Tolls, Hippies, and Acoustics Part II

Show Two-Charlottesville, VA-Very Blearyeyed from my previous night of fitful sleep, I struggled to keep my mind on driving to Charlottesville. Andrew snoozed in the back while I sang all of our songs in my head just to keep from falling asleep. The light was bright and the air looked swelteringly humid. All the sleepy air and light just stood there, very still and groggily laughed at me as the our big silver van bumbled its way through like a mindless insect. Upon reaching Charlottesville we found a parking space and proceeded to see the town. In five minutes we were drenched in sweat. The reality that we had no way of showering off two days of sweat and grime dripped to the ground with our sweat and I wondered how we were expected to dazzle people with our music when we ourselves looked like we had swam through a muddy pond and then baked in the sun. We walked around town promoting the show, handing out fliers, hanging posters. I met a girl named Loon who gave me a free ginger iced tea when she found out I played the piano. The tea made my stomach tingle. I met an owner of a vintage music shop who had a gray handlebar mustache and whose specialty was vintage men's playboy magazines and old pull down maps and diagrams. He had a huge pull down map of Europe that was pre-world war two. He spent twenty minutes pointing out to me the difference in Europe then and now. But I was glad of this lesson. It was a good vintage reminder that all things change and mold and grow and shrink whether for the better or for the worse. C'est la vie. He also had a giant pull down diagram of a heart from the sixties. He tried to sell me a typewriter because I said I liked to write but he coulnd't get it to work so we parted. I left him a Cain & Annabelle flier.
Too hot to think strait, we decided to find our venue which was an art gallery....or should i say a concrete rectangle with white walls and no art. The Bridge PAI. We parked the van across the street in some shade so we could take a nap but thirty minutes later realized we had parked in a mosquito den. By the time we figured this out we both had about 15 bites each. So we spent the rest of the time before the show running form the heat and mosquito in the air-conditioned van.
We arrived back at the venue on time for the show where we were met with the booker, Jacob. He wore a sky blue shirt that had a picture of a beaver on it wearing a necktie and sunglasses. He was very serious but it was hard to really believe in his professional aire due to the absurdity of his t-shirt. The band who was bringing the PA system (called the Tiger and the Lamb) was an hour and a half late. They were a group of recently graduated indie rockers who all wore horn rimmed glasses and tight jeans. In fact most people is Charlottesville where funny glasses. It was a theme of the town. Our show got cut short by 20 minutes due the late arrival of the sound system but people liked us anyway. Things might not have gone so well had I not washed my hair in the bathroom sink before the show. A joke. (A girl did tell me I had cool hair though. Which would not have happened had I not washed it.) After the show Jacob took us out for a drink after he had to take care of a friend of his we ran into in the street who was tripping on mushrooms and who had lost her way home. She could not get over how the rain drops looked on her hornimmed spectacles and was weaving down the side walk smiling strait up at the sky. After she was shown home, we met up with his friend James in an old bar that looked like France. This person James never stopped talking from the moment we sat down til the moment we got up. He told of his riveting exploits in NYC and L.A which might have been fairly interesting if it hadn't been 2am and if he didn't laugh like a baboon each time he finished a sentence. One common theme of touring, I have found, is that our time is constantly highjacked by people who take advantage of the fact that we are new to town and therefore must have nothing to do or nowhere to go. Sometimes this is grand but sometimes all we want sometimes is to unwind, write, think. But it seems we are often at the whim of others who take us round and talk us into the ground, sharing all the musical jargon they can muster because they think that is what we want to hear. Don't get me wrong, I love meeting new people and interesting company, it is just difficult when you don't get to choose who these people are. They choose us. After hours of listening to James talk making movies and decribing songs, he offered to let us stay at his place. We felt obligated to accept since we had already said we had no place to stay besides the van. We followed James home on foot. I felt like I was in a highschool gang. We went down an alley, down some falling apart stairs, under a bridge of an overpass, through a hole in a chainlink fence, accross some train tracks, and finally up a side street that led to Jame's house. We entered the house and were met with a banner that read "Shalom" along with an unsettling stink of mold and old garbage. He gave us a tour of his "humble abode" as he put it and informed us "if you walk in the bathroom with shoes on, feel free to squash any cricket you see." The toilet was black with god knows what diseases, the bathtub was blue with mold, and the sink looked like someone had shat in it and then poured their coffee down the drain, and the floor had thousands of bugs and crickets hopping too and fro. The couches we were supposed to sleep on were both caving in and the only couch that was looked fit to lay on was on the front porch. Andrew and I were speechless at such a hovel. The outside of the house looked perfectly normal. It was in a nice neighborhood. James seemed like a clean guy. We sat down on the edge of the couch and politely said goodnight to James. As soon as he shut his door we crept out the front door like criminals and then ran like a nose down the street to our van. We drove off and found a nice quiet neighborhood to park in and slept better knowing that we had left all those crickets behind. I still wonder what James thought when, thirty seconds after we crept out of the house he came out of his room to say ...."oh by the way guys....um...you guys?"