I’m actually not feeling even remotely inspired in the early evening, waiting on these guys to show. Sleepy, but also lacking that extra gear needed only in the wintertime, where you have to work up additional energy just to go outside. Yet when Alan calls at 10:20 to say they’re on their way, this in itself provides a little more motivation, and also serves notice that I better find a means to rustle up the rest.
Tomorrow, my friends in Bedlam will be playing their first show in 3 1/2 years, and tonight are holding just their second practice to prepare for it. Afterwards, three of the guys are planning on driving down here from the Mansfield area tonight, to crash here and hopefully create a little mischief beforehand.
Score and score on those two fronts, as things will turn out. We are checking all these boxes tonight. All the more remarkable when considering that they don’t even make it here until one o’clock in the morning.
Damon, Alan, and “Big” Paul Linville roll in with a case of Bud Light cans, as well as a 6 pack of bottles. This seems like a lot, maybe, but is really a tad pedestrian for some light domestic beer you’re planning on splitting four ways. Sensing the error of our calculations, without ever coming right out and saying so, the four of us decide to hedge our bets by walking up to Traditions before they roll up their carpet for the night. It’s quite cold, sure, but not too long of a walk, and lively conversation helps pass the time. More of the same awaits us in the form of bartender Steve, who is always on the ready with his endless stream of rapid fire, commonly surreal but always hilarious anecdotes.
“My first threesome was senior prom,” he tells us, a comment, as is usually the case, not even remotely connected to anything we’re discussing. But hey, at least he gets the ball rolling with some amusing chatter. “I had to wait 13 years for another and it cost me $250,” he adds.
All things considered, particularly for a Friday, this isn’t exactly the most action packed night we’ve ever seen in this place. But the cold is surely keeping people away, and whatever the case, though I for one attempt talking to this chick in a U2 tee shirt, the prospects are otherwise limited. We take off just shy of closing time, wind up back at my apartment restless but with no inkling how wild – and wild in a somewhat unprecedented fashion, at that, even for us – this night is about to become.
I’m not really sure how my microwave becomes our sudden focal point. It is on the fritz, though, and suddenly there are jokes aplenty about pitching the thing in creative fashion. Except…what if we didn’t? What if maybe we just messed with my neighbor Nicole instead?
Up until this point, despite living here at Merrimar Circle for about 18 months (with Alan as my roommate for the first year of it), we are actually on good terms with Nicole. She’s kind of bitchy, but you get the sense that much of this is a performative shtick, like some character you would expect to see in a low budget indie drama, hanging out in a coffee shop all the time with a scarf and a beret, chain smoking as she went on and on about how miserable she was. When Alan lived here, though, she would often do a lot of her smoking out on the steps between our apartments, right alongside him, and has continued to pop in and hang out in the living room throughout this run (my ex-girlfriend Jill moved in with me, when Alan decided to shack up with his own woman, and now I am on my lonesome – but more about that at a later date). But that all ends tonight. In fact, none of us ever speak to her again, following this night, one which allegedly finds her filing a police report against us.
Somehow, and no one is quite sure who to credit for this particular stroke of genius, our single minded obsession right now becomes: what if we super glued my microwave to Nicole’s front door? As it just so happens, I have some tubes of glue on the premises, and we decide to give this concept a whirl. For the record, though not depicted in any of these photos, I wasn’t opposed to these pranks in the slightest. It’s just that somebody had to operate the camera, and that wound up being me:
Preliminary efforts appear to indicate, however, that we don’t quite have enough super glue on hand for the task. Thus, a late night run to the nearest Kroger is required. As I warm up my car and we discuss the matter, however, everyone agrees that hunger is prevailing at the moment, and we might just have enough time to squeeze in a Hounddog’s run first.
So this becomes the official mission, as the four of us head off in that direction. By the time we arrive, it’s almost 3am, but this place is packed. Yet we manage to land one of the few if not only available tables. While wait, these three chicks and one guy from the next table over strike up a conversation with us.
“You look like Pete Townsend,” Damon tells the guy.
“Who’s that?” he says, adds, “people tell me I look like one of the Baldwin brothers.” Yeah, whatever. We call him Pete rest of the night.
Meanwhile, one of the girls tells me, “you look kind of like my old boyfriend Nick.”
Though we are quite clearly in a boisterous mood, with Big Paul, for example, who’s a bit of a klepto, trying to figure out how to steal their gumball machine (note: he gives up on this notion without any actual attempt) and someone else, I can’t quite remember who, smashing a beer bottle outside, our waitress is really cool to us. We order and devour one 16 inch pizza, will wind up taking most of the 10 incher home with us, and she’s extremely patient, she tolerates our crude and probably quite lame jokes. At least up until Damon suggests to her, “let’s crazy glue our nipples together.” At this, she makes a terrified face and scurries away.
But it seems we are not the only ones in some kind of fired up mood tonight. Through the plate glass window facing High Street, we’re watching as this fight threatens to break out between these two frat boy looking fellows on the sidewalk. Instead, there’s just a bunch of shouting, clear up until the cops arrive to separate them. And as if we needed any other prodding to get moving again ourselves, that table next to us, with whom talk has mostly dried up, now stands to leave.
“Hey, no cockblockin, Pete!” Damon jokes, as that guy makes to leave with those three chicks.
We are just stalling now, however, and everyone knows it. The time has arrived to finish the task at hand. Up next is that pit stop at the Olentangy River Road Kroger, to pick up the necessary supplies. Along the way, Alan is cracking us up asking if we remember those old commercials from when we were kids, where that construction worker was dangling from an I-Beam by nothing but his super glued hardhat.
Upon arriving at the store, we make a beeline for the “school supplies” aisle. Yeah, that’s it. School supplies, sure. As the two of us have the most interest in this topic, Alan and I seize every variety they have on hand, begin examining every square inch of the packaging.
“There’s the guy with the hardhat!” I marvel, pointing to one which does indeed depict that scene from those old commercials. Well, sort of.
“Yeah, but where’s the I-Beam?” Alan bellows, like a crotchety grandpa, or maybe someone who feels that this tinkering with history has just ruined his childhood. Instead, for whatever reason, the guy in the hardhat appears to be just sort of sitting down. “Look,” Alan adds, jabbing a finger at the dude, “he’s kickin back in an invisible easy chair, watchin a Rams-Steelers game.”
At the cash register with our small but hopefully adequate arsenal, I ask the checkout kid with a straight face, “does this stuff work on microwaves?” But he doesn’t seem to know the answer.
Soon enough, we are attempting round two here with the grand super glue experiment. Much to our astonishment, though, despite applying tube after tube to the back of this microwave, it just doesn’t want to stick to Nicole’s front door. Someone suggests we support it with a small trash can underneath, until the stuff dries, and we give this a shot. In the meantime, somebody glues pieces of this broken mirror in artful fashion to her door, someone else, uh, which might actually be the most egregious offense of all, applies glue to her lock.
At some point, it occurs to us that there’s probably a very good reason why this glue isn’t working in the slightest, even after supporting it. The temperature outside might be too cold for this glue to take. Well, the cold is nothing that a nice, toasty little fire wouldn’t fix! Not that this is why we decide to set some things on fire. Nope, this is just pyromania for its own sake, destruction as a form of warped comedy.
Only much later, when I think Damon points this out me in the photographs, do I realize that Big Paul is still wearing his shades, though it is now about 4 in the morning. It didn’t seem the least bit odd at the time. Come to think of it, I’m not sure why he had these on at any point, considering it was one a.m. when he arrived. But some people just have a certain “rock star” essence about them, every moment of every day, and he is one such person.
Some of the other neighbors will later tell me that Nicole had filed a police report, but I’m not quite sure when this could have happened. Unless maybe while we were off scoring a late dinner and replenishing our arsenal, although we hadn’t really even gotten started yet. At any rate, upon chucking her burning wreath over the rail and then doing the same with my microwave, it isn’t as though we immediately fall asleep. This case of beer remains relatively untouched still, after all.
To get them in the proper frame of mind for tomorrow’s show, we pop in a dubbed copy I have of Woodstock ’94. At 5:30am, Damon and Paul pass out, the latter while clutching a brew in his hand. Alan and I manage to stay awake for about another half hour, entertaining ourselves with surreal yet hilarious jokes about what would happen if their other guitarist, “Little” Paul Radick just so happened to show up tomorrow – don’t ask me how we got on this kick – only to discover that Damon had somehow super glued a microwave to his left hand.
“Paul will be like, what’s that behind your back, Damon?” Alan theorizes, “and Damon will be like, oh, it’s nothing, pulls out this microwave that stuck to his hand.”
“Yeah,” I agree with a laugh, as it then suddenly occurs to me to add, “he could only play slide guitar that way.”
II.
Okay and so what else was going on around this fair city, on January 14, 2000? Although I’m aware it was technically the 15th by the time these dudes showed up, if I haven’t gone to bed yet, it always makes much more sense to consider it all the same day. Rather than adhering to some arbitrary midnight cutoff. As it turns out, not all was mayhem and destruction in good ol’ Cbus, no sir not at all. Consider these events, all ripped from the headlines. Or at least buried within the free weekly papers, flipped through and copied just now for this piece:
The Wexner Center kicks off a two night series of old German films with Faust, from 1926. In an interesting twist, most of these silent movies are accompanied in-house by local pianist Brian Casey. Variety is the second film showing tonight.
Lily’s Crossing begins at the Riffe Center, through January 30th.
At the Columbus Museum Of Art, they’re screening a Russian film titled The End of St. Petersburg at 1pm, as part of its “From Revolt To Real” series.
“Human jukebox” Matt Avery plays at Cosmo’s. Delyn Christian Band are at Fats. A much bigger act going by the name of Kid Rock plays the Schott.
