4, CHECOUT TIME WILL BE 1 PM.
“Checkout is spelled wrong,” I said. “You should rectify that.”
She glanced at the sign, then turned back to me. “So ’tis, but the one PM part needs no rectifyin.” She glanced at her watch. “That gives you an hour and a half. Don’t make me call the police, hon. At state fair time, they’re thicker’n flies on a fresh dog turd, and they’d be here in a jiff.”
“This is such bullshit,” I said.
That was a blurry time for me, but I remember her reply as clearly as if she had spoken it in my ear two minutes ago: “Uh-uh, honey, this is reality.”
Then she turned back to the television, where some fool was tapdancing.
• • •
I wasn’t going to try scoring dope in the daytime, not even at the state fair, so I stayed at the Fairgrounds Inn until one thirty (just to spite the country girl). Then I grabbed my duffel in one hand and my guitar case in the other, and set out walking. I made a stop at a Texaco station around where North Detroit Avenue becomes South Detroit. By then my walk had become a portside limp and my hip was throbbing with my heartbeat. In the men’s room I cooked up and delivered half my goods into the hollow of my left shoulder. Mellowness ensued. Both my sore throat and the ache in my leg began to recede.
My good left leg became my bad left leg on a sunny summer day in 1984. I was on a Kawasaki; the elderly asshole coming the other way was piloting a Chevrolet the size of a cabin cruiser. He wandered into my lane, leaving me a choice: either the soft shoulder or a head-on collision. I picked the obvious choice and made it past the asshole okay. The mistake was trying to swerve back onto the road at forty. Advice to all you novice riders out there: swerving on gravel at forty is a terrible idea. I dumped the bike and broke the leg in five places. I also shattered my hip. Shortly thereafter, I discovered the Joy of Morphine.
• • •
With my leg feeling better and the itches and twitches at bay, I was able to move on from the gas station with a bit more vigor, and by the time I got to the Greyhound terminal, I was asking myself why I’d stuck with Kelly Van Dorn and his screwed-up country band as long as I had. Playing weepy ballads (in the key of C, for God’s sake) was not what I was cut out for. I was a rocker, not a shitkicker.
I purchased a ticket on the following day’s noon bus to Chicago, which also bought me the right to stash my duffel and my Gibson SG—the only valuable possession I had left—in the baggage room. The ticket cost me twenty-nine dollars. I counted the rest sitting in a bathroom stall. It came to a hundred and fifty-nine bucks, about what I had expected. The future was looking brighter. I would score at the fair, find a place to crash—maybe at a local homeless shelter, maybe outside—and tomorrow I’d ride the big gray dog to Shytown. There was a musicians’ exchange there, as there is in most big cities, with players sitting around, telling jokes, swapping gossip, and looking for gigs. For some this wasn’t easy (accordion players, for instance), but bands were always looking for competent rhythm guitar players, and I was a smidge more than that. By 1992 I could even play a little lead, if called upon to do so. And if I wasn’t too wrecked. The important thing was to get to Chicago and get a gig before Kelly Van Dorn put out the word that I was unreliable, and the pisshead just might.
With at least six hours to kill until dark, I cooked up the rest of my shit and put it where it would do the most good. Once that was taken care of, I bought a paperback western at the newsstand, sat on a bench with it opened to someplace in the middle, and nodded off. When I woke myself up with a volley of sneezes, it was seven o’clock, and time for the former rhythm guitarist of White Lightning to hunt up some of the good stuff.
• • •
By the time I got to the fair, sunset was just a bitter orange line in the west. Although I wanted to save