Portland Recap, or Behind The Donuts

When we finally got to Portland our enthusiasm getting out of the car may not have been so appropriate considering the quality and welcome of our motel, but nobody had been able to move all night and the car had developed a perpetual fart smell about six hours ago. Our transition from equipment-cramped stereo-blaring careening-northwards-through-the-night in the car to the mysteriously-stained, occasional-distant-screams, dirty cold and still cramped motel room took a lot of whiskey.
Timmy drank most of the whiskey and then went back to the room to throw a tantrum in his pink wife beater and long johns until we left him alone. Later at our radio interview we struggled to answer the first 12 questions in Chapter One of “How to Interview a Band for Your College Radio Show” without using the word motherfucker, only to learn that tomorrow’s gig had been CANCELLED because our generous hosts forgot to pay their rent and there was nowhere to play. At least that’s the story they told us. The next day while stumbling pathetically around town in the freezing rain, begging for a gig at every bar, venue, prominent street corner, and cute girl’s house, we learned the truth about Portland.
It seems that the Taiwanese mobsters have complete control of the music scene between Eugene and Seattle, and they’d blackballed the Bad Hand because of something racist that Zippy allegedly said in a convenience store in 2004. The rest of the afternoon then became our mission: Bad Hand vs the underground Taiwanese mafia. Everywhere we went it seemed one of them had just left, and we saw some following us around every corner. They wore trench coats and brightly knit caps and sinister expressions. Also they carried walkie-talkies. Once I was sure I saw two of them sneaking around, one standing on the other’s shoulders to look taller and wearing a really long trench coat.
Eventually, fed up with the total lack of success, the booking agents wouldn’t even look straight at us and several of them crossed themselves when we left, we decided to take a breather at the bar across the street from our haunted motel. That’s right the place was haunted. Burning-hot hair straighteners had been found, plugged in, in empty rooms. Rattling. Anyway across the street was more whiskey and there we befriended a chubby, lonely out-of-towner whose name I forgot, who sat at the bar with us and told us his life story, which I also forgot. Friendly dude, though. He got up to pee and an hour later we found his body floating in the motel pool across the street. Pinned to his back, and still dry since he was so fat and floating facedown, the paper was well above the water level, was a note that read “GO HOME BAD HAND”. How did they do that? Did they pin the note on him after dumping him in the pool? Did they have a crane? Well we got the message, but now we had to avenge our friend the bar dude’s tragic death. It looked like the Koreans stabbed him in the knees a bunch of times. Did I say Koreans? I meant Taiwanese. I can’t tell them apart.
In any case it was on now and Oh yes, we would be playing a set in this goddamn freezing stupid city. It was personal now. All we had to do was contact a member of the secret club Punk Rockers Against the Mafia. PRAM. You’ve heard of PRAM? They were our only hope. Unfortunately, like all true punk rockers, they were all between 13 and 16 years old. It’s an angst thing. So maybe less of a rebel movement and more of a carpool group, but they’re all over myspace. One of them agreed to a secret meeting at Voodoo Donuts which had just been written up in Maxim, and we went incognito, trying to tone down our hippie rockstar image. By which I mean we made Dan wear a hat. But the punk never showed! I heard on the news later he was found in an alley, both his little legs broken, beaten with a walkie-talkie wrapped in his own spiked collar.
Things were heating up in Portland, but we couldn’t cave. Portland needed an injection of Bad Hand something awful and we had a duty to rock. So we lured the manager of Voodoo Donuts into the bathroom, stuffed his mouth with a cruller so he wouldn’t scream, tied him up with Timmy’s long johns and locked the door behind us. Fortunately we had just had a haunted motel-trashing biblefight deathmatch before coming and our pockets were full of crumpled torn bible pages we used to stuff the insulation of the bathroom to soundproof it. We set up on the loft platform above the bathroom, crouched under the ceiling, and brought the rock to Portland.
We played the hell out of that set, the smell of donut in our noses and tears in our eyes for bar dude and punk kid. The place quickly filled up with sugar-hungry would-be moshers, but just outside a crowd of sinister figures in trench coats formed, all staring at the donut shop, all tapping their walkie-talkies against their legs menacingly and deliberately off beat. They were waiting for us, but we could outlast them. We could play for days.