| Dayton, Ohio / November 2003 |
| Kyle, Ed and I head out for Dayton. It's a Saturday night gig only an hour and a half away from home at the Canal Street Tavern. Canal Street is probably the best attended and definitely the most congenial of Ed's Ohio venues. Owner Mick Montgomery is a prize and a prime example of that thinning breed of rock club owners - a good guy who knows and cares about music and takes good care of the acts he books. The show goes great except Ed's being heckled by one really drunk middle aged woman who I finally have to tell to shut up. She eventually drinks herself into a coma under the watchful, approving gaze of her husband and grown son. (I think they also wanted her to shut the fuck up.) Hubby goes to get the car and I wind up having to help her kid walk/carry her out of the bar. In the process, all three of us fall down the steps. It's Saturday night in Ohio. We leave Canal Street way too late because it's just so damn easy to hang out with Mick and his staff and lose all track of time. It's between 3 and 4 o'clock in the morning when we hit a BP station on the outskirts of Dayton for snacks. (Some combination of Hostess cupcakes, milk, microwave food, potato chips and Mountain Dew are essential for late night drives when 24-hour diners are unavailable.) The only other occupants of the station in these pre-dawn Sunday morning hours are four drunk teenagers cruising for microwave burritos. And I mean young teenagers, 16 or 17 tops, no way they were legal to buy alcohol. We've gassed up the car and Kyle and I are in it waiting for Ed, whom we last saw in line at the microwave. Kyle says to me from the back seat, "Hey, I think Ed fell down." I look up from opening my orange cupcakes to see Ed straightening up and rushing over from the other side of the gas pumps. "Did you fall down?" I ask as I pull away from the station island. "No, I didn't fall down," Ed replies, "I got in the wrong goddamn car." "What?" Kyle and I chorus as I pause at the station entrance to check traffic. "I came out of the station and got into those drunk kids' car by mistake." Ed explains. Kyle and I are now laughing so hard I have to pull back into the station because I can't drive. "I'm glad you both think this is so amusing. I could have gotten shot." Ed says testily. "But you didn't get shot," Kyle comforts, "If you had gotten shot we wouldn't be laughing nearly so hard." "How did you get in the wrong car?" I ask, tears in my eyes from laughing, "There were only two cars in the whole place." It turns out Ed was concentrating on his microwave sandwich, saw a car with a driver and somebody in the back seat he claims looked like Kyle and plonked himself down in the passenger seat. He never looked up from unwrapping his sandwich for what must have been at least 30 seconds, until the kid driving said simply, "Dude." Ed looked up into a stranger's drunken 16-year-old eyes and realized he was in the wrong vehicle. He bailed out fast, tripped getting out, pulled himself up and that's when Kyle thought he fell down. I'd have paid a huge sum of money to have a video camera on that kid's face as a dressed-head-to-toe-in-black-Hamell-On-Trial invited himself into his car and settled in for a late night snack. I bet Ed scared the fuck out of those poor drunk kids. No wonder all the driver could manage was a monosyllabic "Dude." "I could have been killed, you know." Ed says, as Kyle and I try to stop laughing, regain our composure and furrow our brows pensively to feign concern. It's my sincerest hope to this day that Ed gets hugely famous and those boys recognize him and tell all their friends, "One time at a gas station at 3 in the morning that guy got in our car by mistake." Their friends will never believe them. Postscript - Two months later in Birmingham, Alabama, Ed and I are leaving a movie theater and Ed again starts to get into a strange car, which this time, luckily, is unoccupied. "That's not our car." I say nervously, because we are not in a nice neighborhood. "Yes, it is." Ed replies and sits down in the passenger seat. "No, it's not," I insist, standing well clear of the vehicle and speaking quietly through the open driver's side window, "our car was locked. And where did all those beer bottles come from if neither of us drink?" I step away, waiting for shots to ring out and bullets to start hitting us and/or the car. Ed surveys the liquor-strewn interior of the car and exits calmly but quickly. I worry about Ed when he tours by himself, I really do. All Material © 2004 by Ric Cacchione, all rights reserved. |