October/November 1998

My bandmates arrived yesterday – Ohio by bus from Ohio, and Coz The Shroom from Texas picked up Dame Darcy in New York in his big, old, rusted van. Those two had a harrowing trip, with Darcy yelling from the back to slow down and that she didn’t care if she died, but she didn’t want Coz to “mutilate her beautiful face with his stupid, ugly van.” Coz replied that there was a couple who got in an accident and the wife’s beautiful face was messed up and the husband couldn’t take it, so he took a rock and smashed her to death. Since all of us but Coz are from the northeast, we don’t understand things he does like wear bright colors and drink vinegar and urinate in places other than the toilet.

Darcy and Coz are having little squabbles all day long, like about our friends having passed rice from the woman’s mouth to the man’s. Coz thought that was romantic; Darcy said it was sick. Coz said birds do it. Darcy said, “We’re not birds; we have manners.” Then Coz started thinking out loud about a business venture where you chew up old people’s food and regurgitate it for them. The fact that we were eating dinner at the time made this idea not a good one. I have told each member of the troop separately that the others are crazy. Each person agreed. I bet they’re having conversations about me when I leave the room. Everyone but me has had bleeding ulcers but I have the worst insomnia.

We did our first interview (phone). When the interviewer asked if Darcy’s a control freak, Coz piped up that she is. He cited her ordering him to go put on more deodorant the first day they met. Also Boyd called when I was out and Coz chatted with him for a while, then Darcy started yelling from the couch answers to questions she couldn’t hear. Darcy’s explanation for this was Coz was not giving the information about when I’d be back soon enough. Coz said he was just being friendly. Darcy replied that he was being “retarded and inefficient.” While trying to explain all this to the interviewer, Coz and Darcy fought over the phone and it hung up.

Coz is quite stinky. I don’t know why. There’s one on every tour – the stinky one. Coz has all these herbal remedies for every ailment – physical, mental, or situational – that he’s always trying to force on us. I wish he had one for stinkiness. He also has a bizarre historical memory -- like that Reagan and Bush had sex. He is earnest and grave, and surprised and confused when we laugh.

Everyone but me had a nickname, so I asked my bandmates for one and they came up with “Slavedriver,” because I make everyone practice all the time. It’s just because I love to see Ohio and Coz dance. They’re like drunken Russians/breakdancers/snake-charmers/Sha Na Na. Everyone is enthusiastic, except Darcy refused to sing the finale -- a GG song that contains the line “we’re living like sewer rats.” She feels this does not mirror her doll-life aesthetics. I took everyone to the Dover waterfall and then to Extreme Bowling (under a strobe light). We stole our bowling shoes. Darcy almost got kicked out for trying to bowl down somebody’s legs. Ohio misread Turkey Supper on a church sign as Turkey Slipper, and Coz said very seriously, “Well, every earthbound mollusk has a tongue on his foot, so turkey slippers would be good for them.” Coz went to bed early, and Darcy, Ohio and I stayed up laughing about the earthbound mollusks with turkey slippers for I am not kidding two hours. I was crying and drooling, and Ohio’s stomach hurt, and Darcy’s face hurt. Ohio said he’s laughed more in the last week than in the last few years – since the time Bill Cosby talked about his lip catching on fire. Coz always says the wrong thing to women. He said I look like a piranha and thought he was complimenting me. Also, an article heralding our upcoming tour described me as extremely beautiful and I said I hate that because then people are disappointed when they meet me and I’m nothing special, and Coz said, “Don’t worry – no one’s gonna get too close a look at you.” Jesus! He refers to Darcy’s weight and actually bought arthritis cream because he said he’s sore from having to carry her when she’s in her mermaid costume. All this after knowing Darcy has an eating disorder. Coz wears acid-washed jeans. Those dingy grayish ones. I admire someone who is so fashionably out of it, who just wears what they want – but he’s just so wrong. I tried to explain why I was laughing. I said, “Your pants are just so … so…” “Butch?” he guessed. Totally serious. I don’t know – maybe this is not sounding so funny. But every single thing cracks me up so bad.

Played our first show, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. People seemed to like it. They clapped and yelled between songs, and danced – which is something that never happened to me before because there were never real songs before. Just screaming opera and chaos and naked people. I have sworn to keep my clothes on and not touch drink this tour, hoping that will magically imbue me with a good voice. I got so excited when the show began I peed my pants a tiny bit. Ever since then, Coz has been trying to force water retention herbs on me. I said, “Coz! I do not have incontinence! One time in my life I got so excited I peed my pants! Leave me alone!”

Darcy would like to add this about the Portsmouth show: “Ohio was attacked by a weird guy in the audience wearing a cowboy suit. His arm ended up being slashed open, and his real blood combined with the fake blood, ruining his ‘good’ shirt he was supposed to wear during the wedding song for the rest of the tour. After the show we all got in the van to drive Ohio to the hospital and I was astonished to see the weird guy sitting in there. Lisa said he would stay at the house tonight because he worked in Dover. She didn’t even know his name. I just thought, Whatever. He can’t do much to me in a houseful of people so I’m safe. They really liked us in the hospital waiting room. Lisa’s makeup was smeared all over her face and she looked insane as she recounted about other Suckdog tours and all their injuries. Plus we were with Boney-Bo Monkey Coz and the weird, tall, cowboy-clothes guy. Back home, stalker cowboy guy insisted on sleeping on the floor in the guest room with us. I lent him my doll pillow and he kept talking all night and farting really bad. I told him if he had to do something that bad again he had to either stick his butt out the window or go outside. He left early the next morning and during the night he had ripped the doll pillow to shreds. What was his problem?”

Boston, New York, Philly. Ohio was saying that he realized that people who spend the most time with him know him the least. He pours everything into strangers. In the Boston audience was a fellow who’s been just barely, halfway eluding my clutches across Massachusetts and New Hampshire beaches all summer long. He constantly lies: said he had a pool on his roof, but he doesn’t; said he has seven cats, but they’re his roommate’s. One time he said he went to a certain store but I checked the receipt, and he’d gone to another. I always want to get in the pants of those who lie to me (maybe I think I’ll find the truth tucked down in there). I went home with him, and at last this unattainable thing was mine. But the next day, crawling into the van, I was feeling like, “Aw, fuck it all.” Love just confuses me and it’s too hard and I hate it. And then we were flying away. At dinner, the four of us discovered that we all were hyperactive as kids and were all sent to a psychologist around the age of eight! And had out-of-body hallucinations around that time. My guess is we were just trying to escape from under so much pressure from our parents – three out of four of our mothers were hypochondriacs and looked to young, trapped us to give them all the love their husbands never did. “You’ll be sorry when I’m dead!” “You’re making me sick!” Coz’s mom was always thinking he had worms. Coz will say really inappropriate things really loud, and then when I say, “Don’t say that so they can hear you!” he says, “No one can hear my voice. It’s so annoying that people tune it out.” He actually believes he’s auditorially invisible! That’s so sad. Then we get up and play. Darcy’s mermaid song is just like a real siren’s, lulling and preternatural; Coz’s falsetto, divine. Ohio’s rendition of “Feel Like Makin’ Love” almost makes me cry – it is big and lumbering and cracked. Like Kris Kristofferson.

The van died on the highway. Darcy and Coz freaked out. They’re the crazy kids; Ohio and I are the good cop/bad cop. We still all love each other -- even Darcy and Coz. Those two are like an old married couple – a Catholic one, where you cannot get divorced, even when circumstances really call for it. Ohio said he’s having the best time of his whole life. Darcy says she can’t remember the last time she felt no sadness at all like this. Coz said he wanted adventure and he’s getting more of it than he thought possible. I made friends with everyone tonight. I feel friendly. I love Philadelphia.

Next day. I don’t believe it’s exactly true that I made friends with everyone. I do believe I made everyone run away. I bit a man’s nipple when he proclaimed impressionism superior to expressionism. Apparently I called a halt to my no-drinking rule. After the show, Coz drove all night and claims I was leering at him and saying, “I have hypnotic eyes! You will stay in your lane!” Then, with my head against the window and my legs bent up against my chest, I slept. It was a beautiful sleep, deep and still – my first one in days. Ohio’s asleep right now in the back seat with a bear mask on and his hand on Darcy’s hair. It’s a rather frightening sight. I feel pretty fine, not hungover in the least.

Everyone begged Coz to put his shoes back on (in the van), but he wouldn’t. So Darcy said, “Please put some of this baby powder on your feet then.” He starts telling us about rubbing your feet with chopped onion or some other of his home remedies and we’re all, “Coz, we DON’T WANT TO KNOW! Just put that powder on!” He called us ignorant about health and sprayed the powder wildly and it got all over my ham sandwich and I was so mad at him.

The show turns into whatever city it happens in. In Cleveland, I stage-dived and got carried around by the audience. What was I thinking? Ohio knocked over an amp, or someone did, and broke a mic cord and the stand of someone filming. The soundman and all the workers were totally cool about it. It’s just crazy here. The kids are all right. Ohio and I had a deep talk. Then he puked. The doorman kept buying me kamikazes. When our no alcohol policy from the northeast went out the door, so did our clothes. Poor Darcy – she’s so ladylike, and little did she know the show would degenerate so far so rapidly. This guy told Ohio to shut up and I said who said that? No one said a word, then the guy’s friend ratted him out. I walked up to him and punched him so hard I’m afraid I broke something. Then I ran away because I was afraid he’d get up off the floor and punch me back! Ohio’s dad was at the show and he loved it. The dad’s girlfriend danced on a table. Ohio dedicated a song to his dad – naked. All the ladies were yelling, “Ohio! Pull your pants up! Cut it out, Ohio!” Afterwards, everyone was yelling for more. We said only if five people get down on their knees and beg, and they did! I guess that’s strange, but actually people like to beg. So the next night, in Columbus we made ten people beg. Ten naked people. Everyone in Columbus was coming on to Darcy. In Columbus, people look like out-of-work lumberjacks. Darcy likes dapper men who sip wine at art openings. Seriously. She said she never saw such a bunch of hard-up losers in her life. Nobody came on to me. Perhaps, dreamers that they are, they only want what is unattainable. Unlike the Dame, I’m very attainable to out-of-work lumberjacks. The downtrodden intellectuals with potbellies pushing against the bar, who let their dreams go and so keep them perfect. They cry at the wrong things. They’re beautiful.

Coz is trying to get me to eat ginger root. I’m trapped in the back of the van with him. I should say more about playing in Columbus. Of course it was out-of-control. I have only out-of-control memories of any time I’ve been to Columbus, even when not touring. Darcy got naked! Ohio and I just looked at each other with our mouths hanging open and then we took our clothes off too, then this crazy girl got on stage and took her clothes off, then about eight guys dropped their drawers. Coz did too. Darcy is one of these people who is always covered from neck to wrist to ankle. She thinks all people should be completely dressed at all times, even in bed. So you see how feral Columbus can turn people! I was leaping from table to table, flying. Dyke Supreme, a long-haired 47 year old who loves AC/DC, did vocals on two songs and got tackled and his thumb was broken! I got a shard of table metal embedded under my nail bed. After the show, a philosophy major seemed like he’d buy two Rollerderbys and then he only bought one. So I got mad and attacked him. Well, actually, we were yelling about Nietzsche and he thought he knew more than me or something. Actually, he did know more than me. But I told him, “Well, I’m better than Nietzsche!” And to prove it, I bit him. “There! Did Nietzsche ever bit you? No – because he’s dead!” Then I went home with him.

The other name my bandmates gave me is Darth Vadar because of my driving. I totally concentrate, not talking to anyone, not touching the radio knobs, just looking straight ahead and driving at warp speed. We got sideswiped going 90 mph, and we should’ve been driven off the road, but I just braced my arms against the wheel and barreled ahead, absorbing the shock of the other car, and I didn’t say a word while Coz screamed, “Oh god oh god oh god.” The stupid guy who sideswiped us then waved his pot pipe at us, offering us some!

I talked to Jerry Wick on the phone. He said 50 people in Columbus hated the show and ten people said it was the best thing they ever saw.

Oh my god, the fight Coz and Ohio had in Chicago! Ohio told Coz to turn right and he had a hissy fit, so Ohio told him to quit being such a baby, so Coz stopped the van and said he wasn’t going any further till he got some respect. Ohio said you get respect when you give it. Then he called him a baby again. Coz said, “You’re the baby!” Ohio said, “No, you’re the baby!” Coz started the van again and took the right turn at around 90 mph! Coz said this was the worst time of his life and he wanted to die. Ohio said well quit yapping about it then and do it. I told Ohio to quit antagonizing Coz and to switch seats with me. I was afraid Coz would have a heart attack. Earlier, when we’d had trouble finding the Playboy headquarters (Chip Rowe gave us a tour), Coz literally pulled his hair out and threw chunks of it on the ground. I thought that was just a figure of speech! There was some guy we picked up from the show in the back of the van for some reason during Coz and Ohio’s fight, and he said something about Liz Armstrong, who wore a furry white bikini and bunny ears and danced on the amp at our show, being a bitch, and how her bunny ears were messing up men’s thinking like TV antennae. I told him to take back calling my friend a bitch, and he said he can say the word bitch if he wants. I said you can’t say whatever I don’t want you to say when you’re in my van or you can get the fuck out. So he took it back. Then Ohio told Coz he loved him, but Coz was all stony-faced and anal. He didn’t talk to any of us for about twelve hours. I think little tiffs are good for relieving tension when you’re on tour. You just can’t take them seriously, and you got to make up right after.

            Coz coughs and snorts and clears his throat a lot, by the way.

Ohio and I are gonna do some coke tonight. I bought some cocaine panties at Wal-Mart. They have tiny gold spangles. We bought panties because roomfuls of people have been making fun of Darcy’s underwear whenever there’s no private place to change her costumes. She wears granny drawers – big old cotton ones, gray and white with collapsed waist bands. Some have candy canes and Christmas wreaths on them. Anyway, after all these people said “NICE panties!” to her, she decided it was time to break down and enter the 20^th century. So I gave her a Panties 201 lesson. We picked out eight pairs for her – velvet baroque, spangled, bowed. Very nice. I still thought she should’ve stuck with the old ones. I thought they had personality. Oh – and because she passed out on the floor of the club in Columbus, now she’s worried she has hoof and mouth disease.

This girl said after the show in Chicago, “Great show – but you got a small weenie, Ohio!” He said, “Hey … it expands! I been drinking two weeks – what do you expect? Hey, it works!” And so on, but the girl was long gone. Beer makes your penis shrink? I never knew.

I seriously think I could teach a panties class. I know a lot about them. So many career opportunities.

Everyone but me throws up. I never do. I don’t need sleep. I don’t need ginger root. I’m not even human. I’m pure, sweet feeling that happens to be able to walk, drive, and dance.

The windshield wiper flew off while we were driving. These are some of the things the van is missing: a gas gauge, a light for the speedometer, a seatbelt head for the passenger seat, the turn signal stick, the sun visor, and now the radio. And it smells like gasoline.

In Pittsburgh, the audience was a few people on metal chairs just staring. The coke made me realize I could do four dance moves in the amount of time I’d formerly been doing one. I kept telling people they were gonna die so they might as well boogie tonight. They did a little. Got a sexy pirate to get naked in the end. He was about 55 years old and wore an eyepatch for real. He said he’d do anything for me. His first time naked! Ohio is down about something. I don’t ask what, because when you’re stuck with three other people 24 hours a day in a tight space, you don’t want them in your face trying to figure you out. This creepy guy was drooling over me and Darcy, and Darcy was all petulant about how she got presents in every city but Pittsburgh (Darcy frowns like Clara Bow when she doesn’t get her way), so Creepy Guy went to his car and found a present for her – a Skid Rowe tape!!!!!

The emergency flash switch fell off the van. I love to drive. I put on my sunglasses and I feel like I’m in a bubble. I get all the aloneness.

Soundmen are really good-looking! You think of bands as being the hot stuff, but in reality all the bands we’ve met on this tour are either fat or scrawny; they’re smelly and tired and they drink too much. Even if they’re nice, you don’t exactly want to date them. But the soundmen – they have all their equipment, and they have their life together. They have time to get a haircut. Us too – when we roll into town … well, I’m sure we’d be much better-looking if we were soundmen.

In Newport, Kentucky, they shut us off after two songs due to the fact that they’re pussies. The soundman – who was not good looking, nor was he a real soundman! – messed up so bad … two out of four mics working, no backing tape in the monitors. Ohio got so upset he got naked and turned over tables and the soundman shut us off! I said turn us back on. He said he can’t when we’re breaking equipment. I said last I knew a table was not equipment, and it’s not broken anyway. I said tables get knocked down every Friday night, what’s your problem you can’t take it. I was calling him a pussy, then I added, “Nothing bad about vaginas!” Then Darcy got on the mic in her nice white outfit and said, “Yeah!” This guy Bones kept saying he wanted the show to go on. I’m not sure how it happened, but I punched him in the face and he tackled me and he was punching my head and two guys were on top of him and I was in a fetal position with my arms around my head, which three men were sitting on as they wrestled! I reached up to pinch Bones really hard and then Bones broke one guy’s nose and the next thing I knew Bones and I were outside and Bones said, “I love you, Lisa. I’m your biggest fan.” And we embraced. So Coz gave Bones a ride home in the van, and I went in the car of the girl whose house we’re staying at and her boyfriend, who was one of the guys who tackled Bones. I can’t even remember the last time I had so much fun. Right before we went onstage, Ohio said to me, “Come here and inhale some devil’s breath.” That means coke. I said no, because something bad would surely come of it, but he said he wanted that. Anyway, I believe we behaved appropriately, considering the circumstances.

Someone threw a dead chicken at us. We figure they wanted to put a voodoo curse on us but couldn’t remember which part of the chicken. “Not the wings … uh … just throw the whole thing.” The logic on this tour kills me. This morning I thought Coz was in bed with me with a blonde wig on. I thought he used a blonde wig as a sleep-aid (turn it backwards and block out the sun). But no, it was Darcy. Darcy said, “I love being on tour. We don’t have to call anyone. We’re just demented, roving hedonists going from town to town, making out with girls, drinking whiskey, then we get back in the van. And every once in a while we have to go to the hospital.” People were telling us last night’s show was the best show they’d ever seen. I said, “But we got cut off!” They said, “We’d rather have ten minutes of ecstasy than an hour of pleasure.” I’m at Sudsy’s now while Ohio’s getting his broken or sprained ankle X-rayed and Darcy’s finally getting that tetanus shot she’s been longing for. Sudsy’s is a bar/jukebox joint/pinball machine alley/Laundromat.

Went thrift-shopping in Louisville. I bought some art. An oval painting of a leafless tree and a cabin. There’s no horizon line – just sort of light emanating from the dead tree, bleeding into the murky forest floor and the dark, orangey sky. It’s haunting. I can’t stand colors or anything blooming in my house for the same reason I can’t have mirrors. I need dark, lifeless things to suck up some of the excess energy. I hope I don’t sound like an art fag. Well, I guess I am one. Oh well.

This girl Tara and her boyfriend Jim drank like twenty beers and smoked a whole pack of cigarettes – in one hour! Then Tara told this guy David she had to talk to him outside about why he stopped calling her three years ago. So she’s screaming at him and then she grabs his ass! At which point he ran away. Then she’s hanging on her boyfriend Jim and he says “don’t touch me!” and then they all disappeared. So they missed the show. Everything is crazy in Kentucky/Ohio. That’s why I like it so much better than New York – you never know what will happen. In New York people cross their arms. Darcy and I agreed that this tour is about “breaking boundaries … and tables … and metal chairs … and Dyke Supreme’s thumb.”

All of Kentucky is my boyfriend. Hanging out in the parking lot with the twenty-year-old shirtless wonders. When I get in the van, they bang on it like gorillas, calling my name. We were afraid they were gonna knock the van over! I love them too. They think it’s rad that I’m 29. If only they could see me between cities, driving, with my glasses and my sensible shoes – then they’d really be turned on. Back when I was twenty, it was all the forty year olds coming on to me.

Turns out the chicken died because Scott the Kentucky promoter left it in the cooler for eleven hours. He’d planned on releasing it to run crazy, but suffocated it. And then he actually told this to people. That chicken was doomed anyway – did he really think it would survive being underfoot 150 drunk Kentuckians?

Two separate people in Louisville told Ohio last night that this was the first time they’d gotten naked in front of people since jail. (!)

Darcy is full-on hate for Coz now. She’s like Princess Leia in that she likes to yell at men and has funny ears. During “I Can’t Stay With You Baby” she just gave up singing her parts and physically assaulted Coz with a hard plastic pitchfork. Fiercely. But later that night when Darcy was out of the van, Coz told us that he “hoped she didn’t notice the bulge rising under his costume” during the attack. Ohio and I were horrified and hysterical. I leapt out of the van and tried to tell Darcy what Coz had said but was laughing so hard I fell over and knocked her down. I tried to tell her there on the cold grass with my arms around her knees, but still I couldn’t get the words out. “I know,” she said, “I saw it.” I almost died. Then she yelled, at 3 a.m. in a suburban neighborhood, bursting with righteousness: “No more pitchfork for you, Coz!”

A paintbrush was attached to one of the poky tips of a crane, and it would dip into buckets of paint and slowly lift up its metal arm and paint on a big canvas hung down the entire side of a building. It was sad and beautiful – this giant, lumbering machine trying to move so delicately. And in Lexington, Kentucky!

Well, Kentucky certainly is interesting. It’s a bunch of crazed, unpredictable people. Scott was so weird – sweating bullets, avoiding all eye contact, killing the chicken, cheating two sick old ladies out of their money, refusing to let in for free this guy who’d played for free for him two nights … and then we found out he’d recently been let out of jail for hit-and-running a child. Anyway, we said we wouldn’t play the final show without being paid first for the previous three. He said no, so we packed up our things and told everyone to get a refund and we’d play a party for free down the street. Unfortunately, the cops had shut that party down. So we were all hanging out in an alleyway – twenty or thirty of us. Scott’s friend told us that Scott’s plan was to have us arrested for public nudity and/or violence at the last show and keep all the money. Everyone gathered together gas money for us. They are so nice. I can’t even believe it. The sum total was $22, and you can bet that they gave all they had. Kentucky is ultra-cool. I don’t know where I am, I mean who I am right now, but I feel pretty sure that the whole world is pretty good – all of it in different ways – and wherever it is I am is good enough.

Postscript by Dame Darcy: “Lisa Suckdog is like a divining rod and a lightning rod. She divines some kind of crazy spirit that runs straight through her and deflects off her in every direction, but not touching her. It affects everything around her and she doesn’t even notice. Everyone but her had to make at least one trip to the emergency room during the tour, and a week after it was over, Ohio and I were still sick in bed, Coz was somewhere in West Virginia in a broken-down van, and when I called Lisa she wasn’t sick or tired at all – she’d just flown back from LA where she’d spoken at some film conference and kissed an international businessman.”