The Wild Hunt: Idle Hands
Gydnia, Poland 07/10/2015
Mike and I spent the morning walking around the roof and soaking up the mild Berlin weather, a welcome change from the sweltering weather of the past 10 days. Being six stories up without a gate or a fence holding me in felt dangerous. I laid down and thought about body betrayal. I thought about a friend of mine describing riding her bike across a bridge every day to school strapped to the feeling of not knowing whether today would be the day she’d fling herself off the side of the bridge to experience the fetish of free-fall. You’ll pay for thrills, in actuality, but in conscious fantasy, only sensation. I wondered if this compulsion was about control, the presence of or lack there of. Inarticulate desire for a new body, for a new consciousness, the space between agency and reiteration. A stinky mood sunk over my being as we headed north to Gdynia, “ You’ll be playing the Gdynia DIY punk music festival with Swordweilder and Massgrav”, Chris informed us with Charlie’s Angels execution. “Sounds like we’ll fit in,” Corey said, one headphone in. Corey’s headphone van cocoon was dedication I’d never seen before, I swear she could check out anywhere anyhow, she had the tracks to support the time alone, I envied her resolve.
I took over driving as we entered as we entered Poland. The forest and agrarian landscape expanded. Sunflower fields stretching beyond the eye could see articulated themselves. Forests thick with conifer trees and small growth underbrush stood in rows between farmland. Driving in Poland required new intuition. The two lane highway allowed fast driving, slower cars would pull into the wide shoulder and fast cars would straddle the median. It took the confidence to know where to speed and when to let another car coming from the other direction take priority. “ This is well fucked”, Chris toothed, grasping the door handle. The game was intuitive, once I figured it out I loved the sport of it. As I looked back at the sleeping babes in the back of the sprinter my body was the key to safety, from point a to point b. Sleep well friends, your life is in my hands. Intersecting the highway were roads leading to smaller towns, vigil at the mouth of were gaudily dressed sex workers. Standing close to the highway, tucked between velvety grain, defined hedging, they smoked, looked at their phones, or waved/stared at the cars as they drove by. One of them I saw was walking on the shoulder of the road, her skirt beaten about by the wind that was turning the endless sheets of grain. It was all very beautiful and dramatic.
Getting closer to Gdynia I looked over at Chris and pointed at the forest that sprawled on either side of us, “You know what makes those forest’s so scary looking? Is the low foliage and how its all been replanted in rows. Walk in far enough, you won’t be able to see the path you’ve cleared and everything is in rows so it’ll all look the same.” “ They look sinister, like they’d devour you” Chris said. I put my eyes back on the road and we floated off into the future. Chris took over driving inner city, I was still nervous about quick changes and transitions, they scared me. We drove past a furniture store called FART, which we all found very amusing. The closer we got to the club the city scape turned from dusty vaulted Communist high rises to boxy port storage facilities. Grey, austere, the iron curtain had drawn back and behind it was a cinder block.
As we loaded into the venue large bouncers screened us to see whether we were in a band or not, one with a very large neck tattoo stared deep into my eyes as he choked my hand with a wrist band. I smiled and mouth hi, he just stared at me. We set our gear down and posted up in the green room, got some pierogis from the food tent and gulped them down before working out before our set. We had a long drive that day. It is important to get the blood flowing. We did push ups, sit ups, squats, leans, grimaces, a long hair tapped on a drum pad in the middle of the room glancing at one of us every few moments. I got up, sweating, cracked open the seal of a water bottle and nodded at him. He tapped on his drum pad and nodded back, “ Do you guys do this before every show?” he inquired. “All of us? Generally after long drives” I replied. “ Gotta stay ready baby, gotta be ready for anything, “ Mike huffed as he fell like a 2x4 towards the ground into a push up position, pumping up diagonal limbs in a dance like fashion. “ Maybe my band should do this, but I think we are too lazy,” he said. Puttering around we made small talk with people, met and set up march next to some chillers from Brazil, Anti-Corpos, who were making their European rounds the same we were. We got up to play, our friend from the green room said hi on our way on and wished us luck.
The show was in a giant venue with what seemed like pro sound, the crowd didn’t fill out the room but there was a fist full of teenagers that got sweaty while we played. One of them got too close to MJ while she was playing and caught her fade, he stood in tears staring at her wondering why she’d done that. I felt like taking him aside telling him it wouldn’t be the last time that’ll happen to him. There’s something Calvinistic to those who are publicly humiliated, some of us are just destined to having terrible humiliating things happen to us, the more we exit the hanged man and enter the fool the quicker we lean into our destiny, salient humiliation. MJ was under the drummers stage by the end of the show, I felt really good about our performance.
We camped out at the merch booth, I nervously walked in and out of the venue trying to find someone interesting to approach. I had recently decided to break up with my partner at the time and was desperate to talk to someone beautiful. The language barrier would prove this difficult. I mustered a, “ Do you speak english” to someone I found attractive and got a two hand shake with, “ sorry don’t english” on the other end of the conversation. Damn. I went upstairs and noticed a guy hawking the merch table, swooping in back and forth, he came up to me when I ordered another drink from the bar and started talking to me. He did all of the classic things that made me not want to talk to people, told me that no one understood my band like him, asked me how old Corey and MJ were, told me again that no one understood us. I walked outside again, people people everywhere, no one to talk to. Mike and Chris had both peeled off into the city to explore, which I was generally down to do, but this place creeped me out and I attract public humiliation, something was in the air and it didn’t suit me walking around a craggy port. I went upstairs again and saw that the hawk was doling out coffee to MJ and Corey. MJ passed me a coffee, “ He bought these for us, he kept on asking if we wanted a drink and I kept on saying no, but he insisted so I asked for coffee,” she said. “This guy gives me the fucking creeps, he has pleated pants.” I said. “I wear pleated pants, “ MJ said, I could tell I had hurt her feelings. “ You know what I mean, chinos and polo, at a grind festival,” I backtracked. I left it alone and we sipped on our coffee, I had a few sips and felt like if i had anymore I’d probably be up all night, I decided to continue pacing, hoping I could socialize somehow, I don’t know why I was so desperate. I smoked and leaned, trying to look interesting, or disinterested, kind of a mix of both.
I looked at the vendors at the DIY fest, 40 dollar shirts of bands that weren’t playing and had quit a long time ago. DIY being reduced to some nomenclature completely meaningless, but thats what value exchange and exponentiation does to everything, right? Makes it the sun bleached bloated corpse of youth idealism, in a tent, images in paint, ready to wear. I still love it and shit, but it just sucks to know what garbage really means as you get older. I waddled back inside and found that MJ and Corey had abandoned post. I asked one of the members of anti corpos where they had went and they said MJ and Corey had both got up and left without saying anything. Overwhelmed with the fear of abandonment, I scanned the room for them. “ Do you think they went to the van” I asked one of the Anti-Corpos people. “Yes, you should check”. I ran out of the building and made my way to the van, Chris was sitting in the van with MJ and Corey in the back, he asked to talk to me outside of the van. “MJ and Corey are saying that they’ve been drugged”, Chris said, “ They pulled me aside and asked me to take them to the van.” “Oh shit” “I want to go home, what time do you think we’ll be home”, Corey asked. “What?” “What time am I going to be home” Corey asked again. “ Like your house, like home? We’re in Poland, you can’t go home. “ I looked at MJ and she was staring off into the middle distance, “ I feel really fucking high right now.” “I am going to pack up the merch and get Mike,” I said to Chris, he nodded.
I made it to venue at a criminal pace, I walked up to the merch balcony, I was feeling pretty loopy. I went up to the merch table and started packing up feverishly. One of the Anti-Corpos people tapped my arm and I turned around, wild eye’d and I would hear later looking pretty drug crazed. “Where have they gone?” they yelled into my ear. “ They got fucking drugged, watch your back, there’s a slime ball that drugged our coffee.” Screaming I see our coffee distributor leaning against the railing. I go over to him, grab his polo shirt and get as close as I can to his face. “Stay the FUCK away from me and my friends or I’ll fucking end you, does that make sense?” “What are you talking?” “You know what you fucking did, now stay the fuck away from us or I’ll end your life. Does that make sense to you?” “You’re crazy” “ You bet I am and I’ll end you stupid existence.” I remember the words escaping my mouth like rubber. I felt feverish and like my eyeballs were shaking in their sockets. Mike showed up and grabbed more merch and calmed me down. “ Ian what happened,” I rambled off incoherently, we looked around for the guy but he was nowhere to be found. I finally spotted him at the edge of the stairs. The band stopped playing, we found security and I proceeded to start yelling at him to give back the merch he bought. People looked really uncomfortable, an older woman implored me to stop yelling at him, drug crazed I continued to scream at him. “ Ian, you’re gonna get fucked up, go to the van” I came to my senses and realized I had attracted a lot of attention. Mike was pointing at the guy saying “ Don’t trust this guy he’s a sketchy fool, he drugged our band, fuck him”. I walked away while Mike talked to security, who came out to the van with a very nice lady we would be staying with. “ Do you want to go to the hospital to get a blood test so we can prosecute?” “Fuck no, we want to go and sleep.” They shrugged to each other and our host, who I’ll call Mary, got in the van with us and directed us 30 minutes outside of the city.
I was apparently talking to her about the smell of whale’s breath on the way back, I really can’t remember. I spent the rest of the drive thinking about being preyed on. The determination of the predator, the acceptance of the prey. Lock step, behind stuttering naivety, where awareness and vigilance rest behind repose. The predatory instinct to know where to place yourself to get advantage. What a fucking horrible thing to be, what a sickening sad lonely existence, vigilant for weakness. I remember taking a selfie with her dolphin toilet seat. Everyone else went to bed and I sat up and talked with our host, her husband, and his friends who filled me in on watching the surveillance videos of the man getting us coffee. “He went into a place with the coffee where the cameras cannot show so we don’t know what he did” Michael, our hosts husband, told me. “ Still blood tests would have proved more conclusively” he reiterated. I asked if I could try every tincture he had created and that distracted the conversation from unpleasant drugging to the joy of picking elderberries and making a home made liquor. We finished out the night laughing and discussing the differences in Polish and American culture. One of the up sides to being drugged is I slept very well that night.
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