We arrived in Austin just after seven. Gus/Roy parked the van withunusual speediness, and bolted into the club, Emo's, before we had thevan unloaded. It was approaching the full moon.

I found Gus in the back bar of the joint, a room filled with paintingsof women with syringes as arms. He was standing on a picnic table,staring at a suspended television on which Claire Danes was smiling thesemi-smile that Gus loves her for. He was chortling softly.

"Ohhhhh-ho-ho-ho," said Gus.

Every once in a while he would leap up for the volume knob, in a vainattempt to hear Claire Danes' voice. Then he would go back to staringat her in awe, his mouth open.

"Yo, man," said some kid wandering past the picnic table, gazing up."Jordan Catalano ain't s@#t." In the background, Jeremy, theborn-again-Christian lead singer of Sunny Day Real Estate, was playingvideogames elatedly.

Yuval sprained his ankle that night, leaping offstage. "Yo, G," hesaid, "no 'Mr. Bitterness' for a few of them days."

The next day, we played a little college town called Bryan, on a verymovie-set-of-a-small-town-in-Texas street on which everything wasclosed but the Opera House we were playing and small loan shops, mostof which also sold jewelry, most of which were watches shaped like thestate of Texas. There were more than a few cowboy hats in the housethat night. So we played a calculatedly offensive show--we opened withthis new song "Paint", a move more or less designed to confuse people.Happily, no one was confused, and the house was quite into it. "Whatabout Mexicans?" yelled a booty-shaking girl in the front row, after wefinished playing "White Girl."

And after that, desert and desert and desert. Insanely long drives.Beautiful though--particularly when we got to watch the rain coming on.Texas is unfathomably huge. We stopped in El Paso to sleep, and Larrythe Soundman and I went down to Bobby Q's to eat mediocre barbeque andask waitresses where amusing activity could be found.

"Well, uh," said the waitress. "What is this, Saturday? There's, uh,alternative rock night at the Cadillac Bar, down the way at themall..."

Instead, Larry amused me with tales of his days touring with Kix, andeverybody went to sleep.

Tuscon was next. We got to the club and no one was there; the doorswere locked. We had been driving for eleven hours. We were miserable.Funnily enough, when they did open the doors and we played, it turnedout to be, for me, the best show of the tour so far. I think everybodywas into it. It was crazy fierce. William from Sunny Day's entirefamily flew down to Tuscon to see him; the best part of the show waswhen I asked the crowd if anyone in the room was related to him; therewas a huge, joyful roar.

The Downtown Performance Center, where we played, is some sorta DIYco-op venture. Very cool. There was this strange sign posted by theentrance stating that, since the co-owners of the club couldn't affordsome ridiculously expensive insurance policy, dancing was prohibited byArizona law. Very 'Footloose'. The sign respectfully asked the crowd toquote passively enjoy, unquote, the quote entertainment, unquote.

We said goodbye to Sunny Day, who, of course, cannot enter the state ofCalifornia, and then got in the van for a long drive overnight to LosAngeles. We stopped at a messed-up Flying J just over the Californiaborder. They had utterly no beef jerky. Mark and I spent ten minutesgawking at the empty beef jerky racks.

"This place isn't fit to wear the Flying J name," said Gus/Roy, masterof all things Flying J, disgustedly. "I'm gonna complain."

You've already heard everything I got to say about L.A. However, we didhave a Pajama party at our friend Randy's house; it was booming, asPajama parties always are. We played two sets, mostly new stuff, and aversion of "Down To This" with none of the real words in it, just the"industrial penetrating oil" chant that we do live, and the "See TheBall To Gee That Bootyack" chant lifted from the jive-talking guy inAirplane by DJ Mark the 45 King in his fine song "Cold Got 2 Be."

Our pal Dale, who works at Slash, our fine fine record label, claimedto be able to get Claire Danes down to the gig. I wrote her a noteinviting her, and he faxed it off to some production company or other.Gus/Roy looked incredibly freaked-out the entire time. But, alas,Claire did not show. Claire, Claire, where are you? Gus' life is inyour hands.

More free poetry:

FROM A GAS STATION OUTSIDE PROVIDENCE

This kiss, unfinished; lips to receiver in the parking lot, a puckershot through a fiber optic wire to an answering machine, towardswitchboards and stations transmitting in blips to satellites, thiskiss thrown earthward and shooting down coils, around pipeline andelectric power lumbering underground, up threads and transistors andtransference points. This kiss is zeroes and ones jumbled and tossedinto the pneumatic system, unscrambled at the end and scrawled onto atape recorder slowly rolling at the side of your bed, then slappingback, reverbed off the ringer, a tinny phantom of the smooch like asmack on an aluminum can, up the same veins through the belly of thesame satellite and softly to the side of my head; this kiss is homebefore the next exhalation leaves.

I'm stooped in the booth, pounding quarters into the slot; yellow lightdroops over the asphalt, and your ghost, too cool and elusive withthose hands and mouth sings around me in the smell of gasoline, Whosemouth is this, scratched in static; some droplet of a sigh, atomized,and sputtering digitized into my room?

San Francisco was ultrachill; my girlfriend Maggie flew in from NewYork, and we did nothing but lay around and bathe for two days.Sebastian disappeared completely; I only saw him at the gig, and thenafter we got off the plane in Portland. San Francisco is Mark'shometown, so the joint was chock full of De Gli Antonies--theirresponses to my local-boy-done-good onstage announcements rivalledthose of William's relatives in Tuscon.

And now, Portland. Cold and wet. What else can I say?

--Doughty, November 25th, 1994