Skeletons in My Closet: Tour Horror Stories Pt. 1

April 11, 2008 by Lord Jason  Send to a Friend

While Milli Vanilli, 80s porn and bad college experiences did not crush Jason’s spirit, a night with 16 cats and a barren photographer in Clevelend, almost did. Enjoy:

Year: 2006

Age: 29

Item: A Crazy Cat Lady’s House

Note: This was taken from a tour diary I wrote on Death By Sexy’s 2006 midwest tour with Schaffer the Darklord.

I’m sitting in a cafe/coffee shop in Cleveland right now. The show was supposed to start at noon, and there was supposed to be around 10 bands playing. It was also supposed to be in a skate park, but now it’s in a suburban coffee shop in the middle of a strip mall. Who do you think loves rock music more, soccer moms or kids with liberty spikes who read Thrasher magazine? You get one guess.

We are the only band here right now, apart from Schaffer the Darklord*. The guy putting these shows together has incredible planning ability. Partly because he never told any of the bands what time they were supposed to play, and partly because he doesn’t have ANY contact information for any of the bands. Foresight, look into it.

*Rapper/comedian from NYC, also know as STD, our tourmate, and all around general good guy, and evidently, sexually attracted(and attractive) to Martha Stewart. Check out my interview with him here:

Anyways, I’m sure Cleveland is a good place, and a cool Rock’n'Roll town. Earlier on tour, someone told me that NYC was like a pair of Double-Ds, in the way that they are both very large, and there are many, many wondrous areas to explore. Taking that metaphor further, I figured DC is a full B cup, and I expected Cleveland to be a pert C. But my expectations have fallen way short. Cleveland is more like taking off a girl’s bra and finding three long, coarse black hairs protruding from the areola. Unexpected, and a little off-putting.

Example 1: The first exchange I had when we walked into the café went as follows.

Show Promoter, introducing me to some random 40 year old guy: “This is one of the bands from out of town.”

Me: “Hi how’s it going?”

Guy: “You’re not going to beat me up are you?”

Me: “Uhh…no.” I shouldn’t have to tell you, but this is a perfectly reasonable question to ask someone you’ve just met. Especially someone who looks as menacing as I do. Which is to say, not at all.

Me: “I’m as gentle as a newborn pup.”

Guy: “Well, I’m as gentle as a pitbull who just got his butthole touched.”

Me: “uhh…ok.”

Now I’m sure this guy doesn’t represent all Clevelanders. In fact, I’m fairly sure that most Clevelanders probably don’t mention touching a dog’s anus the first time you meet them. But this exchange came nothing close to our experience we had at Pepper’s house last night.

Do you know how in Vietnam or other war movies when a platoon is walking through a beautiful, serene field, everything looks fine, and suddenly the Nazis or Charlie pounces on them and unexpectedly wipes out the entire lot of them?

Well, we were that platoon. Pepper was the serene field, and her sanity was Charlie. And when Charlie pounced, we were knee-deep in the shit, kids.

As you may know, life on the road in a little indie band isn’t exactly room service and catering all the time. In fact, you are lucky to get a shower once every five days. As our options were limited, we were ecstatic to find out after the show last night that we had two options for a place to stay for the evening. Well, three if you include sleeping in the van, but that sucks.

Option 1: We could have stayed with the guys who lived across the hall from the place we were playing. This wasn’t going to happen because
A: It was all hardwood floors
and
B: It was owned by a Fanboy that was going all Jame Gumb on Schaffer.

Earlier in the evening, Fanboy was taking a shitload of stickers off of Darklord’s merch table. Schaffer actually sells his stickers, so when I confronted Fanboy about it, he proceeded to tell me he was connected with the underground hip-hop scene in Portland, and then told me he QUOTE “Wasn’t trying to Jew me. I’m not a Jew, dude.” I myself greatly appreciated this statement, as I often open every conversation I have by mentioning the religious and ethnic groups I am not a part of. Anyways, Fanboy was sweating STD HARD the rest of the evening. He asked him if he wanted to go smoke up in the apartment we would be staying at. When we went over there, he then asked us if we had any weed. I love it when people ask you if you want to smoke drugs and then ask you if you have any.

Then all Fanboy wanted to do was show STD rap videos on YouTube. So staying there was not an option, unless we wanted to end up in his Buffalo Bill Rape Well. And, to cap it all off, when we were trying to leave, Fanboy comes running out of the venue and asks Darklord if he wants “those adidas” he was talking about. This led to STD walking down a dark alley with Fanboy and going to his car, where Fanboy tried to sell him a pair of sneakers for 50 bucks. I can only assume he also asked him to help him load a couch in the back of his Rape Van. That was creepy but it was about to get creepier.

Our other option was staying at Pepper’s house. From our initial conversation, Pepper seemed very cool and very normal. She was a photographer who was displaying some of her work at the venue. She used to be in a touring punk rock band, so she understood what it was like to have no place to stay for the evening. To top it all off, she had a large house with three full sized couches. The only thing was, she had some cats and dogs at her place. She said if we were viciously allergic to animal hair, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to stay there.

Now, over the course of my first conversation with Pepper, she revealed a few things:
This all happened during the 3 minutes STD was off with Fanboy looking at Adidas and skin suits.

1: “Some” cats actually meant 16. Literally. 16 cats.

2: She had cancer. Having cancer doesn’t automatically qualify you for crazy status. However, saying that you did to a person you have just met and haven’t said three sentences might be a warning sign.

3: The reason she has 16 cats is because she is barren.

4: She still lives with her husband, and they are on the downslope of a marriage because “he put his wiener in someone else”. Also the husband was upset about us coming over because we might “shoot drugs” and “do bad things”.

I kind of felt like she should have been lying on a couch, and I should have been analyzing her dreams and asking her questions like, “So, tell me about your mother.”

The red flags were there, but nevertheless, she had three couches, and more importantly, a house, and that meant I would get to take a shower*

*My proclivity for taking frequent showers led my tourmates to give me a new nickname: Princess. Schaffer even found a black and pink sticker that said “Princess” on it. It now proudly graces my guitar case.

I don’t know how many of you have ever been in a Real Life Crazy Cat Lady’s house, but let me say, if you can’t handle the smell of ammonia, you probably don’t want to venture too far inside.

The first thing we were told when we were bringing our stuff inside(after the wave of cat pee smell viciously assaulted our sinuses) was that we had to bring it up to the “safe room” otherwise her cats were going to pee on it. Great. Then we were told if we slept on the couches downstairs we were very likely to get peed on in the middle of the night. Double great. Fortunately, there was a room that we could sleep in that was off limits to her cats. Unfotunately, the “safe room” looked exactly like the trash compactor scene in the first Star Wars.

The couch in the room was a fold out bed, which meant if we all slept across the width of it, we’d all have a little bed space. But we would have to work for it. This meant clearing the mounds and mounds of clothes, bags of trash, and suitcases full of makeup that were literally ankle deep across the entire room. Pepper gave us free reign to move whatever we needed to, but warned us that there was a layer that was covered in Karo syrup.

What?

You heard me. A layer COVERED IN KARO SYRUP(corn syrup for those not in the know). Oh man. What in the hell had we gotten ourselves into?

Over the rest of the evening, during which we had relatively pleasant chit-chat with her and her friend (some blond goth dude who we later referred to as Marilyn Hanson), about everything from taints to Jizzy Pops*. We also learned if you point a gun at one of her dogs, he’ll “Play Dead”. We wanted to see, so she brought out a 9mm pistol and pointed at her dog, which proceeded to play dead. Yes, there was a gun in the house.

* Popsicles made out of semen. When asked if I would eat this, I replied, “I don’t eat my own product.”

And the capper – right before we fell asleep like three little piggies in a row, we all remembered that her husband, who was worried about us shooting heroin into her eyeballs and then having a bukakke party, would be coming home around 6am, because he was at his job.

Did I mention her soon-to-be-ex-husband was a cop? I probably should have said something about that.

In the morning, after we rubbed the sleep(i.e. cat dander) out of our eyes we immediately skedaddled like a Secular Progressive running away from the love of Jesus.

I don’t wait to seem ungrateful though. For all her craziness and the state of her slovenly hovel, Pepper was a really nice girl who helped out a touring band on the road. But, in case you really didn’t get an idea of what our stay at Pepper’s house was like, the last thing she said to us was:

“OHHH! Before you guys leave you need to see my cat’s pubic hair!”

Yes, Pepper, your cat has wondrous pubes.

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