MOM N DAD FUEL UP TO GET FINGER(11)’D…
Ok, so I knew of a band called Fuel out of I wanna say York but could be from just about anytown, Central PA. Quite possibly Harrisburg, but in fact I forget exactly where. Either place or way, the band was one of us. I really didn’t know much of them, my cousins did, and their music grew on me. I’m more of a classic rock kinda guy, these guys were as much late 90s as they came. No, I didn’t see them come up, but they were in mid-fame, having a video on MTV and they were playing at a bar in a small town called Cross Keys, PA.
Cross Keys, PA…?
I have no idea where Cross Keys is in PA, so I had to consult with my, above all else, closest cousin and best friend jonny mac who accompanied me to the show. Or did I accompany him…? either way, we went. Jonny and I pretty much grew up together. Our family is huge, and he is the eldest son of the elder of the second set of twins in my father’s family. Oddly, yet truthfully, I am the only son of the eldest of the first set of twins in the family. Didja follow that? He is a year older than me, and we’ve been stuck at the hip since I can remember “coming online” as Louis CK put it.
(It’s the earliest of memories you can have, and the very first memory of Louis as he said on stage at the beacon theater, was taking a tremendous shit, and he coined the phrase for me at least, “That’s when I came online”, that time when everything from your eeaarrllyy childhood is forgotten and your first memory is that. Can you say run-on, with commas? Louis CK is the new Carlin of our time. Not in any way like George, other than in the amount of new material he is putting out there. Probably a close second to a comic named Doug Stanhope. I wanna say Stanhope is up to 10 cds now, if not more. I saw a video of CK explaining his learned behavior from George, and he is becoming one of the most prolific and risen comics of our time. Can I over explain this any further? I tend to digress a lot but in this case I am respectful of stealing material from comics and do what I can to give them full credit for any words I use that was theirs… their material is like lyrics to a song for me… and I love what they do for me. Its hard to make me smile some days, and when I listen to comedy it makes it a little bit easier.… moving on… )
Jonny mac and I have been pretty close over the years. We’ve been through the spaghetti incident, the peeing over the car incident(s), the five minute fart incident (not knowing it but uncle mike was building ammo against us from an early age) all that was before we were, say, 8 years old. We’d call each other to find out what santa gave the other, whoever knew first about the man behind the suit (prolly him) never told… I think I was 12 when my Uncle Kevin the colostomy-bag-of-douche told me. I think I was taller than he was then… too. He’s got MS now though so forget the rhythm, Gloria… Karma is gonna get you… To-night!
Jonny mac prepared me for the change of schools I was about to go through in the big tree behind gramma’s house. That was supposed to be 5th grade, but hell waited till 6th grade, and it was disastrous to me psychologically, simply because I am a socially awkward person. And my parents had just divorced, and I was introduced to anxiety attacks from grade 6 throughout high school. Life was lookin up through a cloud of shit, but that cloud had an end, I just had to get through it! Hello? What’s your name? the dim dark hell of Depression? Well, it’s bittersweet to meet you.
But jmac was/is there for me. Crazy as I was/am. And I love him dearly.
So long story short… (of jmac at least… my fingers couldn’t write about ALL of our adventures, but this probably won’t be the only one told…) jonny mac in his youth and even today… if you take him somewhere, he becomes instantly accustomed to the area, as if he’d been there before. And in a lot of ways I believe with travels with my grandfather in his young young days, jonny mac became a human map. If he’s been there once, he’ll never forget how to get there the second time. I have trouble finding my car in the morning, but jonny mac literally is a genius of the road. {Infamously - to us - at the age of 4 or 5, my aunt cissy wanted to take us to the pool… all the cousins. Maybe 10 of us at the time. There were regular roads and highways, and she was from San Francisco. No one knew how to get there. But jonny mac got us there in the usual 10 minutes flat.}
So we were off to see fuel (remember them?) in Cross Keys, PA. Again, don’t ask me how he knew where it was, but we arrived at the bar called Woody’s.
It was a pretty rustic place from the outside. I parked on the side of the road due to the traffic coming to the place was pretty solid. Like I said, Fuel was starting to get a name for themselves, Finger Eleven was their opening act, and I wanna say it was the start of maybe Fuel’s first hit song from the new cd Sunburn. I am getting way too deep into the band BS and it really doesn’t matter… so back to the bar.
We walked in to this small on the outside but huge on the inside place of PACKED bar. You ever see the Japanese load their working class people onto trains? Or even the Pakistani workers’ trains? It was tight inside. Very little elbow room but the room was eclectic. There were those from the city, those from the country, and those from, well, Cross Keys, PA.
We found our way to the bar and jonny ordered a Hennessey n coke, and I ordered a lager. (an aside to this story… jmac was working overnight at the time so sleep deprivation had a lot to do with his condition…) we chatted and mingled and did what we could to look like we belonged there. and as the night wore on he ordered another henny n coke, and I ordered another lager. Out of the corner of our eyes there was an open table so we decided to sit down and take a load off. We shot the shit, were enjoying the opening to Finger Eleven (third band’s name escapes me) and we were tapped on the shoulder to see if anyone was sitting across from us.
“you are” we said. So they did.
Sitting across from us was an older couple. He seemed like a tradesman… one who worked HARD for his money using his hands and every wrinkle on his face showed every hour he toiled at his job. She seemed like a diner waitress type. And it seemed like these two saved up a bit just to come to the show. And we were proud to be sitting across from them, two snot faced 21-22 year olds.
At the time I smoked cigarettes and a little cheech n chong. Because of the latter I used to (still do) wrap my lighters with an immense amount of electrical tape in odd designs and colors so that when it was passed around with the chong, I knew where it was and not just did I like it, but everyone knew the wrapped lighter was mine. So I always got it back. You chong smokers know you pay a huge amount of your habit on lost and stolen lighters, which in the karma scheme of things you ended up getting them back over the years.
When this man of working class took out his Marlboro reds pack, I noticed he had a red lighter on his cigarette pack. It was a beautiful red bic, and it had red electrical tape on it.
“jon! Jon! Look!” I said… “his lighter…”
So I asked the guy… “why do you wrap your lighter with tape?” (holding mine in my hand in my pocket to blow his mind… but I wanted to hear it from him…)
he said “well, I like the way it looks, I always know where it is, and everybody knows its mine.”
I pulled my hand from my pocket and slowly turned it to unsheath a green Bic with black electrical tape wrapped around it. I asked “can I call you DAD N MOM??”
“I would be honored” he said. And we were friends for life, err, that night at least. It was a milestone I never thought I would have ever seen. I mean, I’m a kook, but how perfect was it that we were sitting across from these people we didn’t even know and I was equally as kooky as the guy sitting across from me.
Off to the bar and instead of a 5th Hennessey and coke, jmac ordered a lager for himself and a lager for me as well. I don’t remember if jon had anything to eat that day, he was running on fumes from working the night before, and he introduced a new friend to his stomach full of liquor.
The adage… “Liquor before beer, have no fear…” is bullshit.
Jonny had come for Finger Eleven, and had seen some of their act. The stage seemed to be in the basement in another room, and we were positioned on what was now I guess the balcony, yet we never climbed stairs. Fuel was about to come on so I grabbed a high chair and knelt on it to see over the rail down into the abyss. Fuel was electrifying. The riffs and signature sound when you hear it was amazing, and loud as you wanted it. Forget “finger” eleven, we were at “volume” eleven.
Jonny came back and joined me for a minute, walking sort of sideways and looking a bit green.
“GIMME YOUR KEYS!” he shouted.
-WHAT?
“gimme your keys! NOW!”
-you’re not driving anywhere!
“TRE! I’m gonna be sick! Gimme your keys!”
So I did. I waited for the set to be over because I expected him to come back to the concert. Sometimes drunk or not a good puke will snap you out of it. but he never came back. So I went out to check on him… … …
I think he made it just past the handicapped ramp to get into the place when he lost his alcohol. But he kept walking. So as I went to my car, you could see a trail as if I was hunting a sick jonny mac… the telltale sign was there. the whole way to the car.
It seemed as if a puke arrow was pointing to my car and the passenger side door was open.
“you ok jon?”
-yeah immabefine… ijuss… i… it was hot and I had to… “ *hurl*
“hmm, you wanna go?”
-no, no, go watfuel I’ll bein…
“hmmmm ok, well, here’s the cd so you can think you are in the concert even though you’re stuck out here… see ya in a few”
-ohg – ok…
So there I left him, jamming to Fuel’s cd Sunburn, with his seat reclined a bit, to puke it out and I figured I’d see him later. But after Fuel’s next and final set, he was still out there, sound asleep.
I closed his car door and headed to Hershey where he lived. When he came to, we were at his home.
“where… how the hell did you drive home?”
My sense of direction is zero, so I was thinking the same thing. To me a 40 or so minute drive. To him, he time travelled. And travelled - travelled. I figure he expected to be good to go for the next set, but that was long over.
“tre,” he asked, “how are we back at my house???”
-well, you passed out and I watched the concert and closed your door and drove home. Let’s go to bed.
“good idea”… I think he said.
III
