"Try this trick and spin it, yeah."*

Coachella Part V  

    This is the fifth part of the story of my trip to Coachella in 2004. If you feel the need to read the earlier installments, go here: One, Two, Three, Four.

    It should be mentioned (in passing) that Scott and I had a relationship that consisted largely of twisted humor, going to bars and having petty arguments. We were thrown together by circumstance (acting in a very emotionally disturbing play) and had come to rely heavily on each other and the ability to be complete assholes together. We were both bossy and demanding but found ourselves and each other hilarious. We had a lot of fun, and we fought continually. And usually, everything was his fault. We are still friends, though less so. There, now everything is out in the open.

    “So,” Scott said between bites of French toast, “where are we headed next?”

    “The nearest, cheapest hotel we can find.” I attempted to eat eggs and drink coffee at the same time—no easy task, as my keys were clenched so hard in my hand they were leaving indentations.

    I was attempting to inhale bacon through a straw when our check arrived and Scott suggested that I pay it.

    “You’re the one who locked the keys in the car,” he reasoned.

    “Yeah, and? You’re the reason we’re here in the first place. You’re the reason $200 of my money is gone!”

    “Money you didn’t have to begin with!”

    “But money I had at one point and had grown to enjoy!”

    “True as that may be, you are the reason that we’ve been here all night!”

    “You are the reason that we left LA at midnight!”

    “The fact remains that you locked the keys in the car.”

    “Bitch, you’ll be lucky if you get a seat in the car.”

    We fumed and ate and stared hatefully at each other for a minute.

    “Fine,” I said. “We’re splitting everything from here out. Breakfast. The hotel. Gas. Decision making.”

    “Fine.”

    I threw my half on the table and stormed out in the most dramatic way I could. Functioning on zero sleep, it wasn’t a challenge. 

    Anyway, by 8 a.m. Scott and I were back on I-10 East, looking for any exit near Indio that boasted a hotel. Sadly, we were coming up pretty short. Did I mention there’s nothing in the desert between LA and Palm Springs? Because I lied. There are windmills. And they creep me out because they remind me of Mac and Me.

Windmills in the desert. Shudder.

    We passed a sign: Indio Next 3 Exits.

    “Alright,” I said, “we’re just going to have to get off and look. I don’t want to pass Indio.”

    We exited. Almost immediately we came upon a run-down motel advertising HBO and showers. I considered only briefly what exactly would have to be wrong with a place in order for showers to be a selling point. It didn’t matter. We were exhausted. I was struggling to keep my eyes open.

    I parked and we went inside.

    “We’d like a room,” Scott said. “Preferably one with two beds.”

    “We’re booked.”

    “What?”

    “It’s 8 o’clock in the morning,” the clerk said. “No one checks out until 12. There’s a concert here this weekend, you know.”

    “Yeah, we know,” Scott sighed. We walked back to the car.

    We began driving up and down the busier looking streets we could find. A few times we got lost in residential areas that reminded me of Phoenix: dry, dusty, cookie-cutter. Occasionally we’d see large landscapes of what appeared to be working farmland, dotted with pink and yellow houses and impossibly thriving flowers. But no hotels/motels/RV parks or even campgrounds.

    Every time I ended up in a residential neighborhood, Scott would get mad and I would remind him that he was free to drive at any time and then he would be quiet again. Fatigue had taken its toll on our bickering.

    Eventually we found another hotel. A Spanish-style, yellow building with pretty flower beds. We parked again and went inside. Tiled floors, fountains, flowers all around. But all the pretty had a $200 price tag, and for 6 hours and two college kids that was absurd.

    So we drove some more. We drove for 400 hours. And we died in the desert.

    Just kidding. At 9:30 we found a hotel near the freeway (how had we missed it? Who cared?) that would let us stay until noon for $80.  (I think this is where the term “highway robbery” comes from, but I could be wrong.) But Scott paid.

    We crawled up to the room. It looked like a run-down apartment complex, complete with lawn chairs and holiday decorations outside each screen door. In retrospect, it’s highly possible that we spent the night at some conniving slumlord’s tenement housing. Noisy children frolicked in the dirty pool below. Old ladies fanned themselves and drank lemonade or maybe horchata on the porch. Did they live there? It’s hard to say.

Nicer than the place we stayed. I can't find that place online.

    The inside matched the outside, but there were beds (one king-sized, one a single) and a shower (hooray!).  Scott gave me the king-size and went into the shower, and since I hadn’t brought PJ’s I just chucked my jeans and crawled into the bed. Within seconds I was asleep.

*The Pixies "Where is My Mind?"

"Where is my mind? Way out in the water can you see it swimming?"*

    
 Coachella 2004 Part III


        Okay, so we were at the Morongo Casino in Cabezon (read previous installments here and here), my buddy Scott and I, and I’d just realized that my keys were inside of the car and we were outside of it.

        He asked me if I had Triple A and I nodded.

        “Well, I guess you better call them.” 

        I nodded again and began to turn away from him slowly, my hand digging in my purse for my wallet.

        “You okay?” Scott asked my back.

        “Uh-huh,” I squeaked, hoping he couldn’t tell that I’d started silently weeping as I grabbed hold of my wallet.

        “Well, let me know if you need anything,” he said. 

        I turned around.

        “Wait, where are you going?”

        “Back inside. No sense both of us waiting.”

        “Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. Okay. You’re right. You go on back inside…”

        This is the part where I started openly weeping. I didn’t care if he saw me. He was going to leave me in the parking lot of Morongo Casino so he could go lose some more money? Fine. Then he could take the memory of my tear-stained, helpless, exhausted face inside with him.

        To my disappointment (usually I find tears to be a great manipulator of men), he saw my tears and chose not to respond. He walked back on up the hill and into the nasty, horrible, ugly, stupid, buttface casino.

        So I cried harder. And as I cried, I rifled through the cards in my wallet. It was curious how many cards I had considering I had no credit score and could probably have disappeared into Tijuana without a record of my ever existing on this planet. I had a Ralph’s Club, a Von’s Club, an Albertson’s Club card; I had my hilarious student ID from high school (still do, as a matter of fact), my current student ID; there was a debit card, a couple different library cards, a few punch cards from the classy restaurants I like to frequent (Subway), a Blockbuster card (remember Blockbuster?), my blood donor card and about 47 business cards. (I’ll take anything a stranger hands me in a Trader Joe’s parking lot). And, thank all that is holy, the AAA card my Dad had insisted I get when I started driving (and, incidentally, he was still footing the tab for said card). 

Emily added the "Fucking Hot" to my high school ID. I know I am, but I'd never write it myself.

        Sorry I wrote the word “card” so many times.

        So I called the three A’s and the nice lady on the phone said they’d send a truck to Cabezon (location: Nowhere, CA). And I sat there, leaning against my car for a few minutes thinking about how I was going to punish Scott for making me go to the casino and then abandoning me in a parking lot in my hour of need. 

What my baby, Phillip, looked like. Sigh.

        But then I got bored, so I went back into the casino and played a few more hands of black jack. And I didn’t win. And Scott didn’t win. And I was panicking because my phone battery was at half-mast and I didn’t want to miss the triple A’s. So Scott gently suggested that I go back to the car and wait, and he promised to check in every 10 minutes or so.

        So I waited and shivered and Scott came outside, as promised, every so often, to check in on me. The first time he said, “Hey, how’s it going?” and the second time he said, “Hey, how’s it going?” and the third time he asked for a favor.

        “So, I’m out of money. And since you won tonight and we’re still here…because of you…I was thinking maybe you could spot me a twenty.”

        I was tired. I was cold. I was grateful for the momentary company (to this day I keep a book in my purse for situations like that). But mostly I was feeling really sorry for myself and didn’t really care about anything anymore (I’ve been known to be somewhat dramatic on occasion). So I gave him some money and watched him as he sprinted back into the casino.

        And then, an hour and fifteen minutes after I’d called, I saw the triple A’s truck lumber into the parking lot.

        I jumped up and ran after it, screaming and waving my hands. “I’m over here! Honda Civic! Hooray! This way! Over here!”

        He parked near my car and I stood waiting at the foot of the massive semi. Not one of these inner-city AAA trucks, but a truck so big it could tow my car all the way home. A truck full of tools. A truck that could change my oil and give me a new paint job if it wanted to, or replace the sparks in the rotor-nut or whatever parts needed help…I gotta stop talking about car parts.

It was like this size AAA truck--but without the front part open.

        A pleasant fellow wearing a white t-shirt and a spare tire (pun totally intended) stepped out.

        “So, keys locked in the car, eh? What’s the year?”

        “2001.”

        “Ooooohhhhhhh.”

        I shit you not. That’s what he said.

        Scott took this moment to pop down and “check in on me.”

        “What’s going on?” he asked.

        “Here, don’t worry about it,” I said and thrust a $20 into his face. I was mad at him, for real now.

        Scott ran back up the hill, shouting over his shoulder, “Call me if you need anything!”

        “So,” said Mr. AAA, “I’m going to try to get in through the passenger door, but here’s the problem: a few years back, Honda started making their locks a little harder to jimmy. You know, so people wouldn’t break in. So…it’ll be tough.”

        And so I watched as he pulled one tool after another out of the amazing AAA truck and tried them on my super safe little car. Nothing worked in the slightest. The desert was freezing, but Mr. AAA was starting to sweat when he finally admitted defeat.

        He explained again about Honda’s fancy new locks. I said I understood, and mentioned how lucky I was to have a car that was so difficult to break into. (I may have started silently weeping again by this point.)

        He smiled and got back in his truck. He apologized once more and drove away. And then I sat down on the concrete, leaning against the driver’s side door and started to sob for real.

        This story is kind of long, right? Sorry.

 *The Pixies' "Where is My Mind?"

The fourth and fifth parts of this story can be found (respectively) here and here.

"I was swimming in the Caribbean/ Animals were hiding behind the rocks/ Except the little fish/ But they told me he swears/ Trying to talk to me coy koi/ Where is my mind?"*

Coachella Part II

        This is a continuing story about my second time at Coachella. Read about the first part here, if you must.

        Scott had convinced/harassed me into stopping at Morongo Casino (“resort and spa”) and I had acquiesced because I was a) up for anything, b) a sucker and c) promised a drink. Indian gaming, he said, gave them license to serve drink for however long they saw fit.

        I’d never been in a casino before, and it was….what’s the word? Gross. Casinos are designed for sad people who’ve lost all other hope: fluorescent green lighting, terrible, repetitive clinking and banging noises, and you don’t get to sit down unless you’re gambling. I learned that right away: I remember watching Scott play a slot machine and the hostess made me stand up because I wasn’t playing. It didn’t matter that no one else in the entire place was playing slots: I could not sit. Assholes.

        Anyway, we walked in over dirty, argyle-patterned carpets and under green lighting and Scott guided me to the bar. I requested a vodka tonic and the bartender explained that last call had already happened, “hon.”. I looked at Scott, and Scott looked at the tables. I got a glass of water, sighing dramatically for his benefit, and we set about the room. I followed him around and checked out the people at the various tables on a Friday night/Saturday morning in the middle of nowhere. Everyone was shaky and green and desperate. It was very intimidating and incredibly depressing.

Inside of Morongo Casino. It does NOT look this good.

        I watched Scott play various games. I tried again to sit down and was asked again to get up off my ass, as the seats were only for players. I could feel my face burning, as I stood up and moved behind Scott. Assholes.

        Scott played multiple hands of black jack before I realized that black jack is the same thing as “21.” I got some bills from the ATM and started playing black jack with Scott. And I sort of started winning. After about an hour, I’d won $200 playing $5 black jack tables. I was feeling pretty good about myself. (And that, dear friends, is why people have gambling problems. Duh. Making money is how we measure success, and if we make money super easily: even better!)

        But I wanted to leave. I was nervous and tired and wanted to find a hotel room so Scott and I could rest up for the concert. But Scott wanted to keep playing. I said we should cut our losses and go home, and he finally agreed, despite being about $150 in the hole. We hit the “bank” and made our way out of the casino.

        We trudged down to the car. I had my winnings in my wallet and was fishing around for my keys. Scott was whining about how if we’d stay for one more hour he could get all his money back.

        I had a sudden jolt of uncertainty and panic. I couldn’t find my keys in my purse. I squatted on the side of the driveway and dumped my purse out on the ground. No keys. Lip gloss, checkbook, wallet, notebook, tampon, book, pen, Chapstick and sunglasses, but no keys.

        Scott was irritated. I’d like to think it had to do with his losses, but it seemed like he was just flat-out annoyed to death by me. He said we should go back into the casino and check all the tables we’d played and the bank.

        So we did: we went through the entire casino. We checked the bank, each table, and the lost-and-found. And the keys were still gone. We talked to security and I scoured the ladies’ restroom.

        Finally we met in the foyer and I said what I’d been dreading the whole 20 minutes.

        “Maybe they’re in the car.”

        “I guess we should go check,” a defeated/pissed off Scott replied.           

        So we walked apprehensively down the long, sloping driveway to my innocent, black Honda sitting in that enormous, hideous parking lot. Part of me never wanted to get there. I thought maybe if I could come up with some other part of the casino we hadn’t explored (the bar! The hotel lobby! the fountains!), we wouldn’t have to face what was starting to feel agonizingly inevitable.

        We approached the car slowly—Scott on the passenger side, me on the driver’s side—and bent over to peer in at the same time.

        There in the flashing neon lights of the Morongo Casino we saw the big, metal blob that was my keys: enough to look like I was some kind of janitor. The ridiculous key chains that featured Aladdin and Jasmine, a basketball, a “hang loose Breckenridge” sign and a USC bottle opener. There were my keys to my apartment, my mailbox, my back gate, my valet key, my parents’ house, my storage locker and my car.

        “Well, there you go,” breathed Scott, in his throaty, Jack Nicholson voice. “You got Triple A?”

        The rest will follow.(You can read parts three, four, and five here.)

*"Where Is My Mind" by The Pixies.

"With your feet in the air and your head on the ground/ Try this trick and spin it, yeah/ Your head will collapse but there's nothing in it/ And you'll ask yourself/ Where is my mind?"

        I thought in honor of Coachella, the annual, epic music extravaganza in the California desert (Indio, if you want to get specific) just happening last weekend (and also, apparently, the weekend before that) I’d tell a little story about my time(s) at that whack-a-do place.

        The first time I went was the Spring of 2002, so I guess that was the fourth year of the festival (at one time a line-up of indie rock bands playing in side-show tents with an occasional big name thrown in as a headliner performing on one of the actual stages). It was fun and sweaty and tiresome in a good way, but nothing to write home about. There were lots of hippies (and people who just smelled bad for no good reason), expensive bottled water and mind-numbingly foul port-o-potties. Sigh. It’s an outdoor concert/all day event. What are you gonna do? But to quote a calendar I once had, “I love not camping.”**

Hot hot heat, a batrillion people and no bathrooms? Sounds awesome!

        But the second time I went is what I really wanted to write about. That happened in the Spring of 2004 and I was deeply into The Cure at that moment in time and so agreed to head into Indio yet again for the concert. But this time, I wasn’t going for one day. I was going for THE WHOLE WEEKEND. The Pixies were playing, along with The Cure, Radiohead, Blonde Redhead, and Belle and Sebastian. I think. I could have my years confused. But definitely The Cure, The Pixies and Radiohead. Come on. You gotta go, right?

Robert Smith of The Cure. Wore this man on a t-shirt. Truth.

        I want to address briefly the way I feel about concerts: not super stoked. I like music. Hell, I love music. But concerts make me feel anxious and annoyed and trapped; and like something is maybe really wrong with me. I don’t like to dance (where anyone can see me, anyway) and I can’t sit because usually the people in front of me stand up to dance and then I can’t see. I like to know the music before I go, and most of my favorite bands are comprised of people that are no longer with us or are too old to feel like jammin’. So I’m relegated to loving a new(ish) band and going to see only them(Belle and Sebastian), waiting for an old band to plan a reunion tour and sit with a bunch of middle-aged hippies (Loggins and Messina; Simon and Garfunkel; a group of people covering Joni Mitchell songs) or—horror of horrors—seeing a band I know nothing about. Shoot me now. I’d rather stay at home and watch Monk all night, truthfully.

        But my good buddy, Scott, and I decided that the line-up was too good to pass up, and we bought our tickets early in April (for a May concert). Our plan was to drive down to Indio Friday night, the day before the concert, check into a hotel and then hit the concert grounds running in the morning. This way, we figured, we’d beat traffic, be well rested, and get a relatively decent parking spot Saturday morning.

        I remember I went to his apartment that Friday night and he made me a “White Trash Burrito,” instructing me to try it before he would reveal his secret ingredient. The burrito was delicious and the secret turned out to be pork rinds, but he obviously didn’t know me very well if he thought that was going to be some kind of deterrent. Scott explained, mid burrito, that he was hoping we could stop at Morongo Casino on our way to Indio. A short stop, he said, just to play a couple rounds of black jack and hit the roulette tables and then we’d be on our way. I said I’d think about it. He said we were going. I said sure, I’d totally think about it. He said we were going. I asked if he wanted a ride. He said we were going. We were very accustomed to fighting (we were in a play together at the time).

        So we set out on the road sometime around 12 a.m. and began blasting The Cure as soon as we hit the freeway. We were young, excited, on our way to a musical extravaganza, like young people are supposed to want to be.

        Within 15 minutes, Scott was asleep in the passenger seat and I was so relieved. I actually felt a little crafty and clever. We’d just skip right past the casino and he wouldn’t know anything until he woke up. By then, it would be too late. He was 26 to my 21 and I figured the old man would sleep all the way to our hotel—wherever that might be.

        Unfortunately, as it sometimes does, the 10 Interstate East suddenly came to a standstill right around Cabazon, CA, an hour-and-a-half into our trip. At 1:45 in the morning. Apparently we weren’t the only yahoos that thought we would get to Indio a day early.  Guess what’s in Cabazon? Nothing at all except for one thing: Morongo Casino Resort and Spa. I have to say that they use the terms both “resort” and “spa” incredibly loosely out there in Cabazon. Because you can tell that joint’s a shit-hole all the way from the freeway. 

Morongo Casino. Blech. Trust me, it's worse in daylight.

         But Scott woke up and insisted that we stop. “Just for 30 minutes,” he kept saying. He also pointed out that I could get a cocktail, if I chose not to gamble.

        “It’s last call,” I said, pointing at the clock.

        “Not on an Indian Reservation.” He seemed so sure of himself.

        I pulled (very reluctantly) into the parking lot and we got out.

        I want you to know that the Indian Reservations stop serving drinks at 2 a.m., same as everywhere else. The rest can wait for next time.

Read parts two, three, four, and five.

*The Pixies "Where Is My Mind?"

**Anne Taintor.