The Wild Hunt: I see you
Day 4
Leeds 07/03/2015
Getting to know Chris was easy, humor is the great equalizer. He kept on trying to convince us that everyone in Leeds said the city name as if they were a mouse in a disney movie. He was so persistent that I almost believed him in some pavlovian trigger capacity. The landscape between English cities is mostly uniform so I don’t have much of a memory of coming in and out of any city we visited. That day though, would be the first time I took over for Chris driving. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I was the only other person who could drive a right hand drive car. At first it was really strange, but after six or seven times of killing the car I got into a groove of floating through roundabouts in neutral until i could figure out how to not shift to first gear instead of third. Arriving in Leeds, we met our English tour buddies from Sauna Youth. I was feeling shy so I didn’t talk much and just laughed at their jokes
Chris kept on asking me to bet on whether there would be vegan chili for dinner. I kept on agreeing with him that there would be vegan chili for dinner. But he kept on betting as though I didn’t agree. So when the vegan chili was served up I apparently owed him 50 pounds. The vegan chili was good but I stayed away from the squeeze bottles of salsa, guacamole, and sour cream. This coupled with the Mexican food I would experience in Glasgow turned me off from ever trusting a UK Mexican mix up again. Corey and I went off on a nice bathroom-to-crap-in adventure, which is generally a good way to kill time. Basically you walk around until you find a nice bathroom that isn’t the (sometimes) shitty one in the venue you’re playing. I think we ended up crapping in some wine bar down the street, mmmmm tapas. Time passed, bands sound checked, the bill seemed pretty diverse. I walked into the bar section of the venue and saw a hand painted United Mutation logo on a leather vest that I had seen a few months before in Portland, ah Liam Fox, Antony and the Johnsons loving acid warrior, tuff man, sweet guy. I started hanging with him and eased into getting messed up, things got fucking loud. By the time it was time for us to go on I had a steady buzz and felt like my scalp had come loose.
My memory is hazy from it being a lit night, but I remember everything being very loud and close. The bands had a semblance of who they were instead of what they were doing. Which in hindsight, especially after some shows on this tour I look back on and smile at, thank you for caring, thank you Leeds bands. Like I said, my memory is Mush but I remember that band name (Mush) and Sauna Youth playing.
Things just kept getting louder and louder, I was ready to jump out of my fucking skin, I could see it in Mike and Corey’s eyes also, it was time to go. Watching the video of us playing seems strange to me because in my head I remember feeling like we were burning through the set. Ten minutes goes by and MJ is rolling around the crowd getting buck. Out of the corner of my eye I see her clutching her head still doing vocals, My heart started to sink a little but I kept on playing. I figured she had head butted someone again, comes with the territory I guess, head butting people. Then she came into my view in the stage lights. Dark threads of blood were streaming down her face and she was wincing pretty hard. All the blood left my hands and I prayed that her eye cavity wasn’t caved in or something terrible. Blood doesn’t make me weak in the knees but the idea of a close friend of mine being seriously injured the third day of our 31 day tour scared the shit outta me. We quit playing and everyone hustled MJ to the bathroom. I started crying and freaking the fuck out, collected myself and went to go face a probably angry crowd and seriously injured MJ.
The cut wasn’t that bad and MJ got some glue and a butterfly stitch, luckily we were in Leeds on a Friday Night, which has fight night fun huts where you can get your head stitched up for free. Let the demons out. Corey, Mike, and I, or maybe just me, addressed a few angry people. “I don’t know why she does it, sorry, but only she got hurt so whats the problem?” I remember saying to two older gentlemen who were rife with indignation that something so violent might happen at a hardcore show. “Just a show of direct aggression” one of them said, I guess its direct. Sometimes it makes me angry to think about, but I also don’t know what MJ goes through when she performs. The music we play isn’t always pretty, isn’t always fun, its not docile, its volatile and its mean, it’s not up to me to explain away someone else’s performance. I am glad no one else wanted to talk about it.
The night was winding down and we all felt like striking out and hanging, It was hard to hang with both camps, the Leeds punks and the Sauna Youth, Mush or whatever crowd because the bouncers wouldn’t let the leather jacket having butterfly stitch needing skateboard wielding crowd that I had wandered around with into the bars. Lindsey, the guitarist from Sauna Youth tried to talk us into a club but it was a fools errand, we cabbed over to Liam’s place and kicked it with some chillers until I started to feel really ill. Corey and Mike opted to stay at the house while MJ and I got a cab to crash for a few hours before going to Glasgow the next day.
On the way home I knew I was in for a full on horrible prostate attack. This is probably the only true misery I go through when I tour: the fear of stress and anxiety can induce a physical attack on my prostate. Some doctors have said it is candida, some say it is a homeostatic infection that will never leave my body and lives in the under studied prostate that hides inside me and attacks when I least expect it. We get back and I basically piss needles for one of the three hours we would have gotten to sleep. I come back to the room MJ and I are sleeping in and lay down on the couch. “What’s wrong?” “I am having an attack” “didn’t you say if you cried it just goes away” “yeah” “ Then cry, come here” .
MJ crossed her legs on the side of the bed running parallel to the couch I was on. She put my forehead on her ankles, I started bawling. Its a strange sensation to not feel sad, scared, upset, but maybe just stressed, and the urgent need to cry to relieve some alien, completely confusing disease in your body. I have to do it at least once a month when the misery of an attack overtakes me.
Something strange started to happen though, my vision went from being black with my eyes closed to bright red. While MJ rubbed the back of my head and my back, comforting me while I blubbered like a confused seal, a loud hum overtook my hearing, louder than anything I’ve ever experienced, I can only akin it to an airplane landing. I could feel MJ’s body seize up and become tense as the noise became the only thing I could sense. I lost the ability to move my body but at the same time didn’t lose the strange posture I had suspended between couch and fold out bed. while MJ rubbed my back she lightly pulled her hand away from my spine and I felt something draw out of my chest. An thick and horrible weight running from the middle of my throat to the bottom of my sternum, like I had a giant kettle bell attached to elastic bands suspending it in the middle of my torso. She lifted and lifted, I could feel her struggle with whatever it was until she released it and put it back down into my body.
“ What the fuck was that”, MJ laughed nervously, “ I don’t know!” I felt amazing, I felt as if something had been shook out of me, like MJ had dusted off a 4 foot thick rug that was my midsection. I fell asleep and dreamt about having the weight lifted out of my being, and woke up feeling pretty good considering the heavy partying. As we dragged ourselves awake after 2 hours of sleep I asked MJ, “what do you think that was?”. “I don’t know, but it was too heavy for me to lift out of you” “do you think its like grief or something?” “whatever it is, its really heavy.“
We packed our shit and made our way out to the van in a thick misty fog that had surrounded the wet brick townhouses, threw our suitcases in, and picked up Corey and Mike. Chris could tell we had ran ourselves into the ground and teased us for being ridiculous. Just 27 more of these nights huh? We all uuuuuuuhhhhhed our party weary bodies in unison and skipped off towards Glasgow.