‘No Life - Nowhere’

By Chris Wall
Contributing Writer

‘I’m tired of everything except being tired’

— Outside an Alabama Waffle House, Aug. 7, seven weeks on the road with my band A.N.S., and seven more days to go.

It’s 3 a.m., and we’re driving across the United States/Canadian border into Vermont, deep within a sea of fog and misting rain. We emerge from the Canadian forest like a half-dead team of sleigh dogs pulling their master’s body behind them — each one of us possessing our own unique stench of bodily decay.

I remember watching the inspector search the inside of our van with his hand covering his mouth, later remarking to us, “Boys, I don’t know what you’ve done in that van, but I’ve never smelt anything like that before.” At least now we know we weren’t imagining it.

For years I never had the urge to tour the East Coast because I never thought we would fit in as well as we had on the West Coast. Ironically, the most solid section of our tour during the planning process was the East Coast, but by the time we got there, half the shows began to fall apart. Luckily for us, we had good friends to help us out, and nearly all the lost shows were recovered, and what wasn’t, we spent as much-deserved days off. To my pleasure, the East was a million times what I expected it would have been, and our stay there was strongly competitive with our experiences elsewhere.

However, I must say, all the stereotypes about New England drivers are true, and their highway system is saturated with toll booths with the most confusing overall designs. Driving around Boston was the closest thing to a nightmare I’ve experienced on any roadway.

Trying to characterize or even categorize all the memories I have from the East Coast, or even the tour as a whole, could never be done. Simply understand that I came away happy I had been given to opportunity to visit. I had the pleasure of hanging out with some of the most unique and fun individuals around, and the times we had together are much more than the summed-up experience, but are beautiful in their own right as individual experiences.

I wish to convey to you all the importance of seeing the forest for the trees — to see the experiences within the journey, New England was amazing (except for the traffic).

We traveled across the land, no longer on interstates, but from basement to basement; constantly working to avoid sun contact and return to our subterranean world. We played basements of tattoo shops, clubs, houses, apartments — anything we could, yet each event was so drenched by positive crowd response you’d think we toured there all the time.

The only negative to our last-minute schedule was that we were forced to drive back and forth from Massachusetts to New York a total of four times, playing different sections of the coast and inland states, and with the way New York taxes the interstates, each trip was at least $15 in highway toll charges.

We worked to cover all the shows we could but some dates simply could not be, so we settled for the days off and headed south towards Birmingham.

All those years of middle school geography finally paid off, because I realized in order to arrive in Alabama, we had to drive through Kentucky, and to skateboard enthusiasts everywhere that meant but one thing: LOUISVILLE!

The city of Louisville has the most amazing free 24-hour public concrete skatepark ever, and we were driving straight to it!!! We made good time to Louisville and skated there all day and all night, with nothing but a few burritos from Taco Bell and several twelve packs of Coke. The park has a 30-foot fullpipe in the middle of its course! That night we slept on the concrete next to the vert-ramp, and that night I dreamed -- of skating more.

In the deepest of the Deep South, we met up with our Bostonian comrades, Bones Brigade, to form a skate-death-march through Atlanta, much akin to General Sherman — except without all those guns. Once in Atlanta, we toured the Coke bottling plant and one of the members of Bones Brigade drank 10 cups of this European Coke product, Beverly, which tasted something akin to Wookie sweat. Ten cups — even now thinking of that drink makes me want to puke. The shows in the South were such a good time.

I was born in Georgia, but never had the opportunity to return for anything more than a family visit, so playing my home state had a certain special excellence for me. Florida as well was amazing. There are some real crazy individuals out in those bayou/beach communities — good crazy and bad crazy. Bad crazy would be the landlord who threw us out of a tenant’s apartment because he didn’t call to inform her he had guests, or the nut that robbed our roadie at gunpoint for $20.

Good crazy as in the Gulf Coast Hardcore kids, and the ultra-rad scene molded out of Daytona and North Florida. To Kenny from Tampa, Fla., if you ever should read this, remember one thing: It is your right to take your clothes off and anyone telling you otherwise is jealous.

As we drove the 13-hour drive from Tampa to Shreveport, La., I slept atop the equipment in the back of the van, on a pallet made of backpacks and sleeping bags; my face resting less than a foot from the van roof. Nathan, the bass player, took the first driving shift from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., and I drove the second shift from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. An hour east of Shreveport, we stopped for gas and let the van cool off, and we were met with five large good-ol’-boys expressing with their fifth-grade education that they didn’t like “our kind” around their store. Well, after a typical display on our part of, “who wants some,” we had an epiphany — these guys could shoot us and dump our bodies behind the store and no one would ever know. So we leave, some gladly and others reluctantly.

The bitter sweetness of Shreveport was that, although we managed to sell bookoos of merchandise to the army of kids who showed up to see our zombified corpses play, true to form, the police showed up and shut the entire event down before we could even unload the equipment. Thirteen hours for this?

On the drive home in the morning, the van was throwing up antifreeze all across the state line and into Dallas. I don’t think we cared anymore at that point. We were home, on Texas soil, and as we kissed the cigarette-butted highway roadside, I thought to myself, “This is home?” Before the show could even start, hometown drama was soaking my soul and making me weary of our return. Now the “real world” gets going. All the disassociation, the grief, responsibilities, obligations and of course the loving embrace of — no one.

I have had a long time to really think over what I had done — as if atonement for my sins of antinomianism could ever be repaid to the state. The more I dwell on the time away, the more I wish to get away. I don’t want to escape, because there is nothing at home I am incapable of handling; I only wish to exist in a better place, either mentally or physically. When I am out in the world’s open spaces, seeing what others see through tube-vision; I appreciate life the way it was meant to be appreciated. I am capable of swinging my mood with the weather, I am free from all the chains of the Home — the chains of formality and comfort; I am at last free to wander the roads within myself. The only hate I possess in the wilderness is for the minds of simple men too afraid to meet me beyond the tree line, and for myself for being too weak to remain there.

— Third of a three-part series