Blunder Road Blunder Road Being teenagers in the ...

Being teenagers in the suburbs of Miami in the days before the internet was like growing up in a Third World country. We were completely cut off from modern society. We had no awareness of underground music, no idea that kids everywhere else were piling into vans and inaugurating punk rock's third or fourth wave. So it's strange that, in Miami in 1990, two of my best friends, James "Jimmy the Brain" Sevigny and Ian "Mr. Torso" Hussey, decided to form a punk rock band called the Human Oddities. Their influences were equal parts Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys, with a little Devo and Ramones thrown in. I joined the band on bass.

We thought we were the last true punk rock band in the world, and our ignorance made us very self-important. Jimmy the Brain's catchy-yet-abrasive songs?"I'm a Complete and Utter Bastard"?became blueprints for how to live our lives. We wanted to break things and do drugs. We wanted to upset people. We wanted to epitomize punk rock. We hit the anemic Miami music scene?often wearing matching mariachi jackets?with a bang. People either loved us or hated us, but they paid attention.

Of the Oddities, I was the most bourgeois. Through the band's many fights, lineup changes, banishments from clubs (for which we were notorious) and general misbehavior, I remained a full-time student at the University of Miami. I never got puking drunk, I never fought with club owners, I never told the audience to fuck off. My bandmates were much more punk than I was, a fact that became plain when the Human Oddities went on tour.

On the first outing, our then-manager, John, who was older and actually knew something about music, pestered all his favorite bands for gigs. We shared bills with Urge Overkill, the Poster Children and Die Kreuzen, among others. But John booked only four dates, all of them in the Midwest, and we barely had enough gas money to get out of Florida. Somehow we did it, and in Chicago managed to shit our pants in front of a thousand people.

It was on our second tour that the band began to unravel. John, who was now our guitar player after a malicious group decision to fire Ian, booked five shows spaced several days apart in Richmond, Norfolk, New York, Pittsburgh and Champaign, IL. I had recently acquired my dad's 1984 Dodge conversion van, and after ripping out the sink and mini-fridge, we were able to cram in ourselves and our gear and hit the road.

It was good to get out of town. We were elated as we cruised up I-95, watching the no man's land of Central Florida blur by through the windshield. When the odometer rolled past 100,000 miles?indicated in a string of five zeroes, because Dodge never dreamed that one of these vehicles could survive long enough to see six digits?we all screamed, "Hooray! New van!"

And then we lurched to the left and the steering wheel shook and we felt the thumpeta-thumpeta of a blown tire. We pulled over and hauled out the jack?buried beneath 100 pounds of amps and drums?and put on the spare. At the earliest opportunity, we bought a cheap retread and continued north.

I believe it was in southern Georgia that it happened again: thumpeta-thumpeta-thumpeta. What were the odds of that? Well, shit. Over the next hundred miles we blew all four tires?and the spare. As soon as we'd roll out of one shitbird southern town with a new $15 retread, another tire would blow, and we'd hobble into the next one. Many hours were wasted in garages owned by men with names like Gator and Buckethead.

Throughout all of this, we wondered where we were going to sleep each night. We couldn't stay in a hotel?especially not after blowing all our cash on tires. James and his girlfriend, Natasha, who also sang in the band, were capable of squeezing into any available cranny and sleeping like angels, but the rest of us?John, Henry the drummer and me?were fucked. John had often made the claim that he could sleep under the van if necessary. Under the harsh lights in a parking lot at South of the Border, I put his claim to the test. Sure enough, he eased himself to the ground and slid beneath the van, his nose inches from the transmission. I napped with my head on the dash and my feet under the brake pedal. I don't remember what Henry did.

The gigs in Richmond and Norfolk were typical of no-name bands from disreputable places: Ill-attended with bad sound and little pay. We'd been eating poorly and bickering constantly and were glad when we had a few days to unwind in New York City. John's girlfriend was a student at Pratt, and said we could stay in her dorm room. This sounded fine, except that she didn't have enough space for the five of us. We agreed that someone needed to stay in the van to guard our equipment. I volunteered.

On the floor of the van with a cymbal stand wedged in my palm for protection against intruders, I slept soundly. It was such a relief to be alone; I didn't mind the summer heat, the wailing police sirens or the itinerant crackies lurking in the Pratt parking lot. Better crackies than other forms of Human Oddities, I thought.

The next day, we played a matinee gig at ABC No Rio in a space the size of a restroom stall, for an audience of four. As I recall, we sounded great that day, so it was unfortunate that those in attendance loathed us for not knowing about Mumia and not caring whether he ever went free.

We had several days before the next gig, in Pittsburgh. As much as I'd enjoyed my night in the van, I was not enjoying the company of my bandmates?or anyone else. I was young and cranky, with no social skills, and my parents kept a summer cabin in the Catskills, next to my grandmother's house.

"Goodbye," I said to the band. "I'm going to visit my grandmother."

"We're not here to visit our grandmothers," Jimmy the Brain said, quite reasonably. "We're on fucking tour!"

But I was gone. I spent two days, alone except for the occasional mealtime with Grandma, soaking in the tub, staring at the lake, picking huckleberries, sleeping in a king-size bed in total darkness and silence. I returned to the city smelling like mountain air and fancy lavender soap and greeted with a smile the hostile glares of the Oddities.

The remaining two shows on the tour went quite well. In Pittsburgh we played to a full house with Railroad Jerk, one of John's favorite bands, and in Champaign we watched a band called Dick Justice literally set the stage on fire. In Miami, about a year later, the Human Oddities broke up.