Lisa Savidge

Tour Journal: Days 3.5&4

Welly welly well, it’s been some interesting times.

After my post last night, as foretold, I joined up with my old army buds (specifically, Vincent & Sobe) for some dinner and drinks.  We wandered around for quite a while looking for a place that both looked good and was open (I’d say it was around 9pm on a Sunday night).  This is a common issue for me since, on my usual schedule, I’m often having breakfast at 11-noon, and I’m often out late either working or supporting some event or another, meaning that A – I usually catch dinner close to midnight, and B – I’m usually looking to eat out somewhere.  I despise the very concept of drive-throughs…  The food tantalizing you with its smell (or alternatively, repulsing you, because you need to eat SOMETHING, but you aren’t super-enthusiastic about your choice and would like it to be over as quickly as possible) as you drive… Plus, there’s the principal of it, which is that the price of that fancy restaurant, with the chairs and tables and all, is built into the price of the food, so I’m paying for a premium service that I do not get to use.  I swear, put me at a coffee table with a bunch of other guys and ask me about drive-throughs…  No more than six hours later most of us will be dead following a heist gone wrong.

You know, it literally just occurred to me that Reservoir Dogs is nothing more than a Shaggy Dog Story.  How about that.

Back to the point, being that I didn’t expect this sort of trouble in a town where everyone tells you that “you simply must try the food while you’re there!”  We did, in fact, find one of those white collar bar/bistro places (with the single-sided, single-paged menu, where every dish is a variation of steak or the sort of seafood to be found in the local area, and they don’t use ‘cents’ in their prices…  Like “Caesar Salad……27″).  I’d also venture that we were a little under-dressed for the occasion – I in my touring musician wear (ripped jeans, plain black t-shirt, thrift store hoodie), they in their “still obviously in a uniformed service while being not in uniform” garb.  There’s a certain look you learn to spot a mile away in any base town – ESPECIALLY with the males.

I could see it in the eyes of the matre-d’ that he intended to turn us away, but that simply wasn’t happening.  You see, the last time the three of us had stood in the same room it meant that someone was about to die (or wish, at some point, that they had), and the energy just kind of picked up where it left off.  Within an instant  (and with no words spoken to this effect) we were not a couple of guys and a gal out on the town after work – we were a fire-team cruising the mean streets of Frisco, not in charge of any law – be it street or judicial or societal – but not subject to any law all the same.  Not like gangsters or something like that – we weren’t intimidating anyone (not much, anyway), but more approaching with the sort of swagger that says “I am not to be bothered, and I’ll be seated wherever I wish.”  They complied with due haste.

This, perhaps was the hardest thing to let go of, and something we would end up lamenting later on.  This is how Mick Jagger walks into the room.  This is how Tom Cruise does it.  For a brief, shining moment in our lives, we were rock stars – or at the very least, had the key element of being rock stars…  The one where you walk around the metal detectors and no one dares question you – or better yet, walk right through them, hear all of the alarm bells go off, and just keep walking without so much as a glance.  This seems to be the thing people really dream of.  The money and all of that is nice, but it’s the permanent inoculation to all of life’s little indignities that definitely would not come with a winning lottery ticket.  It seems unreasonably cruel to let someone taste that at such a young age, and then take it away just as quickly.  Suddenly all of those little indignities aren’t so little anymore.  After all, nothing about you has changed, and what you’ve done is permanent.  It’s only limited by the willingness of others to recognize it.  Am I wrong to blame them?  I don’t feel like I should be.

After dinner we head to a shady looking bar near my hotel called “Wouldn’t You Believe?”  Yeah…  A real class act.  Over a round we really got into it – the slow-motion train wreck of my downfall, the unwitting roles we had all played in the things I had discovered later…  How do you tell a friend that they unknowingly but directly participated in the perpetuation of a genocide when they thought they were doing the right thing?  It was a bitter enough pill for me to swallow, and I wasn’t sure how to pass that along.  I floated the theory that maybe we’d been avoiding each other on purpose for all of these years for just that reason…  We knew judgement day was waiting for us and we thought we could beat the system by never being in the same room together again.  Still, you can only run for so long.

To lighten the mood, we spent the rest of the evening wandering around the blocks and recounting old war stories in the shorthand we’d developed long ago (but had forgotten up until that very moment).  ”Remember the time we were doing that sneak and peek up by team clownshoe and the skipper was freaking out that the bird was gonna have his ass cuz I’d waxed so many more people than his precious gator-radors – but those guys weren’t putting in the hours!  If you want the shit, you gotta put in the hours!”  ”Yeah, no shit, the hours is what it’s all about.”  We must’ve sounded crazy.

On the other hand, maybe we were crazy.  Somehow, pulled back into that context, all of the old coping mechanisms kicked in.  ”Remember the time you cut that guy in half at the hospital in Khadimiyah?”  This is one of those things that had always troubled me.  I never got confirmation the guy was up to no good…  It’d be way too much of a downer for me to tell you how this particular guy actually got himself killed by my hand, suffice to say that I’ve lived this scenario a thousand times in nightmares.  But now, how do I react?  I practically fall off of the curb, laughing my ass off.  People always say “oh, that’ll be funny later,” but there’s a certain kind of horror that’s funny only when you’re there.  And there we were – one foot on Geary in San Fransisco, and the other on Haifa Street.

The other running theme at the end…  Even amongst 99% of other troops who were in Iraq, you can’t even tell the truth because they wouldn’t believe you.  But we were rock stars once, and now – each of us in our own ways – has spent the last half of a decade pursuing some pale substitute of the real thing…  Always with the faint hope somewhere in the back of your mind that the phone might ring one day saying that they need someone like you to do the things you do in some corner of the world.  How can we just accept that our early 20s were such a vast summit above anything else we’ll ever do?  Why bother living if there weren’t at least hope that the next rush might actually materialize at some point.

In a lot of ways, that’s why I do what I do now.  When you get up under those lights…  Or when you’re in the studio and the tape is rolling… Or when you’re sitting with the notebook and the guitar…  It’s as close as I’ve ever gotten without having to pay the terrible cost (though the cost still is high – but acceptable).

The gang had to work early the next morning so they took off around 11:00.  I headed back to the room…  The past all dug up and the dirt all over me, but no more jovial framework to put it in.  I looked at the clock and realized April 4th was just an hour away.  The date of the first time I killed another human being…  What are the odds that on this night of all nights, I’d find myself so deeply entrenched in all of that old crap?  I went and got a jack and coke, my first in well over a year, washed down my pills, and settled into a restless night.

DAY 4:

I woke up and burned out of town ASAP.  San Francisco is not the place to be when you’re driving a vehicle with no visibility and no sense of how the streets work there (hint:  They don’t).  I figured I’d make it as far as Medford, OR, making for an easy drive on day 5 to get to Portland, and a bit of time to get on point for the back-to-back-to-back shows in the Pacific NW.  I stopped in Redding for a bite and some fuel, and decided I needed something new to listen to if this was going to be a full day of driving.  Turns out Redding has a Barnes & Noble, so I selected a BBC audio production of Brave New World and was on my way.

The drive was fantastic.  As a matter of fact, while I’ve come to hate driving in my daily life – it just puts me on edge a little bit too much…  Almost every sudden and horrible thing that’s ever happened to me happened on a highway, and I don’t think my brain’s ever lost that connection.  Wait, where was I?  Oh yeah, as a matter of fact, I’d say the driving has in many ways proven to be the best part of this whole excursion.  The solitude, the freedom, and the ever-changing scenery along the route granting a sort of feeling that I’m actually accomplishing something while also actually having some time to simply sit and think without feeling guilty that surely there’s something productive I could be doing right now.

It was hot enough in Redding that I found myself running the AC, but very shortly thereafter I was flanked by snow on all sides.  I stopped for a moment at a gas station in Weed, California (I must be clairvoyant – I had predicted that the gas station would be full of overpriced crap that traveling college students and burnouts would buy by the bushel  because they said “weed” on them, and lo it was so) just to take it all in.  Mt. Shasta had a ring of fog obscuring the top and blending the white snow of the mountain into the white sky – almost as if the world had turned upside down…  Really something to see.

All the while, the production on Brave New World was unfolding quite nicely, although there seems to be a bit of a problem.  In the event that you haven’t read it, a lot of the central conflict rotates around an outsider to the civilization being completely unable to relate to the world that’s been created, while the inhabitants of that world simply cannot comprehend living any other way.  Everything is just so ingrained that it is just assumed – to the point where no one can adequately describe why things are the way they are, and furthermore, can’t fathom why they should even need to explain it.  They’re all just talking past each other.

Anyway, it seems that Mr. Huxley had made the same assumptions about the reader having a certain perspective – which may well have been reasonable in 1931 – but don’t relate at all to me 80 years later.  Really, most of the time I find myself siding with the “wrong” people, and if it hadn’t been set up so deliberately to make the leaders of the “civilized world” the bad guys, I’d be with them 100%.  A bit odd, considering that they had pulled out the old trope (or perhaps it was new at the time) of censoring all “high art” because it could lead to descent by making people think too deeply about things, while I myself am driving across the countryside in an effort to pursue the very same, but I’ve seen the “instability” (as they like to keep referring to it in the book) that they’re combatting, and I can’t help but wonder if it isn’t a small price to pay.  Certainly, I wouldn’t feel so inclined to say the things I’m saying with the music if the circumstances around it weren’t so patently awful at times.

Anyway, after having caught a dose in Weed (the irony – or actually the opposite of irony, but there seems to be a lexical gap as to what that should be called – wasn’t lost on me) and I was feeling pretty good…  Almost as though I might make it all the way to Portland.  Unfortunately, the weather turned against me in the mountains, so I compromised by blowing right through Medford and stopping in Eugene instead.  I believe my IQ must’ve jumped a few points because I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.  A nice place, and probably a bit extravagant for my purposes, but it was nice to be in a kind of classy setting after what feels like a never-ending procession of motels and gas stations.

Posted in Lisa Savidge/Lisa Savidge, Tour · April 7th, 2011 · Comments (0)