We were on our way to a show at some café in Jersey, opening for a five-piece “art rock” ensemble called Hungry Magic Station. None of us was all too excited about it, but it was a gig and we were getting paid two hundred and fifty bucks. We’d been on the road for all of twenty minutes before it occurred to any of us to ask Rodney, our drummer, if he knew where the hell he was going.
“Yo, Rodney, you know where we’re going?” I reached forward, opening the glove compartment. “Should I be looking at a map or something?”
“Naw man, I got it.” I looked over at him, not entirely convinced.
Jesse, our bassist, stuck his head between the two front seats. “Dude, seriously. Do you know where the hell we’re going? Did you talk to Duane at the club?” Even though the place we were playing was called the Davenport St. Café, Jesse refused to accept that we were playing at a café, and kept referring to it as “the club.”
“Yeh, man, I did. I talked to Duane. I even wrote down directions.” Rodney leaned forward against the steering wheel and pulled a yellow post-it note from his back pocket. He handed it backward to Jesse, shoving it in his face.
A mild degree of hostility had developed between the two of them since we’d made a collective decision to replace Jesse with Rodney as van driver—not a result of Jesse’s poor driving skills, but more related to Rodney’s inability to sit still. Sitting idle in the van for more than five minutes drove Rodney to crazy bouts of word game suggestions and drumming on the ceiling, which inevitably annoyed the hell out of the rest of us—Tug, our synth guy, Cross, our singer/guitarist, and me, the lead guitarist. We’d thought that seating him behind the wheel would remedy the situation, however we’d been late for two gigs and missed one completely in the week since Rodney’d been designated driver—but it was either that or tying him up and gagging him, which we worried would have a negative effect on his bass lines.
“Well were you planning on using those directions?” Jesse grabbed the note from in front of his face. “What the fuck is this?” He showed me the note. All that was written on it were three bullet points: - MCA, - schools, and - trains-NJ transit. “Fuck, man. What the hell does this shit mean? These aren’t directions.”
“Relax, guys, I told you, I got it. Man, Jesse, you’ve got to reexamine the excess of rage that you’ve got built up inside of your soul. It’s just not healthy. Why don’t you just sit back and smoke a bloody fag. I’ll get us there this time, trust me.” Rodney had an irritating habit of using British slang terms he’d picked up while we toured through the UK the year before. They always came out sounding ridiculously lame, but he’d already fallen in love with the quirk.
Jesse shot me a defeated look. “He better get us there,” he warned me sitting back in the mess of the back of the van between two amps and a crate with our auxiliary percussion equipment. He lit a cigarette and puffed grumpily.
“Rodney. Man, you sure you know where you’re going?”
“Look, dude, we’re almost there.” Rodney gestured out the windshield to a large sea-green water tower with the letters, MCA, fading away across the middle. He made a sharp right and Tug fell off the drum stool he was sitting on in back. “Get off my stool, you wanker,” Rodney scolded into the rearview mirror.
“Fucker,” muttered Tug.
Ten minutes later, Rodney whizzed by what looked like two schools, one on either side of the street, stopped at the next intersection, and leaned forward, searching left and right. Once he spotted whatever he’d been looking for, he brought the van down a street lined with gravel on both sides.
“Rodney—“ I began, but shut up after I noticed train tracks running along out the passenger side window. We followed it for a good seven minutes until we came to a large train yard filled with NJ-Transit cars, where Rodney proceeded to make a left turn, and before we knew it, he pulled in to a lot and found a parking spot in front of a sign which read, “Parking for café patrons only.”
“Guys, we’re here.” I announced to the back of the van.
