Ghost Tour (ch.15)

September 21, 1998

Daylight streams through the tour bus. The light consists of photons, which are real, but have no mass. Light is energy, not matter.

A band on a tour bus perceives the light with consciousness made of electric impulses, also not matter.

Everyday on the bus, much of a band’s conscious reality amounts to one form of energy engaging with another.

Some cultures do not confine consciousness to neurological tissue. An untethered consciousness can occupy a building. A river. Or a tour bus.

A tour bus is made of atoms, which are mostly empty space.

There are a lot of places to hide in plain sight on a tour bus.

# # #

Reid sat on a couch in the front lounge staring into space. He ruminated about Kristina taking up residence at Coke Central. Why would a trustable person willingly put themselves in an un-trustable situation?

But then, the same could be said of himself on this tour bus.

Better to think of other things.

He got out his notebook, changed the channel. The reality of a song could have more gravity than a place he was sitting.

Today it wasn’t a song but the tour journal he tinkered with. The ghost he’d left sitting here last installment, who was he?

His unthinking hand scribbled Neal Cassady, tapped the name with his pencil. He could picture young Neal driving west in his ’49 Hudson with Kerouac. Or slightly older Neal, at the wheel of the day-glow school bus with Kesey and the Pranksters. X-13 was heading to Denver at this moment, maybe Neal needed a ride back to his boyhood home?

But that would resolve too quickly. Reid needed this ghost to ride along at least to the West Coast. Maybe some crazy drummer from a previous band who had checked out while on tour? Made a good story. Pretty grim, though.

He came back to the clothes he’d pictured the spirit wearing from a bygone era. It reminded him of whatever had appeared in his living room back in Clinton, like it was still following him.

He got the chills when he thought of this, like it was maybe too close to the truth. He closed his notebook and looked out the window. They’d just crossed the state line into Colorado on I-76.

Maybe it was better to go back to thinking about Kristina.

# # #

The Bluebird Theater in Denver was a couple miles from the flophouse district of Neal Cassady’s youth. Even if old Neal had hitched a ride, he still would’ve had to take public transit the rest of the way home.

As they pulled up to the theater, Roncho came through the bus passing out plastic bottles.

“Drink more water, folks.”

No one took the den mother routine seriously, except for Rex, who was somewhat asthmatic. Ten minutes into load-in, the thinner air of the Mile High City forced him to swap his smokes for an inhaler.

Roncho ducked to a nearby cellphone store for a new charger, then set up camp in the Bluebird’s business office. They had dial-up so he could catch up on e-mails.

Looking ahead to the next leg of their tour, he saw something that made him get Jordan from the dressing room.

“What the fuck?” Jordan said when he saw it.

The listing for the Austin show read:

JETCO, with special guests X-13 and MaybeYes

“Get Brandon on the phone.”

Roncho did as asked, then got the heck out of the way.

“Jordan, buddy, how’s it going?” Brandon said, cheery.

“Who the fuck is MaybeYes?” Jordan said.

“Yeah, been trying to reach you, added them to the tour about two days ago.”

“I can see that. Why?”

Brandon tapped the copy of Billboard on his desk back in midtown Manhattan, as if Jordan could see the magazine through the phone.

“You know how many spins they got last week? Almost as many as Jetco. No one knows where they came from.”

Jordan was blindsided by Brandon’s stance in addition to the news. He was expecting squirming, not an unapologetic justification.

“So you like this idea.”

“Can’t say I hate it. They go on first, you have a full house by the time you go on. It’s good for everyone.”

Jordan wasn’t convinced.

“So this has nothing to do with sales?”

“Nothing to do with sales. Though to be honest…”

“Is it because of that fucking pirate thing?”

“No, we’re just…not hitting the numbers. Least not yet.”

Silence.

“Look, don’t worry,” Brandon said, “you’ve been in flyover country this whole time. You’ll get a bump when you hit the west coast, you’ll see.”

Jordan handed the phone back to Roncho in disgust and hit the street. He was short of breath. He hadn’t been paying attention when Roncho handed out the bottled water, so didn’t correlate the altitude.

Two blocks down the street he found a record store. X-13 was supposed to have an end cap. Nothing doing. Just two copies buried in the X section. Maybe BMT was saving the money for Tower on Sunset Boulevard, but still, how the fuck were they supposed to sell records like this?

Who did have an end cap was MaybeFuckingYes. To add insult to injury, he brought their cd to the counter and paid for it with his own money.

He walked the two blocks back. Everyone was inside the venue, so he had the bus to himself. He put the cd on and listened critically.

Not so much a band as a guy pretending to be a band. Sounded like he’d recorded it in his bedroom. Production non-existent.

Jordan just didn’t understand. Admittedly, X-13’s first album had been a little lo-fi, but they’d upped their game on Pareidolia. They even brought in real strings on two songs.

What if this were the direction things were going? Calculated naivety. Not being bothered to put too much effort into it.

If this was what people actually wanted, then he’d just bet on the wrong fucking horse.

# # #

During the show, Reid could tell something was up. Jordan went into it like he was apart from the band, blinders on, guitar swinging off his shoulders like a machete through dense overgrowth

Reid could’ve responded musically but didn’t feel invited, so he hung back, locked in with Liz and Corey, let Jordan work it out. It was a sleepy Monday in a medium-sized city, the first show of the tour that hadn’t sold out. The crowd was polite, that’s about all you could say, and the performance was competent.

After the set, Reid figured he’d steer clear of the post-game and took his turn at the merch table. Freddy the merch guy was glad for the company, but didn’t compliment him on the set the way he’d complimented Liz a few nights back.

Not too many people seemed to want t-shirts. A hippie chick made eye contact from halfway across the room. Wrong demographic for X-13, or Benzedrine for that matter, but here she was. Reid returned the glance, more come-buy-a-shirt than come-hither. Whichever message she received, she came over.

“Your online journal is very curious,” she said.

Reid had been writing the journal in the Imperial We. He guessed by Your journal she meant the band’s, not that she knew he was the one writing it.

“Glad you like it.”

“You have a follower,” she said, serious tone.

This was likewise confusing, was she commenting on the content or referring to herself in the third person? She was definitely one of these chicks with a psychic vibe, whether actual or cultivated he couldn’t say.

“They have lots of followers!” Freddy broke in, trying to lighten things up, sell a shirt. Psychic chick didn’t break character. She continued almost monotone.

“Most ghosts are residents, some are followers. That’s what you have. A follower. You’re being followed.”

Reid was starting to feel uncomfortable. Part of him wanted to to tell her he was just making shit up. Wasn’t that sort of obvious? But you don’t give away insider information, that’s the whole reason he was making up the story to begin with. Even though to some extent, he wasn’t entirely making it up so much as processing something by toying with it.

“Any idea who it might be?” he asked, playing along to see where it went.

“There’s something unresolved back home, where you’re from,” the girl said. “It might be something personal. It might be something that has nothing to do with you, something you’ve attracted somehow without realizing what you’ve done.”

An actual customer approached the table at this point, a college kid who wanted a Benzedrine shirt, which Freddy was happy to sell him. Reid was glad for the break, he was hearing more than he bargained for.

Psychic girl was still standing there when the transaction finished.

“Maybe we should smudge the bus,” Reid tossed off lightly to try to close the conversation.

“I would,” the girl said prescriptively.

# # #

Back in the dressing room, Roncho’s phone rang. Usually he’d take a message, but in this case he covered the mouthpiece and called over to Jordan.

“It’s Lila.”

Jordan took it from Roncho.

“You really need to get your own phone, it’s getting ridiculous,” Lila said.

“I’ll get a gem-encrusted one in LA.”

“There is a God. Look, I’m throwing us a party,” she said. “I mean, I’m throwing your band a party, but…there might be photographers, it might come out that we’re, you know, an item…does that work for you?”

This was the weirdest commitment conversation Jordan had ever heard, but maybe this was just how they talked out in Hollywood.

“Works for me,” Jordan said.

“Good. I’m having it catered, kind of a French Mediterranean thing. I know you guys like your Denny’s.”

“I’ll try to use silverware.”

Jordan’s mood improved immediately. This was how things were meant to be going. Next level stuff. Who gives a rat’s ass if the booking agent adds some piss-ant band to the bill in Austin. X-13 had played Austin tons, they could fill that place by themselves.

He drank another beer in the dressing room, and another one on the bus. He was glad to find Reid in the back lounge, the guy’d been MIA. Jordan dropped onto the couch next to him and gave him a slap on the knee like they were the buddies they’d long been.

Reid was glad to see that whatever funk had come over Jordan earlier seemed to have passed. He’d been having an odd night himself and for a moment couldn’t remember what town they were in. The lounge swayed back-and-forth as Kenny steered the bus out of the lot and onto the Denver streets toward the interstate.

“Anyone want another beer?” Subs asked before heading up front to grab one for himself. Somehow the question presented itself to Reid’s consciousness as both profound and incredibly simple.

“Yeah, I’ll have one,” he said.

The whole lounge shot Reid a surprised look, Liz in particular.

Subs came back in twenty seconds. He laid the requested bottle cautiously in Reid’s hand.

“Reid, what are you doing?” Liz said.

“It’s just one beer,” Reid said.

His voice sounded strange to his own ears, like another person’s. It was a snap decision, he couldn’t say exactly what he was thinking or why he’d made it, but with all eyes upon him he decided the less he made of it the better.

He popped the cap and took the first sip.

“Reid’s back,” Jordan said and clinked bottles, as if he’d been rooting for his friend to resume drinking all along.

Liz looked imploringly at Jordan not to encourage Reid. If Jordan saw her, he pretended not to notice.

Reid, for his part, drank slowly. Staying true to his word, he stopped at one. But it’d been eight months since he’d had so much as a bite of rum cake. Between this and the altitude, the single beer had more of an affect than any single beer since he was twelve.

Maybe it’d help him sleep.

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