Olivia Pepper gave me a haircut on a bench in a small park in Austin, Texas. The park was filled with strange birdfeeders that looked like Scandanavian condominiums. A random man walked by and saw what was apparently the first outdoor haircut he had ever seen and shouted, jokingly, “Hey! I’m next!” Olivia yelled out, “OKAY!” and said under her breath to me, “Someone always says that…”

I had seen Olivia the night before at a small house show I was playing. I was standing in the kitchen opening a bottle of Shiner Bock while the opening act played in the living room, and a young woman sitting in the small audience very deliberately winked at me. As usual, I figured that she was winking at someone else, but turned around to see that no one was standing behind me. It wasn’t the kind of wink that someone gives you to tell you that they think you’re handsome (does anyone give those kinds of winks? I’ve never gotten one). Rather, it was the kind of wink that was saying, “You should recognize me, but I’m sure you don’t because you don’t ever recognize anyone.” When I talked to her after my set I realized that I had met her twice before in different cities, and she told me that she couldn’t stick around longer that night, but that I should meet her the next day at noon for coffee.

We met for coffee and in the course of our conversations I told her that I was looking for a haircut in Austin. (I had actually been looking for a haircut for four weeks.) She said that she could cut my hair. I asked her if she was actually any good. She pointed to a large tattoo on her right forearm of a pair of scissors. That was proof enough for me.

She also mention that she did Tarot readings, so after the haircut I asked her to do one for me. I wasn’t skeptical of the reading at all, but there was a moment where I wondered how good she would be at it.

She spread her cloth on the table and laid out the cards in front of me and then looked intently at them while she reached into her bag for something. For a moment I thought, “Please don’t let her be reaching for a book with Tarot interpretations– that would be so disappointing…” Instead, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, squinted at the cards and told me a startling amount of things about myself that I knew but had never before heard together so coherently. I will never again doubt Olivia Pepper.

I told my friend back home about the reading and my friend asked me what I thought of Tarot and astrology and such things. I wrote her the following:

“Look at it from a physical standpoint. There are planets and stars that are composed of matter and they are spinning around the universe,as we are. Nobody denies this. All these objects either emit or reflect light, and all of them have a gravitational pull of some sort. The sun is the most obvious example of one of these bodies that effects our world with the light it gives and the pull it exerts on us. In fact, if not for the sun, we would have nothing. Stars are just suns that are far away. Just because something is far away doesn’t mean it doesn’t effect us. Light never stops traveling through the vacuum of space. Even if a star is long dead, the light from it is still racing towards us. And scientists have learned that light is not just a wave or a particle, but in fact BOTH. So that the light from a long dead star that has traveled a million light years to get to Earth and is shining in the sky at night as you step onto the roof of your apartment for a cigarette, that light hits your eye and enters your body with a very real amount of matter. Now, we can agree that things that enter your body affect your well-being in some way, yes? Perhaps the light from the far-away star is not nearly as bright or noticeable as the neon sign across the street, but consider that this star’s light has steadfastly marched through millions of light years of cold dark space to penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere and enter your eye, and doesn’t that imbue it with a little bit more– as political pundits would say– gravitas? I would give that particular particle of light a lot of credence. I think that particle of light has a lot to tell me. I want to know what that particle of light has to say. And there are millions of those stars, all arranged in interesting constellations in the sky, all streaming towards your eyeball just as they are streaming in the opposite direction towards alien eyes, and they all have some sort of meaning, if anything in this universe has any meaning at all, which I believe it does. Not to mention all the planets in our solar system, which are much closer to us than the stars (not that distance means anything) and which exert gravity and reflect light in very real ways and are circling around us in interesting ways and affecting our lives. Not to mention the moon, which is RIGHT THERE, very close and very bright and pulling very strongly on the oceans, which are salt water, and your body, which is
mostly salt water. So how could all this not exert some sort of order and effect on our lives? I want to know more about it. I find it comforting.”

Me and William drove the next day to a small ghost town in West Texas called Terlingua. We were now a two-piece band plus our friend Dustin from Run On Sentence, who would join us with some percussion and back-up singing. After New Orleans Scott and Nathan had flown back to Portland to work a little and make some money and wouldn’t rejoin us until Phoenix, and we were to face the harshness of Texas with a depleted army.

We played at the Starlight Theatre, a little adobe structure that would probably be the ideal place to see Willie Nelson perform. We played all night for the dinner crowd and the bartender gave us as many drinks as we wanted. We had nowhere in town to stay, so we slept in the backyard garden, under the stars. William was afraid of tarantulas, but I assured him that if he got bit I would suck out the poison, thinking to myself, “do tarantulas even have poison?”

The next night was El Paso. I once wrote a song called, “El Paso Is One Kind of Purgatory”. We were supposed to play in a hookah bar that was celebrating its two-year anniversary. However, instead of reaching their two-year anniversary, the bar closed the week before and our show was moved to a different hookah bar. We had dinner in a Mexican restaurant before the show. It was deep in the endless side streets of El Paso and while we ate a very old Hispanic man was playing on a thrift-store organ in the corner with a basket for tips. I am now indebted to every musician performing for tips, so I dropped a couple dollars off for him.

Our show in El Paso was the first one of the whole tour that I didn’t want to perform. We were following belly dancers who were dancing to electronic music. The stage was something you’d expect to find in Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace, where he would make someone dance for his amusement. What would we add to the situation? Dustin wanted to go through with the show, so we did it, and I swore to never again stop in El Paso. Not even for gas.

We reached New Mexico the next day and decided that we sorely needed to make an offering to the Traveler King. This would be difficult since it was just me and William and neither of us had done an offering before. We always just watched Nathan read his beautiful poems and then rip them up. We didn’t even have an old one we could reuse. We’d have to come up with something new. We stopped in Truth or Consequences and walked down the main street until we found a dried up old rowboat sitting in a little garden. “Let’s do it there,” I said. I picked a few desert flowers and me and William stepped into the rowboat.

“Dear Traveler King…” I started hesitatingly, clearing my throat,

“aka Papa Hobo…”

I got no more than a few words further before an old man walked by and said, “Hey, there are nails in that rowboat. Be careful.”

“Okay,” I said, looking down and seeing no nails.

He stopped walking and said, “No really, it’s dangerous in there.”

I honestly thought he was over-reacting. “Alright,” I said, “We’re just making a little offering to the Traveler King.”

“You know what? Just get out of that rowboat.”

“No it’s okay. We’re alright.” I laughed nervously.

“Look, Silly,” he said, “Get out of the rowboat. Now.”

He actually called me Silly. I remember that clearly. We slowly stepped out of the rowboat, ending the most pathetic and ineffective offering to the Traveler King ever. But as the old man walked away I said, “You know, of course, who that was. THAT was the Traveler King.”

William nodded.

We made our way through Albuquerque and up to Santa Fe, where we had a couple days off to resurrect our spirits. Out at dinner one night, in another fine restaurant with incredible food, celebrating Dustin’s birthday, I excused myself for a minute and went to find the bathroom. The restaurant was another of those exquisite adobe structures, with winding halls and low doorways. I finally found the bathroom and while washing my hands I looked at a colorful little drawing hanging to the right of the sink. It was sort of a parody of a 50’s Western-style pulp novel cover. It showed a cowboy sitting around a campfire at night, playing a guitar with a surprised expression on his face, while lying next to him in a lawn chair, improbably, was a beautiful woman in a bikini. The caption above the scene was spelled out in a lasso-style font: “HE STRUMMED HIS WAY INTO TROUBLE.”

I smiled and thought, “Hold on there, little guy. Things’ll get better.”

Links:
Nick JainaSpace
A real awesome Willie Nelson concert (JUST BECAUSE)

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