Waiting For The Encore

We had been on the road for over a year without pause. I never complained, though. It’s what I wanted to be doing, and I had my brother along with me, so we made the most of it.

We camped along the roadside and showered with water bottles, even after I had hired a backing band. The whole lot of us would settle down somewhere, one person asleep on the back seat, another on the floor, and another somewhere in the trailer. I had a hammock that I’d hang between our van and whatever we were parked next to. It was ridiculous, but I felt really connected to something living like that, as if the dirt and the grime were a sort of soil to my wandering roots.

The record label had allocated three-hundred-thousand dollars to tour support, which means that I could have flown first class between shows, stayed in five-star hotels, and hired a personal assistant to pick my nose if I’d wanted to. It would’ve all been reimbursed, but I never spent a cent... Instead, I felt like “paying my dues” in retrograde, so we all slept in the van.

It was a bit like camping, and a lot like being homeless, but I loved every moment.

We lived in that van for over a year, playing shows all across the U.S., and the miles really started to add up. It had been months since I’d seen my girlfriend or slept in my own bed, and although I didn’t realize it at the time, my drinking and drug use had become a real problem.  So, when we got a call from management about a string of shows in California, everyone was excited to go home.

It would be a chance for us to visit our families, and the shows they had booked were with some really popular acts. Everything was sold out in advance and the venues were huge.

We made that cross-country drive in haste with the windows down, happy to let the wind blow away our months of isolation.

When we got to Los Angeles, my manager had a special pre-show dinner planned, and all of the musicians booked to play that night were there. I was sitting at a table next to a famous singer, and I remember thinking that he didn’t have much charisma for a front man… I can also remember thinking that his nose was far too large for fame… But I guess I was wrong, because they went on to sell another couple million records, and I went on to being dropped by my label.

That’s what happened next: my label dropped me...

Chris, my manager, pulled me aside and told me that he wanted to talk. He said that Sony Music wasn’t going to move forward with the project anymore.

“What project?” I asked him.

“Well… Your project…”

“Right…” I repeated, “What project?”

And then suddenly, I understood what he meant. The "project" was my career, like it had been something I threw together with glue and paper. Not my soul or my identity or my place in the world, but just my “project”.

I must have been hurt and I must have felt betrayed, but really, I can’t remember feeling much of anything.

“Oh. Okay,” I said, “Yeah… That’s okay… We’ll just keep going forward without them”.

He didn’t reply. He just smiled back at me in this sort of half-assed way, with his lips forced into a bow-shape, but his eyes distant and cold.

“They need you for sound check,” he said, and so I went.

The next couple of shows were great. I had the band and my brother by my side, huge crowds and lots of familiar faces to keep me grounded. It was a short run, but I’ll never forget those gigs. We played five nights as a band, and then I was scheduled to fly back to the east coast for a month of solo acoustic dates.

That’s when everything started going downhill.

I rented a small car in New York City, and filled the trunk with bottles of whiskey. For some reason, I got in the habit of burning incense while I drove, and I would hold them in my mouth like a long, flimsy cigarette. They kept falling out, and so I had a growing collection of circular burns in my clothes and on my skin. Everything in that car, myself included, smelled of smoke and booze.

I don’t remember much of what I thought about on those drives, but I was alone all day, every day, and all night, every night. I wouldn’t go into the venues until my name had been called on stage, and then I’d rush right back out after my set was done. I hadn’t even been collecting my pay, because I didn’t want to talk with any of the promoters.

I wasn’t sleeping much, either, and whenever I did sleep, it was just a nap in the driver’s seat. The rental car didn’t have anywhere comfortable or spacious like the van did, and I was still too stubborn to rent a hotel room.

A week into the solo tour, I started talking to myself aloud, and when my agent called to ask why I wasn’t collecting our pay, I just threw my phone out the window and watched it skip along the highway like a stone.

I missed my girlfriend, but more than that, I regretted the years I’d left her waiting at home while I ran around chasing dreams. Also, I missed my family, my brother and my dogs. More than anything, though, I missed having the sense that I was going somewhere... I missed my drive and my passion… I was beginning to feel lost, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

I can remember pulling into Boston, and feeling like I had nothing left to give. I hadn’t slept in weeks, and I was losing my grip on reality. When I took the stage that night, and those hot lights hit me, I remember feeling as if my flesh was cooking. I thought I could smell it even, like meat in an oven.

I pulled the shirt away from my shoulder and discovered for the first time all of those circular burns that my incense smoking had left. I looked at my hands, turning them over, and noticed anew the bloody pit where I’d ripped an entire fingernail out from the root. “How have I been playing with this?” I wondered. And suddenly, it started to hurt for the first time.

“I am on the outside of truth!”

Someone was singing…

I heard it like an echo in my mind, and I wondered for a moment if I’d started my set without knowing it. I reached up to check my mouth, but it was still closed.  I strained to look out past the lights, but my eyes were blurry with sweat.

“I’m looking in on you!”

The singing continued.

I then realized it was a girl, somewhere in the crowd, and that she was singing my songs for me, almost angrily. She had horrible pitch, too. “Woo! Ronnie Day!”

“H… hello,” I tried to respond, but my words fell silent. I still hadn’t found the microphone, and I felt dizzy. My bitten fingernails were throbbing with the pain that, until then, I’d become so good at ignoring.

“Sing me a song, Ronnie Daaaaaaaaaaaaay!” The girl in the front row wouldn’t leave me alone, and her voice was shrill like someone’s mother.

“Th… That’s not my real name,” I tried to tell her, but I still couldn’t find the microphone.

“Woo! Woo! Ronnie Day!” she screamed back.

I turned to find the microphone, and in doing so, I saw the back door swung wide open. Without a second thought, I unplugged my guitar and walked out through it. I heard nothing but my own heart beating, and as I got into the car, I knew there was no turning back. A light drizzle had begun falling from the sky, and I pulled out onto the highway once again.

Massachusetts has a hook that reaches off the Eastern coast like a finger, and on my map, I could see a road running down the middle of it, out to the very tip. I decided that this was where I would go: to the tip of the hook, to the end of the road.

I had lost my home years before. I had just lost my record contract, and in that moment I was losing my mind. The tip of that hook seemed to me like it must be the final stop, and so that’s where I wanted to be. I imagined meeting an old seer atop a lighthouse, or a lone fisherman out on a rock. I imagined a threshold passing into the underworld, and an answer to the question of my suffering.

But as I would soon discover, there’s a place called P-Town on the end of that hook, and it’s not a dark portal to the underworld. Rather, it’s one of the happiest, gayest places on Earth. And I mean really gay, like they have penis-shaped beer mugs at the bar and purple napkins.

I arrived near midnight to a quaint little town painted in pastels. Pairs of men walked the streets hand-in-hand, and as I idled slowly past the town square, a transsexual dancer in a hot-pink thong said I looked lonely, with a drawn-out, exaggerated wink… Not knowing what else to do, I parked the car and went to a restaurant for dinner.

Every table was set for two, and pairs of happy gay men gazed dreamily into one another’s eyes. The wait staff wore tight shorts and low-cut V-neck shirts. They spoke to me like I was some contestant on a game show, with exaggerated pep and enthusiasm. This was not what I expected, and I felt completely out of place.

I paid my tab, got back into the car, and drove to a beach just outside of town. I parked, and fumbling through the glove box, I found a small bottle of sleep-aid. I took a dozen of those little pills in one hand, a bottle of whiskey in the other, and I walked across the wet sand towards the water. Along the way, I came upon a frog, and so I stopped to visit with him for a moment.

“Hello, Frog,” I said, “It’s cold and wet out here… But I’ll bet you like that, huh?” The frog gazed back at me, it’s chin swelling and sinking. “Well… I won’t keep you, then,” I said. “Have a good night.”

I let the frog go, and I swallowed the handful of sleeping pills with a good drag of whiskey. I laid myself down into the wet sand, and found sleep at last.

I think I was out for three days, but it may have been more, or it may have been less. My ears and nose were filled with sand and my head felt like a block of ice when I finally awoke…

I got back in the car, and drove it straight to the airport. My nose wouldn’t stop bleeding, my fingernails were mutilated, and the burns on my shoulder kept sticking to my shirt, but I was home in San Francisco by nightfall.

I didn’t stay very long, though.

My manager had been calling my brother, and when I got home, he finally got me on the line. He was setting up a big showcase in L.A. at The Roxy, and said that it would be a chance for me to get myself into a new contract with a different label. “Everyone who’s anyone will be there, Ronnie.”

“Okay, yeah,” I said in agreement. I shouldn’t have. If I had any sense, I would have told him to wait a while, but I didn’t. I just agreed.

That night, I went to see my girlfriend for the first time in almost a year, and when we looked into each other’s eyes, we knew that it was over. Everything had changed, and it didn’t take very many words for us to agree that we were no longer in a relationship.

It’s not that I didn’t love her anymore—I did, and I do and I always will. But I didn’t have anything left to give, and I think that maybe she felt the same way.

So, that night I drove down to L.A. and started taking meetings with everyone I knew. “Big showcase at the Roxy this weekend,” I’d tell them. “Invite your boss… And have him invite his boss, too!”

Unfortunately, it worked. Everyone showed up...

Maybe they saw the lunacy in my eyes and were just curious to see how badly I’d fuck up, or maybe they genuinely had an interest in signing me to their labels. Either way, I had a full house for that final, fateful showcase...

I also had my band on hand for the gig, and as we were waiting on stage for the curtain to rise, they were all giving me nervous glances… They must have known I was in bad shape… I just wish I had known it, myself.

As the curtain rose, I decided to try and ride it up into the rafters like a pirate. It just ripped from its hooks and fell onto the crowd. I jumped to my feet and grabbed the microphone, “Ta da,” I exclaimed, “And for my next trick, I’ll make the band disappear!”

Then, I turned and shooed them all off stage, “Go on. You’re fired.”

As the crowd was finding it’s way out from under the fallen curtain and the venue staff was scrambling to make sense of the situation, I started improvising a 30-minute song about the music industry on my piano. Bare in mind, many of the most influential figures in music business were seated above in the VIP section.

I’m not sure exactly what I sang in that improvisation, but it was probably something about exploitation and indifference in a corporate world… Needless to say, I wasn’t offered any record contracts that night.

Afterwards, while my manager was apologizing frantically to everyone he could reach, I went out to pack my stuff and drive off. Just before I could make my escape, though, a young fan stopped me on the sidewalk.

She was a little girl, maybe twelve years old, and she had been crying. She asked if I was okay, and I told her “yes” with a fake smile.

“I’ve never seen somebody so messed up, Ronnie,” she said. “Please, go and get better.”

I didn’t know what to say to her, because at that time, I didn’t know I was messed up, yet. I didn’t know what she meant by “better”. So, I just got into the van, and drove off.

It would be four years before I ever played another show.