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February 21 1998, Saturday

I

  hooked up a cheesy little dumpster-dived stereo so I could listen to the radio downstairs. All the electronic entertainment equipment has been taken away by the our former housemate, the very large infant and his unquestioning mother-bride.

A Grateful Dead show was on WNRN, and I played it just to remember how awful that music is. I used to have to listen to the Dead all the time back when I smoked hippie dope for free. But no matter how stoned I got, I never liked the Grateful Dead. And believe me, I tried hard to like them. It's not that I didn't like psychedelic music or classic rock. I just never could tell when Jerry was done tuning up. That reverby distortion-free guitar sound never did anything for me at all.

I

  got Deya to take me to Tate's junk yard today so I could get some tires for the Dart.

Tate's wasn't easy to find, nestled as it was on undesirable land back from the road (Avon Street Extended). But once we arrived, it fit our expectations. Tate's is what you think of when you picture a car parts scrap yard. In the front is a dog in a cage (the "junk yard dog," though he was a border collie and didn't look very menacing). The fucked up, rusting cars stretch for acres. Most are 80s models, and a good many have been in fairly severe accidents.

Up near the main office was a pile of tires, all still mounted on their wheels. I looked through them and picked out four for my Dart. Figuring out the size codes and number of lugnut holes was the only real complication.

We also wandered around in among the cars. It's a self-service junk yard, where do-it-yourselfers, tools in hand, go to scavenge what they can from abandoned prides and joys of others. Something about the casualness with which one could approach and and begin disassembling a car excited me. I liked the place. I wanted to move in for a day or two, settle down, get some parts, fix a car. It was a great day to be salvaging parts. The sun sat happily among fluffy white clouds, beaming down yet more springlike warmth.

Too bad we hadn't brought any tools.

There was only one Dodge Dart in the whole place, and its copies of the side light that I need to pass inspection were both broken. I suppose I could still use one of them anyway. More interestingly, it doesn't seem like much of an effort to pull the back end off of a Dart. The necessary tools are just small wrenches, and it doesn't look all that heavy. I'm thinking about coming back some time to get that back end for my car. In case you don't remember, the Dart has persistent transaxle complaints.

Deya liked the place almost as much as me. Like me, Deya has a special fondness for free things. Many of the cars still contained personal belongings. Before long, Deya had obtained a hard hat and an umbrella. I tried to teach a Labrador retriever to say "umbrella" when I was about four years old.

$40 dollars poorer, we left Tate's with four good wheels. We passed a large dull-looking lad on the driveway, and Deya immediately recognized him as "Teddy Tate" from back in fourth grade. She remembers that he was "a little bit slow" and that he "took all the special classes."

Back at Kappa Mutha Fucka, I got a call from Jessika. She's still debating whether or not to move down here. One of the major problems, as she sees it, is that the only jobs she's qualified to do is to wash dishes and clean hotel rooms. Perhaps I can teach her some flashy computer skills. Then, even if she still has to work for the Man, she can earn a reasonable wage.

Deya headed out to work and I spent the afternoon attaching wheels to my Dart. It turned out, by the way, that there is another factor I hadn't considered when getting my new wheels. The hub aperture on some wheels is slightly smaller than it has to be on a Dart. All the wheels I'd purchased were afflicted with this problem. I didn't really notice, however, until I went to install the front wheels. There's a big lubrication bulb on front wheels, and this refused to pass through the narrow hub apertures of the new wheels. So I was forced to put old wheels on the front of the car. The tires are good on these wheels, but now the left wheel is somewhat larger now than the right.

It's a good thing I changed tires. When I looked at the right front tire, I was amazed. It was terribly worn on the inside edge, in some placed right down to the metal cables within the tire itself! I'd noticed that the car was shaking badly on my last drive from Staunton, but I had no idea that the internal structure of the right front tire was undergoing breakdown. It has somewhat the shape of a potato chip, although it still holds air!

I

n the evening, Deya and I hung out in our newly quiet living room, listening to a tape someone had made for her. It seems that Deya once worked at some sort of facility for retarded blind people, and one of the clients, let's call her Maxine, had a special fondness for Deya. Maxine was a sort of idiot savant. She was extremely fascinated with all things Swedish, including Deya (whose mother is a native Swede). On this tape that she had made for Deya, Maxine recorded a little random Swedish language lesson, with the days of the week and such demonstrated in Maxine's Sweden-by-way-of-North Carolina accent. Then Maxine had recorded some music, Abba of course, complete with a long-winded biography of the band. "Knowing me, knowing you, there is nothing we can do / Knowing me, knowing you it's the best we can do." Maxine hadn't used any fancy equipment to dub the music, she'd just held a tape recorder up to a stereo and hoped for the best. It was mid-70s pop by-way-of do-it-yourself lowfi. I wondered what it would sound like on tussin.

W

e'd heard that some of the Blond House people would be performing tonight at the Tokyo Rose as an opening act for a band from Switzerland, so we decided to go. Deya dressed up (that is, she put on the helmet she'd found at the junk yard) and we headed out in her car. On the way we picked up a six pack of Budweiser in bottles to smuggle in with us. Jen the Wacky Bartender was the bartender as usual, so it wouldn't be a big crisis even if we were busted (at least we weren't trying to get drinks for free, right?).

Meanwhile, Amy from Memphis was checking the door, and while it's good to have a friend running the bar, it's also good to have friends checking the door. It's probably true that if you befriend enough people money becomes a luxury.

There weren't many people downstairs, and I knew almost everyone there. Almost the entire Blond House contingent (Elizabeth, Natalie, John) had turned out, along with a good fraction of the Abundance House people (Kirsten the eco-radical, Cory the Coffee Cart Girl, Franz) and a good chunk of the kids from Freedom's house. They were all whooping encouragement to the band and giving each other last-minute geography lessons on where exactly Switzerland is and what language they speak there. The only thing that most people seemed to know about Switzerland is that it exports a cheese with holes in it.

The band on stage consisted of Blond House's Ches on bass, along with Patrick (boyfriend of Freedom) on guitar & feedback, a manic guy with very short hair (some day I'll need to know his name, but for now let's call him Mercury) on drums, and perhaps others. They're an experimental non-melodic noise band, but they must be practicing or something, because they not infrequently lapse into respectable jams à la the Doors. Patrick plays around with the guitar feedback by twiddling knobs on various equipment to get a synth-like sound. They have a lot of fun, and part of their entertainment value is the fact that they don't give a fuck about what you think and they're not really very serious about what they're doing.

Then came the Swiss band Alboth. The singer was big tall blond guy with ax-like features and an extremely serious demeanor. He'd unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a massive muscular hairless chest draped with silver beads. His back up men were funny looking. The guitarist wore black boots, emo glasses and a ruffled red satin shirt. With his sideburns, he vaguely resembled an Elvis impersonator. The bass player had big white caterpillaresque sneakers. The drummer, crouched calmly behind his stripped-down double-bass kit, had a sinister air with his wild black hair and tight dark clothes.

Their first song lowered everyone's expectations. It galumphed along slowly and flamboyantly while the singer grumbled lyrics in anguish. I wondered how to classify its sound and decided it was "industrial lounge." But after awhile the band picked up some spunk, and flew through some songs at incredible speed. The pounding of the double bass drums gave such an impression anyway. The guitar was played in a most unique manner, producing crazy little lounge-music-like chords at odd intervals in a mostly atonal manner. Sometimes it was ponderous and reminded me of Godzilla crushing cities. Other times it sounded a little like Primus. It was pretty good, overall, except for one undeniable fact which everyone in the audience kept pointing out to one another: didn't the singer know that the bare chested serious thing fell out of fashion 15 years ago? He seemed to be taking himself entirely too seriously. It made us wonder if the entire European music scene might still be struggling through the 80s.

A better interpretation of the evidence was that this was a goth band. Goth society (or neo-goth society) is perhaps the only still-functioning social type with a fondness for such corny stage theatre. I could easily imagine Theresa being very impressed with the singer's antics. But if this was a goth band, where were all of Charlottesville's countless dozens of goth kids? Hadn't the word gone out? Is there a problem with the Charlottesville goth network? The only person in the entire room who looked to be a goth was some plump 35 year old woman clad entirely in black who sat by herself in the corner. She was, I learned later, the band's only groupie. Come on goth kids, Alboth is a great goth band! If they come to your town, show them a little support!

Since my friends and I were the only ones there, we did our best to be an enthusiastic audience. Some offered the band members places to stay, while the rest of us danced appreciatively. Deya sure was cute dancing with her little bunny hops beneath her hard hat. Kirstin the eco-radical danced in that hippie style that (according to Cory) she uses for all music. When I was in a mood to dance, I did it Godzilla-style, stomping around in front of the stage, crushing cups underfoot with slow, calculated steps.

By the time the band was done, I was extremely energized. So was Cory the Coffee Cart Girl. She had word of a party over near the Downtown Mall and managed to convince Deya to take her there.

While I waited for these arrangements to take place, I beat out a stripped-down version of Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" with a fragment of a drum stick. Freedom and Cory joined me on the chorus, which are the only words anyone knows to that particular infectious song.

A

cross town on Altamont Street, Deya, Cory and I walked up to the house where "the party" was supposed to be. It was awfully quiet in there, but there were still a few people about. They had some liquor going, and best of all, they had a big spread of finger food. I ate an enormous amount of chicken wings and while Cory (a vegan) didn't approve, she refrained from being being holier-than thou.

The others at the party consisted of a small group of sort of geeky grad students. You could tell they were geeky because they made abundant references to things they'd encountered on the web. Being a humble web personality of not-inconsiderable notoriety, I nodded appreciatively and acted mostly like I had no idea what they were talking about. After several rounds of "thumb-war," Deya drove Cory and me back to our respective homes. We would have stopped in at Blond House (where there was a rumour of an after-hours party), but it looked dark in there as we drove past, and we were all tired.

one year ago
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