Thunder boomed, lightning flashed that Thursday night as our ride dropped us off at the Caretaker's Garden, near the old Boont Berry farm where we planned to spend the night in the yurt I built out of redwoods and necessity in 2007. He'd picked us up from the Greyhound drop off near the airport on South State in Ukiah, and was giving us time to shower before heading to the KZYX studio to meet John McCallister and perform a song on the air. We'd arrived in town with only an hour to spare after a grueling four days on the bus, and it was necessary to shower before sharing the confined space of the radio studio.
"Never seen lightning like this around here," said our ride, who's lived in the Valley for more than two decades.
"That's 'cause I'm here," said Jetta, giving me that defiant look that I've grown familiar with, the one that accompanies her reading off Facebook about the changing consciousness coming with the solar flares. Like many hippies who have discovered the magical keys to the universe, Jetta believes that she can influence the weather with her thoughts. She'll probably fit in well in Mendo. She gives me that look when stating a hypothesis that will no doubt sound ludicrous to me.
She was referring to a line in the chorus of a song I'd composed more or less about her that we'd never performed together, "Bringing Heaven Down," a line that really only was included because it rhymed: "You might here some thunder when she rolls into town."
The storm added dramatic backdrop, especially when sleet pelted my hat as I crossed Highway 128 in a dead sprint from the hotel to Pic & Pay to get beer and cigarettes and say hello to the night clerk who misses my business, he said, asking about my son who used to loiter in front of that building with his buddies back in the day.
"He's 18 now, watching the farm back in Indiana while I'm gone."
The radio show went smoothly, quite a great time after the Greyhound ride. We hadn't planned to take the bus. I consider cross-country Greyhound trips to be somewhat more arduous than doing time in jail, the only differences being you can't do push-ups and the inmates are co-ed, and you have to deal with babies crying all night. The Amtrak, however, is like a bar on rails, somewhat like riding a cruise boat. The passengers tend to be retired teachers and European tourists, but we missed our train in the Chicago station. The connection from Indianapolis arrived at 10 a.m. Monday, and I felt like shit, realizing I'd been infected with the stomach flu that my son and all his friends had been fighting, regretting the impulsive decision to eat White Castle hamburgers at 4 a.m. in Indy. I never eat White Castle or fast food, but was sort of excited for the trip and just agreed to do something impulsive since we were early for that train. Now at 10 a.m. in Chicago I had to find a restroom quick. My head was throbbing, somewhat hungover with lack of sleep, as Jetta and I had been so giddy we'd messed around somewhat inappropriately on the ride.
"Let's find the bar," I suggested upon finally emerging from the john. I'd been to the station before and knew of a place somewhere in that magnificent old gem of architecture, so asked the Homeland Security guys who were everywhere thanks to the recent tragedy in San Bernadino. Awkwardly I carried a naked banjo because minutes prior to our late night departure from the remote hills of Kentuckiana I'd discovered to my chagrin that kittens had pissed on the nylon case. The banjo was strapped to my neck, tied by thin galvanized electric fence wire to its cheap frame.
"You play us a song?" they asked.
"No, I gotta get some beer. Ain't in the mood." I was real polite with the fellas, mostly in their early 20's, who were probably just glad to have the jobs. And they were protecting us from random whackos who could strike at any second. They all gazed at Jetta who drug a wheeled suitcase and might have been dressed for a show, paying no more attention to me. One of the guys told her we had to go to Union Station which was outside and around this great marble hall.
We rambled forever, up escalators and down concrete steps outside, the rolling suitcase bouncing with its heavy cargo. After one of those labyrinth nightmares that usually include federal agents in sunglasses stalking you at every step that are a result of movies like the Matrix, we finally located the bar I remembered and took a nearby table since Jetta had lost her photo I.D. and looks more like my daughter than my girlfiend thanks possibly to night life and avoiding the sun.
"Is that your daughter?" they ask me at the farmers' markets.
"No, she's my niece. I'm putting her through college," I usually reply, giving her a kiss on the lips and grabbing her ass.
We shared a tall beer at the table and eaves-dropped on the pro football discussion between fellows from various cities extolling the virtues and vices of their heroes. In between a black dude from Philly and a local white fanatic donning a Chicago Bears Jacket and cap sat a uniformed soldier from Denver. We had four hours before the two o'clock departure time for San Fran on the California Zephyr, so shared one beer after another. A few more fellows from Wisconsin and Minnesota sat at the bar, as well as a voluptuous woman who it turned out hailed from an organic farm in southern Indiana slammed whiskey. I invited her to our table, bought a round of shots for the three of us. The guys from up north joined us, asking me to play the exposed banjo.
Recently Jetta has started performing with me on stage, and bangs a tambourine. She knows the songs better than I do. We started out with a crowd favorite that usually gets across in boisterous environments called, "Piss Test." The guys liked it and made us play it one more time so they could record it on their smart phones. Somebody ordered a pitcher. We all got to know each other. I can't say what songs we shared with them after that, but at about 1:45 Jetta and I decided prudently to get over to the boarding platform. Gazing up at the digital arrivals and departures, she noticed that the California Zephyr was due in at 3pm.
"Shit, let's go back to the bar," I concurred, worried that if we sat on those benches we'd crash out after no sleep. One more round, and we returned to the departure station only to have the sweet black woman inform us that the train had departed on schedule at two.
"When's the next train?"
"Tomorrow at 2. You can get a hotel."
Rather than a hotel, we chose to transfer our tickets to Greyhound, who routed us through Las Vegas and L.A. Four days on the bus without booze except for smuggled vodka in water bottles after Denver, where we discovered they'd sent us south and another day out of the way. Four days with the stomach flu and craving restrooms, regretting the mistake in Chicago which I originally somewhat blamed Jetta for mostly out of miserableness. The first two nights a baby screamed from the back seat, but the second two nights the infant turned out to be a possible son of the devil who belted out this heavy metal gut-level angst. Most of the passengers in the back had spent at least half their adult lives in prison. They were all discussing "scripts," meaning "prescriptions" for various drugs like oxies, and the laws regarding such in different states. Of course the prison system prescribes pharmaceutical versions of heroin to inmates.
"These voices are driving me insane!" I whined to Jetta as we veered off course towards Vegas.
"I always wanted to see Vegas!" she exclaimed, hogging our smart phone to snap breathtaking pictures of the barren desert rocks. "Have a positive attitude!"
"I'm not angry, just feel like shit after two days of not being able to eat or drink or smoke a joint or walk around except to hit the crapper."
Las Vegas turned out to be a good time after all my negativity, though, as we hit this pedestrian den of sin near the bus station for a few hours, walking around with the naked banjo and really looking and smelling like hobos. We bought a bottle of vodka and poured it into a plastic water bottle, chilling on the side of a club with brick walls on the outside. Immediately a Canadian couple approached and asked if we were an act.
"I got to drink some more water," I said, shivering a little with hands unsteady, somewhat nervous. I hit the vodka, looked over at Jetta and started playing in the cool night air. They seemed like nice folks my parents' age from Midwestern Canada if there is such a thing, by their accents a little north of Minnesota, so I played "Ain't no Machine Gonna Pick a Watermelon," though I could barely pick the banjo for nervousness in this overwhelming environment. After that we played "Piss Test," maybe just to make them leave us alone. More folks approached, handing us a cup of coffee which I refused as the vodka appealed more to my mood on this break from the gauntlet bus ride. Eventually a dude in a suite who looked like the role he played--a bouncer for the casino outside which we loitered, informed me that if I stayed at that spot for another song the cops woulds be there and slap us with a $1000 fine for busking without a permit. Gratefully I returned to the bus station for the ride to L.A., though Jetta was disappointed to miss out on the Vegas experience.
"You don't have an I.D., anyway."
"Thanks for reminding me!"
The whole ride to L.A. we passed the water bottle of vodka across the seats as she shared one with a white-haired black dude, and I sat beside another African guy younger than me who said he had five kids with five different woman. "I'm a rambler. If one of my girls pisses me off I just go find another." We hit it off, the three of us, and passed the bottle all the way across the desert, until we neared the city of angels and somehow Jetta and I got into a domestic dispute that really cracked the black dudes up. We nearly split ways in L.A., at the station, and sat in separate seats the whole ride up to San Francisco where it started raining, finally. I felt like I was finally coming home once we got to the bay area.
In San Fran we ended up waiting six hours for the bus to Ukiah, so we rode the transit up to Haight-Ashbury and found a music store along with outfits for the upcoming show at Lauren's in Boonville. I bought a case for the banjo, tired of people coming up and demanding a song when I wasn't in the mood. Riding up 101 through the insane stop and go traffic and rain all the way to Santa Rosa I stressed out about making the show, my whole body reeking after four days of sweating off the flu, my toes nearly rotting off, but once we passed the rose city the driver laid on it to make time, the bus swaying with G-forces as the tires vibrated over the warning friction beyond the white lines. Once we hit the two-lane stretches and Hopland my mood brightened more.
After the radio show my friend dropped us off at the old farm down Lambert Lane in Boonville, where we spent the night in the ramshackle yurt I built out of necessity with funky, barked redwoods back in 2007. The structure has some gnomish charm and has been occupied by the new farmers on that property who took over when I left in 2010, though they are five months pregnant and she now prefers to sleep in a camper with electricity and propane so they wake up warm. I don't believe in much in life except for irony and poetic justice, and had to admit both were in play as Jetta attempted to build a fire in the wood-stove while I held the cell phone like a flash light, watching.
The bark she'd brought in from outside the yurt had soaked in the storm, and though she shredded a Tecate beer box discovered in the old barn, the fire failed to light.
Holding the cell phone and watching her attempt to light a fire in this yurt I grew impatient. Irony temporarily soured my mood. "I never got laid in there," I told Tim, the new manager of the Anderson Valley Community Farm, when inquiring about spending a night there. "No sooner did I get the roof on, and my first Ex sent my 12 year-old son to live out here. That's when I moved into the barn."
Jetta's futile attempts to build a fire frustrated me. Both of us had endured the four day bus ride without getting laid or any such fun, and she really wanted to get that fire going, but the bark was wet and I asininely neglected to inform her that I'd observed dry kindling in the barn where the current inhabitants built fires at night. Holding the cell phone and watching her I remembered all the times that strong-willed hippie girls I loved had insisted upon doing things like use a backwards skill saw blade to cut thick sheet metal. As a feminist I'd always supported that stuff. As a beer drinker I'd often run into intelligent women who thought power tools and alcohol don't mix. But after four days on the bus I might have forgotten to mention the dry kindling in the barn, and when I finally commented something about strong women who think they know how to do everything better, Jetta ran outside and told me to do it myself since I was so much smarter.
Of course with the dry redwood splinters the fire started immediately. What should have been a romantic night had its ups and downs as I admitted to having known about the kindling the whole time holding the cell phone as a flash light.
"I'm going to live here!" she said, once the fire raged and we got over our little spat.
"No way. It's impossible."
"Why? I love it! It's all I need!"
"The aliens."
"What?" she seemed genuinely interested.
"I didn't build this yurt alone. Look at the symmetry in those rafters. I had--I had help from beyond this realm. They don't want me to live here. That's all I can say. That's why I never got laid the whole time I lived here. It's not meant to be."
I can't say what happened after that, but suffice it to say we won't be staying in the yurt at the old Boont Berry Farm again.
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