I had a week to kill between the shows in São Paulo and Las Vegas, and I was out of money. It's unlikely I would have returned to Vegas early anyway, when I was already in an exotic, faraway, and foreign place, but even if I'd have rather been in Vegas, the fact remains that even a hellhole in the acid-wash district of Fremont Street, or Boulder Hwy., or even the cheapest room in the dead zone that exists in the northern part of S. Las Vegas Blvd., would have set me back at least $100/night. It didn't usta be that way; I remember a time when a low-end, bleach-scented hotel room on a shady section of Fremont St. cost $20, but those days were over. As it turned out, a Motel 6 on Tropicana Ave. cost upwards of $200/night, even if you booked it days ahead of time for half that price, but I wasn't there yet. I like Vegas, actually, but I'd been there a thousand times. São Paulo was perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and cheaper. So I stayed in the city for a week after the show.
The show itself was unspectacular. I had the "last show of the tour" sense of relief, even before I started to play. That relaxing feeling of knowing it doesn't matter if you conserve your voice for any upcoming shows. It doesn't matter if you're in perfect shape. Or even good shape, necessarily. You can blow your voice out, if you have to. You can even have a cigarette or 2 afterwards, if you like. I always like to have a cigarette after the show, but if you do that on tour, you end up smoking half a pack of cigarettes in a week, and it affects your voice. So it's best to save your cigarette for the very end of the tour. The last show relaxation smoke. The only greater pleasure is in the show itself. Assuming that it's good.
The bar itself was friendly, of course, being in Latin America, but the other band couldn't have cared less that I was there, and immediately left with all their fans as soon as they finished their set. The old familiar disappointment. There goes the room. Watch the people evaporate like raindrops in the desert. Everyone was gone. What just happened? Did I magically transport myself to Chicago, or L.A.?
Where did everybody go?
This selfie with the soundman and the guitarist in the other band was so insanely friendly, everyone I spoke to was so incredibly nice, that I was genuinely surprised when everybody left. Out of nowhere, I was left in the Green Room all alone. It was alright. I had a week to kill before my next show, so I was relaxed. I would finally get some rest. I sat in the Green Room for a minute, tuning my guitar. The room wasn't clean, but it was cleaner than me. I brushed against the wall, the pukeboards and the wetwall stained with marker paint and booze fumes, loogies in the muck, and my shirt was a little cleaner from the contact. I was gross.
Rock 'n Roll, amigos. Outlaw country-fried, to go.
My performance wasn't bad, but there was no reason to exert myself. I didn't half-ass it, but I didn't put it into overdrive either. It wasn't worth it. I've had my share of fight gigs, and know that their value lies in the way that they train you to soldier on when no one cares. Everything is broken, the audience is hostile (or simply wrong for you), the sound is terrible, and the microphone electrocutes you if you look at it sideways. None of this was the case in São Paulo, so it was an easy ride into shore. I coasted into port like a tired yacht who is just happy to be out of the open sea. Battle-scarred and bruised, I drank my free soda, smoked a couple cigarettes with the soundman, and went back to my hotel.
Getting into town hadn't been a problem. God made a way. I wandered around GRU after Diego dropped me off, deciphering maps and subway routes and buslines, all of it written in that strange alien code known as Portuguese (though in all honesty, probably in English too), and quickly realized that it was impossible to get into town without first doing a loop around the Maldives in a wooden raft, juggling balls of frozen sunshine, tricking the false gods that act as the archetypal Doormen of Gibraltar to let me into the exclusive club of mermaids dancing on the floor of the Middle Earth Sea, and finally climbing to the top of an Alpine mountain peak and sliding down the frozen slopes like a skier singing Shabat, Shiboot, Sla-loam. Slalom and Shalom. Hello and goodbye, around the trees in circles, all at once. The Jewish Feast of Tuber-Knuckles, innertubing down the plaxtic river of infinity. Perhaps even rapping on the floorframe. The iron Irish waterslide of the lurking, loco ages.
It didn't make any sense at all, in other words. There's no way to get into São Paulo from the São Paulo airport, without stopping in Dubai. Maybe with a balloon, or some kind of converted, idiot dirigible. But not by traditional transportation means, like a submarine, or horse.
You have to have a car.
Fortunately (God), I found myself at an Uber counter, talking to one of their employees. Turned out, the guy was about to get off his shift. Turned out, where he was going was not far from my hotel. Turned out, he was leaving in 5 minutes. I just paid him for the ride.
And so I made it to the show, with time to climb out of the enclosed balcony of my room beforehand, onto the second floor roof, overlooking the street.
The show was down the street from the hotel. It was a 5-minute walk. I was free to chill at last.
I titled this poorly-composed exercise in terrible lighting "Push The Sky Away," since I was still trying to get Nick Cave's attention with my social media posts (I couldn't afford to go to his shows and harangue him from the front row, which would have been more effective). I was too tired to turn on a bedside lamp to illuminate my face, but I didn't want the light glaring on me anyway. It was time to cruise my books, and make notes inside the skullpane. Watching people drying clothes on rooftops. Acrobatic cats, leaping over walls. I woke up slow and easy, with a lethargic sense of caffeinated grace. It was peaceful, clean, and mellow. The week was laid out before me like a 7-course buffet.
Which was the only thing I could afford to eat. The free breakfast buffet, open every morning from dawn until whenever. I had my ticket to Vegas, and a pack of English cigarettes with lung warnings in Portuguese, but nothing after that. Not enough to do anything with but get back to the airport, at the most. The free breakfast buffet was my only meal of the day. I set my alarm so I wouldn't miss it. The alarm went off, and I took the elevator one floor down and gorged myself on monster fat and protein, yogurt fruit and cereal, and brought up several of these tiny liquor-cups of coffee for later, when I actually woke up. I woke up every day at 2pm. It was mellow, calm, and clean.
I walked into the streets.
The streets which were amazing, if also hostile and imposing. The jungle was obviously trying to crawl back up through the bottom of the city, and turn it into Anaconda Eden. Giant trees made of petrified serpents rose out of the bus stop, like upside-down waterfalls of wood.
Parque Augusta was chained shut, so that only ghosts wearing crowns like crashing tambourines could float through the gates and enter. What is that music, you may wonder, coming from the creepy gated park? Is it the jungle singing unholy hallelujahs? Is it the sound of giant serpents kissing? Snakes proclaiming their love for one another in the hissing, python language of the streets?
Yesss, indeed. It is.
Explain, ye snakes, the Star Wars car, parked among the great postmodern edifi of long-forgotten time. Isn't that a salvage ship for homeless droids? What's it doing in Brazil?
And what about the graffiti people? Is there a caste system in place for the cartooned drawings of hijab-ied aborigines? Or is it aboriginal hijaberies? It can be difficult to tell. De-pupiled tiki robots saying, "Não." Strange imported gods, just beneath commercial bustle.
And who, really, is Caboclo? With his monochrome-yet-rainbowed hair, his Star of David eyes? Is his arrowed mouth a sign of progress, or impending human silence?
Who, really, is Caboclo? Is he really running for to be the Presidente, or is he the leader of a band of alien subversives? An army of slithering, socialistic reptiles, waiting for the signal, so that they might fall like leather snowflakes...
From a flying snowman made of conquered stars?
I need to know. I need it. Knowledge donut ships evade me. Do NOT avoid me, brainslaves. Row your beetles into shore. Bring your mangos and your lipstick to the bronze and gleaming gravesite. Don't forget a piece of candy for the kid. His little molded dog is hungry too.
Are you a crazy woman weeping? Your tears have turned to sideburns. Disconsolation wrought in iron. Your face is buried like a loved one, in the freshly-dug grave of your own open palms.
Shall we escape this oppressive alien madhouse? This city by the drunk and sunken sea? The subterranean ghost lights, powered by the grave?
Does humanity persist in the wreckage of the spaceship?
It seems to that it might. Judging by these holographs.
Singing through the canopy of serpents, floating over concrete seas.
Concrete seas, or the floor of an open-air cave? Stalagmites full of people, spires of sharpened asphalt pointing toward the coming of Caboclo? Or just another place of business, populated by happy, solid ghosts, conducting operas in their sportswear?
It's kinda hard to say. São Paulo rubbed me wrong. It had a hostile vibe, and after a few days I stopped walking through the wasted, lush, and psychedelic fray. There was madness on the streets. The vibe was hard and ruthless. I'm no mark, but I felt like a target, just sitting in the park, watching skaters dancing on their concrete city surfboards.
After a few days, I felt the need to avoid it altogether. I spent my last 2 or 3 days never once leaving the hotel. It sounds depressing, but it wasn't. It was a welcome break. A chance to rest and sleep in a looney-proof oasis, where language isn't twisted into ghostly street poetics, just so you can read a subway map. I wasn't in the mood for skateboard wars. I didn't feel called to preach to demoniacs with eyes like switchblade knives, waiting for their moment to open up on you. I didn't need to sing. The ghosts had already left that show, before it had begun. And I didn't have enough money to do anything cool anyway. So I started waiting just to leave.
It was alright. I needed the break. The buffet was good, and I moved to a room on a higher floor with a better view, so I could better see the rising smoke, in the blissful, unusual state of being freshly showered. Who knows though. Perhaps the city was inspiring. Like a stroll through the halls of Pandemonium, while the demon lords are meeting. I'm writing about it now, after all, 5 years to the date after the day of the show. Santiago was pretty heavy too, but it wasn't in any way oppressive. São Paulo was oppressive. The day of my flight to Las Vegas arrived, and I got a car to take me to the airport. Literally nothing that I saw on my way out of town made me want to stay. In fact the city burned my eyes.
But I'm not knocking it, not really. I'm not a tourist. I was there for the show, and the tour. The fact of the trip was success enough. Whether every moment of it was enjoyable or not. The trip is never about perfecting the exquisite nature of the manufactured experience you seek to re-create in your own personal mind-brochure (though who knows, it might be if you have money). The trip is about nothing... but the trip. The trip is about the trip. It doesn't matter if you're in Valhalla, Fort Collins, Poughkeepsie, or São Paulo. It might be a street lined with prostitutes and assault-rifle-wielding cops in Mexico City, or an idyllic little town in the Brazilian mountain hills that can only be reached by riding a winding anaconda school bus with a bunch of singing, drunk Peruvians. Neither experience is superior to the other. They both are what they are. São Paulo didn't want to be my friend, is all it was. By the end of the week, the indifference was mutual. The poster I made for the show surely seems to indicate a that there would be a lack of substance to my time there. A transient experience of hellfire, spattered with disparate, disjointed words, in fonts that make no rockabilly sense.
Perhaps I'm not a Country music outlaw, or a renegade of sexual and chemical restraint. Perhaps I am a ghost. Perhaps São Paulo made me into a cardboard cutout of the woulda-been condoomned, if only I'd-a stuck around a little longer. Perhaps the city added to the stew of my psychic insubstantiality. I did become a soup of molten sleep, after all, in the great, jungled-out metropolis, no small distance from the sea.
I became restless in my rest, regardless, and was never so happy to get out of anywhere, as I was to get out of São Paulo a few days before my show in Vegas, in October 2018.
As I wrote in Guarulhos Airport Poem,
"The gate is crowded and
disgusting,
the seats are molded
from used
chewing gum,
the floors polished
with soda,
but I don’t mind; it means
I’m leaving"
Which isn't to say I hate it, or that I'd never go back. I absolutely would return, even though I probably never will. It's not exactly on the way, unless you're on your way to hell.
The cemetery was a highlight, though, and the little Brazilian girl singing gospel songs in an alien tongue. The street musicians on Avenida Paulista were generally great. Interesting and varied. The people I met were mostly cool. The streets were colorful and heavy in ways that outclass even Mexico City in the atomic psychic weight division. It was interesting. I wouldn't go out of my way, but I'd go back, if there was ever any reason to.
It is what it is. It was what it was. As Vonnegut poignantly observed,
"So it freaking goes."
