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by The Bookhouse Boys
Alex
We are the Bookhouse Boys. We’re a banditry metal band from Oregon. We’ve coined that term to signify music whose intensity slinks in from dark corners. We’ve been touring the US now for about six months, but we don’t really play that many shows, as no one’s much heard of us. So we’re currently the house band of the Delta Inn in Cordon, FL, where we all live and work as cleaners, cooks, van drivers, etc. We ran out of money and luckily found one of the few places, aside from the military or whorehouses, that would clothe us (like maids and bellboys), house us, feed us and pay us to not work very hard. We’ve been writing songs for an album that’ll be called Howl 2.0 about the whole ordeal. It’s loosely based on the Ginsberg poem, because our generation is a bunch of tools, too. In the spirit of the “Sidebar Issue”, we’ve each written a miniature article. Hopefully it’ll all come together in an explosive, mind-expanding cooperation of words. Like that orgy your dad told you about, when he hooked up with the Turkish Swedes, they airlifted in all the horny dolphins to go ballistic in the KY pond, and he swore he saw C. Everett Koop walk by smoking a miniature dildo. We are Joe (percussion), France (guitar), Carlos (vocals, flute), Neila (vocals, keys) and me (bass).
Joe
Driving about the US in a minivan has taught me many things. For example, pretending to be the little crippled boy with the dead trucker father and the hardworking mom from the song “Teddy Bear” isn’t funny to the 18-wheeled speed freaks of “America’s backbone”. Neither are CB handles like 18 Wheels of Ass or Wet Moustache. Talking about how the coffee at a certain diner tastes “exactly like shit”, on the other hand…that’s, well, that’s some vintage Steve Martin type of shit. Yet (and this one came as a bit of a surprise), questioning how one could qualify the “exact” taste of shit is, again, not funny. Truckstop prostitutes really do exist and are called “small cargo” over the CB. Minivans aren’t allowed into convoys. When tossing urine filled cups out the window, it’s best to just let them fly, rather than holding them out and then letting go, as the piss will spray all over face and lips.
France
The strangest place we’ve been through is Tennessee. It’s like FDR’s still in office over there. We saw a pack of wild Labradors running through the trees next to the highway. Three adults and a litter of puppies just galloping along like wolves. The highway’s lined with shacks. It’s like a fucking Mark Twain novel, but with no jokes. You see kids out front with tattered overalls, skinning coon hides or throwing rocks at each other and old ladies carrying barrels of water. At a grocery store someone told us that Tennessee’s state bird is the shit fly. We picked up a hitchhiker there, and, short of the polka dot knapsack tied to a stick, he looked like one of Norman Rockwell’s hobos, with the saggy features and dirty cheeks. He was really nice and dropped some science, like every good windswept rambler should.
Carlos
An Interview with the Hitchhiker from Tennessee
Me: Where you headed?
Hitchhiker: Well, you know, that don’t matter too much. I figure in a business like mine, you can pretty much do it wherever you want.
Me: Oh, yeah? What business is that?
Hitchhiker: I got no business doing nothing whatsoever.
Me: Oh. Looks like I walked right into that one.
Hitchhiker: You sure did, kid. You see, you can pretty much do nothing wherever nothing’s been selling good. And right now nothing’s selling all up and down and across everywhere you look.
Joe: Is your currency canned beans?
Hitchhiker: (laughs) I like that! (laughs) Canned beans. I eat a lot of ‘em.
Neila
When we started out on this tour, we thought we’d be playing asspiles of shows and finding all these crazy underground punk rock clubs and shit everywhere. We figured we’d be like Jacques Cousteau and just have to convince people that fish (our music) were important, so they’d pay us to spear gun some sharks (play our music). Unfortunately, we’re either really shitty boatsmen (musicians) or America’s really boring. Maybe it’s a little of both, and waxing stuffed alligators for cranky dying people with freaky-ass knees at the hotel we work at in the middle of a swamp is a good experience for us.
We’ve been practicing quite a bit in the basement of the hotel–writing really good songs packed with Masonic allegory–and we’re beginning to like all the dying people that pass through. Old men tend to get poetic when they’re drinking Ancient Age with girls. Even the most crotchety old fucks have some handsome words in them. But they’re generally just walking around cursing youth because they’ve finally realized that no one gives a shit about them anymore. That, and they’re coming to terms with the fact that they’re slowly rotting. But they can forget about it for a minute when an attentive ear comes by. A guy from Baltimore recited a letter to me that he’d written to his girl, as he lay facedown in the trenches of rural France during the “second double w”. He hadn’t ever sent it, though, because he was afraid he’d die there. He figured that a beautiful letter becomes much worse than a shitty one, if it’s sent from a dead man.
The day he returned to the States (“a couple bullets heavier”) he bought a Snickers (“God, did she ever love her Snickers”) and took a taxi over to his girl’s house, the letter in his hand. She saw the car pull up, and she ran outside, never even setting down the jar of pears she’d begun to open. She cried and hugged him, squealed delightedly. She’d been cheating, though. He found out right away from her side leaning eyes. So he ate the Snickers in front of her and walked back to the cab, where he decided to use that letter to find a new girl. It was successful in the securing of two subsequent marriages.
Sometimes life is a serious motherfucker, but when you become all shit-stinking and wrinkled up into dust, and you look back on it all, the shitty parts can pretty much be summed up in a paragraph or two. And the good parts are what make you stay up ‘til 3 drinking whisky with a woman sixty years your junior and pretending not to try to fuck her.
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