forgetters, Wild America, and Come and Take It at the House of Commons

Pam Cantu and I drove to Austin on Friday.  Well, she did the driving and I paid for gas (I don’t know how to drive).  We made it in 2 and a half hours, a personal record.  She somehow got her Honda Fit up to 100 mph, I saw the speedometer with my own eyes.  We almost crashed into a median and died.

On Saturday I was waiting for the Jesus Lizard to begin their set.  The band started and my phone started to ring.  I decided to wait until the Jesus Lizard were done and then call whoever it was back.  During “Mouth Breather,” I get a text from the same number. It was Aaron.  I was about to text him back but at that moment a stagediver kicked my hat, gun range earmuffs, and glasses off.  I picked up my hat and ear protection but I couldn’t find my glasses.  I pulled out a little flashlight on my keychain and got down on one knee and looked for it.  The second I did that, the whole crowd of people made space for me, 2 guys pulled out flashlights, 3 guys pulled out cellphones and started using them as flashlights, and everyone was looking for my glasses.  And one of those guys found them. Awesome.

After the Jesus Lizard set, I called Aaron back and he informed me that forgetters from Brooklyn, New York were playing a house show that night.  I couldn’t get the show confirmed as real and not a hoax, but I couldn’t risk it.  I thanked him and started walking to the address he sent me; it was 2 or 3 miles away and took about an hour to walk.

For those of you who don’t know, forgetters (all lower-case with no article) is a band from Brooklyn, New York with Blake Schwarzenbach (Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil, Thorns of Life) on guitar and vocals, Caroline Paquita (Bitchin’) on bass, and Kevin Mahon (Against Me!) on drums.  This would be my only chance to ever see Blake play a house show.

When I finally made it to the house, I saw a bunch of people sitting on the front porch and a kid pumping what looked like a potato cannon with a bicycle pump.  That kid was Kyle, I hadn’t seen him since I was about 15 or 16.  I yell from the sidewalk, “Kyle, is that you?”

“Yeah!” he replied.

I walk up the steps and ask him in almost a whisper, “Hey, uh…is forgetters really playing here tonight?”  He said yes.  I walked inside and sat down in the room with the PA.

A guy with a beard was sitting next to me.  “Are you excited, man?” I asked him.  “Yeah, how ’bout you?”  “Totally. I never thought I’d ever see him in the flesh, y’know?”  (Aaron had been using the phrase “in the flesh” for the past week so I made it a mission to use it at least once)  I told him about how Jets to Brazil didn’t come to Houston on their last tour and I told him about all the other legendary shows I had to miss because I was so young.  He was quite a bit older than me so he told me all the bands he had to miss.  I think one of the bands he missed was Jawbreaker because his dad said no and it was a school night and it was snowing.  Blake then walked into the room and put down his guitar.  Then he started talking to some guy.  Me and the bearded guys sat there in silence and watched.  The 2nd bearded guy pulled out a Polaroid camera and, without looking in the viewfinder, pointed the camera from his lap at Blake and pressed the button.  A big bright flash momentarily blinded everyone in the room and the loud mechanics of the photo being exposed made a shrill noise.  “Uhh…hi there…” said Blake.  The 2nd bearded guy waved his hand. “Hi,” he said.

Their set was great.  I recognized one of the songs was a Thorns of Life song, I think it’s called “Oh Deathly Death.”  My friend Leah was at the show with one of her friends.  I told them how legendary this forgetters show was going to be, but they didn’t get it.  They actually left before the forgetters set.  If I believed in god, this moment would have thrown my theism down the drain.

The Chris Ryan Private Pool Party, 20 years of Felipe, AK-47’s reunion, & washing the dishes

“My parents are out of town and nobody’s home, come over and we can hang out and go swimming!”

“Should we bring beer?”

“Sure!”

That may sound like a transcript of a conversation between two high school students in the middle of summer, but it’s actually from a conversation between two adults.  One is 22 and the other is heading towards 30.

Chris Ryan invited Aaron, Laurene, & I over to his parents’ place in Sugar Land.  They were out of town so he and Melissa took a break from their place in the Heights for a while to watch it.  We took the 30 minute drive and once we got there, everyone went swimming.  Well, everyone but me.  I’m not really into swimming.  I took some pictures and Chris Ryan told me not to tag him in them on Facebook because he’s friends with his parents on Facebook and he doesn’t really want them to know he had people over.  After he grilled some hotdogs for us all, we watched the Tour de France.

I talk trash about the suburbs all the time, but spending time in one of those giant houses makes me realize that living like a king could be pretty cool.  Chris and Melissa told me the only bad thing about it was the insane drives to go to Houston.

When Felipe turned 20 a few weeks ago, he had a party at a house that was kinda like a king’s place.  It was at the house of an investment banker.  The place blew my mind.  Especially when it was filled with people in formalwear.  I took advantage of this party because it would be one of the last ones I go to for a while.  After I got my Associate’s Degree and hung it up on my wall, I decided that once college started up again I’d stay inside and try to learn as much as I can and study and make the best grades.  This will also give me more time to write and paint, two things I haven’t done in a while.

I’m going to miss things like this.

The best thing about the party was the afterparty at Calder’s place.  I think it was in the poolhouse, but I’m not very sure because I’ve never been to his place before then.

You can tell it’s an afterparty because everyone’s top button is undone and ties are loose.

It was a good party to end partying with.

Aaron and I have been hanging out more this summer, especially because his dad opened up a burger/hotdog restaurant that we started working at downtown.  Aaron is a host/cashier/server I’m a dishwasher over there.  I like washing the dishes.  There’s no responsibility, no pressure, nobody to deal with, and gives me the opportunity to spend a few hours to actually think.

We arrive at the restaurant around 9 or 10 every morning and we leave at about the same time.  The thing is, even though we work 10-12 hour shifts, we still feel the need to go out and do something.  Most of the time we go to the Mink and we find ourselves there 2 or 3 times a week, at the minimum.  The other night we went there and saw AK-47, something I thought I’d never be able to see in my entire life.  I saw AK-47 play “The Badge Means You Suck.”  I still can’t believe I’m able to say that.

While hanging out downstairs, I ran into Zoe Kanan!  I had 7th grade math with her and was absolutely obsessed with her family because her dad was in Poison 13 and played with the Big Boys for some time and her aunt or something had something to do with the movie Paris, TX.  I asked her what she was doing there and she told me her grandma was in the Mydolls. Unbelievable! Punkest family ever.

Something Fierce’s Tour Kick-Off Party at the Marshall Law House

College orientation on Friday really sucked the life out of me.  I took the bus there at 7 in the morning.  I skipped lunch that day because I paid my good pal, Dale, a visit at the copy center where I gave him my original Jawbreaker promo poster to duplicate.  On the bus ride home I decided to call it a day and stay home to rest.  That didn’t work out too well.

Aaron Danger called me up and somehow convinced me to go to the Marshall Law house for Something Fierce’s tour kick-off.  We stopped at the Valero by my house to fill up on gas.  I walked into the station to pay and on the way out, I a quite fetching girl come out of her car.  She had tattoos peeking out the bottome of her t-shirt sleeve.  This blew my mind.  You see, at the Eastwood Valero station the only people that go there are cops and creepsters.  I was so enthralled by this girl that I didn’t see a car coming my way as I crossed the street.   Luckily, the car quickly braked and spared me my life.  Looking back at that moment, I almost wish the car did hit me, that way the mysteriously keen looking girl would come running my way to make sure I wasn’t dead.

We pulled up to the house and the porchlight shining on a group of cupholders on the front lawn was pretty inconspicuous.  Seeing Something Fierce cram their gear (and themselves) into an upstairs bedroom with a bunch of goodhearted troublemakers to play a set really brings me back to my youth.  The night was going pretty great.  A keg of Shiner stuffed in the closet and a strict NO RANDOS policy never seemed to fail in the past, now that I think about it.

Stewart and his friend from Mexico City, Moises, DJ’ed later that night.  Too bad dancing scares the hell out of me…

The party spilled out onto the sidewalk.

Darcy and Alex stopped by, but not for long.  Before I knew it, I was out of there.  Everyone crammed in the car and headed to Late Nite Pie.

Buxton’s 7″ release show, being the door-guy, & 6 freezepops for breakfast

Last night was Buxton’s 7″ release show at Mango’s.  When I showed up, I saw Buxton’s bassist, Young Christopher, preparing for the duties of a doorman.  I walked over to ask him what he was doing and I learned that he was going to run the door for the first few hours of the show.  I thought this was horrible because he’d have to go through the troubles of counting money and X’ing hands and checking IDs and wristbanding and ripping tickets, only to play a complete set at the end of the night! I offered to help him and before I knew it, I was helping out running the door.  What sucked though is I missed the opening band, Ghost Mountain.  The music they played was awesome but I wasn’t able to see all the visual stuff they had going on.  Over the tops of people’s heads I saw the upper tips of some awesome projections of puppets and bugs.

A few people think that’s kind of an odd thing about me.  I mean, the fact that I like running the door at shows.  Most people hate it.  People try to slip in for free and you have to stop them, they claim they “lost their ID” and make pouty faces when you X their hands and tell them that they can’t drink, they get mad when you tell them it’s state law that they can’t walk out and then came back if they’re under 21, anyone running the door misses the show, and countless other shortcomings that I can’t think of.  All in all, running the door SUCKS but I love it.  I really like acting like a jerk when I tell people “HEY MAN YOU CAN’T BRING THAT DRINK OUTSIDE” or “PUT THAT OUT! THERE’S NO SMOKING HERE, WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, ABILENE?!”  I really like being the nice guy when I tell people “Hey, this is the last band so I’ll let you both in for the price of one.” It’s good times all around, for me.

My favorite time running the door was at Walter’s when I was helping at a Teenage Kicks show and I was doing a moneycount in between bands.  A drunk gay guy came up to me and said “ME AND MY BOYFRIEND…WE LOVE YOU. WE LOVE YOU SO MUCH CAN I GET A PICTURE?!” and I waved him off saying “Yeah yeah whatever sure” and he put his arm around me while I counted $20s and his boyfriend took a picture.

The worst thing that ever happened when I was running the door, though, was when I was at the Mink for a Casiotone for the Painfully Alone show and I lost the guest list, a sharpie, miscounted the number of the clicker, and then did a money count to see I was around $200 off my mark. Everything worked out in the end, though.

After the Buxton release show, I went to Chapultapec.  I went to a friend’s house and I fell asleep and when I woke up I did someone else’s dishes and ate 6 freezepops for breakfast.

Houston’s scenic moped route, Fleabag, & Cory Branan’s manager

I didn’t have internet access for about 3 week or so and now that I have it back, the internet hasn’t gotten any more interesting than the last time I got on.  Getting on my moped never gets old, though.  On a moped there’s always something to do and something to see, even though I never really have a place to go.

I live on the East Side of downtown and every time I head up to the Heights, I pass that big steel WALD sign.  I don’t know what it is, I think it’s some sort of steel company.  I’ve been seeing it ever since I was a kid.

I also pass this General Electric building that looks like it has been in business for the past 50 years without changing any of its decor.

Fleabag from Oakland, California was marked on my calendar for June 29th at Mango’s.  I’m a big fan of Brad, their drummer who used to live here in Houston.  He’s been in bands like Die, Emperor! Die!, Rosa, Punkin’ Pie, and the Tenspeeds so I was curious to see what this band sounded like.  It was a murky, cloudy day and when I rode out to Mango’s I swore it would rain on me.  I was a few hours early and when I got there I sat with John Sears.  He was eating a salad and drinking a beer.  I asked him if he was here to see Brad’s new band and he informed me that he is the biggest Brad fan around.  We talked about Houston punk houses and Houston punk bands what it’s like to grow up punk in Houston.  He pretty much had nothing good to say about anybody or anything but it was pretty great. No sarcasm, I loved it. He loved it.  It was hilarious.

Fleabag was pretty great, a gritty pop-punk/power-pop band fronted by a female.  Too bad it was a total clusterfuck of a show.  I mean, come on, SIX BANDS on a MONDAY NIGHT? And a few of those bands were on tour, but not on tour with each other.  It was pretty obvious nobody was going to stick around to see SIX BANDS on a MONDAY NIGHT.  Good thing Fleabag played 2nd.

Cory Branan was playing on July 1st at Walter’s but I didn’t plan on going.  If that name sounds familiar but you can’t really figure out how you know it, you might recognize it from the song “Tears Don’t Matter Much” by Lucero.  One of the verses goes something like “Cory Branan’s got an evil streak/and a way with words that will bring you to your knees/he could play the wildest shows/and he can sing so sweet.”  I recently quit my job at the punk rock ice cream shop I had been working at for the past year and a half and didn’t really have much money to spend.  Well I check my email one day and Cory Branan’s manager, Brian Mann, emails me telling me information about the show.  He offered to send me MP3’s and albums and stuff to convince me to go see Cory perform.  I thought it was pretty random for him to email me but he told me it’s because I seem like a “punk rock kind of fellow.”  Well that convinced me enough to go out to the show.  I bought a cheeseburger from the the Broken Spoke Cafe, one of my favorite local restaurants about a mile away from Walter’s that’s also owned by my former assistant principal.  I took it over to Walter’s and walked inside.  Doors hadn’t opened yet and Cory Branan and Jon Snodgrass were doing sound checks inside.  I sat down at the bar and started to eat my burger.  I started to think about how a few years ago I walked into Walter’s before doors opened I was sternly asked to leave, but now I can pretty much walk in there whenever I want and sit at the bar and eat dinner.  The bartender sat down next to me and I asked him how his ice cream was and how his head was healing.  (He got stitches in his head recently and I sent him a 2-quart container of his favorite ice cream, key-lime pie.)  He told me the ice cream didn’t have enough key lime pie in it and his head was alright.

Cory Branan and Jon Snodgrass played great that night.  Instead of playing individual sets, they alternated songs in a single extended set.  Thinks got pretty shambled, though, when Jon lost a piece of his guitar hardware when trying to change a string so he and Cory had to share one guitar and alternate songs.

The headliner of the show was actually Joey Cape.  He was the lead singer of Lagwagon, a big pop-punk band in the 90s that I never listened to.  At the end of the show, he invited Butch from 30FootFall on stage to play guitar and do a sort of duet.

After the show, I was leaving the parking lot and Cory complimented my moped.  I told him that the only reason I went to the show that night was because his manager emailed me and told me to come.  He told me that it was nice to “meet proper” and we said our goodbyes.  I went over to Darcy’s and we tried to watch Tokyo Zombie but we couldn’t get passed the first 15 minutes.  We ended up going to this kid’s warehouse, which turned out to be the old Todo Moto warehouse.

We lit a bag of sanitizer on fire and threw rocks at it while listening to a Geto Boys tape.  We got drunk and then at around 3 in the morning we went to Late Nite Pie to see if they had any left over pizzas in the dumpster or any they were willing to give us.  We parked the car outside near the back and an employee came out and we hung out for a while. He told us to wait a little bit and he went inside to go check on the status of leftover pizzas.  We talked about stars and aurora borealis while we waited.  He came back out and told us that all the pizzas had been delivered or eaten already.  Darcy and I went back to her place.

When I woke up in the morning, I planned on leaving but I had so much fun that I decided to stay for one more day.  She sleeps a little longer than I do so he roommate and I just hung out in the living room for a bit.  Our talking woke Darcy up but she didn’t mind.  We didn’t know what to do all day since we no longer have jobs, but I had a pretty good plan.  I remember Darcy telling me about how she loves Allison Mosshart and the Kills so I told her we were going to Whole Foods.  We go there and walk around and buy some food, but what I really planned on doing was finding Bucky.  Bucky and I have known each other for a while now and he loves to talk and tell stories about all the punk stuff he did or planned on doing, but more importantly he was the driver for one of the Kills’ tours so I wanted him to tell stories about them and Allison Mosshart and Discount.  He wasn’t at Whole Foods so I Darcy and I went to Domy Books to find him.  Luckily, he was there and Darcy and I sat on the floor and ate our food while he told us stories about touring with the Kills.

We finished our food and Bucky finished all his stories so we went back home.  We hung out for a few hours and we decided to go hang out with this kid.  He was hanging out with his friends at the time but he told us we were more than welcome to come by, so we did.  We ended up at this guy’s awesome house; he had a lot of antique or vintage furniture, like old rotary telephones and tube-speakers and antique luggage.  It was amazing.  He also wired all the telephone lines in his house, rebuilt a 1980 diesel Mercedes, is currently building a fountain, and was interested in restoring a vintage scooter.  We get to talking about scooters and mopeds and small diesel powered engines.  This guy was awesome, he was a plant operator for the city of Bellaire.

We ended up going to Catbird’s where we didn’t have any money so we left and went back to the old warehouse.  We sat there for what felt like hours, awkwardly glancing at each other and not saying a word.  It was treacherous, like Sartre’s “No Exit.”

Darcy and I went back to her place and watched the Royal Tenenbaums and she stick ‘n poked herself a tattoo on her left hand.