Spike and Mike: Crew Leader: Costa Mesa

I had no idea when I accepted the position working with Spike in Santa Cruz, a position I named Spike’s Bitch, that I was earning major credential with the office. Working with Spike was trial by fire and I’d passed, with flying colors. Just staying through the whole run was considered admirable but to actually have Spike say good things about you afterwards and to tell the office, “I don’t know what the big deal is. We had a great time.” Well, that made you a bit of a diety.

Jan was running the office now. Margine had been as big a part of keeping the festival going as Spike and Mike themselves. Unfortunately she died of a sudden brain aneurism shortly after Mike’s death. Jan was Margine’s right hand and the natural choice to replace her. We’d all considered Margine a beast as she had the unfortunate job of playing bad cop to our dopey bosses’ good cops. She did a hell of a job keeping that insane company going. Jan was now the beast, and she had big paws to fill.

Jan asked me if I wanted to keep working and I suggested the offer me towns when they came up and I’d be available occasionaly. What she offered me was a crew leader position, meaning more money than I’d made thus far in my life. I accepted. I had to negotiate price with Spike and Jan told me exactly how much Scott and Frank were being paid and how much I should ask for, including a bonus for sold out shows.

Jan also asked me if I knew anyone else who would come work for the festival. I invited my friend Patrick if he’d be interested and his eyes doubled in size. He quit his two jobs, moved out of his apartment and put all of his posessions in storage.

I got on the phone with Spike and he put Jan on a third line. She helped him argue against me getting what she’d told me to ask for. I was furious, too stupid to realize at the time that she was doing what he paid her to do and her advice ahead of the conversation was a huge favor. Spike said he’d have to think about what I was asking for.

I agreed to go and work Costa-Mesa, with Scott and Frank but only if I was paid the crew leader salary I was asking for. Spike was non-comital and I told him I wasn’t going anywhere until he agreed to my salary. Some how I ended up in Costa Mesa without securing a deal and when my first check arrived. I was being paid what I’d always been paid.

I called Spike and told him I was cashing the check and buying a bus ticket home. He agreed to pay me my salary starting on the next check. I insisted on a couple hundred bucks now since I had come down here on the condition that it be as a crew leader. He refused and I let everyone go out working without me that day. That night Frank handed me two hundred bucks. Negotiating with Spike was always a headache but winning felt damn nice. It wasn’t a feeling you got to feel too often.

When we first pulled into Costa Mesa, a cool beach town in Southern California, Homes, Frank, Scott, Patrick and I all had to squeeze into a single hotel room for one night. Patrick and I would get the room next door the following day. Homes took the couch and Frank and Scott took the floor. Patrick and I were fine with sharing a bed so we got to be comfortable.

All was going well until, in the middle of the night, I heard Scott yell “Keith, what the hell are you doing?”I didn’t have to think. The answer came quite naturally. “Spooning.” Somewhere in my subconicous mind a puzzle was missing some pieces. Either Scott was in Bryna’s bedroom yelling at me while I spooned with Bryna, or I wasn’t in Bryna’s room and… that… wasn’t… Bryna. I half opened my eyes and realized that in my sleep I’d gotten out of bed and joined Homes on the couch.

I heard Frank start laughing loudly as I got up, walked into the kitchen and lay down on the floor. I was back asleep in minutes. I was teased in morning by everyone but Homes who never mentioned it again.

Patrick and I got our room with two beds. We had a door between rooms that allowed us access to the kitchen in Frank, Scott and Homes’ room next door. There was a plastic stand on the back of our toilet with maps and tourist information. It was the perfect size to hold porno magazines. Two issues of Swank were put in place.

That night two more crew member’s arrived. Matt and G-Spot. We would be promoting the Costa Mesa show and the nerby Long Beach show so we had a larger than usual crew.

Matt and G-Spot (I hated the nick name) were two wild skater guys who drank like fish. They struck me as nice enough guys though. Matt was a talented cartoonist and spent a lot of time drawing. I would work with Patrick most of the time and we had a blast. We got plenty of thrift and record shopping done. I wrote many letters home to Bryna and we spent a fair amount of time in the other room using Homes’ turntables which he’d begun bringing with him as he traveled, to make mix tapes.

Patrick and I went to visit my brother’s in nearby Riverside on our day off and Patrick fell for a girl from my brother John’s church group named Tracy. John’s crowd were alternative culture born agains. They looked like normal young folks but they had Jesus on their side. Patick was in love something awful. I told him to forget about it. He was competing with God, and that was a losing battle. Our drunk skaters got wilder as time past. I knew they spent a lot of time hitting pools when they were on the clock, but I was satisfied that the shows would be packed. So, one day Patrick and I decided to go out with them and enjoy a day of beers and watching them skate. We found a pool right away. I was saving my beer drinking for later as I was driving. Matt dropped into the pool, and landed on his face, hard. G dropped in next, actually managed to shoot across the pool, up the other side and catch some air before launching his board and landing flat on his back. My spine hurt just watching. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I’d been around skaters all my life and had taken my fair shair of bumps, but I’d never seen two guys just beat the ever living shit of their drunken selves for an hour. Finally I had enough and we split.

Patrick I went into their room with them to drink some beers and I noticed G’s bedding was all on the floor.

“What’s up with you’re bedding G?”

“Oh, I pissed the bed again last night so I flipped the matress.”

I laughed, assumeing he was joking. Matt interjected, “He already pissed both side I don’t know why he bothers flipping.” I could see that Matt wasn’t joking as he took a pull of his beer. We kept drinking, though we’d never catch up with these two. They had a head start, but they were still lapping us. And then G went nuts.

He pulled out a knife and suck it in his mattress, through his board across the room and punched Matt in the head. I was about to jump in but Matt just laughed and socked him in the face. This was how they played. After the day they’d had flinging themselves against concrete how much could a fist hurt? I knew I should fire G but I didn’t do it. After all I’d been pretty nuts when I started and Mike had been so great to me.

Patrick and I went to our room, smoked some weed and crashed out. The next day we were taking the two clowns to the campus, some campus, they’re really all the same. We were pulling out of the parking lot when G says, “We have to go back. I just shit myself. We all had a good laugh, and then the smell hit. I flipped a u-turn and as he climbed out of the car with the load in his pants I told him to take the day off. Matt asked if he could have the day off too and I said sure. And still I didn’t fire him.

That night the manager of the hotel informed me in an embarassed tone that one of my employees had “gone to the bathroom in his pants” while sitting in the lobby enjoying the free wine and crackers. I had to ask if it was liquid or solid. I apologized and insured my new friend Merl that it wouldn’t happen again.Patrick told me the full story. G had actually announced that he was going to piss himself in the lobby and then did it while they as sat eating free food. He wasn’t even drunk, yet. Scott had come down and sat in the wet chair so he knew what was up.

Still I didn’t fire him. I told Soggy (G now had a nick name I could support) that this needed to stop or he’d be going home. He told me he’d mellow out and we actually had a good night skating in a parking lot and drinking beers.

The next morning the four of us would be working together again and as we passed the hotel next to ours we noticed some kind of cop convention going on. Soggy did the logical thing one does in the presence of an entire police force in one place. He put half his body out the car window and yelled, “Smells like bacon, you fucking pigs, fuck you!” He let his middle fingers punctuate the sentence and seconds later the red and blue lights told me to pull over.
“Hi officer. I know you’re wondering what the hell that was and so am I. This guy is a coworker, I’m actually his supervisor. I’m going to fire him right now. If you’d like to take him that would be great. Otherwise I’ll drop him back at our hotel so he can pack to go back to San Diego where he comes from.”

The cop chewed Soggy out and wrote him a ticket for not wearing a seat belt. Still I didn’t fire him. He had another day off and again Matt joined him.

I avoided these two and hung out mostly with Patrick. We flyered at the beach hitting all the little shops in the area, we did the campus up. Patrick met a girl named Meagan and they started a romance. She worked in a tatoo parlour and scored Patrick a good deal on some ink; Robert Crumb’s Mr. natural on one arm and a Coop devil with wrenches for cross bones pirate style. Megan was almost enough to make Patrick forget about little Christian Tracy but not quite.

The shows started and they were doing very well. We had a film called How To Make Love to A Woman so I ran a “Show us how you make love to a Woman” contest. The contestents would show their techiniques with a blow up doll. The funniest was a man who just looked sad while throwing dollar bills at the doll who of course totally ignored him.

A charming crackhead named Phylie started hanging around. I let her help fold t-shirts and I honestly enjoyed her company. The crack hadn’t comletely broken her yet and mayber she’d escape it. Patrick and I were at the beach on Saturday morning when I spotted the most revolting clown I’d ever seen. He had five o’clock shadow, his swastika tatoo showed beneath the thin fabric of his department store clown outfit and he was flirting up fourteen year old girls while making them baloon teddy bears. I approached the clown and asked if he knew how to make any dirty baloon animals. Well hot damn, this was his specialty. Dick head hats, whith balls that hung in the face of the wearer, dogs with giant dicks and best of all, a teddy bear with a tail. Squeeze the tail and voila, the god damn bear got a boner. I knew we had to have him at the show.

He came to the show that night and I introduced him to the crowd describing just how I’d found him. I’m sure most folks assumed it was an act but he sold many dirty baloon sculptures. He told me he’d finally made enough money to have his Swastika tatoo turned into a tatoo of a clown with a tear in his eye.

That night we went home and noticed the lights on and the door open at Soggy and Matt’s place. We went in and found Phylie there visiting. Soggy had scored some acid. I hadn’t tripped in ages and I was feeling good. Patrick had eaten acid every night for a month before I asked him to work with the fest. He never said no to drugs. We dropped and I don’t remember it hitting. I just remember going from Phylie hitting on me and Patrick as we kept telling her we were married to suddenly realizing that we were watching Matt fuck Phylie. Soggy was running around them trying to get in on the action but Phylie kept smacking him away. It was as if we’d been watching TV and this channel had just come on. I was fascinated by Soggy’s desire for Phyllie, a desire few men could have felt for this poor crippled soul, and he was the one man she didn’t want anything to do with. When she invited Patrick and I too join Matt I suddenly felt dirtier than I’d ever felt. I walked outside, and then I went back in and dragged Soggy out. We stood on the walkway as Soggy tried to see through the curtains. A women we named chicken woman ran through the parking lot.

“Patrick, she was moving too fast. People can’t move that fast.” Patrick agreed with me and we walked down stairs to investigate. By the time we reached the sidewalk chicken woman was blocks ahead, still booking. We walked in that direction until we found an empty lot overtaken by long grass. We walked to the middle of it had a seat and after a while we shook off the hideousness of what whe’d just witnessed. I didn’t go easily or completely. I’d encouraged Phylie to hang out. I thought I could show this addicted desperate person some kindess, and in turn I discovered a funny energetic soul. So I did drugs with her and watched my co-workers fuck her.

Yeah. It didn’t get much filthier than that. So we sat there in the grass, breathed deep and after a time we felt at least a little bit better. ”Let’s just never even think abou that again.” Patrick suggested, wisely. We went back to our room and watched the Flintstones and The Andy Griffith Show until the wee hours. Patrick had every episode of both shows memorized down to the credits and this frighened me.

Luckily we had the next day off. It was pooring rain. I took the car despite the fact that I still felt spun and we made our way toward my brothers. I’d been drinking lots of awful of water from the tap but I couldn’t get Patrick to drink any. We stopped at trader Joes and bought smoothies and chocolate both of which tasted so foul to us we couldn’t get any of it down.
I noticed a bottle of wine for over a hundred bucks and said louder than I intended, “One Hundred bucks! For that kind of money that bottle had better have a pussy.”

We walked out under the evil gazes of Trader Joe’s yuppies. I counted thirteen accidents on my way to my brothers. The roads in Southern California seem to fall apart in the rain like they were made of sugar cubes.

We got to Erick’s and I chugged more water, ate some not so fresh carrots, canned potatoes, anything I could find. Erick gave us direction’s to Boner’s house and we went there hoping to score some weed and mellow out a bit.

Boner’s dad let Boner take over the house. They never really spoke. His dad came home at night, played his electic organ for a few hours and went to bed. Meanwhile young adults gambled, got high and camped out. Their were giant bongs with plungers and exta chambers and strange moving parts that took the mellow drug that was weed and turned it into something else.

I skipped on the weed and just kept drinking foul tasting water. Patrick took a couple of hits and then handed me a mic. He picked up a bass and Boner and his pals took up their guitars the drums, even the electic organ was in on the act. We improvised some crazy shit, me screaming away. Then more bong rips, which I again abstained from and Patrick took a walk toward the kitchen. He fell down and he started shaking. Nobody seemed to notice. I ran to Patrick’s side. I remembered that durring seizures people could bite their tongues or choke on them, but I forgot that they could also bite your fingers off. I did the one thing I’d been told not to do and pushed his tong down with my finger. As he shook Boner told me to relax.

“Dude, it’s just that bong. This happens all the time.”I had trouble believing that. Patrick had always been a bit of a nervous fellow who I knew had secrets. When his eyes opened I asked him if he was epileptic. He said yes. I didn’t know what to do. I was about to call his dad but I called Bryna instead.

She told me to get him hydrated with slightly warm water with a bit of salt in it. She told me to keep him drinking water as long as I could and then to observe him as he slept it off. I was scared to death. He slept for a good eight hours as I paced and checked with a mirror to see that he was still breathing. Finally I loaded him into the car. I needed to be back at the hotel where I felt safe. This acid trip was going on tooo damn long and it needed to end.

I drove home in insane fog. I could just see the front of the car. Somehow we made it. I put him in bed and ten minutes later there was a knock at the door. The little bastard had actually gotten Tracy to agree to go on a date with him to the bowling alley. I explained that he didn’t feel well, and I looked pretty bad myself. Tracy looked me over.
“You guys are on drugs.”

“No. Not at the moment we’re not. Do you want to go have a cup of coffee at Norm’s?
“No. I need to use the bathroom and then I’m going to go to my cousins house. She lives nearby."

She’d driven in that fog for an hour to get here. I pointed her past Patrick’s unconcious body to the bathroom. Only after the door had shut did I recall the porn on the back of the toilet. Tracy went home. God won.

Spike called the next day. The shows were going well and there were only a couple of weekends left. We were to cut Soggy and Matt loose until the next run. Spike instructed me to get those guys moved out as soon as possible. I had them out before 11am checkout. I offered them rides to the bus station, and bus tickets back to SD but they said they wanted to hang out with some friends in Costa Mesa for awhile. We went our separate ways, or so I thought.

That night, Patrick had Meagan over and we were both feeling much better, mostly because the terrible two were gone. And then, they showed up. I should have just told them to leave but instead I was cordial and we all stood around and had a few beers. Soggy got loud a couple of times and Scott came out and told him to shut up. And then, he was humping Meagan’s leg. Suddendly, out of nowhere, he’s down on his knees, clutching her leg and humping like a poodle, tongue hanging out, panting. I grabbed him by his t-shirt and flung him.

“Get the fuck out of here!” I yelled. ”Get me out of here. Hit me. Go ahead, hit me cool guy. Hit me and I’ll leave.” He was shouting and getting in my face. Scott came out and told him to leave and when he refused Scott just freaked and started choking him. It wasn’t my intention to double team the guy, it wasn’t my intention to do anything but make it stop. With Scott’s hands around his throat I punched him in the face as hard as I could. Scott stared at me for a shocked second. “Why the hell did you do that?”

Shit. Why did I do that? “Oh, and choking him was a better idea.”

Frank took control. “We’re going inside, this is your problem now. You sould go inside too, and let it be the motel’s problem. These guys aren’t guests here, they’re tresspassers. Go to bed.” Frank and Scott went back in their room. I turned and Soggy was back on his feet. The scary thing is he looked none the worse for ware. He was walking towards me. “Soggy, when you get within striking distance, I will hit you again.”

He kept walking and I kept my word. This time I had a clean shot and I gave it to him, right in the middle of his face. I put him on his ass, but he just shook it off, and he was walking right back at me again. I nailed him for the third time. A person should not be able to take such direct hits. In a normal fight shots like these are rare, but when they happen they’re fight enders. Not this guy. Trading punches in the face was what he and his pals did for fun. I was tired of hitting him. I walked into my room and locked the door. The phone rang and Merl the manager asked me what the hell was going on.

“Merl, it’s the guys we moved out today. They’re not supposed to be here, they won’t leave.”

“Alright Keith, I’m calling the cops.” Merle was excited about getting back at the chair wetter. The cops showed up and knocked on our door.

“Mr. Jensen?”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“Can you step outside please.”

“Of course.” Soggy had told the cops of my assault, and he wanted me arrested. I gave my
version of the story, including my punching Soggy, but leaving out Scott’s choking.

“Okay, I’m going to have to arrest you. He’s already said he’s pressing charges.”

“Alright. I understand.”I was handcuffed and patted down.

“And you, Gregory” he addressed Soggy by his Christian name. “You’re going to jail too. Hands against the wall.”

“What? He hit me!”

“Mr. Jensen will go to jail for assault and he’ll be out in an hour. But I have to write my report. Which means I have to mention that the charges brought by a tresspassing, vagrant who was drunk in public never mind what warrants you might have. You'll be out in a week. Now let’s get your hands against the wall. Unless of course you’d like to drop the charges in which case I wouldn’t have to write that report.”

“That’s fucked up.”

"What’s it going to be?”

Soggy left and I went back to bed. I didn’t get much sleep. He would be hired back on if he wanted. He could blackmail me with telling Spike and I’d give him my reccomendation.

The next day after flyering I got a call from Spike. Soggy had blown his Ace in the hole. He’d marched into Spike’s office and told Spike that I’d hit him. Spike, bless his soul, told Soggy that if I hit him he must have been asking for it. Then he told Soggy to to get the fuck out of his office. Spike asked me to write down everything that happened in full detail just in case this came back to haunt us, and he told me not to hit anyone else. He never even asked me what had happened.

A week later Patrick and I loaded up the car and headed North. I pledged that this brief revisiting of the crazy, hectic festival of lifestyle would not follow me. I decided it had been tied to Soggy and Matt. Then I backed up the car not realizing the passengar door was open. The door caught on a pole and bent in half. I called the office reported a hit and run. Maybe the craziness was tied to Santa Monica.

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