Spring Break, Nov. 2002

November of 2002. “The Spring Break Tour” night 6 – some basement, Milwaukee, WI.

I collapse onto a dog-turdish pile of young bodies that’s been plopped out, warm and stinking, into the narrowest basement in Milwaukee, shat out the wrong end of bad music.

About two hours later, the show’s dead and the house has gone quiet. My flip phone, which is at one-percent battery, reads four AM. Judging by the positioning of all these contorted bodies–the ones who didn’t crawl upstairs, anyway–it’s possible there was some sort of gas leak. No sleeping space was provided for the band, so had I gone upstairs, I’d have just staggered around until I collapsed on a different floor.

Here in the basement, I see the young men and women are still in their underwear (more on that) and mostly tangled together on the beer soaked carpet. The threadbare carpet feels like piss-soaked pajama pants.

My last clear memory is of kids shaking cans of dirt-cheap beer from something called a “keg pack” and spraying the foam all over each other–and everything else–while my brother angrily guarded his amp and guitar pedals. Beer dripped from the ceiling. Clothes were shed.

As usual, I’m hungover, aching, and I spy Matt, our drummer, digging around on the floor. I free myself from some dude’s legs and army crawl to him (Matt the drummer), scan the scene once more–if a few kids weren’t snoring, you’d think everyone was dead. I nudge Matt, whispering, “Battleblow.”

“What?” he whispers.

And I explain: “That’s a good name for a band.”

He continues picking at the knit of the carpet. His face is scrunched in consternation, his lips pursed.

Some people say that Matt looks like Anthony Kiedes–the Red Hot Chili Peppers’s singer–and he does, only head-shaved and bigger and more muscular from a brief romance with steroids. He wanted to keep his position as the goalkeeper for our college soccer club. He didn’t.

Underneath Matt’s nose is a little brown, spoon-shaped glass pipe.

“What are you doing?” I say.

“Looking for weed.”

Our band smoked all its marijuana in Chicago and we’ve gone without for about two days, except for bumming the occasional bowl. It’s said one cannot become addicted to weed. Not true.

The kids at this house claim they will hook us up in the afternoon.

After several minutes of work, Matt and I manage to pluck from the carpet a bowlful of pocket lint, weed scraps (we’re pretty sure) and rat shit (probably).

We smoke it and smile at each other in the dim.

“Spring break,” I say.

“Spring break,” he agrees.

***

This was but one of a hundred similar snapshots (well, TikTok videos?) of my days playing with a terrible screamo band in the early 2000’s.

R.I.P. Shitville.

What I ponder (worry about) almost daily is this: after every show with that band–and we played many–I’d suffer an awful, splitting headache the next day. Usually, I attributed this to a hangover. Additionally, my face would be pock-marked with little, purple splotches–broken blood vessels, I guess? These I attributed to screaming into beer-breath reeking microphones.

That band lasted for six years, until one night, I suffered a series of seizures at home–totally unprecedented. We hadn’t played in weeks. My wife was (and still is) convinced my epilepsy was caused by all that violent Shitville shouting and screaming. A series of doctors would dismiss her theory. No source or cause has ever been discovered for my epilepsy; it appears that it will remain a mystery. Because I’m now taking around 10,000mm of medication a day and have had three brain surgeries, lost my driver’s license, and still suffer seizures, I wish this wasn’t the end of the story.