That's the Kind of Tour This Is
by Baird Harper

It’ll be seven dollars cash, cash only.  You’ll fold it up into your palm and give it to me in a handshake when the tour is over, like a drug deal.  Trust me, it’ll be cool.  That’s seven dollars American—we’re close to Canada so I have to say it.  Oh, and I do reserve the right to cut this thing short and take off without notice if my ex-girlfriend calls or if I step in something. 

A little bit about me first: I work the twenty-eight inch circular saw at the Blue Moose Woodworking Co.  We make those carved wooden moose that hold toilet paper rolls and act as unsuspecting bookends.  You know the ones.  They’re dumb.  And misleading too.  A real moose isn’t to be manipulated.  They’ll trample you if you get too close, smash your head in.  I know a guy who eats his meals through a straw and watches grass grow.  Anyway, it’s a terrible job.  Sawdust finds its way into my stool and I take orders from a lady with an auburn mustache.  And nothing about the job qualifies me to be the one to tell you what he was like, and what it means to live in the town where he grew up.  But it’s my off-day and here I am, the guy with the spare tire and the Supersonics t-shirt which doesn’t quite touch my belt.  I’m aware of it, so stop trying to tuck it in with your eyes, it’s my favorite shirt and I’m going on a diet next month.  And there all of you are, just standing around wondering what it is about Rueville that could have produced a man so talented, so famous—your beloved guitar hero, Mick Freelander.

I’ll walk backwards so that you folks can hear me, but you’ll have to let me know if I’m going to step in dog poo or if some blind old lady is coming down the sidewalk.  Okay, great, so thank you all for coming, let’s begin.  On your left is the Rueville Chamber of Commerce.  I like to begin here because it gives me a chance to gloat.  You see, they tried to keep me from recruiting tour patrons like yourselves on their front lawn.  About two years ago, they filed a piece of paper that said I was a “nuisance” and a “public concern.”  The whole thing went to court, and I won.  Well, it never actually went to court, but they did raise a case against me that was going to go to court until I decided not to recruit in front of the Chamber of Commerce anymore.  After that, I went to visit my Uncle Rondo in Vancouver for the summer, which was cool, and then I resumed business as usual last fall.  There are rumors of another lawsuit, but they’re so busy promoting the new swimming pool on 3rd Street that they’ll never get around to it.  I consider it a victory.

Coming up on the right is the boyhood home of a good friend of Mick Freelander’s.  When Mick was twelve he would come over to this house and practice guitar with his friend Joe Spokely, who lived here with his alcoholic mother and a bunch of stray cats.  There was another guy, who played drums, whose name I can’t remember.  They were called the Battering Rams, a three-piece power trio conceived in the tradition of Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience.  Their biggest show was Brittany Goheen’s fifteenth birthday, a party to which I was not invited.  They opened with “It’s Your Birthday” by the Beatles, played a bunch of Ramones songs, and then got sent home early when Brittany’s father caught Mick sniffing glue on the backyard swingset.  I was at home that night, helping my mother make a pineapple upside-down cake for the church bake sale, but I heard all about it at school on Monday. 

Pardon?  What’s that?  Oh yes, Mick and I went to high school together.  We weren’t exactly friends—except for this one moment in time—but we were both in Mr. Gerble’s homeroom, and there was a shared pain in dealing with that rotting gym teacher everyday.  Gerble was a veteran, and worse for it.  When you looked at him closely you could see the fires of the flashbacks still gutting his head.  I think Mick and I had woodshop together once, too.  If it wasn’t him I’m thinking of, then it was this other guy Jim Wednesday who played on the lacrosse team and shoved a fat kid’s head through the vending machine glass.  Anyway, in homeroom Mick would hang out with the other druggies and draw tattoos on each other’s arms.  None of them had the guts to ink up for real.  In ways, they were really just a bunch of poseurs. 

I know you guys don’t want to hear that kind of stuff, but it’s true.  Sure, he became a guitar god for the biggest rock band ever, but there was a life before the fame.  Like this guy I knew told me that Mick used to leave giant phlegm wads in the second floor drinking fountain, and this was the only good fountain in the school—you know the one I’m talking about, the boxy metal one with the chilled water, not those eighteenth century porcelain dinosaurs that taste like the water’s been filtered through a dictionary.

Okay, I’m losing you, I see that.  But this is the real tour.  Go ask the guy who runs the hardware store and he’ll give you some line about how Mick was a swell kid who was born to be great.  But he just wants you to buy the extra fifty metric nuts that go with that ratchet set under your arm.  He’s a liar, just like the asswipes down at the Chamber.  They don’t care about you, they’re just trying to cash in on whatever they can, while shouting down people like me who give out the truth for free.  What’s that, ma’am?  Oh right, for seven dollars I meant to say.  American dollars, by the way, did I already mention that?

Okay, see that water tower where somebody spray-painted the huge penis—oh man, they’ve been trying to cover that up all week—well, just to the right of that is a line of trees, and beyond that is a diner.  There’s a girl in there—she’s a woman now—who waits tables, and she probably took Mick’s virginity in high school.  No one really knows for sure, and she’s not telling, but everybody basically figures it was her.  She was that girl, if you know what I mean.  “Easy Andrea,” people called her, and she was, though I wouldn’t know from experience.  I didn’t give it up until I was twenty-eight, to this chick named Marty who was only decent looking, but really cool.  We had a thing going for a few weeks before she had to leave in the middle of the night for a job in Gillette, Wyoming.  There’s a top secret weapons lab down there, and she always was sort of a gun nut, so it makes sense.  She loved that cloak and dagger stuff.  That’s probably why she left without saying anything.  I was cool with it.  Follow your dreams, right?

We’ll pick up the pace through this section and cross to the other side of the street if you folks don’t mind.  The restraining order still stands for another sixteen months, so we should hurry past the used car lot.  But stay away from this place even if the law doesn’t require it, trust me.  They’ll sell you a lemon and then stick you with it forever.  I’d like to see one of you sink two grand into a piece of crap and not break a few showroom windows.

Speaking of cars, Mick drove a real beater in those days.  It was a brown minivan with cut truck tires for bumpers.  Ugliest thing you ever saw.  The gray water spots beneath the lacquer made it look like a dried out cat turd on wheels.  He’d come into homeroom twenty minutes after the first bell, bragging about how he’d parked it in the teacher’s lot again.  Gerble would sit and listen to it and stare at Mick, but he never said anything.  It was as if he was waiting for the perfect time to pull the rug out.

I rode in that van once, my senior year.  We were going on one of those team-building field trips—some crap with a ropes course and a Gordian knot, fall backward off the tree stump and pray they don’t drop you on purpose.  But the bus never came to pick us up that morning, and they were going to send us back to class for the day.  “Are you kidding me?” says Mick.  His bloodshot eyes were beaming crazily.  Every homeroom got their field trip day, and there was no way Mick was going to let them cheat him out of his chance to sneak off into the woods and snort detergent.  By then he was pretty well-known for his guitar.  It had a naked chick airbrushed onto it, and she had an apple in her mouth and was lying on a bed of lettuce.   Their drummer had moved to Switzerland by then so Mick renamed the band Ramming Speed, and got this gorgeous bald girl to play tambourine, and all the songs were set up to feature these indulgent ten-minute guitar solos.  There were rumors that he’d once eaten lunch with Eddie Van Halen, not my favorite, but still. 

So Mick says to Mr. Gerble, “there’s no way you’re sending me back to class.”  Gerble was a gym teacher and a war veteran, and no one ever told him what to do.  He stepped right up to Mick’s face and said, “if there’s no bus to get us there, then we can’t get there, can we?”  We were all standing out along the sidewalk with the wind whipping and you could feel the rift opening up between these two: the guitarist with the budding drug problem and the grizzled vet with spittle foam at the corners of his mouth.  You could feel them drawing gravity.  Gerble swung his big steel wristwatch between their faces and said, “I’ll give you ten minutes to see if the bus shows.”

We were all sitting on the grass praying for a bus watching the narc vans circle campus when someone hooted and pointed toward the staff parking lot, and there was Mick’s giant cat turd tear-assing through the front gate and turning straight at us.  He pulled up onto the curb and announced, “the bus has arrived.”  Without thinking I slung open the sliding door and jumped in, assuming more would follow.  But when I turned around, they were all still standing on the sidewalk staring at me from the curb like it was the edge of a cliff.  Mick gave the horn a quick beep-beep and said that there was plenty of room for everybody.  Gerble was foaming good now and his eyes had gone translucent like a dead dog’s.  He stepped up to the passenger side door, slow, with legs apart like a gunfighter pacing out into the middle of the street.  He opened the front door and climbed in.  Then he rolled down the window, and slapped the roof.  With that, everyone piled in.  He just slapped the roof, and there were fourteen of us jammed in there two seconds later, peeling away.

Later that day, as we watched Harlan Crinkle have a nervous breakdown while dangling fifty feet up, Mick punched me in the shoulder and said, “you’ve got balls of steel my friend.”  Before that moment I’d never thought he liked me—and a few months later he and Arty Hoover would steal my clothes while I was in PE—but at that moment, in the middle of the woods with the frantic sheiks of a weakling ringing through the trees, the two of us connected. 

Up ahead is Rueville High, the end of our tour.  There’s a tree with a plaque commemorating Coach Gerble who died that year.  His heart exploded while he was yelling at this girl who couldn’t dribble left-handed.  I saw her in the supermarket last month and asked her if the old man was still yelling at her in her nightmares.  Funny stuff now, but I guess it was a sad time then.  I remember there was a service in the gymnasium during the last week of school and all these old veterans showed up to pay respects like it was a real funeral.  The principal didn’t know what to do, so he just let them all in.  Let me tell you it was weird: a gym full of us punk kids just happy to have a break from classes like it was a pep rally or something, and then all these ancient military bastards looking grave and wearing their best suits.

Principal McFarland said a few words, and they played a slide show—all pictures of Gerble coaching the volleyball team and drinking coffee in the teachers’ lounge.  No basketball pictures.  Pretty boring stuff, but you could tell the vets were enjoying it.  After that, there was an awkward moment while McFarland and the other folks on stage milled around.  The students began to fear the end of things, when suddenly the sonic clunking of wires plugging into amps resonated through the gym.  McFarland returned to the mic and announced that our own Micky Freelander would play a song in commemoration.

It was just him, alone on a stool with that naked guitar, looking skinny and a bit drowsy from the last glue high.  He tuned up for a minute with these blaring power chords that had all the vets looking frightened and turning down their hearing aids.  But then he trickled into this heavy-handed set of riffs that were all melancholy, heartbreaking.  I don’t know music, but this shit could eat your soul.  He wasn’t the greatest singer back then either, but the fact that he was trying made the whole event feel brittle.  The lyrics told the story of our field trip, though I must say, not quite accurately.  He described his role in third person, and he basically made Coach Gerble into a revolutionary hero when all he really did was slap the roof of a van.  No mention of my role in the story, which pissed me off at the time, but who cares, right?  The vets were digging it and some of the girls in my section were actually crying.  That’s what really matters I think.