Steve on the phone #1 [J Roddy Blog Archive]

This post was originally published on the old J Roddy Walston & The Business blog in 2007. It was written by Steve Colmus. I’m reposting it here for archival purposes.

My cell phone camera is about the only thing more ubiquitous on our road trips than Gatorade bottles that may or may not be filled with Gatorade and Billy’s antacids. I like to think of myself as the Ansel Adams of dirty white dudes in a van. My journey to document the mundanities and tchotchkes that come with spending entire weekends in a moving box with your four best friends, has produced somewhat interesting (read: mixed) results. Witness:

This is Zach on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, NJ. It’s a great town – I just wish we could have seen it before a nuclear holocaust levelled the place. We walked along the boardwalk after getting there several hours too early and later learned from the bar staff that a band had done the same thing the week before and one of them got shot in the head. Thankfully all we got was windburned. The manager of the club that night was a guy named Casper who had left his long-time gig at a bar in Florida to take the job. He was still tanned six months later – which provided a beautiful contrast with his blinding white set of fake choppers – and was physically aching for college girls (he didn’t elaborate). All night long he regaled us with tales that included getting high with Rick Derringer, selling crystal meth to Joey Ramone and living next door to the MILF Hunter. It was pretty awesome. At the end of the night he slipped us his phone number in case we ever needed a lawyer (he knew a good one) and the last four digits were “WILD.” SCORE!

This is the world-famous Casino in Asbury Park. The gambling here sucked…all they played was craps.

Beautiful, downtown Cincinnati. Seriously, the Queen City is awesome (so I’m told). It was the site of The Greatest Argument I’ve Ever Heard In My Life, which took place at 4am in a suburban Cincinnati diner, and involved two drunken hillbilles. It went like this: Woman: F*ck you Man: No, f*ck you Woman: F*ck you Man: No, f*ck you Woman: F*ck you Man: No, f*ck you Denise [End scene] To Cincinnati: You must have been nice in, like, 1920:

Here’s our man, Chris “Ichiban” Zalamia in action. He travels with us and handles merch for us. He might also be the smartest human being alive (or dead). We shared a house in college and I watched him teach himself Calculus 8 or something in one week, because he had slept through every one of his classes (and he had three alarm clocks). He got an “A.” He’s also a shaman.

This is us applying white face paint and baby powder to ourselves in the bathroom of Parkway Billiards in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This was our big Halloween show and someone decided we were going to be some kind of Colonial America-Louis XIV hybrid. We raided a few women’s blouses and blazers from a Goodwill, picked up some tights from Wal-Mart, and lost our self-repect somewhere along the way. The end result was pretty hideous. The hightlight was watching the halo of baby powder that surrounded Rod’s head the entire evening. Also at the show, we met a white guy who came as Mr. T. Just have a look and we’ll leave it at that:

This is Rod cleaning our friend’s floor in Lexington, Kentucky. He probably knocked over a glass and made a gigantic mess and then started crying like he always does. I mean, he cries all the time over the littlest stuff – he asks for a drink and someone hands him a “bad” Gatorade, or Zach eats raw broccoli and falls asleep next to him, or we throw away his sleeping bag because it got mixed in with the trash in the van…I swear! He’s probably crying while he’s reading this. BABY! These are the fingers that I hurt really bad on tour. I bled all over, like, three pairs of jeans:

This is Billy wearing the new Hardees Fry Holster. (You can put Tater Tots in it too, I think.) This is from some rest stop in New Jersey…those stops are either really good or really terrible. This was one was pretty terrible (that’s why we’re eating Hardees). We had played New York City the night before and made $30, while racking up two separate $60 parking tickets at the same time. We kept them both as souvenirs.

This is Raleigh, North Carolina in a bewitching fog. I met a witch once – I dated her daughter for a week in high school. She wrote romance novels for a living and had alot of lame candles…I heard later on that her daughter convinced her to put a spell on me. I hope she instead spent the time casting an anti-gingivitis spell on her daughter because her gums were gross. Anyway, we played King’s that night and got to see The Whistlestop for the first time, which has got to go down as the one coolest things we’ve got to do. Later, I got diarrhea.

Seriously – who’s not flushing? Seriously. Grow up. Couple of quickies…

Rod is The Cream Machine. (In related news, I’m looking for a new inflatable mattress-mate.)

This is our friend Matt Ballard, who came on a trip with us once. We would like to thank the kind folks at Chik-fil-A in Dorch, North Carolina for allowing him to eat in their establishment.

These are some gorgeous Tennessee mountains. (And no Dolly Parton punchline.)

This is Zach’s dream vehicle – he said he would pay $500 a month to own it. It belonged to Jerry Berghoff who drove a monster truck called “The Attitude Adjuster.” It’s painted “General Lee sienna” and has a mural of “The Attitude Adjuster” on the side. It is currently parked at a Texaco station in Wheeling, West Virginia, across the street from “Hubcaps” (a hub cap emporium).

This is me drunk and loving it at The Dame in Lexington, Kentucky. The next morning, I realized our crappy performance the night before was due to this shirt being unlucky. I have since undertaken a vow to never wear it on stage ever again.

This is Zach and I kissing a pair of Blue Bulls. I don’t know why drinking them that night was so funny. You can look at Zach and tell I forced him to take this picture. I’m sorry Zach. And finally:

This is the last thing we see everytime we head out for the road and the first thing we see when we get back – Jesus, shotgun shells and a baseball bat. That’s America in a milk crate, baby! Steve