Memphis, TN to York, PA – “Mail-Order Meat” – October 6, 2000

Doc Soucy and I flew from Memphis to Pennsylvania for a one off on Saturday, arriving in Harrisburg a little past 9 pm. A six-hour day of travel was hardly easy considering how scared both of us are of flying.

I flipped nervously through the Sky Mall catalog thinking I might get something for one of the Chrises, whose birthdays both fall during this tour. (Soucy’s is Oct. 24th and Delucchi’s, the 28th). Hummm, Hammacher Schlemer? Sharper Image? …. What up with the mail-order meat? I thought. “Hey Soucy,” I said, grabbing and clutching at his shirtsleeve from across the aisle, “I was thinking of ordering you a nice steak from Sky Mall for your birthday.”

“Dude, don’t you dare.” He replied as I bat my eyes. An attractive stewardess walking down the isle stopped to look at the two of us, and said “Aww, you guys are cute,” before passing.
“No, we’re not. NO WE ARE NOT CUTE!” Soucy called after her.

We had a 3-hour layover in North Carolina, which we spent playing and regressing in a toy store. I bought a fluorescent yellow “nose flute” for a buck and walked around the airport annoying fellow passengers trying to learn how to use it. Soucy followed me, dragging his disaster of a bag around the treadmill walkways. Little known fact, Soucy loves airport conveyor belts and would spend all day going back and forth on them, given the opportunity.

Let me take a moment to describe the abomination that is Chris Soucy’s travel luggage. It’s a bag on wheels, like the rest ours, only, it’s somehow taken 100 times the abuse. One wheel has come off and so it limps and clumps through hotel lobbies like a stray puppy tearing up carpet as he tugs it pathetically behind him. The leather handle is broken and flacidly flaps to one side. Three tours ago, he attempted to fix it with some duct tape and now it’s sticky to the touch. the metal pull-up frame is crooked too and clicks when he walks like a prosthetic knee. He refuses to retire his bag because “the new ones are so expensive,” and so, continues to drag the poor thing around behind him like some sort of dirty binky.

At the Hotel in PA we threw our stuff in our rooms and went for a nightcap in “Chats,” the hotel bar. There, a wedding reception was winding down. Muffled disco music wah wah-ed it’s way through warped mirrored walls. Glittery dresses walked their wearers around with mannequin-like stiffness. Men in tuxedos tripped through balloon-filled halls with plastic glasses of Champagne, small talking to one another: “Where are your kids in college Stan?” and “My wife always cries at these things, Bill.”

I leaned over my gin and tonic and sighed. I’ve been feeling under a considerable amount of stress recently from the discord in the band and Soucy let me vent to him before taking me to the hotel arcade. There, the least enthusiastic wedding guests and most derelict kids had assembled and we fit right in. Doc Soucy knew just what would make me feel better. First he fed one buck into a jukebox and cued up a stack of Led Zepplin tunes, then slipped another buck into an air hockey game. I went to town on that floating blue disk and lost every game. But by the end of the night, I’d won my sanity.

Soucy truly is a doctor.