chinese broccoli

Pretty much exactly two years ago I was sitting up late in my house having some sort of pajama party with Leah Quimby and Elisa Ambrogio and my cat Woodward and there was this brainstorm-like spark of oh you like to ride around on tour with bands for no good reason, Liz? maybe we will one day make up a reason for you to come with Magik Markers! Suddenly I am in a Windstar van with this generation of the Magik Markers (swap out L. Quimby for Western Mass’s John “Cob” Shaw) and I am hurtling back below the Mason-Dixon line for the third time in how many weeks?

Everyone is excited to find out that none of us are vegetarian on this tour and that there is a Roy Rogers at the next service plaza. Elisa marches up and demands four roast beef sandwiches for the lot of us (one without cheese) and honestly they are so delicious. I know people say the road is hard, but…

We get to DC and load into the Velvet Lounge, which has no lights. Ghost, who are headlining this tour, are already here hanging out, and they dress very nicely but don’t speak much English. I hang out quietly for a long time next to their depressed tour manager and take a couple of walks around the neighborhood, DC’s rowhouses reminding me of Toronto, as usual, and therefore making me a little sad. I squelch the sadness with a half-smoke chili dog from Ben’s Chili Bowl, which despite my natural disinclination to put chili on top of other things, turns out to be delicious. As I am walking back to the club eating my chili dog, a homeless man slumped somewhere on Avenue U wishes me a Happy Mother’s Day. I had been sad to miss spending this unique holiday at home in Bed Stuy — where it is an occasion not just for mothers, but for everyone, on the scale of Easter or perhaps Thanksgiving — but this fellow makes it alright.

Velvet lounge is bass-heavy and dude-filled for Magik Markers’ set, which is both sturdy-loud and pretty, and will come to me later in dreams. As Ghost are about to come on, my cousin Paul, who has been nice enough to Metro from Arlington, pay the cover, and hunt me down even when I wasn’t answering my phone while trying to sell some guy a CD-R or a t-shirt, sneaks up behind me and grabs me. We manage a quick drink before his next appointment and it is so awesome and strange to have found all these weird long-lost relatives around the country in the last few years. P. goes to Pakistan in two weeks and I’m glad to get to see him for an exciting 30-40 minutes.

My role on tour seems to be “tour friend”/photographer/person with iPhone and mapping therefore mapping abilities/coffee finder, all things I feel reasonably proficient at but do not make me feel quite worthy of being given a free vacation roaming around the Southern US with my friends and eating pretzels on the side of the street while the band loads up their gear… I practice this tonight, and it turns out I am good at that, skill, too.

We end up staying the evening at the bachelor condo of a nice musician man who amazes me by first preparing a whole French press of coffee at 1:45am and then smoking some hash. He won’t tell us what his job is and has never turned on his 37″ flat screen TV, and the whole scene is a little mysterious, but very, very comfortable. Breakfast is Ben’s Chili Bowl (the band’s first time ever, my second, and thank god, since I left there the night before in deep deep regret that I had only ordered one chili dog instead of 28) and a trip to Peregrine Espresso before hitting the road to Chapel Hill…yeah!