it’s never fun to wake up after a night of serious drinking. the first time I opened my eyes it was still dark, just after seven a.m. I lifted my head to look out the window and discovered that I had a screaming headache. fair enough. I rolled out of my bunk, being careful not to disturb andreas sleeping in the bunk under me, and found the bottle of excedrin I had brought with me. and then for the next hour, while waiting for the drugs to kick in enough to allow me to go back to sleep, I watched the station we were parked next to. I never figured out if it was a train station or bus station or what, but I watched people go in and buy tickets and disappear into a stairwell or elevator. it wasn’t terribly interesting, but it gave me something to do until I felt well enough to lie down again.
the next time I woke up it was almost one, and we were on our way to spain. andreas, god bless him, isn’t the smoothest of drivers. this, coupled with the fact that we were crossed the pyrenees, made for a nauseating afternoon. fortunately, it wasn’t too terribly far to bilbao. we had been provided with a day room at a nearby hotel so that we could shower, and after loading into the club we were playing I went and cleaned up. kate, adam, tyson and morgan went to go find the guggenheim, and while I really wanted to go check it out, I just couldn’t find the energy.
our first show of the tour that night went pretty well. I had some technical difficulties with the keyboard on one of the songs, but the first few shows are always wonky. I hadn’t heard two gallants stuff before, and I really enjoyed it- a two piece (duh) with adam on main vocals and guitar and tyson on drums and backing vocals. I loved tyson’s drumming, very energetic, and adam’s vocals were surprisingly powerful, considering how soft-spoken he is.
the show was over at twelve thirty and the bus wasn’t picking us up until quarter past two, so we spent the rest of the night fooling around and drinking, watching the two gallants crew have pull-up contests in the green room and rounding up what food and drink we didn’t finish to put on the bus. after an aggrevating load-out through the throngs of people now crowding the club with a late night dance party, we discovered that the bus had been blocked in. we waited on the sidewalk in front of the club, our gear piled around us, until three thirty, when andreas was finally freed of the cars left by thoughtless weekend warriors.
we got to the club where we were meeting up with the two gallants crew just after eleven a.m. when we first arrived, we saw some indie rock-looking kids hanging around out front by a van. I had a sinking feeling that there had been some horrible miscommunication and that that van, not a tour bus, was what we were taking around europe. but then they looked at us and ignored us, and I decided that they were probably one of the opening bands that had played the night before. I noticed one of them, a dark-haired girl with glasses, had a ‘jaya the cat’ t-shirt on, which was a band from boston that a couple of my friends had been in over the years, but I just wasn’t in the mood to strike up a conversation. we were met by jacob the tour manager, morgan the merch guy/ spiritual adviser, and donny the sound guy, and kate and eric and I took turns watching the pile of luggage and gear on the sidewalk while we walked around getting coffees and baguettes and water.
after an hour or so the bus finally arrived. it was a big red bus that had ‘red car’ emblazened across the front and back windshields. I think it’s the name of the company that rents the busses. we met andreas, the german bus driver, and the gentlemen of two gallants, adam and tyson. inside the bus there were twelve bunks stacked two high, a table that seats four and another two chairs facing front with a little shelf for writing, a kitchen-esque area with all kinds of fruit, teas, condiments, breads, and other stuff pilfered from past green rooms, and a refrigerator sorely in need of cleaning out. towards the back there was another refrigerator that held manly drinks, and in the way back was the lounge around with a big, broken-in black leather wraparound couch, a tv with a dvd player and perhaps some kind of game console, and a stereo. it was decorated with a couple barbie dolls, a snowglobe with a jamaican in it, a weird statue of a tiger with a few little tiger babies hanging around it, and lots of half-drunk bottles of liquor. I claimed a bunk in the front, figuring the farther away from the lounge it was, the quieter it would be.
jacob and andreas decided that we would drive to bordeaux and spend the night there, as we had a long ride to bilbao and an off night. we spent the ride just hanging out, making small talk with our new friends and feeling each other out. they couldn’t have been sweeter. I was so relieved- a bus is a small place for nine people who don’t get along to be living on. as we got into bordeaux, we passed by some kind of magnificent structure on the waterfront, perhaps a hotel? it was incredible, really breathtaking, and I was sad that it was too dark to take a picture of it. after parking the bus we set out en masse to find ourselves a thanksgiving dinner. we quickly discovered, however, that instead of landing in a gourmand’s dream, we were instead smack dab in the middle of a bunch of sex shops. we wandered around the block until we found a restaurant that was open and not suspect-looking. it was thanksgiving, but there were no turduckens to be found, just a small italian place with nobody in it. we got pizza and pasta and weird dishes of calamari in some sort of black sauce and wine, lots of wine, and had a lovely dinner. donny and I, to some eye-rolling from our party, talked baseball for a long time (he’s a giants fan). post-dinner we all retired to the bus where we drank more wine and adam and donny taught kate and I how to play poker. the lounge party broke up around two, and I stayed in there for a while longer by myself, drunkenly trying to make an airplane warning light that had spilt in two in my vision recombine. it didn’t work. I went to bed knowing that I should drink some water but not doing it anyway.
the phone startled me awake at ten a.m. it was my friend jonty, from london but in paris on business, calling to see if I had time for a cup of coffee. I quickly brushed my teeth and went outside to meet him. he is a friend of mine from when I lived in austin, as he had a brother that lived there and would come to austin to visit. we walked around the corner to a nearby café and caught up over espresso. he told me he had been working on his family’s lake house over the summer and his dream of having a sort of commune there- not so much in the hippie sense, but just having a few close friends and family living there together. it’s a big place, apparently, and could house about eight people. I was genuinely tempted for a moment, daydreaming about bucolic, rolling green hills dotted with sheep, having little house on the prairie-style dinners, making jam to sell from a roadside stand to travelers on their way to a nearby tourist town.. but I have relationships, plans, obligations that are important to me, all of which require me to be stateside. jonty had to go back to work, but we left with promises to have drinks that evening. I left the café and wandered around the neighborhood, looking for more coffee, and ran into kate. we got croissants and coffee and changed some money into euros, then went back to the hotel for a couple hours of practice.
kate left around four to go to the louvre, and eric and I made plans to meet up with her at the eiffel tower at seven. it’s really a magnificent structure, much more impressive in person than I would have thought. eric and I were early and it was quite cold and raw out, but fortunately the rain that had been coming down for most of the afternoon had stopped by the time we got there. we shuffled around, trying to keep warm, and when kate finally arrived, we were ready to move on. I mean, other than riding the tram to the top (which even if I wasn’t freezing and terrified of heights, the ticket price of seventeen bucks or so still would’ve kept me on the ground), there’s not much to do there except look at it for a few minutes.
in a fit of hunger, we stopped at a touristy restaurant nearby and had some overpriced, overcooked burgers and fries before heading back to the hotel. jonty came and picked me up at the hotel in the range rover he had been driving around for his job, which I only vaguely understood to be part of a ground crew that was following a zeppelin that was flying around europe to advertise “the palm”, a ridiculous man-made island in dubai in the shape of a palm tree (yeah, I have no idea). we found our way to a wine bar about a mile away and since it’s beaujolais nouveau time, we decided to try it out. I have little palate for wine; usually if it’s red, it’s fine for me, but this was really quite nice.
we didn’t stay too long, as jonty had to bring someone to the airport at five in the morning and I had to get ready to leave paris, which I was fairly ready to do at that point. I’d love to go back there for a vacation, but it’s a hugely expensive city, and had managed to spend about a hundred dollars in two days on nothing but food, coffee, a couple of beers, and a pack of cigarettes.
we arrived at the hotel after an uneventful seven and a half hour flight and half hour cab ride to discover that, with it being only eleven o’clock in the morning, we couldn’t check in for another three hours. eric had slept some, kate and I hadn’t slept at all on the plane, and it was five in the morning our time, but we were humming enough with the excitement of being in paris that we figured we could knock around until two. the three of us dropped our bags in the lobby and wandered our way to a brasserie a couple blocks away. we ordered beers (I was surprised at the lack of raised eyebrows when I remembered how early it was there, but then remembered we were in europe, not america) and sat around, pretentiously enough, smoking and discussing world politics. my attentiveness faded in and out with my ability to stay awake, and I could only participate in the conversation some of the time. sometimes I just stared blankly around the brasserie, noticing things like how odd it was that people just threw their trash on the floor by the bar or that the replicas of toulouse-lautrec paintings hung around the bar seemed ridiculously clichéd.
after checking in, we were supposed to practice from three to seven at a rehearsal space near the hotel, but the beers were, in hindsight, a poorly thought out idea. we crashed almost instantly upon dropping our bags on the floor of the room. I remember waking up at one point and hearing eric telling us that it was five, and that if we got up right then we could make it for about thirty minutes. I laughed weakly before turning over and falling back asleep for another three hours.
dinner was had at a last resort restaurant, everything else having closed by the time we left our room at ten. it was passable italian food. I got a disappointing salad of romaine, shredded carrots and canned corn for five euros. eric and kate fared better with pizza and pasta. I didn't think I'd sleep well after having slept all afternoon, but I crashed out at two a.m. for another eight hours.
