Kalamazoo, MI
To be fair, everyone knew it was coming. And with a six foot tall Swedish shaman woman expecting me to run her away to New York, I wasn't about to renege. Lotten held up her end well enough, finding us a guy in Detroit to ride with us until Jersey. With a little under 5 hours before leaving, I thought up the now famous Peace-Out doctrine and drew up my exit strategy: Go find everyone, say hello, say goodbye, give hug/kiss/handshake/bomb, leave forever(maybe). The specifics of this plan...did not exist. The results were however, mildly successful, at least as successful as they can be with a quick-drawn strategy like this. I do not exaggerate its effectiveness when I say I dropped good-byes, like they were hot, to about 100 people in less than a day.
So with most of that out of the way, I had to finish up my computer transfers before everything was lost forever. I got a hold of Laura and she let me shanghai her computer for a few hours while I transferred the files back onto mine. About 5 minutes into the process with 3 flash drives blinking their little mechanized hearts out, I realized that this was not going to happen fast enough. It was already 8 p.m., and Jon and Lotten were, for the most part, set to go. I told them to run back to Avi's place, where Jon had his car stashed, to figure out their final details and I would meet them there a little bit after 10.
I decided to dump my beloved collection of videos and music. Replaceable as they are, it's still hard to push delete on the master piece theater of Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding that is The Mighty Boosh. So cutting most of the replaceable crap out, I was left more or less with my writing doodles and pictures. Sounds simple right? Well it would be, if you didn't have a stack pictures that could bury several pregnant mothers and a dog. Estimated, the time was going to be about midnight before I had them all secured safely back onto my computer.
I called Jon and Lotten and told them we weren't going to be able to leave until midnight. I don't think they minded too much, and they didn't have much of a choice to be honest. As long as we got to Detroit, or somewhere close, so we could pick up our guy the next morning after he was done with work, everyone was happy. Lotten had also talked to our mutual friend Lando in Detroit, (other Nevada BM* folk), and he had a place for us to stay - if we didn't get there too late.
"What's too late?" I asked her.
"I dunno, 1? He has to work tomorrow morning."
"We aren't going to get there at 1, maybe 2."
"Well I guess we'll just be too late."
I figured it'd be nice to have a place to stay in Detroit so I went back inside Fourth Coast, where the computers sat chitchatting it up, and asked them if they could drop a HEMI in their pants and speed things up. They were too busy making out through USB cords and swapping flash drives to listen much, so I let them do their thing. Figured it was worth a shot.
When The files were wrapped up around 11:30, I remembered I still had to ditch the refrigerator-sized bench seat I pulled out of Matt's garage. First things first though, I had to get the computer back to miss Laura Hillen. Texting up a storm, (I've come to realize this is the only communication Laura Hillen will accept most of the time), I figured out she was at Derek and Nikki's house down the street, so I packed up shop and shipped out.
On the way in the door I noticed there was a lonely couch sitting on the curb. I figured it could use some company, like a bench seat. My beat seat was exactly what I had in mind, so I asked Derek if it was okay to drop it off. He said it was, and I kind of wondered why I asked since there was already trashed piled on the curb. Syd, the one the bike was for, helped me unload it out of the van and drop it next to the couch so they could talk before they met their death, being crushed and compacted into the size of a sugar cube, the following morning.
So long story short: I gave a few hugs out and said bye-byes there, picked up Lotten and Jon, and fired the Van up and took of for Detroit, city of industrial abandonment.
30 miles down the road everything was going fine, music was playing, Lotten was in the back doing whatever Swedish girls do in the back of vans by themselves, and I was happily gulping an energy drink hoping it would help get me through all the way to Detroit without stopping. There are only a few sounds that really irk me, the sound of Ex-girlfriend's voices, dogs barking, and, of course, the sound of a wheel grinding against the frame of a car going 70 m.p.h. Well, I thought, it didn't take long for God to swoop down with his glistening talons, scoop us up, and drop our marauding band in to a nice steaming pot of fuck-you soup. I've had wheels falling off my cars for most of my life, and I was pretty sure that this was the case here. A bad case, a wheel falling off usually means replacing 4-5 parts that attach it to the car...and keep it from...falling off and...stuff.
"Oh fuck, what was that?" Jon asked in response to the lovely metallic thudding followed by what I can only describe as a teenage girl's scream paired with the thuds of someone rhythmically hitting her in the face with a hollow pipe.
"Eh, I think our wheel fell off, or something. It's definitely something," I replied as we crossed over the rumble strip and onto the shoulder. After getting the van stopped, and to the side of the road, I popped the door and hopped out. Lotten, distracted by something obviously, was just now noticing what happened.
"Did we hit something? I felt a bump."
"I think we hit a kid," I told her.
"Oh no! really?" she yelled, more panicked, as she popped her head between the curtains separating the back of the van from the cab.
"No, I'm kidding. Hold on, I think something fell off the van." I skipped over to the other side of the van and took a look. By the great unicorn, it was just a flat. "Oh, shit it's just a flat," I said, scoffing. Moving, as Jon would later put it, at the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, I rounded up my gear and had us back on the road within a few minutes. "Well," I started as we all jumped back into the van, "we got the bad luck out of the way." And this was true, we made it the rest of the way to Detroit without incident.
We did however, arrive far too late to meet up with Lando (Awesome name right?). Instead of our expected ETA of about 1:30, we got there in record-smashing slowness: 3:15a.m. And for those of you who haven't experienced the beauty of inner city Detroit at three o'clock in the morning, I highly recommend it. With no Lando, we had to come up with new arrangements for sleeping. First, we heading to the north suburbs, so we didn't have to worry about being shot, then crawled around town for a bit looking for a place open to get coffee. We gave up quickly; hypothesis: there isn't anything open after 10 in the suburbs. Instead, we slid, sneakily, into a hotel parking lot and crashed in the van.
*references to BM, Nevada, or The Desert, are referring to Burning Man.
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