Steinbeck had Charley, I had Russell. Travels Part 1

My friend Russell and I have had many, many really stupid and moronic adventures together. They’re the kind that upon retelling most people think are terribly exaggerated when in truth the lack of exaggeration is what makes them great. Russell lives in a land far away now and makes movies and stuff (here’s his movie company) and we can only get together now about once a year to do dumb fucking shit that should be worthy of incarceration.

I did get arrested on a night out with at hair-metal bar non-pariel Zaxx (now Jaxx) and got a solid head thumping against the trunk of a squad car for my troubles and big mouth. That is another story though….. the following tale, in the spirit of the Presidential campaign, involves barnstorming across America.

Russell and I worked for many years at a small moving company in Arlington, VA. called Kidner Transport brilliantly named after the owner, one John Craig Kidner. (R.I.P.) John was sort of like a modern day pirate in that he liked money, pillaging, motorcycles, women, beating up assholes and general naughtiness but had a strong disdain for things like paying taxes and cops. He was an excellent role model for stupid idiots like us who wanted to be bad asses but didn’t know how.

Kidner Transport had no business really being in the transport business from a business model, legal, equipment or aptitude standpoint but none of that was much of a factor in our sales strategy. If John could hoodwink someone into writing a check we would move anything, anywhere, under any circumstance. I moved everything from airplanes to bricks to coffins to the chrome plated dildo that served as a paperweight on the bedside table of the President of the Bartender’s Academy. That one was a tad over the top….

Anyway John had me and Russell set to move some poor trusting family’s stuff to Denver. They needed their Reliant K-Car transported as well but instead of putting it on a car trailer as we were contracted for John just decided to have another employee, we’ll call him Inky, drive it out there. Inky was a fledgling tattoo artist who practiced each and every day on himself. He was questionably literate and unquestionably goofy to the point of over-the-top nuttiness. The fact that he did not have a driver’s license was quietly overlooked by all parties involved and off we headed West in our two vehicle convoy. First stop…Memphis Tennessee.

We hit Memphis after 18 hours on the road. Amazingly the truck was a brand new International Harvester and brand new trucks go slow while the engines break in, really slow. We passed the time by chain-smoking, listening to bad heavy metal and popping ephedrine tablets by the handful with Mountain Dew chasers. We would take short breaks when the old heart rhythm would get so speedy that breathing became too difficult to smoke cigarettes. Say what you will, it got us down the road.

Upon hitting the exit for Memphis the truck broke down at the bottom of the ramp and we were very upset for there was heavy drinking to be done and the fact that we had a stuck truck was biting into that precious activity. Russell and I had Inky take the car and call a tow service while we waited and passed the time blaming each other for our bad luck and intolerable levels of sobriety. Finally the wrecker came and we hopped in with Inky and went to the Motel 6 up the street.

As I stated earlier Inky didn’t have a license or other I.D. so we left him at the motel (which we would have done anyway if he had I.D. but this way we didn’t have to feel guilty) and went out to a bar where a band called Sweet F.A. was jamming. Metal Edge magazine said Sweet F.A. was fucking awesome and who were we to argue with Metal Edge?!?! I’ll skip over the getting to the bar and meeting the band because that’s just the same old you do so many shots you throw up on your pants kind of stuff that I can rehash in a hundred other stories.

After closing the bar and careening down the sidewalk most of the way back to the Motel 6 we passed out in our respective Flotsams and Jetsams. I woke up the next morning and called Kidner to tell him the truck was broken. Per usual when receiving this kind of news he threatened to kill me and said horrid things about my mother before hanging up on me and calling the mechanic. JK rang back a bit later to say we were stuck in Memphis for two days and there was no way he was footing the bill for us to stay in a fancy place like the Motel 6 and what kind of high-falooting assholes did we think we were anyway and he had called the front desk to have us tossed out. We packed up our meager totes and headed to the K-Car to find more suitable lodgings for assholes like us, luckily plenty of places like that exist in the seedy underbelly of dirty cities like Memphis.

It was later on this night that the real idiocy took off like a roman candle shoved up the bum of a masochistic serial arsonsist with a rump fetish. We headed back to the bar (sans Inky again) to continue bro-ing it up with Sweet F.A. who were in for a two-night stand. Of course we were primed to meet some ladies of questionable character and upbringing and meet them we did. About nine of them each one more bacon-guzzlingly round figured than the next. We would have certainly told them to beat it had we had morals, standards or the available funds to buy the booze and breakfast that they were cackling about going to procure. As we did not have said funds, and certainly not the morals, we charmed them to the best of our abilities until closing and then it was “to the K-CAR you horrific pigs…we have your money to spend and the hours are getting late!!!” You see the strategy was to get them to buy a bunch of booze, feed us and then ditch them so we could go meet the righteous stiletto-heeled, slim-calved rock Goddesses that were surely waiting for two studs of our caliber right around the corner at the after-hours BYOB bar where the Sweet F.A. dudes were heading. We had a plan, we had a car, we were drunk and we were ready to rock. What could possibly go wrong? That is a story for tomorrow and tomorrow the story shall come.


Rock out.