Quotes:
“Starbucks, Tampons, and Conspiracy.” Chuck summarizing the
various band members needs that will be met by Dallas
“(insert rude sound) Fazoli’s!!” John from inside the stall
at a Fazoli’s. You could hear Chuck laughing throughout the whole restaurant.
Fauna: I will continue to hope, but I’m guessing that fauna
is going to be hard to come by from here on out.
Nice quiet start to the day; paid bills, folded clothes,
filed band receipts, ate lunch with my friends, and had some good dog time
before the band picked me up to head on to Dallas. The van was eerily silent
and I realized they hadn’t gotten to have a break from each other. Still
everyone was doing OK.
Rene really wanted to see the assassination site, so before
we went to the club we travelled through Dealey Plaza. It went by so fast I
couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I said I was going to have to walk back and
look at it more closely and everyone in the van said, “Why? We just did
it.” So we made our way to the
club, were scolded by valet parking dudes because we were encroaching on their
area by about two feet, backed up, parked over a sewer grate and were assaulted
by the smell of corpses rotting. Loaded in up two flights of stairs at a club
called City Tavern, which was right next to a velvet rope club called Plush.
Plush was the kind of club that had a man wearing a tuxedo standing inside a
door with no windows and horrible faux fuck if I know statues of women with
bared breasts and no nipples. Between that club and the sidewalk patio of the
Tavern there were at any given time 20-30 people willfully ignoring, actively
enjoying, and tenaciously pursuing their Snookie inspired lifestyles and
cigarettes completely encased in the smell of slaughterhouses in August.
I was anxious and crawling out of my skin so I started
walking. Dallas is a very clean, new looking city. It had that open feel that
I’ve seen so much in these western cities, which were obviously built with an
infinite sense of space. I know Dallas has been around a long time because I
stumbled across what is presumably a replica of the first post office that
marked the beginning of Dallas, but it really looked like everything was less
than 20 years old. I came across a decent cemetery and a herd of bronze life-sized
long horn cattle before I made it to the Kennedy Memorial. It’s emotional
impact lay somewhere between the Vietnam Memorial and a youtube video of a
kitten playing with a crab on the beach. In other words I get what they were going for and I
think their intention was good, but in the end it’s just a big box with a black
slab inside it bearing J.F.K.’s name. I laid down on the slab to take a picture
pointed at the sky in an attempt to capture the stated intent of the artist in
creating a quiet place inside the city. It didn’t work but as I was sitting up
I heard a loud, friendly voice cackling, “Ah ha ha ha, I’ve seen a lot of
pictures here but I’ve never seen someone try that!” (It’s possible he was shining
me on) It was a surprise because Dallas at that hour on that street was essentially a ghost
town. A homeless man came ambling up to me like a sage in a poorly written
movie about to dispense wisdom and crystallize the solution to a problem so obvious the audience
had known it for an hour, however he just wanted to take me on a tour of the
assassination. I thanked him and told him honestly the reason I was walking was
to be alone. He was cool with that, I gave him a few bucks, and continued on. I
walked past the old courthouse and found myself in Dealey Square. I will
confess now that I am not a scholar of the assassination. I’ve seen the same
famous pictures everyone else has, but talk of conspiracies has a negative impact
on me; like reversed polarity magnets. An argument could be made that people
who believe in conspiracies are optimists because they believe humans are far
more intelligent than I do, albeit evil and conniving. To pull off
most conspiracies requires a cleverness and dedication, not to mention ability
to go to the grave carrying a secret of unacknowledged success than I think is
typical in most human endeavors. You know what Benjamin Franklin said, “Three
people can keep a secret as long as two of them are dead.” That said, I am also
in awe of mankind’s innate curiosity and ability to peel back at least some of
the mysteries of the universe. I believe that a lot of the hard things we do
comes from an inherited shame that we do not live up to our better angels, and
that it is our deepest inclination to be generous and kind. Or as Joe Henry put it, “God only knows
that we mean well, and God knows that we just don’t know how.”
To get back to Dealey Square, I kept turning around in circles
confused. I couldn’t square the reality with the pictures. Even after sunset on
a Wednesday night the area was a hive of activity. I saw a group over by what I
assumed was the grassy knoll and went over and eavesdropped as an unofficial
tour guide was holding court. I finally figured out which building was the
depository and which window the shots came from. I stood in the street and
could take in the entire tableau. I figured out what was throwing me.
Everything was so much smaller and closer together than what I thought. From
the square across the street, to the knoll and on over to the depository seems
like it could fit in maybe a football field and a half. The shot from the
window is completely make-able. The Clock Tower shootings were from much
farther away. You could throw a damn rock from the knoll and hit the motorcade.
Guns are loud, I don’t see how someone could have fired a rifle from the there
and not had it be completely obvious. Regardless, as I stood in the street I
had the same overwhelming feeling of loss and sadness that I felt at the
Clocktower; of lives changed and cut-off, of pain and mourning. In the way that
alcoholism or abuse can echo through a family for generations after the fact, I
feel like these places of violence still send out ripples and that is why, more
than just morbid curiosity, people are attracted to them and grow silent in
their presence.
As I was standing there another hale, hearty, homeless voice
called out to me, but this time rolling without pause into what really
happened. He wanted to show me where a bullet had hit but I asked if he could
just point out stuff from where we stood. He talked about the changed route,
pointed out where the other shooters were and about the missing network
footage. After a particular point I said, ”Yeah, but the depository window had
the best angle.” He said, “Yeah, you got it! You right.” Then he gave me a high
five. I paid him and walked for awhile longer before getting back to the club.
And that’s when the wheels came off. From our first note on
stage nothing was right. It’s easy to be a good band when you’re well-rested,
you can hear everything, and the audience is adoring. A band makes its bones
when faced with adversity and still puts on a good show. In the end we just didn’t do our jobs
and let down the people who’d waited a long time to see us. It’s not the end of
the world, but still I feel embarrassed. The feeling is that maybe it kind of
shook us up and now we’ll finish the tour strong as opposed to limping home.
Here’s hoping.
Tomorrow is Little Rock, another place we have a little
making up to do.
