“I CAN’T SEE! I’M BLIND! HELP ME! OH GOD…”
Joe reached Don first, followed by Johnny. I was only about 10 feet behind them. Jack was still laying on his back in the snow, dazed and staring up into the void.
I heard some stuff being tossed around, and assumed that Joe and John were digging Rose and Don out from beneath some rubble. I had just stepped back into The Upside Down Bus through the sunroofdoor, so I heard the following discussion clearly. It’s burned into my brain forever. As I mentioned, Joe’s voice was very similar to that of Tom Waits. I think it adds to the ambience if you keep that in mind while reading this next part.
“JOE! IS THAT YOU? HELP ME. I’M BLIND.”
“Hold on brother, I’m almost there.”
“I CAN’T SEE!”
A bit more rummaging noise, and then …
“I CAN SEE! I CAN SEE! JOE! I CAN SEE YOU!”
“Well Don, that’s probably because your head isn’t stuck inside that suitcase anymore”, he cackled. John was giggling, I think more out of relief than genuine amusement. Rose was just laying there. Having her boyfriend being blinded probably wasn’t the worse thing that had ever happened to her. My assumption is that she was figuring out how to work this to her advantage at the welfare office.
It turned out that when The Bus rolled, a suitcase had broken open and Don’s head had ended up in it, then a bunch of other carry-on bags had piled on top it it. All he knew was that things went crazy for a minute and he now had a sore neck and couldn’t see. It was a bit like Mr. Bean’s Christmas but with a good deal more heroin induced confusion.
I’M BLIND!
By this time, The Upside Down Bus had acquired quite a nice little audience of freaked out truckers. There were 4 or 5 semi’s stopped in the middle of the road. The truckers were all out of their vehicle and standing on the road in a little semi-circle, just looking at us. We started trudging through the hip-deep snow towards them. We reached the shoulder and started to climb, and they all reached out to give us a hand.
Quick head count to make sure everybody was accounted for, then each of the truckers took a couple of us and got us in out of the weather. Those guys were heroes. We all literally owe them our lives. Although we’d been lucky enough to survive the initial accident, it wouldn’t have taken more than 30 minutes before hypothermia and frostbite would have been serious concerns.
Johnny Guitar and I ended up in the lead truck. The first words that trucker said to us were “I saw you flip. We were pretty sure you guys were all dead.” Then he put it in gear and we were once again on our way to Ft. Mac. A while later, he pulled into the parking lot of the Peter Pond Hotel, where we were booked to play for the next week. The manager was expecting us, but he was expecting more Bus and not as many truckers. When we told him what had happened, he opened up the hot tub area and promo’d us a couple of bottles of Jack Daniels. We probably should have gone to the hospital just to be cautious, but I guess nobody really thought about it. Incredibly, we all felt OK.
It wasn’t until we were in the tub that the reality of the situation hit home. Rose started to cry. I couldn’t stop shaking. We all had some sort of reaction. I remember looking at all the guys, and everybody had a “Holy shit, we’re lucky to be alive” look on their face. Nobody said anything, because what is understood need not be discussed. It was surreal. We had been inside a giant bus that went off of a highway, rolled, and landed on it’s roof, and yet we were not dead. We were not dead.
The next morning I called my parents. You should always call your parents when you reach your destination. My recollection is that I mentioned something in passing about having had a little incident with The Bus, but it was nothing to worry about. There wasn’t any point in alarming them. When I got off the phone, I started shaking again and had a little bit of a cry. I felt like I did when I was 10 years old and had to spend a week at camp. I didn’t like it, I wanted my mum and dad, I wanted my dog, I wanted to feel safe for a while. I wanted to go home.
“Hi dad, The Bus got a flat tire.”
Joe snapped me out of it by hammering on my door and intensely Tom Waitsing at me “The Upside Down Bus just got towed in! It’s around back!”
Huh?
I hadn’t really thought about The Upside Down Bus until now. I guess I figured we’d just leave it there until spring or something. I couldn’t imagine how it could be put back on it’s wheels and towed into town already. Turns out it’s pretty simple and not that uncommon to un-roll heavy vehicles in Ft. McMurray . It’s an industrial town, and big shit flips over all the time.
The damage to the Upside Down Bus looked surprisingly minimal, all things considered. The sunroofdoor was obviously gone. Other than that, the battery had broken free of its tie-downs and shattered the oil reservoir, and one of the passenger side windows was cracked. It appeared as though the deep snow had done a good job of cushioning us.
The inside was a different story. In the passenger area, there was stuff everywhere. Every suitcase had explosively unpacked itself. The contents of Rose TSW’s suitcase were easy to identify, but the rest of it was a jumble of denim and leather. And snow. Lots and lots and lots and lots of snow. We weren’t feeling very optimistic about our gear, but what we found in the cargo area of The Upside Down Bus was remarkable; it looked just like it had when we packed it in Valleyview.
“Holy shit…” Joe whispered. He grabbed the first thing he saw, which was a road case containing my main bass, and handed it to me. I opened it. It was fine. I took it out and ran a couple of scales. It was still more-or-less in tune.
What we expected
(click to embiggen)
What we saw.
I still own and play this Custom 1974 Fender Precision Bass, AKA the Danger Bass
(click to embiggen)
We started unloading everything and rolling through the back doors into the club. Being in a band means never knowing what the front of the venue looks like, whether it’s The Enormo Dome or the Valleyview Spa and Resort. It was Monday, and we had a contract that said we were supposed to play that night and for the rest of the week. Since nobody was dead, there was no reason to not play.
Normally, each person would be responsible for their own gear (which sucks if you’re a drummer), but we were all feeling the brotherly love after the crash, so load in and set up went quickly and was actually kind of fun. We sound checked with a bluesy 12 bar turnaround that Joe improvised some “The Time I Almost Died” lyrics over. Then we went and sat in the hot tub and got belted.
For the rest of the week, we played at night and did improvised bus repairs during the day. Step one on Tuesday morning was to get a new battery. The old one had a huge crack in the casing and one of the posts had sheared off. We sent Jack to Canadian Tire to get a new one.
He returned about 4 hours later, hammered. He’d seen a strip club on the way on the way and decided to stop in to see if any of our friends were in town. Of course, some were. At the time, musicians and strippers travelled the same circuits and stayed at the same hotels, so we all knew each other. Jack found out that Little Paige was there. They had a history that was entirely based on sex, so he hadn’t been in the club for more than 10 minutes before he was getting a blowjob in the women’s washroom.
He hung around for too long because the dancers kept buying him shots. He was a good looking guy, so this sort of thing happened to him all the time. And that’s why he didn’t get a battery. We couldn’t really blame him but because he was drunk, we did. Joe slapped him across the face and then asked if he could smell Jack’s finger. Then the two of them set off for Canadian Tire again to get the battery.
Three hours later – an hour before we were going to play our first set – Joe and Jack returned. Hammered. In Jack’s case, hammerder. With no battery. However, they brought Little Paige and a handful of dancers who could reasonably be described as the hottest women on earth in northern Alberta. The forgotten battery was forgiven, and nobody got slapped. At this point, Donny was pretty miserable because since Rose was there, he was missing out. The entirely predictable argument between the band guy and his girlfriend right before we went on resulted in Don turning every song into a Motörhead song, and Rose blowing one of the truckers who had rescued us so she could get a ride back to Vancouver. The rest of us dogpiled Donny at the end of the first set, yelling “THAT’S WHY NO WIVES OR GIRLFRIEND ON THE BUS!”
The next morning, Wednesday, Johnny and I went to Canadian Tire and got the battery. Round trip including shopping time was 35 minutes. While we were gone, Joe had dumpster-dived looking for something that would work as a brake fluid reservoir. He found an empty jam jar, so I ran back to Canadian Tire and got a tube of caulk. Round trip including shopping, 20 minutes. The strip club wasn’t open yet.
Joe used Johnny’s diamond ring as a glass cutter, and punched an appropriate sized hole in the bottom of the jar, then we caulked it onto the master cylinder. A couple of metres of bailing wire, a couple more metres of duct tape, a money-shot amount of caulk, and it was sturdier than the factory reservoir. We bled the brakes, topped up the jam jar, screwed on the lid, and were ready for the next task; the roofdoor.
After we’d finished for the night, we went looking for some plywood. We found some real nice sheets in the lumber yard next to the hotel. Joe said “do those look free to you guys? They look free to me”. The vote was unanimous and we took our brand new, free, quarter inch plywood and stored it under The Upside Down Bus for the next morning. Joe figured the various fluid leaks in the engine and transmission would age the wood overnight so nobody would be suspicious.
Thursday we got up bright and early at 1 PM. Donny had made friends with the hotel handyman and arranged for us to borrow his tools. We measured the roofdoor hole and trimmed the plywood in a more-or-less straight line. It was secured to the roof with at least 100 screws, then sealed with caulk. The exposed pointy ends of the screws inside The Upside Down Bus would have been gnarly if we rolled again, or even went over a big bump too fast. It would have been like getting smacked with André the Giant’s golf shoe.
Friday we put plywood over the broken windows. Now the inside of The Upside Down Bus resembled an iron maiden, but that was The Upside Down Bus roadworthy-ish.
Saturday was dedicated to hangovers, and in Jack’s case, Little Paige and an eight ball. After we’d played the last set of the week, teardown and load out started immediately, as usual. We were done by 4:30 AM and hit the crab-infested hay for a few hours of sleep.
