Taking a show on the road involves a different kind of roadie life pretty much everywhere you go. In Alabama, in the summer, it can be nasty.
We fetch up in Extended Stay Dixie. It fits in the budget. Rooms with thin sheets, thin towels and thin walls. Kitchens with two cups, two plates, and two forks - all plastic. Work crews, each its own community. Drywallers up from Texas to knock up a cheap subdivision. Mexican laborers here in force to descend on the crops like a plague of locusts. Redneck electricians. Three-quarter-ton, extended cab pickups, full of dirty clothes and the tools of the trade. A dozen men piled in a single room, with the door open, betting on NASCAR. Plenty of Budweiser. Families without first and last. A Laundromat with driers you could fire ceramics in. Bobtail tractors backed in every which way. Any woman, any age, in any condition gets attention. There are 15 different chain restaurants within a mile in either direction.
I pick up a local crew. Young Justin’s just out of the joint in Jacksonville. “I ain’t got no driver licen yet.” So he’s limited to fetch-and-carry and the men ride him hard. You can see the belligerence that put him inside to start with. His sweetness turns to fury without any transition at all. Jimmy Patch, always with his pants split open. He’s a local electrician and the hardest workin’ man on the job. Patient and gentle with his apprentices, but harboring dark suspicions about Politicians, Fags, Liberals and Northerners (redundancies, in his estimation.) And Tyrell, a black kid whose laziness disappoints me by living up to the men’s mean expectations.
We work in the awful heat, shirtless. There are at least five storms every day. Travel trailers smell of dog, cigar smoke, beer, and after shave. Trash. Mud. The smell of gasoline. The ozone odor of an arc welder. A stinking, hundred-degree miasma of petroleum vapors, stale tobacco, mutt, and Aqua Velva. No place for an asthmatic.
Then there’s the noise. Machine noise: generators chugging day and night, heavy equipment laboring under a load, the sound of back-up klaxons, hammering, drilling, metal-on-metal. And man-noise: shouting, ribbing, coughing, and the occasional argument … the occasional fight. And the complaints – about bosses, mostly, but also about things that cannot be changed - heat, humidity, and the awful and unjust workings of a Fate that has brought each of us to this ignoble place.
You don’t really belong in this world until you get hurt. You’re not accepted until you’ve done something colossally stupid, been hurt and humiliated, and faced down the ridicule like it was nothing. “BFD. I drop something heavier than that sledge on my foot every Sunday just to wake myself up.” For some reason it’s not accomplishment that ingratiates you in this world. It’s failure.
I’m wearing new, steel-toed boots, which proves I’m not too stupid. I break a finger, showing I’m not too smart either. We learn to get along. I keep my thoughts to myself and the show goes up. Afterwards, it comes down fast and we get out of town. I just want a shower and something to drink besides Gatorade.
