Tour Diary: Day 5: The Meth Problem
Saturday, May 31st, 2008Yo, if this is your first time stopping by you should think about subscribing to my shit. It's the best on the web fo'rils.RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
The whole band is involved in the creation of this post because it’s pretty much taken the combined mental power of all six of us to recall the events that already seem like they happened 25 years ago. This is what we’ve got. We peeled out of Richland as fast as we possibly could1 and Mike drove through most of the night. Headed to Blackfoot, Idaho and then Billings, Montana, our route took us 550 miles, down through northeastern Oregon and across all kinds of Idaho potato farms and whatnot. I fell asleep almost as soon as we hit the road. Mike apparently drove all night.
When I woke up a few hours later, it was light out and Bryan had just slammed the driver’s side door and was getting situated behind the wheel. I’d obviously been asleep for a while. I told Bryan I could take over for him if he was tired. He just stared at me thru the rear view mirror like I’d just called him a fag or something.
“Dude. We’ve been at this rest stop for like four hours. I just woke up,” he said2.
“Oh.” I went back to sleep. I woke up again later a couple of times when Bryan pulled off the highway to take pictures of things. Once, still in Oregon, there were clouds hugging the tops of rolling green mountains. I figured it would be a good picture for Schutmaat to take, rolled over and went back to sleep. Sucker. None of us really remember much else about this drive, so I guess that means not much happened. We went thru a couple Indian reservations and passed a bunch of Indian casinos; I wanted to stop, no one else cared.
Blackfoot, Id. is a really cute little town. It was gorgeous when we got in, the sun was just starting to set and Bryan and I decided to spend some times taking advantage of the golden hour light. After we were compelled to take the same picture like 15 times before we even got out of sight of the venue, we decided to part ways. I went right, he went left. I took a couple of rolls back in the neighborhood behind Main Street, lots of trees and houses, and I’m looking forward to seeing the work.
I stopped at what looked like a mid-nineteenth-century church house, bathed in golden light, little kids playing tag in the churchyard. I stopped to take the picture. I was using my Hasselblad, which shoots from about wasit-level, and it took a good two or three minutes of wandering around to find the angle and whatnot I wanted to shoot. As I was about to take it, I noticed thru the viewfinder that there was a woman standing on the sidewalk giving me an icy stare. I looked up.
“You’re not videotaping the children, are you,” she shouted across the street to me in a heavy, easily-mockable drawl.
“No,” I shouted back, in a tone that I hoped would convey mild disgust.
“Because I don’t want you videotaping our children,” she added, as if there was some kind of additional explanation necessary.
“Okay,” I shouted back, and looked back down into the camera. I was there for maybe another half a minute. I took the frame, refocused and changed my position slightly, and then took another. The woman didn’t move the whole time, she just stood there in that one spot, giving me her icy glare. I’ll blow it up and post it when I get the picture back. That woman was dead certain that I was a pervert. Clearly, I wasn’t there because of the beautiful light on the beautiful old buildings in the town, but because I wanted wank footage of kids running around in the dirt. I can only imagine the “close-call” story she’s telling all the other church ladies. What an idiot.
Anyway, I walked back to the venue (Tony’s Family Billiards - an alcohol-free establishment in what turned out to be an alcohol-free town) to share the hilarity with the dudes. They were all still in the van so I climbed, already saying something along the lines of, “Hey, guess what this woman…” but they were all, “Ssh! Shut up!” I asked what was going on.
Someone explained that they had been sitting there in the van, minding their own business when two girls, probably around 15 or 16, came out of the house in front of us, holding hands. They started making out, and then started dry humping. Then, an older woman they described as “The Mom” came out, but the girls didn’t stop. The Mom was like, you know. Watching.
“What?”
“Yeah, dude. It was so fucking crazy. They just went back inside. Look.”
The door of the place was open. We sat there in silence for like 10 minutes. Then the girls came out. They were holding hands. They were kissing. They got into a pickup that was parked in the driveway. Then “The Mom” came out and got into the drivers seat. The girls slid out of site in the cab. “The Mom” just sat there smoking. We speculated about what was going on in the cab. I asked if maybe we should call child protective services? Then we decided that everybody involved in whatever sexually deviant thing was happening in front of us seemed pretty happy with the arrangement.
Maybe this is why the church lady was so worried that I was a pervert. Maybe this repressed town was overrun with people acting out of extreme sexual frustration. Who knows! The little lesbians came to the show and even though though they played pool and groped each other most of the time, they each bought a tshirt.
The opening band was local: high school kids who played in their underwear. There were only about 20 people, but they were a good 20, super into the music. I took like 4 rolls of film by the time the Jonbenet was done playing, and then the merch table got so mobbed it took two of us to get everybody the shit they wanted. It was a pretty great show even though there was nothing to drink.
Then this amazing thing happened. This little kid with a mohawk went and picked up Dann’s guitar. He was so small, the guitar so big, that he had to sit on one knee and rest the guitar on the other to play it. But he knew how to rock. His dad got on the drums. Dann picked up the bass. And the little dude led a little encore.
Rupe’s the local’s favorite spot, was right across the street, and Bryan and I went there when the show was over for dinner. It was the most wholesome burger place I’d ever seen. The entire place seemed to be staffed by high school kids, and the booths full of families finishing dinner. We were sitting at the counter finishing up when the little dude from before came in to get a milkshake. He said the band was awesome. He told us about his equipment (stratocaster with full stacks modified for his mic). He told us he was eleven. Then he said he had to go; his dad was waiting for him. I ran back to the van to get him a CD. While I was there, I noticed that the young ladies who demonstrated such a deep bond for eachother before the show were back at in in the front seat of a different car parked in the same location.
What a town.
Everyone was in the van, the trailer was loaded And if that’s all that had happened, it would still have made for a pretty funny story. But as it happened, there is a whole other chapter.
Rupe’s closed before the rest of the dudes could get anything to eat. They were hungry, but everything in Blackfoot was dark for the night. We had to find food for everybody elsewhere, and about 30 minutes later, we were pulling into a Denny’s parking lot in Idaho Falls.
Our waiter was a very friendly guy who we’ll call Jeff3. He said hello, took our drink orders, brought us our drinks. And then he made the very clever observation that we were “not from around here.” We told him that, in fact, he was correct. He then deduced that we were most likely a band. The dudes said they were. Jeff got really excited. He wanted to know where we were from what kind of music they play, where the tour was going. He told us about family members of his that were musicians. He said he wanted to buy a CD for his brother. He had all kinds of things to share with us. Mike went to the van to get him an LP which they would all sign, plus a CD for Jeff’s brother.
A few minutes later, Jeff came over again. He said that the customers in another booth were wondering what band we were, and wanted to know if it was okay to say hello. Mike said it was, and a few seconds later, a guy with gauges in his ears, a orange t-shirt and big black raver pants was at our table asking us a lot of the same questions. He had never heard of the Jonbenet, but he wanted to buy a CD.
A few minutes after that, we heard very familiar music playing in the kitchen. We mentioned it to Jeff and he said, “Yeah, we’d play it out here but we’d get in trouble.”
Then, not long after that, a waitress came over to buy the CD for her son. “It sounds like something he’d like,” she explained as the dudes took turns signing the liner notes. And then the kid from the other table came back with his placement and made everyone sign it – including me.
The Jonbenet rocked the shit out of the Idaho Falls Denny’s just by showing up.
But Alas, the experience was bittersweet. We can’t remember how this happened, but as Jeff was clearing our plates (he worked through his break so as not to have to give our table to a different server) he commented that he lived in a rough neighborhood. In fact, thought Jeff, we would be surprised about how rough Idaho Falls actually was; beneath the surface of this deeply Mormon town was an undercurrent of crime and violence. Jeff told us that people get shot on his street all the time.
This was sort of an unexpected turn in the conversation, but Mike wanted to relate. Not knowing what to say, Mike turned to the anti-Meth posters that are as common in this part of the country as road signs or gas stations for conversational guidance.
“I understand there’s a real meth problem out here,” Mike said. Jeff instantly became somber.
“It touches everyone,” he said, standing by our booth with the remains of or grand slam breakfasts on the dirty plates in his hands. “Doctors, judges, businessmen, everyone. I was hooked on meth for eight years. I lost my business, my wife, my kids, everything. But I’m turning it around. I’m working at Denny’s and I’ve been clean for more than two years.”
He nodded and smiled at us. Then he stood there. I think we kind of looked at him without saying a word for what must have been five full seconds. Mike finally said something.
“I’m glad you cleaned up. It’s a hard thing to.”
Jeff acknowledged that it was, then took our shit to the kitchen.
“Hey, Mike,” Dann said after a minute of the group of us all staring blankly at each other. “Next time we’re in a place with a meth problem, don’t bring it up to strangers.”
- Looking back now, this wasn’t that bad a show. The payout turned out to be pretty big because so many of the kids bought merch even though it was sort of like a riot. ↩
- He’s still making fun of me for this. How the fuck was I supposed to know? ↩
- I changed his name to protect his identity since I don’t know if he’d appreciate me writing about him on the internets. ↩






