller metropolitan areas. To the alcoholics of Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Portland: I have no idea how you manage to get home. My prayers are with you. Godspeed.
Since we were hoping to get psyched up for a great show during the ride, as I focused on ignoring the angry liquors swirling around my stomach, our particular fresh-off-the-boat immigrant was talking about some cabbie in Chicago who was shot and killed the night before. I remember saying, "Shit, I didn't do it. Can't we talk about something kind of happy?" Seamus told him about the rule in Chicago, that smart cabbies don't drive on numbered streets, period, and how that guy was just a total dip shit who didn't know about the rule. Our guy seemed skeptical. No matter what we said, he would not be convinced that Chicago cabbies tend to do pretty well. (Fuck him anyway, as you will soon see.)
After a long drive on these big hills overlooking the Ohio, we finally arrived at a small amusement/water park nestled on a green riverside. It was positively idyllic, and I relished the moment when the cab would pull up to the pavilion and let us into the glory of Panicland on one of America's great inland waterways. Unfortunately, we must have uttered something in English that doesn't translate well to Swahili (or, more likely, something in English that's downright offensive), and the guy made us get out on the road into Riverbend. He was kind of a dick about it, but we paid the fare and took down his number, with assurances that he'd come back for us at the end of the night.
As the car pulled away, the waves of heat slammed into us once more. Then it dawned on me that the parking lot was not only immensely large, but also blacktopped. I braced myself as much as possible, but it was no use whatsoever.
This parking lot was big. I mean, really big. I felt like I was trekking across a blacktopped Sahara. I am not exaggerating when I say that the pavement was hovering around 120. I slumped into a heap onto the sign at the entrance to the parking lot and thought to myself, "Nice fifty-foot walk; only 800 to go!" Halfway to the venue, I stopped noticing that I was extremely lightheaded, or that my body was pouring off sweat at an alarming rate. All I wanted at that point was another beer or some water, as I threw one foot in front of the other like a goddamn zombie.After what felt like hours (it was probably closer to fifteen minutes), we were horrified to discover a venue likewise completely covered in blacktop--from the back areas, through the uncovered seats, right through the pavilion, up to and behind the stage. Every surface of the place was throwing off heat, and I mean throwing off heat. We'd unsuspectingly thrown ourselves onto a giant frying pan.
In our resolve to keep the train on the track, we headed directly over to the beer line. Seamus insulted half the staff for getting the book out to check our Illinois licenses. I was fighting extreme light-headedness for all of this, and I remember throwing one of the guys a rude, vile, and probably incomprehensible insult or three. In spite of this, we left the beer area with two beers and a bottle of water each. We pounded the water straight away, and stumbled away double-fisting Bud Heavies--easily my least favorite beer but the only thing available on tap.
I was acutely aware that my battle for consciousness was growing more difficult by the second. Halfway to the pavilion (from the beer stand, mind you--a distance of maybe 50 yards), we lunged into a sliver of shade provided by a bathroom pavilion, hoping for any respite from the relentless heat. As you can probably guess, the difference between the sun and the shade is negligible when it's broken 100 degrees. I put one of my beers down in the shade, so I could pound the other one before it got too warm. I noticed with alarm that the plastic's color got foggier and foggier with each passing minute. It was that hot--the ground was altering plastic.
Seamus slurred his way through a conversation with a semi-Wookie hippie chick he knew from a message board or past shows--I can't remember what the connection was. She was the first (and, frankly, the only one with the opportunity) to say, "Are you guys okay? You seem really fucking wasted. Want some water?" I shouted, "Sure...nah...ah....give me some of that shit!" She started spraying me with lukewarm water from her camelback, but I already so totally soaked with sweat, the water had little effect.
It dawned on me during the impromptu shower that I should have just gone home. If I'd had any of my facilities working properly that day, I might have done so. If you'd asked me right then, I would have honestly told you honestly that I was done for. I literally closed my eyes and said to myself, "Paddy, you're fucking done." Adding to complications, Seamus was no better. He was dripping sweat, pale, and drunker than fuck. Come to think of it, I'm not sure that either of us had properly re-hydrated from the Panic show of the Sunday before in Grant Park, or from getting shitfaced at the Cubs game Monday. I think we were both severely dehydrated and overly intoxicated. Actually, I know we were.After it was determined that the beers we'd placed on the ground were too hot and nasty to drink, we went around the bathroom pavilion to the general admission hill. Because of this summer's drought, the hill was a slope of straw and hot, packed dirt. There wasn't even a tree to sit under, that area being disproportionately small to the size of the pavilion. It was the most desolate hill I'd ever seen.
Seamus began to shoot the shit with some random people from somewhere or another, I think somewhere in the Carolinas. I might or might not have mumbled something about my necessity to find some shelter from the heat, and so I dropped into an open seat in the very back row of the pavilion, not thirty feet from where I'd just been standing on the lawn.
Then, most is pretty much blackness.
I remember things, of course. I remember hoping against hope that it would start raining to relieve the brutal sun; wishing I hadn't had so many shots of tequila before the show; wishing I'd eaten dinner; wishing I'd relentlessly pounded Gatorade for the whole 5-hour car trip; wishing I'd taken a nap; wishing I would stop sweating myself damp. I remember accepting that all of these things had dawned on me far too late to do anything about them, and that my fate was sealed. At that, the music started.
I've seen the set list of the show, and I vaguely remember bits of it all. It wasn't that I was too drunk to know what was going on. I was shit housed but relatively aware of which songs were being played. I remember slurring to myself, "Goddamn you, Schools!" during a really nasty intro into "Rock," which prompted me to begin heaving in earnest. (I bet Dave would get a kick out of hearing that his low notes caused me puke.)
I remember everything in a very subliminal fashion, very vague notes and images of the band as they wailed away in spite of the heat. I wrote the following on a piece of paper in my pocket:
"One Arm
Bowlegged
Lilly*
Hatfield
Ro
WHAT A POOR SHOWING!
ife d. wartime, r h mom"
Panic freaks will no doubt find this amusing, because you've probably been there before. To non-Panicheads, this means that I was literally knocked out of commission for the whole show, except for the first five songs and the two encores. (Click here to see how much I more or less missed out on.)
What happened in between? Well...I puked. A ton. Not just a lot, but literally, tons of vomit. Gallon after gallon of puke. Relentless streams, at times of terrifying force, came flying from depths previously unknown. These puking sessions lasted so long that I was aware of the probability--nay, the necessity--of my being kicked out of the show. By all rights, I should have been thrown out. It's a miracle that no authorities saw me, right there, in the last row of the pavilion, puking like I was on the verge of death.
I had my head down between my knees for the literally entire show, spewing my brains out. I was in this position for so long that all of the muscles in my neck and back skull were strained and hurting pretty badly for the next few days. When I realized that I'd strained most of the muscles groups in and around my head, I wondered if I could in good faith count the songs of this show as ones I'd rightfully witnessed. I don't think I can.
At one point during my waterfall session, a guardian angel came over and threw his arm onto my shoulder. "Hey, bro, me and my girlfriend are here from Greensboro, and we noticed you're having a tough time of it, man."I probably mumbled something that was nice but leave-me-alone that probably came out, "Huff, naff herr herr herr. Shaboo." I meant to say that I appreciated his help, but to leave me the fuck alone. He was unrelentingly kind and said, "Hey, if you have to do your thing, do your thing, just know we've got your back. Tell me if you need water or a Coke. We've got your back, man." I remember taking a deep breath and forcing myself to conjure up enough lung capacity to utter the words, "Dude, I appreciate all the help, but please get the fuck away from me before I projectile vomit on you." I'm sure it came out once again as, "Thoo, foh da namina, hoot da toy to the haggin, you fucker." Remember, this guy was just trying to be nice. In all probability, he's some guy who's been to about 100 Panic shows and was simply looking to make everyone's experience a little better. But I never even looked the guy in the face; I will never have any idea of what he looks like. All I can slightly remember is that he had shorts on, and that they were olive green and of the cargo variety.
I unfortunately also remember projectile vomiting all over this poor guy's bare legs.
Needless to say, the poor guy jumped up and ran away, never to be heard from again. I was left alone for a long while after that.After the second set ended, I fought myself back into an upright sitting position. This took immense amounts of strength and will. As I sat there, wiping the puke from my face, I took a deep breath and it felt great. After such a great intake of humid night air, I could think of nothing but carbon monoxide, so I went into my pockets to withdraw my cigarettes and lighter.I flared one up without even thinking about it. Out of nowhere, a security girl swooped down on me and said, "Excuse me, sir, there's no smoking in the pavilion area." I was simultaneously appalled and indignant. "After all the puking I've just done, you have a problem with a lit fucking cigarette! What is wrong with our country?! Get the fuck out of here, you Kentucky Fried Nazi!"
After the security chick grew tired of me laughing in her face as I continued to smoke my harmless cigarette, the encore started and it was really, really good.After the music ended, I returned my head to its position between my knees and focused hard on getting my shit together. When I finally looked up quite some time later, I realized that the roadies were more or less finished with breaking down the stage, and that I was one of the last people in the venue. I forced myself to stand, and ambled back to the concession area in the most deliberate fashion imaginable.
I barely made it to a doorway, which--thank God--happened to be a bathroom. I looked in the mirror and realized that I didn't appear to be covered in puke, because I'd been exclusively drinking liquors of the non-colored variety. I peeled off my hat and shirt, and threw them both into a running sink. I started up another faucet and plunged my head under the cool water. It was at that point that I looked over and saw a pair of pink and white women's tennis shoes leaving a stall. Oh yeah--oh no! I'd stumbled into the women's room, and I was standing there shirtless, giving myself a homeless-man's shower. Take! I threw on my dripping clothes and headed out the door, all the while conversing out loud with myself about what a jackass I was.
I remember trying to call Seamus and expecting no answer; none received. I figure that he was probably as fucked up as I was, and that we were both probably better off as free agents anyhow. Men can travel to places where other men cannot help them, regardless of the intentions or concerns. Cincy became one of those places.
Still dripping with water, sweat, and my own puke, I stumbled out into the parking lot and was immediately accosted by a fat hippie chick. She was looking to find a ride back to the city, and I told her that I had a number to call, on the condition that she buy me a burrito. We found an awesome falafel tent, but the guy had run out of drinks. From every bad, there comes a good. I told the fat hippie chick to head thisaway to look for drinks, and I'd head thataway to look for drinks, and that we'd meet up in a half hour back at the falafel tent. My fucking ass. After I got her to buy me some awesome parking lot grub, I completely ditched her. Take. Things suddenly started looking up.
I began to wander around the lot on a quest for some water, but the cops were already busy clearing everyone out (lame as hell), so I decided it was time to get myself home. I took out my phone and dialed the cabbie. He said to meet me back at the big sign out front in twenty minutes, back at the drop-off point. I meandered along (all right, I was walking as fast as I possibly could, which wasn't very fast at all) and made it to the front gate at the proscribe time. I saw the cabbie pull up, and I started over toward him.
As I pulled the door open, I slurred, "Hey man, get me the fuck downtown." The cabbie jumped out of the car and said, "Hey! Who are you?! No, no, I'm not giving you a ride!" I said, "What? You just said to meet you here in twenty minutes, and you dropped me off here like four hours ago, ass wipe!" The guy replied, "No, no, I didn't drop you off. Some guy who looked like you, he was coming here with a girl." That's right--the cabbie thought Seamus was a girl.
I was too drunk to get into it with the guy, so I slipped into my natural habit and started screaming and cursing. In a fit of rage, I balled up the tinfoil falafel wrapper and gunned it as hard as I could at the back windshield of the cab, spraying lettuce and sauce every which way. The cabbie started around the car to no doubt kick my ass. There's no doubt that he would have murdered my drunken ass.
However, right at that moment, two hippie guys came over and talked the cabbie down. He finally agreed to give me a ride if only my number came up on his phone when I tried to call him As I climbed into the car, I remember screaming, "This is so fucking childish! Woo-hoo! Big fucking hoot! Let's all whip our dicks out and start prancing around like it's the mother fucking harvest festival when MY FUCKING NUMBER COMES UP ON YOUR FUCKING PHONE, ASSHOLE!"
Of course, when my number did come up on the phone, he was super-apologetic and asked what had happened to the girl with whom I'd arrived at the show. Not wanting to explain that Seamus was actually a dude, I told him that I'd grown tired of that chick, killed her, and dumped her corpse into the river, as was the common custom here in America with unwanted or tiresome dates. (Oddly, he seemed to buy it.) Meanwhile, the two hippie guys thought I was a riot, though they were growing visibly apprehensive of this walking, shouting disaster they'd unintentionally adopted.
It wasn't until we were quite a distance away from Riverbend that it dawned on me to ask where the hell we were going. It turns out that the hippie guys were staying at a hotel in Newport, a town in Kentucky just across the river from Cincy. They assured me that there were a bunch of bars in that neck of the woods, and that I could get a ride back downtown with ease. Lacking any sort of plan of my own, I said it sounded cool. The journey was quick and uneventful thereafter.
During the fifteen-foot walk from the cab into the bar, I decided to resume drinking heavily and abandon an outside hope for more food. The bar was housed in an old Victorian structure that looked like it might have been a train station at some point, sitting slightly elevated from the road on a small ridge. In a strange way, the spirits from an age long passed were calling me to drink; who am I to disagree with spirits from an age long passed?
The second I walked into the bar, I knew that I would take over. It possessed a certain white trash charm and air of mildew that instantly caught my fancy. I went to the back of the bar with the hippie guys and bought them a beer as thanks for breaking up my potential altercation with the cabbie. As it turns out, they were from Detroit, so they were grateful to meet a stranger who did anything but whip out a gun and rob them.
As the $2 cans of Pabst began to flow, and as I started to get re-drunk on many more shots of tequila, I noticed that the hippie guys were really becoming scared of me. I noticed that this was because I was pounding my beers at a very alarming rate, easily three or four times faster than they were. I was also shouting and screaming, laughing hysterically at anything anyone said. I was a mess and making an awesome time out of a fairly shitty scenario.
After around an hour of getting re-drunk, some old guy who'd been standing in the corner approached me. At first I thought that he must be the resident queen of the town, and that I'd have to go through the boring retinue of mocking the shit out of some homo. I was wrong. The old guy said, "Hey, you're somebody," to which I slapped him on the back and replied, "Yeah, and you're somebody too, pal!" And I started laughing like a complete maniac. (I presume that that burst of laughter sent the Detroit hippies on their way, because I didn't see them for the rest of the night not long after that.) Then old guy said, "No, I mean, you're somebody famous."And I replied, "Well...actually...you got me. I didn't want to let on, but you got me, I give you credit." I stuck out my hand. "Nick Lachey, how you doin'?" And the guy said, "I knew you was somebody!" We shook hands, that little being all it took to convince him that I was the member of a boy band and the star of my own MTV reality show.
The guy started introducing me all over the bar as Nick Lachey, who I don't think I resemble in the least. I know I'm not nearly as hairless or fake-baked, and I know that I'm not fucking Jessica Simpson. I also know that Nick Lachey could never in a million years pull off the numbers of beers I was consuming after projectile vomiting all over himself one hour before.
In time, the old guy introduced me to Lisa, who was definitely middle-aged and decidedly unattractive. No matter, I started hitting on her in earnest, having nothing better to do. I don't know if it was my puke shirt, the cheap beers, the hillbillies trying to rap along to a karaoke machine, or whatever combination of the above. But I was completely on fire, just the hands-down king of the universe. At one point Lisa said, "You're smart. I bet you'd be good on Jeopardy." I was so drunk, I had transcended to Jeopardy intelligent in the eyes of a woman who may or may not have all of her teeth.
In the midst of hitting on Lisa, Freddy called me back with our buddy Joel's number. I jotted it down on a cocktail napkin, and he hung up on me after remarking how wasted I sounded. I turned back to Lisa, and with nary one word between us, I started making out with her at the bar. It was equal parts gross and awesome.
After a solid fifteen minutes of public groping, Lisa pulled herself away and said, "Hold on, I want you to meet my daughter. She's got a great singing voice. You should discover her. Leann!" A slender girl came our way, past the karaoke machine, which had recently been powering her painful attempt at some bad country song. (After all, we were in Kentucky.)Leann wasn't too attractive either, but at least she wasn't fifty. In fact, Leann might have been the ugliest person there who wasn't technically old enough to drink. When I think about it, there were quite a few underage girls in there, and I wound up with the ugliest of the bunch. As you might expect, I could care less about that detail. So I started hitting on Leanne. After a few minutes of small talk, I started making out with her, too.
[For those of you who've gotten the turns of events confused, or are simply scanning for the Cliff's Notes version, let me summarize the events of the night for you. I got drunk, puked all over myself, got drunk again to Kentucky karaoke, then made out with a daughter and her mother over $2 Pabst cans.]
When Lisa started to nag after my number, it finally dawned on me that I should get the fuck out of there. So I slid her the napkin with my buddy Joel's number, and across the top of it I wrote in huge letters, "Nick Lachey." I sort of felt sorry for her when she looked at me, with these doe-wide eyes and said, "You're nothing like you are on t.v." I'm not sure exactly what that statement meant, given that I've never actually been on television. I don't know much, but I'm certain that I'm absolutely nothing like the never-before-tried t.v. version of me. I'd never be able to dream up these events or my bad behaviors.With Lisa on one arm and Leann on the other, I began to order many more cheap beers than I could possibly drink before last call, and I went on a crusade against anyone daring to leave a floater. The ladies started nagging me to let them take me to breakfast and (disturbingly) back home, but I resisted. Why push your luck, right? Also, I had flashes of 'Deliverance' running through my head, what with the toothless hillbillies, and the giant booze filtering system my body had become. If I were not raised with a strong sense of moral centrism, I would have probably forged ahead into a scene that would have been resembled an IHOP colliding with the worst porn you could ever imagine. Fuck a religious education, I guess.
When Lisa and Leanne finally went out to the parking lot, I swiftly ducked into the bathroom and, thankfully, out of their lives.
When I stumbled back up to the bar, I was able to bribe the bartender to sell me three more beers for "the ride home." I definitely didn't need them, but he sold them to me anyway. God bless America. As the bars in Kentucky are open until 3, I had been re-drinking there for a solid three hours or more by that point. I was beyond shitfaced, a long-term veteran of sobered up, and found myself passing into and through a realm of non-existence by the time I was re-drinking.
I went outside and saw two dudes sitting on the porch. I must have said something rude, because I remember dodging an empty beer can as I dove down the stairs to street level. After I screamed something profane at the porch fuckers, my loose neck muscles happened to flick my line of sight across the street. There was a large sign in front of the house acknowledging it as the boyhood home of Brigadier General John T. Thompson, inventor of the Thompson sub-machine gun.
Earlier that week, the Cubs had been playing an away series at Cincy, and their terrible color guy, Bob Brenly, started talking about how he likes to do something culturally significant in each city he visits. As it turns out, he specifically mentioned the boyhood home of Brigadier General John T. Thompson as the cultural highlight of that trip. It turns out that this idiot's idea of a museum is a bar in a converted rail station with some ridiculously marginal historical happenstance attached to it. What a fucking dolt! When I realized the comedy of this, I fell on the grass laughing and called most everyone I could think of. Some of you received voice messages from this point in the night. I hope that this serves to clarify some of the unintentional confusion that no doubt followed in the wake of these messages. Please understand and appreciate my state of total re-drunkenness.
The elation of my discovery was quickly tempered by the realization that northern Kentucky doesn't have cabs as the hour approaches 4 a.m. I was too shitfaced to realize or care, but after fewer than ten cars passed in twenty minutes, none of which were cabs, I acknowledged the eventuality of what must happen. I pounded one of my beers, threw my shirt and shoes into my pockets, and started to walk home, half naked, sweating profusely, and loving life.
I paused on a bridge to pee into the river as I pounded another beer. It felt pretty good.
I stopped to pee on the Reds' park, and on Bengals' stadium as well. That felt pretty good too.
I drank the final beer while waiting for a light to cross from the riverfront area into the downtown. I didn't pee there, but I bet it would have felt good.
I stopped in the middle of the deserted street in front of the Cincy branch of the Federal Reserve and pissed right there in open view. That felt pretty great, until a security guard appeared out of the building. Though he was old and slow, I was drunk and half-naked, so I bustled off, satisfied with my third public urination of the night.
My final target was a statue of President James A. Garfield that stood in front of our hotel. I'd eyed it the second we drove in, and I knew I had to stain it. I was unzipped and ready to go, just as the night watchman at our hotel came out and screamed, "Don't you dare piss on Garfield!!! Don't you dare!!!" So I didn't. Instead, I peed on the front of the hotel. The guard somehow seemed okay with that. In Cincy, I guess you just can't mess with James A. Garfield.
When I finally got up to the room, Seamus was (as expected) already passed out in his bedroom. I woke him up and, after he expressed shock at my sorry state, exclaimed to him that we needed food in a hurry, but he replied that there was none to be had. "Bullshit!" I screamed.
I called the front desk and asked what they did when they got hungry and all the restaurants were closed. The guy at the front desk said (I'm not making this up), "Well, I usually just take a sandwich in my pocket out to the bars with me." I reacted with unbridled shock and amusement at this absurd response, and I told the guy he was the weirdest person I'd ever talked to, then I rudely hung up on him.
Then, I finally passed out.
In the morning, I told Seamus about my struggles to keep sane and free from ejection, the comedy of the mother-daughter scene, and my adventurous walk home.He had an amusing story as well. He'd also gotten into a car with some strangers, who had dropped him off at a seafood restaurant downtown, thankfully not too far from the hotel. Before exiting the car, Seamus had spit out the tinfoil from his falafel all over the back of the guy's car. (We'd gone to the exact same food tent--it was probably the first one after the exit, since we were both totally shitfaced and somehow managed to find it.) He said he sat there at the end of this oyster bar until he couldn't keep his eyes open any longer, and he supposed he fell asleep for a bit.One of the bartenders supposedly called for a cab before asking him to leave, so Seamus went outside without a struggle. Unfortunately, the cab never did show up, and Seamus decided to resume his nap right there on the sidewalk. He thinks he was passed out for at least an hour before a different cab pulled up, shook him awake, and screamed, "Dangerous! Is very dangerous to sleep in the street!" Unable to form coherent sentences, Seamus flashed his 2-for-1 drinks card from the hotel at the cabbie, and he miraculously made it up to his bed in one piece.
He let me sleep in all morning, but it's not like I was in any shape to move much anyway. I woke up and Seamus had again put breakfast on my bed: a big jug of some non-carbonated non-juice orange drink. I stumbled into the living room after we traded stories, he told me about how he'd already been out roaming the streets. He got a paper and was watching some unimportant update on his new favorite obsession: the Natalee Holloway murder. I tried drinking the orange stuff and smoking a cigarette, but neither helped me feel better, especially since the update on Fox News was that the girl who'd been dead for two months was probably dead. News-flash my ass. Two things I know: the sky is blue, and Natalee Holloway is fish food.
Seamus ordered me to shower up at about 1. It should come as no surprise that I booted in the shower repeatedly. I must have brushed my teeth ten times during that single shower. My stomach absolutely hated me. It was quite the struggle, and it didn't do much to make me feel better, either physically or about myself.
We packed and left the room, greatly underutilized set-up that it was.After ditching our crap in the car, we went around the corner to Scotti's, an old Italian place around the corner from the hotel. It was very dark in there, very conducive to collecting one's shit. I tried to drink some water and eat some bread, but certain things in there really irritated the crap out of me. There was an exposed light bulb just over Seamus's head that was really fucking with me--that might have been the top irritant, along with an odor that was neither revolting nor appealing, but an odor all the same. I nearly booted at the table, but I held off until I got downstairs.
When I pushed open a swinging door at the bottom of the stairs, I was clobbered in the face by the world's most terrible basement reek. I had to hustle to the far end of the narrow basement to the bathroom, and I unloaded the second I caught sight of the stall. I laughed at how rude it is to puke in a restaurant, and I tried to aim it all into the crapper. If the restaurant had been close to busy, my vomiting might have posed a huge problem, but thankfully it was a quiet Wednesday afternoon. I cleaned my own waste from my face and headed back upstairs.
As it is my standard order, and since I needed to deliver nothing but the easiest dish into my weary stomach, I ordered fettuccini Alfredo, which they (lamely) listed as "Fettuccini Scotti." It was pretty good and went down the hatch quite easily. My general estimation of the place is that, after you discount the fact that I puked in the basement, if you ever find yourself in Cincy, hit up Scotti's. It's really good stuff. We ate and paid, and there was not much to that.
We lit up post-meal cigarettes and with a wave of fond farewell, headed onto the highway north up to Indy.
The drive was innocuous, particularly more so than one might expect after the shit show that was the night before. For, as beautiful the drive into a river town is, the drive out is much less fascinating and slightly depressing, as you head onto the endless flats of the Indiana plains.
As we approached Indy and made the turn to the highway towards Deer Creek, I mentioned that we could go do a little side-trip to the Speedway. Seamus was against the idea, favoring the idea of getting to the venue as quickly as possible. While the area of Ohio surrounding Cincy is beautiful, I'm sorry to say that there's not that much beauty about Indiana. It's like the land that the glaciers forgot. There are no hills there, neither are there many lakes. I've been all over that state, yet for the life of me, I can conjure nothing but images of flat blandness.
Seamus sped past the afternoon traffic toward the venue. Deer Creek is a little bit northeast of the city, and you must drive around a beltway to reach that part of the city.
I wondered aloud why a famous concert venue such as Deer Creek is connected to the federal highway system by nothing more than a 2-lane road. We sped along this (literally, nothing more than a) rural street at 80 miles an hour, dying to get back to Panicland. I'll never forget this one fence that would prospectively block drivers along the oncoming lane from the potential of a forgettable creek. One would think that the damage from driving into a creek would be far less than the damage from slamming into a big-ass metal fence. But, then you think about it, and you're like, "Oh yeah, I'm in Indiana."
Proof that the housing bubble is in full bulbous force: People are buying houses in and around Noblesville. Fuck me. These people are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for these houses. Seriously? From my point-of-view, these people are the same as the retards who bought houses near airports: No fucking shit, it's going to be really fucking loud all the time. You know they'll bitch and moan about this fact, too, just like the airport's neighbors.
It was such a nice day out. After the 100+ of Cincy, Noblesville was about 80 when we pulled into the lot. The air was intensely clear and splendid. There were a few clouds in the sky, but they were so non-threatening as to cause us to laugh. The air was somewhat crisp, one when you don't have to try overly hard to relish every lungful of fresh air. We cursed ourselves for not bringing a football or gloves for playing catch.
We were among the first people in the lot. From my estimation, we were about the 60th car into the lot. Nestled near the front entrance to the world's coolest little amphitheatre (or, the coolest that I've ever been to), we threw open all the doors and windows on my car, and started blasting live Panic tunes for all the world to hear.
The whole day elevated to a level beyond pristine. I sat on the back bumper of my Jeep and thought, "There's nowhere I'd rather be than right here at this very moment." There aren't words for the elation I was experiencing, and I'm not really sure of why. Have you ever felt completely all good? Like there's literally not one worry at all? I was consumed by this feeling that I just couldn't miss, and that was pretty much the case. Everything was awesome; it was like I was on ecstasy, but I swear I hadn't taken a thing.
During his early morning wanderings in Cincy, Seamus bought us some beer. As you might expect, he grabbed the cheapest shit beer in all of Cincinnati, because cheap shit local beer is essential for any road trip to be considered monumentally awesome. It turns out that this beer is so cheap, it's not even from Cincy but came all the way from exotic Pittsburgh. We were sipping on a 12-er of the Old Style of Pittsburgh, a city we weren't even really close to to begin with. Nonetheless, it was perfect. Nothing could bring us down. We were flying high.
Drawing upon nearly forgotten MacGuyver episodes from our youth, Seamus built a legitimate double-lined cooler from the wastebaskets in our room. It wasn't pretty, but it worked like a charm, nestled safely in the back of my car. And, most importantly, though mostly unbeknownst to us, it helped to maneuver our closest-to-the-venue spot away from the cheapest beer in Pittsburgh toward the cheapest beer in St. Louis, a considerable feat when one consideres that we weren't really trying to accomplish this at all in the first place.
A few days after the fact, it struck me how much we had in fact overtaken the parking lot at Deer Creek. Nothing stood in the way of our elation; we were like a freight train of pleasure. After the trials of the evening before, we found ourselves completely high on life, almost in spite of ourselves. Sitting in that bucolic setting, in the bright and refreshing summer sunshine, barely a hundred feet from where Panic was ready to levy their thunder, we didn't have to try very hard to contribute to the atmosphere. But we did, and we did in a great way.
While standing around the back of the car, a variety of hysterical events transpired. First, we started giving these terrible beers out to various people. To a person, none thought that the beer was really that bad, and I suppose it wasn't. I'd promised my liver that I wouldn't drink at all that day, but the positive response from random lot people forced me to consider one. Or two. Or three. It had a strong old-man aspect to it, like a watered-down Old Style, and it in spite of itself.
Seamus was pretty drunk soon after we ditched the car, and I fully suportive of his quest. After all, I was slowly realizing that I was in the midst of the perfect day. Suddenly, he looked at me and belted out a great big, "YEAH!" and lifted up this left sleeve, to reveal a bald eagle tattoo, so small as you could not even imagine. I laughed my ass off when I saw it; it was so small and unimpressive, it was unreal. It was like us at that moment: not making a big deal of it at all, we were simultaneously awesome and yet slightly lame. Though I completely understand the prejudices held against jam band concertgoers, these critics will never understand the raw fun that transpires at these gatherings. I cannot hide the fact that I love the scene so much, despite dread locked Wookies and smelly chicks with hairy armpits, who I pretty much despise. They are a part of the scenery, as much as the random piles of dog shit you'd find in Lincoln Park, which likewise fail to detract from the wonder of the thing.
I could go on in great detail about this show, but I literally can't think of words to capture the unadulterated joy of the moment. A few highlights:
1.) The who parked next to us liked our crappy Pittsburgh beer and traded us a few of them for a few Bud Lights, which we promptly traded for a few Miller Lites. All involved were happy with the transactions.
2.) Guy-Parked-Next-to-Us was scared of not only Seamus and I, but also of Seamus' completely hard-assed soaring eagle tattoo. The whole thing became even more comical when his girlfriend showed up. She was really cute, and she thought the tattoo was the shit as well.
3.) Some random burned-out, tripping hippie came by with a Frisbee, and Seamus started playing catch with him. I found it unbelievably hysterical that, though Seamus was not the provider of the Frisbee, he was much more able to catch and throw the thing. The crazy Frisbee guy was all over the place. It was hysterical. At one point, he gunned the disc at Seamus--straight into the windshield of a parked car, missing a girl's head by no more than two feet. It was unreal.
4.) We had a few (typically) strange conversations with Mic-on-the-Hat-Guy, who Seamus knows from his days living in Champaign. It is very likely that the hippie music people amongst us have seen Mic-on-the-Hat-Guy before. He's got a microphone duct-taped to his floppy hat, and he's as hippie as they come, wearing the same Jerry Garcia Band shirt every time I've ever seen him. This guy is 100% on the bus. You can imagine that the shows he tapes sound like shit, but he's so proud to be taping in this out-of-the-norm way, and that's just awesome. Mic-on-the-Hat-Guy is a complete trip.
5.) We saw Ted, another regular random conversation on Midwest tour stops. Ted was, needless to say, acting like a bugged out weirdo, but we bought a bunch of koozies from him anyway. I've read many grumbles on message boards that these koozies were pretty lame. I didn't think so. So what if they're flourescent and have a line from a song that Panic doesn't even play? Big deal! They keep my damn beer cold!
6.) Unfortunately, my fears that the lights were on overnight in the Cincy garage were confirmed when the car suddenly died, right in the middle of the wicked Barstools & Dreamers from 05/07/97. Since we were the sound system for the lot at that point, people were pissed we had killed the music. So I stood on the roof and shouted, "I didn't turn it off! The battery died! I'll get it back on in a few minutes!" And, with that, a round of cheers and clapping went up from the crowd. Seamus flagged down a couple security guards, who called some guy over with a supped-up golf cart that had one of those portable battery chargers built into the back. He jumped my Jeep, and the pre-show tunes resumed. Those fifteen minutes when the car battery died were literally the only wrinkles in an otherwise flawless day.
What more can I say about the perfect day? It happened. It was so nice out. We took over the tunes for the lot. The show itself was absolutely terrific. It might have been the best Panic show I've ever seen, and I've seen many (37 and counting). Download and listen to it if you don't believe me.
I somehow made the drive home, though I had to make a pit stop in Ft. Wayne for Combos and a Coke. I bought a Bic lighter emblazoned with "Super Pantry," which I plan to keep until it runs out of fluid. [Incidentally It did finally die--at the Jimmy Buffett show on Labor Day Sunday at Wrigley Field, of all places!]
Panic shows tend to follow this strange dichotomy. If one night is terribly brutal, the other will be great. It's all what you make of it, I guess, and I made this particular Panic mini-tour as much as it could (or should) possibly be.
For me, there's nothing like getting out there into our great big America, to take a chance at seeing how my good old home-tested chops play in a completely unfamiliar venue. Not being a big planner, I usually let road trips come to me. In terms of touring buddies, Seamus is my go-to guy. Not surprising for someone who loves the hospitality industry, he's become very adept at finding hotels, restaurants, and bars along the trails to good music.
Much earlier in the summer (back in May, I think it was) Seamus told me I was going on a mini-tour with Widespread Panic. (If you've never heard of them or--gasp--if you don't like them, you're lucky I'm not around, because I would ask if you were paying attention, begin taunting your mom for giving birth to you, and slapping you repeatedly in the face. Well, maybe I wouldn't go that far, but I'd be extremely shocked, at any rate. Widespread is awesome.) Given my devotion to the band, and considering it was my Summer of George, I told him that I would make it happen.
And happen it did. As I previously offered (albeit, through a drunken haze) only the briefest hints about the first portion of the tour (Sunday's Grant Park Panic show and Monday's Cubs game), I'd like to focus this post on the last leg of the journey, during which Seamus and I traveled with our favorite band to Cincy and Indy. Brace yourself.
After falling asleep at 4:30 the night before after a long, long detour after the Cubs game, I awoke at 9 a.m. on Tuesday--still pretty much drunk--to find two bacon-egg-n-cheese biscuits and hash browns from McDonald's lying on my chest. I muttered, "What the...?"Seamus jumped into my room and shouted, "Eat up, shower up, and sack up, you mother fucker! We're hitting the road! Panic tour, baby, yeah!!!"Since he'd wisely left the bar early and got to bed at a decent hour, he had been awake for hours and was raring to go. (I'd honestly meant to follow a similar course of action, but I inadvertently got tequila shitfaced into the wee hours. Such is life.) Though I was woozy and disoriented, we got our shit together, stopped by my Starbucks, and started the drive south to Cincy. Needless to say, Seamus was handling driving responsibilities.
Seamus made me promise that I'd stay awake until we got on the highway to Indy, and I agreed. The problem was, by the time we got into Indiana, the adrenaline was counter-acting the booze and sleep deprivation of the night before, causing me to be completely wired. It didn't help much that Seamus kept laughing and reminding me what a retard I was for forcing the drunken issue on the eve of two days' driving. Surprisingly, given the number of tequila shots I'd had less than 10 hours before, I was overcome more with tiredness than nausea, and I found myself in a strange state of exhaustedness and glee for the rest of the day. We joked the whole way that we were going to tell people that we were Nick Lachey, because he's the only famous person we could think of who's from Cincinnati. We stopped once for gas and snacks.
The drive to Cincy is not bad at all--about 5 hours--and southern Ohio is a very pretty part of the country. Cincy is a river town, so there's this sudden splurge of hills all over the place, all very green and rolling and beautiful. The town is a series of clusters of buildings organized along the hills slanting down toward the river. The town designers have done a great job of planning. Every city in the Midwest wants to compare itself to Chicago, but I found Cincy to be more reminiscent of parts of Lower Manhattan, with small parks placed in the middle of four-lane boulevards. There are a few tall buildings, but no massive skyscrapers that would stand too prominently in a big metropolitan skyline. The center of the city possesses a certain quaintness and friendliness that's 100% appealing.
We ditched the car on the first floor of the dark garage attached to our hotel, the Garfield Suites. As I sought my lighter, iPod, GC, etc., I was annoyed at the darkness inside the garage, which leads me to believe that I may or may not have turned on an overhead light. I was so tired, hung-over, and punch-drunk at that point, I don't remember whether or not I turned on the overhead light. It was totally irrelevant at that point, as our drive to abandon was suddenly overwhelming.
We entered the lobby down a strange and winding concrete passageway, through the underbelly of the hotel. After some confusion in tunnel land, we at last found our way to the front desk.It looked like any other front desk at any other hotel: staffed by three people who don't really care, all wearing suits, all with a slight sneer. Seamus usually handles these situations, as my tolerance for stupidity amongst service staff is rightly known to be terrible. I did, however, have to turn over my credit card for deposit, which I did not at all mind considering how little time or effort I'd invested in planning the trip. The guy at the counter was all fake-smiles as he turned over our room keys and the surprise bonus of a couple of 2-for-1 drink cards.In our just-off-the-road stupor, we wandered from the check-in area directly to the bar--which was obviously closed, to the point that the television sets and overhead lights were all turned off. We said something to the effect of, "What the fuck?! Give us beer!" The guy informed us that the deal was only good from 8 to 11, which did us no good whatsoever. We made some dick comments about the weakness of a hotel bar that's sometimes closed, and hopped onto the elevator.
As it turns out, Seamus really scored on booking the hotel. The room was almost comically humongous for our purposes. We had a full 2-bedroom apartment with a great view of downtown. The room had a huge den, a huge porch, a huge kitchen, a huge bathroom, and 2 huge bedrooms, for only $100 per night. I stated upon entering that I felt guilty for having so much space that was likely to go unused. Predictably, we ditched our shit, had a quick smoke in our non-smoking room, and took off into the intense sunshine.
Now, as I have gotten us as far as Cincinnati, our immediate destination point, I must pause for a moment to tell you something extraordinarily crucial for understanding this tale. The weather in Cincy was hotter than you could possibly imagine. The thermometers read 105, but that's not the half of it. Mercury doesn't appreciate such things as "pollution" and "heat index" and "hot-ass wind". Cincy was suffering the effects of all of these, to a stupefying degree. I thought it was as hot as it could be in Chicago the previous Sunday, but I was wrong. It was even hotter in Cincy. It was literally hotter than hell. Between the hot air and the moisture, I felt like I was walking on the bottom of a giant Jacuzzi.
Upon leaving the hotel, we were able to make our way exactly one block down the street. The heat was taking such an immediate toll that we nearly stumbled into slow-moving oncoming traffic. I told Seamus, "Fuck them. If we get hit by a car and die, at least we might stop sweating." He agreed.The heat was driving us completely oblivious to our surroundings. It became so overwhelming that we abandoned our original destination (a place Seamus had heard about from his cousin), and instead we steered into the closest open bar. For the life of me, I will never remember the name of the place, but it's mostly inconsequential anyway. It was so hot out that we simply needed to get inside, and any place would have been just fine. Any place, in this case, turned out to be rather okay.
By any measure, the place was cool. They'd obviously spent a ton of money in recent months to spruce it up--flat screens, recently varnished wood, new glass behind the bar areas, hot waitresses in black bowties, all that good stuff. Whether or not it had been a bar for a long time doesn't really matter; it was a bar on July 26th, and that was good enough for my purposes.Seamus and I sidled up and started double-ordering the usual: Miller Lite and tequila shots. On account of Panic in Cincy, we were missing a Cubs-Giants installment of the Night Game Challenge, so we talked baseball for a short time to make up for it, including many extrapolations about why Dusty's such a crack head.
We must have had four or five rounds each before the bartender asked, "Are you guys from Chicago? What are you doing in town?" He happened to be an alumnus of Deerfield High School, a few miles north of my hometown. As luck would have it, he also happened to be in my class year. I mentioned to him that I'd gone to one of the greatest parties of my life in Deerfield, senior year, at a guy named Ben's house, and he froze for a second. Seamus looked at me like, 'What the fuck did you just say to him that made him brain fart?' But the guy just smiled and said, "Were you the guy that puked all over the subwoofer, and then felt up the host's girlfriend's boobs in front of the whole party?" With a modicum of shame, I answered affirmatively.
With that, the conversation began to flow as furiously as the (suddenly much taller) shots of Cuervo Gold. Seamus started talking about the New Trier-Deerfield sports rivalry, especially football. The bartender stopped keeping track of our tab, so that by the end of our stay we owed them practically nothing. We suddenly turned 'pre-show drinks' into 'getting drunker than fuck.'In the midst of the escalating shit show, I called my G-Man buddy and told him to leave me the number of our friend Joel, who went to law school in Chicago and moved back to Cincy about a year before. Freddy said he'd call me back later with the number, as he was busy at the office.
After this long hour of heavy drinking, another of the bartenders heard about our need to go to Riverbend and offered to arrange us a ride, as the venue is located several miles outside of the city. We were so very thankful for the help that all four of us did a shot together. I then ordered Seamus and myself two more shots and two beers apiece, and headed to the bathroom, upon which I dutifully left my mark. When I stumbled back to the bar, I took a deep breath and pounded all four of my drinks in one cigarette--about five minutes flat. It only slightly dawned on me at that point that drinking so heavily on an empty stomach was probably not a great idea. I told myself I'd eat something starchy as quickly as possible once we got to the venue.
I am, unfortunately, loathe to follow my own best advice, unless the situation deals with raw survival. As it happened, the situation did happen to come down to a slightly less extreme level of survival, but I ignored my best instincts regardless, foolishly opting to soldier on.
The conversation on the ride to Riverbend was dominated by our cabbie, an unfortunate occurrence when you consider that he had been here for about a week and spoke virtually no English.
Side note to those of you living in major metropolitan areas, under the impression that your foreign cab drivers speak little to no English: you are probably unaware of the fact that those cabbies have actually been here for at least a couple years, which were likely spent in various smaller metropolitan areas. To the alcoholics of Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Portland: I have no idea how you manage to get home. My prayers are with you. Godspeed.
Since we were hoping to get psyched up for a great show during the ride, as I focused on ignoring the angry liquors swirling around my stomach, our particular fresh-off-the-boat immigrant was talking about some cabbie in Chicago who was shot and killed the night before. I remember saying, "Shit, I didn't do it. Can't we talk about something kind of happy?" Seamus told him about the rule in Chicago, that smart cabbies don't drive on numbered streets, period, and how that guy was just a total dip shit who didn't know about the rule. Our guy seemed skeptical. No matter what we said, he would not be convinced that Chicago cabbies tend to do pretty well. (Fuck him anyway, as you will soon see.)
After a long drive on these big hills overlooking the Ohio, we finally arrived at a small amusement/water park nestled on a green riverside. It was positively idyllic, and I relished the moment when the cab would pull up to the pavilion and let us into the glory of Panicland on one of America's great inland waterways. Unfortunately, we must have uttered something in English that doesn't translate well to Swahili (or, more likely, something in English that's downright offensive), and the guy made us get out on the road into Riverbend. He was kind of a dick about it, but we paid the fare and took down his number, with assurances that he'd come back for us at the end of the night.
As the car pulled away, the waves of heat slammed into us once more. Then it dawned on me that the parking lot was not only immensely large, but also blacktopped. I braced myself as much as possible, but it was no use whatsoever.
This parking lot was big. I mean, really big. I felt like I was trekking across a blacktopped Sahara. I am not exaggerating when I say that the pavement was hovering around 120. I slumped into a heap onto the sign at the entrance to the parking lot and thought to myself, "Nice fifty-foot walk; only 800 to go!" Halfway to the venue, I stopped noticing that I was extremely lightheaded, or that my body was pouring off sweat at an alarming rate. All I wanted at that point was another beer or some water, as I threw one foot in front of the other like a goddamn zombie.After what felt like hours (it was probably closer to fifteen minutes), we were horrified to discover a venue likewise completely covered in blacktop--from the back areas, through the uncovered seats, right through the pavilion, up to and behind the stage. Every surface of the place was throwing off heat, and I mean throwing off heat. We'd unsuspectingly thrown ourselves onto a giant frying pan.
In our resolve to keep the train on the track, we headed directly over to the beer line. Seamus insulted half the staff for getting the book out to check our Illinois licenses. I was fighting extreme light-headedness for all of this, and I remember throwing one of the guys a rude, vile, and probably incomprehensible insult or three. In spite of this, we left the beer area with two beers and a bottle of water each. We pounded the water straight away, and stumbled away double-fisting Bud Heavies--easily my least favorite beer but the only thing available on tap.
I was acutely aware that my battle for consciousness was growing more difficult by the second. Halfway to the pavilion (from the beer stand, mind you--a distance of maybe 50 yards), we lunged into a sliver of shade provided by a bathroom pavilion, hoping for any respite from the relentless heat. As you can probably guess, the difference between the sun and the shade is negligible when it's broken 100 degrees. I put one of my beers down in the shade, so I could pound the other one before it got too warm. I noticed with alarm that the plastic's color got foggier and foggier with each passing minute. It was that hot--the ground was altering plastic.
Seamus slurred his way through a conversation with a semi-Wookie hippie chick he knew from a message board or past shows--I can't remember what the connection was. She was the first (and, frankly, the only one with the opportunity) to say, "Are you guys okay? You seem really fucking wasted. Want some water?" I shouted, "Sure...nah...ah....give me some of that shit!" She started spraying me with lukewarm water from her camelback, but I already so totally soaked with sweat, the water had little effect.
It dawned on me during the impromptu shower that I should have just gone home. If I'd had any of my facilities working properly that day, I might have done so. If you'd asked me right then, I would have honestly told you honestly that I was done for. I literally closed my eyes and said to myself, "Paddy, you're fucking done." Adding to complications, Seamus was no better. He was dripping sweat, pale, and drunker than fuck. Come to think of it, I'm not sure that either of us had properly re-hydrated from the Panic show of the Sunday before in Grant Park, or from getting shitfaced at the Cubs game Monday. I think we were both severely dehydrated and overly intoxicated. Actually, I know we were.After it was determined that the beers we'd placed on the ground were too hot and nasty to drink, we went around the bathroom pavilion to the general admission hill. Because of this summer's drought, the hill was a slope of straw and hot, packed dirt. There wasn't even a tree to sit under, that area being disproportionately small to the size of the pavilion. It was the most desolate hill I'd ever seen.
Seamus began to shoot the shit with some random people from somewhere or another, I think somewhere in the Carolinas. I might or might not have mumbled something about my necessity to find some shelter from the heat, and so I dropped into an open seat in the very back row of the pavilion, not thirty feet from where I'd just been standing on the lawn.
Then, most is pretty much blackness.
I remember things, of course. I remember hoping against hope that it would start raining to relieve the brutal sun; wishing I hadn't had so many shots of tequila before the show; wishing I'd eaten dinner; wishing I'd relentlessly pounded Gatorade for the whole 5-hour car trip; wishing I'd taken a nap; wishing I would stop sweating myself damp. I remember accepting that all of these things had dawned on me far too late to do anything about them, and that my fate was sealed. At that, the music started.
I've seen the set list of the show, and I vaguely remember bits of it all. It wasn't that I was too drunk to know what was going on. I was shit housed but relatively aware of which songs were being played. I remember slurring to myself, "Goddamn you, Schools!" during a really nasty intro into "Rock," which prompted me to begin heaving in earnest. (I bet Dave would get a kick out of hearing that his low notes caused me puke.)
I remember everything in a very subliminal fashion, very vague notes and images of the band as they wailed away in spite of the heat. I wrote the following on a piece of paper in my pocket:
"One Arm
Bowlegged
Lilly*
Hatfield
Ro
WHAT A POOR SHOWING!
ife d. wartime, r h mom"
Panic freaks will no doubt find this amusing, because you've probably been there before. To non-Panicheads, this means that I was literally knocked out of commission for the whole show, except for the first five songs and the two encores. (Click here to see how much I more or less missed out on.)
What happened in between? Well...I puked. A ton. Not just a lot, but literally, tons of vomit. Gallon after gallon of puke. Relentless streams, at times of terrifying force, came flying from depths previously unknown. These puking sessions lasted so long that I was aware of the probability--nay, the necessity--of my being kicked out of the show. By all rights, I should have been thrown out. It's a miracle that no authorities saw me, right there, in the last row of the pavilion, puking like I was on the verge of death.
I had my head down between my knees for the literally entire show, spewing my brains out. I was in this position for so long that all of the muscles in my neck and back skull were strained and hurting pretty badly for the next few days. When I realized that I'd strained most of the muscles groups in and around my head, I wondered if I could in good faith count the songs of this show as ones I'd rightfully witnessed. I don't think I can.
At one point during my waterfall session, a guardian angel came over and threw his arm onto my shoulder. "Hey, bro, me and my girlfriend are here from Greensboro, and we noticed you're having a tough time of it, man."I probably mumbled something that was nice but leave-me-alone that probably came out, "Huff, naff herr herr herr. Shaboo." I meant to say that I appreciated his help, but to leave me the fuck alone. He was unrelentingly kind and said, "Hey, if you have to do your thing, do your thing, just know we've got your back. Tell me if you need water or a Coke. We've got your back, man." I remember taking a deep breath and forcing myself to conjure up enough lung capacity to utter the words, "Dude, I appreciate all the help, but please get the fuck away from me before I projectile vomit on you." I'm sure it came out once again as, "Thoo, foh da namina, hoot da toy to the haggin, you fucker." Remember, this guy was just trying to be nice. In all probability, he's some guy who's been to about 100 Panic shows and was simply looking to make everyone's experience a little better. But I never even looked the guy in the face; I will never have any idea of what he looks like. All I can slightly remember is that he had shorts on, and that they were olive green and of the cargo variety.
I unfortunately also remember projectile vomiting all over this poor guy's bare legs.
Needless to say, the poor guy jumped up and ran away, never to be heard from again. I was left alone for a long while after that.After the second set ended, I fought myself back into an upright sitting position. This took immense amounts of strength and will. As I sat there, wiping the puke from my face, I took a deep breath and it felt great. After such a great intake of humid night air, I could think of nothing but carbon monoxide, so I went into my pockets to withdraw my cigarettes and lighter.I flared one up without even thinking about it. Out of nowhere, a security girl swooped down on me and said, "Excuse me, sir, there's no smoking in the pavilion area." I was simultaneously appalled and indignant. "After all the puking I've just done, you have a problem with a lit fucking cigarette! What is wrong with our country?! Get the fuck out of here, you Kentucky Fried Nazi!"
After the security chick grew tired of me laughing in her face as I continued to smoke my harmless cigarette, the encore started and it was really, really good.After the music ended, I returned my head to its position between my knees and focused hard on getting my shit together. When I finally looked up quite some time later, I realized that the roadies were more or less finished with breaking down the stage, and that I was one of the last people in the venue. I forced myself to stand, and ambled back to the concession area in the most deliberate fashion imaginable.
I barely made it to a doorway, which--thank God--happened to be a bathroom. I looked in the mirror and realized that I didn't appear to be covered in puke, because I'd been exclusively drinking liquors of the non-colored variety. I peeled off my hat and shirt, and threw them both into a running sink. I started up another faucet and plunged my head under the cool water. It was at that point that I looked over and saw a pair of pink and white women's tennis shoes leaving a stall. Oh yeah--oh no! I'd stumbled into the women's room, and I was standing there shirtless, giving myself a homeless-man's shower. Take! I threw on my dripping clothes and headed out the door, all the while conversing out loud with myself about what a jackass I was.
I remember trying to call Seamus and expecting no answer; none received. I figure that he was probably as fucked up as I was, and that we were both probably better off as free agents anyhow. Men can travel to places where other men cannot help them, regardless of the intentions or concerns. Cincy became one of those places.
Still dripping with water, sweat, and my own puke, I stumbled out into the parking lot and was immediately accosted by a fat hippie chick. She was looking to find a ride back to the city, and I told her that I had a number to call, on the condition that she buy me a burrito. We found an awesome falafel tent, but the guy had run out of drinks. From every bad, there comes a good. I told the fat hippie chick to head thisaway to look for drinks, and I'd head thataway to look for drinks, and that we'd meet up in a half hour back at the falafel tent. My fucking ass. After I got her to buy me some awesome parking lot grub, I completely ditched her. Take. Things suddenly started looking up.
I began to wander around the lot on a quest for some water, but the cops were already busy clearing everyone out (lame as hell), so I decided it was time to get myself home. I took out my phone and dialed the cabbie. He said to meet me back at the big sign out front in twenty minutes, back at the drop-off point. I meandered along (all right, I was walking as fast as I possibly could, which wasn't very fast at all) and made it to the front gate at the proscribe time. I saw the cabbie pull up, and I started over toward him.
As I pulled the door open, I slurred, "Hey man, get me the fuck downtown." The cabbie jumped out of the car and said, "Hey! Who are you?! No, no, I'm not giving you a ride!" I said, "What? You just said to meet you here in twenty minutes, and you dropped me off here like four hours ago, ass wipe!" The guy replied, "No, no, I didn't drop you off. Some guy who looked like you, he was coming here with a girl." That's right--the cabbie thought Seamus was a girl.
I was too drunk to get into it with the guy, so I slipped into my natural habit and started screaming and cursing. In a fit of rage, I balled up the tinfoil falafel wrapper and gunned it as hard as I could at the back windshield of the cab, spraying lettuce and sauce every which way. The cabbie started around the car to no doubt kick my ass. There's no doubt that he would have murdered my drunken ass.
However, right at that moment, two hippie guys came over and talked the cabbie down. He finally agreed to give me a ride if only my number came up on his phone when I tried to call him As I climbed into the car, I remember screaming, "This is so fucking childish! Woo-hoo! Big fucking hoot! Let's all whip our dicks out and start prancing around like it's the mother fucking harvest festival when MY FUCKING NUMBER COMES UP ON YOUR FUCKING PHONE, ASSHOLE!"
Of course, when my number did come up on the phone, he was super-apologetic and asked what had happened to the girl with whom I'd arrived at the show. Not wanting to explain that Seamus was actually a dude, I told him that I'd grown tired of that chick, killed her, and dumped her corpse into the river, as was the common custom here in America with unwanted or tiresome dates. (Oddly, he seemed to buy it.) Meanwhile, the two hippie guys thought I was a riot, though they were growing visibly apprehensive of this walking, shouting disaster they'd unintentionally adopted.
It wasn't until we were quite a distance away from Riverbend that it dawned on me to ask where the hell we were going. It turns out that the hippie guys were staying at a hotel in Newport, a town in Kentucky just across the river from Cincy. They assured me that there were a bunch of bars in that neck of the woods, and that I could get a ride back downtown with ease. Lacking any sort of plan of my own, I said it sounded cool. The journey was quick and uneventful thereafter.
During the fifteen-foot walk from the cab into the bar, I decided to resume drinking heavily and abandon an outside hope for more food. The bar was housed in an old Victorian structure that looked like it might have been a train station at some point, sitting slightly elevated from the road on a small ridge. In a strange way, the spirits from an age long passed were calling me to drink; who am I to disagree with spirits from an age long passed?
The second I walked into the bar, I knew that I would take over. It possessed a certain white trash charm and air of mildew that instantly caught my fancy. I went to the back of the bar with the hippie guys and bought them a beer as thanks for breaking up my potential altercation with the cabbie. As it turns out, they were from Detroit, so they were grateful to meet a stranger who did anything but whip out a gun and rob them.
As the $2 cans of Pabst began to flow, and as I started to get re-drunk on many more shots of tequila, I noticed that the hippie guys were really becoming scared of me. I noticed that this was because I was pounding my beers at a very alarming rate, easily three or four times faster than they were. I was also shouting and screaming, laughing hysterically at anything anyone said. I was a mess and making an awesome time out of a fairly shitty scenario.
After around an hour of getting re-drunk, some old guy who'd been standing in the corner approached me. At first I thought that he must be the resident queen of the town, and that I'd have to go through the boring retinue of mocking the shit out of some homo. I was wrong. The old guy said, "Hey, you're somebody," to which I slapped him on the back and replied, "Yeah, and you're somebody too, pal!" And I started laughing like a complete maniac. (I presume that that burst of laughter sent the Detroit hippies on their way, because I didn't see them for the rest of the night not long after that.) Then old guy said, "No, I mean, you're somebody famous."And I replied, "Well...actually...you got me. I didn't want to let on, but you got me, I give you credit." I stuck out my hand. "Nick Lachey, how you doin'?" And the guy said, "I knew you was somebody!" We shook hands, that little being all it took to convince him that I was the member of a boy band and the star of my own MTV reality show.
The guy started introducing me all over the bar as Nick Lachey, who I don't think I resemble in the least. I know I'm not nearly as hairless or fake-baked, and I know that I'm not fucking Jessica Simpson. I also know that Nick Lachey could never in a million years pull off the numbers of beers I was consuming after projectile vomiting all over himself one hour before.
In time, the old guy introduced me to Lisa, who was definitely middle-aged and decidedly unattractive. No matter, I started hitting on her in earnest, having nothing better to do. I don't know if it was my puke shirt, the cheap beers, the hillbillies trying to rap along to a karaoke machine, or whatever combination of the above. But I was completely on fire, just the hands-down king of the universe. At one point Lisa said, "You're smart. I bet you'd be good on Jeopardy." I was so drunk, I had transcended to Jeopardy intelligent in the eyes of a woman who may or may not have all of her teeth.
In the midst of hitting on Lisa, Freddy called me back with our buddy Joel's number. I jotted it down on a cocktail napkin, and he hung up on me after remarking how wasted I sounded. I turned back to Lisa, and with nary one word between us, I started making out with her at the bar. It was equal parts gross and awesome.
After a solid fifteen minutes of public groping, Lisa pulled herself away and said, "Hold on, I want you to meet my daughter. She's got a great singing voice. You should discover her. Leann!" A slender girl came our way, past the karaoke machine, which had recently been powering her painful attempt at some bad country song. (After all, we were in Kentucky.)Leann wasn't too attractive either, but at least she wasn't fifty. In fact, Leann might have been the ugliest person there who wasn't technically old enough to drink. When I think about it, there were quite a few underage girls in there, and I wound up with the ugliest of the bunch. As you might expect, I could care less about that detail. So I started hitting on Leanne. After a few minutes of small talk, I started making out with her, too.
[For those of you who've gotten the turns of events confused, or are simply scanning for the Cliff's Notes version, let me summarize the events of the night for you. I got drunk, puked all over myself, got drunk again to Kentucky karaoke, then made out with a daughter and her mother over $2 Pabst cans.]
When Lisa started to nag after my number, it finally dawned on me that I should get the fuck out of there. So I slid her the napkin with my buddy Joel's number, and across the top of it I wrote in huge letters, "Nick Lachey." I sort of felt sorry for her when she looked at me, with these doe-wide eyes and said, "You're nothing like you are on t.v." I'm not sure exactly what that statement meant, given that I've never actually been on television. I don't know much, but I'm certain that I'm absolutely nothing like the never-before-tried t.v. version of me. I'd never be able to dream up these events or my bad behaviors.With Lisa on one arm and Leann on the other, I began to order many more cheap beers than I could possibly drink before last call, and I went on a crusade against anyone daring to leave a floater. The ladies started nagging me to let them take me to breakfast and (disturbingly) back home, but I resisted. Why push your luck, right? Also, I had flashes of 'Deliverance' running through my head, what with the toothless hillbillies, and the giant booze filtering system my body had become. If I were not raised with a strong sense of moral centrism, I would have probably forged ahead into a scene that would have been resembled an IHOP colliding with the worst porn you could ever imagine. Fuck a religious education, I guess.
When Lisa and Leanne finally went out to the parking lot, I swiftly ducked into the bathroom and, thankfully, out of their lives.
When I stumbled back up to the bar, I was able to bribe the bartender to sell me three more beers for "the ride home." I definitely didn't need them, but he sold them to me anyway. God bless America. As the bars in Kentucky are open until 3, I had been re-drinking there for a solid three hours or more by that point. I was beyond shitfaced, a long-term veteran of sobered up, and found myself passing into and through a realm of non-existence by the time I was re-drinking.
I went outside and saw two dudes sitting on the porch. I must have said something rude, because I remember dodging an empty beer can as I dove down the stairs to street level. After I screamed something profane at the porch fuckers, my loose neck muscles happened to flick my line of sight across the street. There was a large sign in front of the house acknowledging it as the boyhood home of Brigadier General John T. Thompson, inventor of the Thompson sub-machine gun.
Earlier that week, the Cubs had been playing an away series at Cincy, and their terrible color guy, Bob Brenly, started talking about how he likes to do something culturally significant in each city he visits. As it turns out, he specifically mentioned the boyhood home of Brigadier General John T. Thompson as the cultural highlight of that trip. It turns out that this idiot's idea of a museum is a bar in a converted rail station with some ridiculously marginal historical happenstance attached to it. What a fucking dolt! When I realized the comedy of this, I fell on the grass laughing and called most everyone I could think of. Some of you received voice messages from this point in the night. I hope that this serves to clarify some of the unintentional confusion that no doubt followed in the wake of these messages. Please understand and appreciate my state of total re-drunkenness.
The elation of my discovery was quickly tempered by the realization that northern Kentucky doesn't have cabs as the hour approaches 4 a.m. I was too shitfaced to realize or care, but after fewer than ten cars passed in twenty minutes, none of which were cabs, I acknowledged the eventuality of what must happen. I pounded one of my beers, threw my shirt and shoes into my pockets, and started to walk home, half naked, sweating profusely, and loving life.
I paused on a bridge to pee into the river as I pounded another beer. It felt pretty good.
I stopped to pee on the Reds' park, and on Bengals' stadium as well. That felt pretty good too.
I drank the final beer while waiting for a light to cross from the riverfront area into the downtown. I didn't pee there, but I bet it would have felt good.
I stopped in the middle of the deserted street in front of the Cincy branch of the Federal Reserve and pissed right there in open view. That felt pretty great, until a security guard appeared out of the building. Though he was old and slow, I was drunk and half-naked, so I bustled off, satisfied with my third public urination of the night.
My final target was a statue of President James A. Garfield that stood in front of our hotel. I'd eyed it the second we drove in, and I knew I had to stain it. I was unzipped and ready to go, just as the night watchman at our hotel came out and screamed, "Don't you dare piss on Garfield!!! Don't you dare!!!" So I didn't. Instead, I peed on the front of the hotel. The guard somehow seemed okay with that. In Cincy, I guess you just can't mess with James A. Garfield.
When I finally got up to the room, Seamus was (as expected) already passed out in his bedroom. I woke him up and, after he expressed shock at my sorry state, exclaimed to him that we needed food in a hurry, but he replied that there was none to be had. "Bullshit!" I screamed.
I called the front desk and asked what they did when they got hungry and all the restaurants were closed. The guy at the front desk said (I'm not making this up), "Well, I usually just take a sandwich in my pocket out to the bars with me." I reacted with unbridled shock and amusement at this absurd response, and I told the guy he was the weirdest person I'd ever talked to, then I rudely hung up on him.
Then, I finally passed out.
In the morning, I told Seamus about my struggles to keep sane and free from ejection, the comedy of the mother-daughter scene, and my adventurous walk home.He had an amusing story as well. He'd also gotten into a car with some strangers, who had dropped him off at a seafood restaurant downtown, thankfully not too far from the hotel. Before exiting the car, Seamus had spit out the tinfoil from his falafel all over the back of the guy's car. (We'd gone to the exact same food tent--it was probably the first one after the exit, since we were both totally shitfaced and somehow managed to find it.) He said he sat there at the end of this oyster bar until he couldn't keep his eyes open any longer, and he supposed he fell asleep for a bit.One of the bartenders supposedly called for a cab before asking him to leave, so Seamus went outside without a struggle. Unfortunately, the cab never did show up, and Seamus decided to resume his nap right there on the sidewalk. He thinks he was passed out for at least an hour before a different cab pulled up, shook him awake, and screamed, "Dangerous! Is very dangerous to sleep in the street!" Unable to form coherent sentences, Seamus flashed his 2-for-1 drinks card from the hotel at the cabbie, and he miraculously made it up to his bed in one piece.
He let me sleep in all morning, but it's not like I was in any shape to move much anyway. I woke up and Seamus had again put breakfast on my bed: a big jug of some non-carbonated non-juice orange drink. I stumbled into the living room after we traded stories, he told me about how he'd already been out roaming the streets. He got a paper and was watching some unimportant update on his new favorite obsession: the Natalee Holloway murder. I tried drinking the orange stuff and smoking a cigarette, but neither helped me feel better, especially since the update on Fox News was that the girl who'd been dead for two months was probably dead. News-flash my ass. Two things I know: the sky is blue, and Natalee Holloway is fish food.
Seamus ordered me to shower up at about 1. It should come as no surprise that I booted in the shower repeatedly. I must have brushed my teeth ten times during that single shower. My stomach absolutely hated me. It was quite the struggle, and it didn't do much to make me feel better, either physically or about myself.
We packed and left the room, greatly underutilized set-up that it was.After ditching our crap in the car, we went around the corner to Scotti's, an old Italian place around the corner from the hotel. It was very dark in there, very conducive to collecting one's shit. I tried to drink some water and eat some bread, but certain things in there really irritated the crap out of me. There was an exposed light bulb just over Seamus's head that was really fucking with me--that might have been the top irritant, along with an odor that was neither revolting nor appealing, but an odor all the same. I nearly booted at the table, but I held off until I got downstairs.
When I pushed open a swinging door at the bottom of the stairs, I was clobbered in the face by the world's most terrible basement reek. I had to hustle to the far end of the narrow basement to the bathroom, and I unloaded the second I caught sight of the stall. I laughed at how rude it is to puke in a restaurant, and I tried to aim it all into the crapper. If the restaurant had been close to busy, my vomiting might have posed a huge problem, but thankfully it was a quiet Wednesday afternoon. I cleaned my own waste from my face and headed back upstairs.
As it is my standard order, and since I needed to deliver nothing but the easiest dish into my weary stomach, I ordered fettuccini Alfredo, which they (lamely) listed as "Fettuccini Scotti." It was pretty good and went down the hatch quite easily. My general estimation of the place is that, after you discount the fact that I puked in the basement, if you ever find yourself in Cincy, hit up Scotti's. It's really good stuff. We ate and paid, and there was not much to that.
We lit up post-meal cigarettes and with a wave of fond farewell, headed onto the highway north up to Indy.
The drive was innocuous, particularly more so than one might expect after the shit show that was the night before. For, as beautiful the drive into a river town is, the drive out is much less fascinating and slightly depressing, as you head onto the endless flats of the Indiana plains.
As we approached Indy and made the turn to the highway towards Deer Creek, I mentioned that we could go do a little side-trip to the Speedway. Seamus was against the idea, favoring the idea of getting to the venue as quickly as possible. While the area of Ohio surrounding Cincy is beautiful, I'm sorry to say that there's not that much beauty about Indiana. It's like the land that the glaciers forgot. There are no hills there, neither are there many lakes. I've been all over that state, yet for the life of me, I can conjure nothing but images of flat blandness.
Seamus sped past the afternoon traffic toward the venue. Deer Creek is a little bit northeast of the city, and you must drive around a beltway to reach that part of the city.
I wondered aloud why a famous concert venue such as Deer Creek is connected to the federal highway system by nothing more than a 2-lane road. We sped along this (literally, nothing more than a) rural street at 80 miles an hour, dying to get back to Panicland. I'll never forget this one fence that would prospectively block drivers along the oncoming lane from the potential of a forgettable creek. One would think that the damage from driving into a creek would be far less than the damage from slamming into a big-ass metal fence. But, then you think about it, and you're like, "Oh yeah, I'm in Indiana."
Proof that the housing bubble is in full bulbous force: People are buying houses in and around Noblesville. Fuck me. These people are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for these houses. Seriously? From my point-of-view, these people are the same as the retards who bought houses near airports: No fucking shit, it's going to be really fucking loud all the time. You know they'll bitch and moan about this fact, too, just like the airport's neighbors.
It was such a nice day out. After the 100+ of Cincy, Noblesville was about 80 when we pulled into the lot. The air was intensely clear and splendid. There were a few clouds in the sky, but they were so non-threatening as to cause us to laugh. The air was somewhat crisp, one when you don't have to try overly hard to relish every lungful of fresh air. We cursed ourselves for not bringing a football or gloves for playing catch.
We were among the first people in the lot. From my estimation, we were about the 60th car into the lot. Nestled near the front entrance to the world's coolest little amphitheatre (or, the coolest that I've ever been to), we threw open all the doors and windows on my car, and started blasting live Panic tunes for all the world to hear.
The whole day elevated to a level beyond pristine. I sat on the back bumper of my Jeep and thought, "There's nowhere I'd rather be than right here at this very moment." There aren't words for the elation I was experiencing, and I'm not really sure of why. Have you ever felt completely all good? Like there's literally not one worry at all? I was consumed by this feeling that I just couldn't miss, and that was pretty much the case. Everything was awesome; it was like I was on ecstasy, but I swear I hadn't taken a thing.
During his early morning wanderings in Cincy, Seamus bought us some beer. As you might expect, he grabbed the cheapest shit beer in all of Cincinnati, because cheap shit local beer is essential for any road trip to be considered monumentally awesome. It turns out that this beer is so cheap, it's not even from Cincy but came all the way from exotic Pittsburgh. We were sipping on a 12-er of the Old Style of Pittsburgh, a city we weren't even really close to to begin with. Nonetheless, it was perfect. Nothing could bring us down. We were flying high.
Drawing upon nearly forgotten MacGuyver episodes from our youth, Seamus built a legitimate double-lined cooler from the wastebaskets in our room. It wasn't pretty, but it worked like a charm, nestled safely in the back of my car. And, most importantly, though mostly unbeknownst to us, it helped to maneuver our closest-to-the-venue spot away from the cheapest beer in Pittsburgh toward the cheapest beer in St. Louis, a considerable feat when one consideres that we weren't really trying to accomplish this at all in the first place.
A few days after the fact, it struck me how much we had in fact overtaken the parking lot at Deer Creek. Nothing stood in the way of our elation; we were like a freight train of pleasure. After the trials of the evening before, we found ourselves completely high on life, almost in spite of ourselves. Sitting in that bucolic setting, in the bright and refreshing summer sunshine, barely a hundred feet from where Panic was ready to levy their thunder, we didn't have to try very hard to contribute to the atmosphere. But we did, and we did in a great way.
While standing around the back of the car, a variety of hysterical events transpired. First, we started giving these terrible beers out to various people. To a person, none thought that the beer was really that bad, and I suppose it wasn't. I'd promised my liver that I wouldn't drink at all that day, but the positive response from random lot people forced me to consider one. Or two. Or three. It had a strong old-man aspect to it, like a watered-down Old Style, and it in spite of itself.
Seamus was pretty drunk soon after we ditched the car, and I fully suportive of his quest. After all, I was slowly realizing that I was in the midst of the perfect day. Suddenly, he looked at me and belted out a great big, "YEAH!" and lifted up this left sleeve, to reveal a bald eagle tattoo, so small as you could not even imagine. I laughed my ass off when I saw it; it was so small and unimpressive, it was unreal. It was like us at that moment: not making a big deal of it at all, we were simultaneously awesome and yet slightly lame. Though I completely understand the prejudices held against jam band concertgoers, these critics will never understand the raw fun that transpires at these gatherings. I cannot hide the fact that I love the scene so much, despite dread locked Wookies and smelly chicks with hairy armpits, who I pretty much despise. They are a part of the scenery, as much as the random piles of dog shit you'd find in Lincoln Park, which likewise fail to detract from the wonder of the thing.
I could go on in great detail about this show, but I literally can't think of words to capture the unadulterated joy of the moment. A few highlights:
1.) The who parked next to us liked our crappy Pittsburgh beer and traded us a few of them for a few Bud Lights, which we promptly traded for a few Miller Lites. All involved were happy with the transactions.
2.) Guy-Parked-Next-to-Us was scared of not only Seamus and I, but also of Seamus' completely hard-assed soaring eagle tattoo. The whole thing became even more comical when his girlfriend showed up. She was really cute, and she thought the tattoo was the shit as well.
3.) Some random burned-out, tripping hippie came by with a Frisbee, and Seamus started playing catch with him. I found it unbelievably hysterical that, though Seamus was not the provider of the Frisbee, he was much more able to catch and throw the thing. The crazy Frisbee guy was all over the place. It was hysterical. At one point, he gunned the disc at Seamus--straight into the windshield of a parked car, missing a girl's head by no more than two feet. It was unreal.
4.) We had a few (typically) strange conversations with Mic-on-the-Hat-Guy, who Seamus knows from his days living in Champaign. It is very likely that the hippie music people amongst us have seen Mic-on-the-Hat-Guy before. He's got a microphone duct-taped to his floppy hat, and he's as hippie as they come, wearing the same Jerry Garcia Band shirt every time I've ever seen him. This guy is 100% on the bus. You can imagine that the shows he tapes sound like shit, but he's so proud to be taping in this out-of-the-norm way, and that's just awesome. Mic-on-the-Hat-Guy is a complete trip.
5.) We saw Ted, another regular random conversation on Midwest tour stops. Ted was, needless to say, acting like a bugged out weirdo, but we bought a bunch of koozies from him anyway. I've read many grumbles on message boards that these koozies were pretty lame. I didn't think so. So what if they're flourescent and have a line from a song that Panic doesn't even play? Big deal! They keep my damn beer cold!
6.) Unfortunately, my fears that the lights were on overnight in the Cincy garage were confirmed when the car suddenly died, right in the middle of the wicked Barstools & Dreamers from 05/07/97. Since we were the sound system for the lot at that point, people were pissed we had killed the music. So I stood on the roof and shouted, "I didn't turn it off! The battery died! I'll get it back on in a few minutes!" And, with that, a round of cheers and clapping went up from the crowd. Seamus flagged down a couple security guards, who called some guy over with a supped-up golf cart that had one of those portable battery chargers built into the back. He jumped my Jeep, and the pre-show tunes resumed. Those fifteen minutes when the car battery died were literally the only wrinkles in an otherwise flawless day.
What more can I say about the perfect day? It happened. It was so nice out. We took over the tunes for the lot. The show itself was absolutely terrific. It might have been the best Panic show I've ever seen, and I've seen many (37 and counting). Download and listen to it if you don't believe me.
I somehow made the drive home, though I had to make a pit stop in Ft. Wayne for Combos and a Coke. I bought a Bic lighter emblazoned with "Super Pantry," which I plan to keep until it runs out of fluid. [Incidentally It did finally die--at the Jimmy Buffett show on Labor Day Sunday at Wrigley Field, of all places!]
Panic shows tend to follow this strange dichotomy. If one night is terribly brutal, the other will be great. It's all what you make of it, I guess, and I made this particular Panic mini-tour as much as it could (or should) possibly be.
posted by Pat at 9:57 AM
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