Wheatland, WY – “Stranded at the Armory” (A Story Told in Polaroids)- April 23, 2001

The Evan and Jaron gigs were ill-advised and now, I’m sick as a dog.  But it was a relief to have a legitimate excuse to cut the tour short—2,896 miles short to be exact.  Soucy and I were supposed to play 6 more gigs with the twins but thanks to my illness and a freak blizzard, we’re back in Boulder.  Being sick in Boulder is much more simpatico than being sick in the middle of Wheatland Wyoming, off exit eighty-something with a road closed both in front and behind us.

But let me back up:

Soucy and I drove to Seattle on a blustery, crisp Easter Sunday to start our 10-gig opening act tour with Evan & Jaron—“Crazy for this Girl,” (their radio hit from Dawson’s Creek). Though we’d have to do our own driving and though it only paid $100 a show, I figured it’d be good exposure and an opportunity to get in front of a different audience.  Unfortunately, Evan & Jaron’s fans are thousands of screaming 12-year-old girls. Each night a different batch of glittery eyed girls came with the sole objective of bounceing up and down and fawning over their favorite boy band and each night, I was holding them up.  To save money, we’d lined up a constellation of couches spanning states through which Evan and Jaron’s tour would take us. When, after the show in Seattle, I found myself at a friend of a friend’s place sleeping between a ridgeback, a retriever, and a pit bull with a tickle in the back of my throat, I thought things couldn’t get much worse … but they could.

Portland was a better show and in Salt Lake City we even managed to sell a single CD! (to a mother of one of the 12-year-olds).  In Utah, I told Evan I might have to bail after Denver due to my increasingly severe hacking cough and fever.  Besides being sick, driving 3,000 miles on deserted highways late at night to keep up with the twin’s cushy tour bus wasn’t safe for Soucy and me.

In the morning after the SLC show,  we grabbed a cheese scone and headed East on I-80.  We were making good time until we reached Sinclair.  There, a cop dressed in neon green was parked in front of a “ROAD CLOSED” sign. He waved us to stop. “Blizzard up ahead,” He explained.

“What are our options?” I asked with my stomach clenched, “We need to get to Denver by 5 o’clock.” The neon officer looked to the sky in consideration.

“You can go back to Rawlins, take 287 North to Casper which’ll link ya’up with I-25. It’s only a couple ‘u hours out of the way.”

“How long if we wait here for the road to open?” I asked hopefully. 

“Couple a days,” he said without a grin. We headed toward Rawlins.

I-287 was like an ice rink.  The wind blew sideways and tall trucks with wide loads threatened to tip onto us.  Soucy and I drove in silence, preserving every ounce of concentration for the road ahead.  Making sound check in Denver was definitely not worth our lives.  By the time Soucy took the wheel in Casper, the conditions had worsened and as we approached Wheatland, you could barely see 10 feet in front of you. But it’s a good thing we had 10 feet of visibility or Soucy may not have stopped at the barricade that denied us access into Colorado for now a second time. The highway was closed both to the South and to the North of us. All that was left for us was to find accommodations for the night and call the twins to explain why we were unable to make the gig.

In Wheatland, there’s a Best Western, a Motel 6, a Wheatland Inn, a Parker Lodge and something called, Vimbo’s Motel and Restaurant but not one vacancy between the five of them. The woman behind the counter at Vimbo’s (needless to say, our last resort) said she’d heard the Armory was opening at 7:00 “They’re flying in the National Guard.  They’ll be handing out cots and blankets then — women and children first.” She said strangling the last of her orange soda from a striped straw. As we walked back to the car at 5:30, Soucy tried to lift my flagging spirits.  “Let’s go bowling,” he said, “We passed a place back there on the left.”

The bowling alley was packed.  Local teens paraded thin mustaches passed tables of prepubescent girls who wore tight ponytails and smoked unfiltered cigarettes through candy-glossed lips. We walked across a meadow of dirty green shag carpet to the front counter and ordered some onion rings, french fries, and a pitcher of Budweiser. I’d only bowled once before but Soucy said “I’m sorry Sal, I’m not gonna take it easy on ya.  I was on my high school bowling team so I’m pretty good,” he bragged.  When he won by only one point – 126 to 127, He said I must be a natural.

While we sat in a booth drinking our flat, watery Bud the blizzard raged outside. That’s when Mike Urosky entered our lives.

I’d seen him earlier, at Vimbo’s, also stranded, also looking for shelter, also denied. “That Armory,” he said breathlessly as he passed and recognized us, “It’s PACKED. I guess they opened their doors at 3:00 this afternoon and you’d better get over there if you want to get a spot. They’re out’a cots. I got one’a the last ones. But you’ll at least get some space on the floor.” Panic-struck Soucy and I abandoned our onion rings. “I’ll lead you guys over if you want to follow me,” Mike generously offered.

The armory, indeed, was packed. Children, in booty-clad pajamas, chased each other around parent’s legs. People, who normally would not mix—a heavily pierced and combat boot-wearing giant, an Amish elderly couple, a stranded monk, a glamorous lady with an alagator bag—all sat uncomfortably in folding chairs, guarding their coveted cots.   I held my breath as I fumbled with other desperate hands, through a box of bedding,  looking for the least threadbare of the olive green cardboard blankets on offer.

There were no cots left as Mike had warned — just naked splotches of cold cement floor. Soucy put our blankets on the ground near Mike’s cot, which was covered with an teal eiderdown he’d retreived from his overstuffed car. He was in the process of moving from Lake Tahoe to New York to be a chef at a four-star restaurant. Turned out he was a drummer too, had his whole kit packed into the back of his car. He was traveling solo and had no dining company so we offered up ours.

Another girl, Candy, who was on duty at the barracks (which coincidentally turned out to be home to none other than the National Guard’s 67th Army Band) got off work to come to dinner with us. She was 24, a clarinet player and the boys (Soucy and Mike) sang all they could remember of the lyrics to The Car’s hit “Candy-O,” as we drove to Cassie’s Restaurant and Bar where elk, deer, and caribou heads watched us from spruce covered walls and where we all became lifelong friends — for the night.

Candy was also really cute and Soucy made yummy sounds at her from across the table over his teriyaki chicken until she told us about the horrible divorce she was in the middle of with a man who’d been cheating on her since they’d married at age 19.

Severe situations called for severe measures so we all piled in my Rav4 and drove down to the local drive-through liquor store/bar/tavern/grill place and continued to anesthetize ourselves. We shot pool. We played every Zeppelin tune on the jukebox and then all the Hendrix ones until we closed the joint at Midnight.

When we returned to the muddy, wind-washed parking lot of the National Guard’s Armory, Mike, remembered he was carrying approximately $6,000 worth of rare red wines in the trunk of his car to the restaurant he was relocating for. “They shouldn’t miss this,” he said, grabbing a $60 dollar bottle from a case and de-corking it.  With our backs to the freezing wind and our eyes tearing and turned toward the northern sky, we took turns swigging from the brown bottle.

“It has a really nice rich oaky character with subtle hints of cherries and currants,” joked Soucy, smacking his lips together after a swig, making light of our current situation. The idea of returning to the bald cement patch of floor, the cardboard blanket, and the 200 other sleeping bodies was unthinkable and we did everything we could to erase our inevitable destiny from our minds.

The tickle I’d felt in the back of my throat was turning into something truly compromising and Doc Soucy insisted we end our Evan and Jaron adventure so I could get home and get looked at.  I knew he was right.  We knew eventually, we’d have to go inside and try to fall asleep.  But we wanted to be good and tired and drunk before attempting it. 

Tidal waves of snores hit us when we entered the armory. The sound echoed off the gymnasium walls — It felt sad and contagious. Blind and drunk, we navigated through a maze of sleeping bodies, inadvertently stepping on the edges of people’s blankets and stumbling over their stray luggage.   Soucy curled up in a bass drum, Mike, who’d gallantly given me his cot, found a thin, inflatable yellow raft and slept on that.

Our dreams couldn’t have been any more surreal than our reality. We tossed and turned all night, and finally, when dawn broke, we woke to Reveille and combat boots and fatigues swished by our partially cracked eyelids. What a night. We were exhausted but WE’D MADE IT!!!!

The roads were back open this morning and the snow had stopped.  We thanked Mike and Candy for their company and called Evan & Jaron to break up with them.  I’m glad to be home.  Sick, but home.