Trouble Bored Page 3

  We brought our coffee upstairs, where I went over the details of our adventure.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, we heard two sets of footsteps coming up the stairs. It turned out to be John “Wolf” Thompson and Steve Murphy, whom I hadn’t really seen since I had quit our band Chemical Sewer. They were both wearing two studded belts, black stretch jeans, and band shirts with the necks and sleeves cut off. Wolf was so skinny he would cut the seam of his shirts and sew them back together supertight. Steve had a pair of creeper shoes with two-inch soles. All their fashion jingle-jangled as they walked into the room and sat at the card table.

  “What up, bro?” Wolf started.

  “Hey,” I replied, confused.

  We all shook hands, like a corporate boardroom meeting.

  Wolf turned toward me. “We stopped at your house. Your mom said you were over here.”

  “I usually am,” I said.

  “You guys want to smoke a bowl?” Wolf asked.

  “Sure,” Chris and I both replied.

  Wolf and I had met in second grade, the same year I met Chris, Freddy, and Nico. We were born five days apart. We went to our first punk rock show together in 1999 or 2000 and saw bands from our high school play with some out-of-town bands in the basement of the Bukendal Temple in Scotia. To us, it might as well have been C.B.-fucking-G.B.’s.

  There were no fights. Everyone just smoked cigarettes and hung out—guys and girls, people of all colors. The only person of age was Doug Zimmerman, who was eighteen at the time and was running the shows.

  It was loud. It was dirty. It was real. We watched every band’s entire set. Everyone did. We witnessed skanking and circle pits for the first time. It was tribalism. It took Wolf and I until the very last song from the very last band to muster up the courage to jump in the pit.

  That night, we decided to start a band. The only problem was we didn’t play any instruments. Our friend Kyle Dunn had a guitar and was taking lessons, so we decided he should probably be in our band too. I borrowed a bass and small amp from my friend’s dad, who had an MA in music but was slaving away at a government desk job. Wolf’s parents bought him a small PA so he became the singer. We never had a drummer, but we practiced all the time.

  Eventually, that burned out and Wolf filled in with Steve’s band, “The O'Briens,” on guitar. Steve’s parents were supportive. He'd already been playing drums and guitar for years and taking lessons long before I met him. He was only a couple months younger than Wolf and I, but it was enough to place him a grade below us. For that reason, I didn’t really know Steve much besides passing by at school and shows.

  Sometime in 2001, Wolf called me up at my mom’s house. He told me The O’Briens were scheduled to practice that day but the bassist canceled, which was apparently becoming a trend. Wolf invited me over to Steve’s place. The three of us got right down to business and wrote three songs before Bungie, their drummer, even showed up. By the end of the session, we had the three songs learned and practiced, then decided to make a new band out of it. We called ourselves “Chemical Sewer.”

  We were playing fast, aggressive punk rock reminiscent of The Casualties, The Virus, or The Unseen at the time. I loved every second of it. It was easy to get shows from Doug Zimmerman, and I would book us other venues and basements using online message boards. The responses from the crowds were great. We recorded an entire full-length album on a hundred-degree day in Chris’s friend’s upstairs flat in Schenectady, and it actually sounded decent. Chris helped me with the artwork. I bought kits to print out labels and burned all of the CD’s. Kids at shows started to know the words to the songs.

  It was my dream come true, but it was all over in a year and a half. The O’Briens were still playing out and getting bigger show after bigger show, even while suffering line-up change after line-up change. At one point, Steve’s ex-girlfriend filled in on bass. That was probably the peak of their run. I got jealous and pissed off after one too many Chemical Sewer practices were cancelled so that The O’Briens could practice instead, and I eventually quit. It left me as the odd man out since all my friends who played instruments—Wolf, Steve, and Bungie—were still in The O’Briens.

  I floated for a while and didn’t do much with music besides teach myself guitar. I still hung out with Chris, Freddy, and Nico every day, playing video games, skateboarding, smoking weed. It was really depressing, though—not knowing when I would get back to being in a band again. No shows, no practice sessions. I was lost.

  I did “jam” with people here and there, but I absolutely can’t stand jamming. I don’t jam well. Two or three people sitting in a room, all hammering out random shit on their instruments—it’s a nightmare. Someone has to speak up and say, “Try this guitar part” or “I’ve got something I’m working on; let’s try to finish it.” The only people who understood my writing language were Steve and Wolf, so I felt pretty shit out of luck until they showed up at Chris’s house that morning with the only weed in town. A peace offering, I guess.

  Chris passed a glass bowl to Wolf. Steve took off one of his creepers, which had a coffin-shaped stash box in the sole, and fished a baggie from it. He handed the bag to Wolf, who began breaking up nuggets and packing the bowl. Wolf hit the bowl, then passed it to Steve—who hit it then passed it to Chris—who hit it, then passed it to me. I hit it myself, then passed it back to Wolf.

  “So you want to play bass for The O’Briens, dude?” Wolf asked me bluntly.

  “What?” I replied. “What happened to Steve’s ex?”

  “She packed up and bounced yesterday,” Steve answered. “Said she’s moving to Philly, where there’s a ‘better scene.’”

  Wolf rolled his eyes.

  “We have a show in two weeks. We were going to teach Zander to play bass, but he broke his foot skateboarding last week.”

  “Wow. So I’m not even your first choice.”

  “It’ll be sick, dude. The shows are lined up. We want to go back into the studio soon too,” Steve said.

  I didn’t think about it very long. I wanted to be in a band again, and those were the guys I wanted to be in a band with. I agreed to join The O’Briens.

  I caught up on their songs right away. Practicing with them again felt great. We played a ton of shows that summer but nothing too big. Our basement shows kept getting shut down by owners or cops. The VFWs and local halls either stopped allowing punk shows or closed altogether. Most of the bands we played with were getting old enough to drink legally, so Doug Zimmerman started booking venues with bars more often than not.

  We were all underaged, but that never stopped us from getting shit-faced. We would either bring alcohol or have a bum buy it for us outside the venues. We did so much stupid shit but never once got in trouble for it, and things always escalated because of that. One time, Wolf straight punched the mirror off a car for no reason.

  Our music started to evolve into a more intricate sound. We worked on new songs that each of us sang, and we would often switch vocals throughout a song too. Bungie only drummed, and he was damn good at it.

  When we went into the studio to record a new four song EP it was apparent to our producer that the songs didn’t sound anything like the previous O'Briens recordings he had helped make. He encouraged us to change our name and try to create a buzz as a fresh band, so we tossed around ideas for a new band name.

  Bungie had shouted out the name “Bored Trouble” because we were always bored when we weren’t getting into trouble. I thought “Trouble Bored” sounded better even though it didn’t really make any sense. We had a couple other ideas but kept going back to “Trouble Bored” until it stuck.

  Green Day had just released their “American Idiot” album to massive success, and The Warped Tour seemed bigger than ever. Suddenly, major music channels were showcasing punk rock in a way we had never seen growing up. There’d been a resurgence in the mid 1990s, sure; but this was way bigger, and it trickled down to us smaller fish thanks to the networking
possibilities of the (at the time) giant social media platform MySpace.

  Punk was exploding, but we didn’t fit in amongst the sea of Emo and Pop-Punk bands in our area. We were rockers. Steve and I would go full-on at these shows and come close to passing out or throwing up from exhaustion every time. It became a badge of pride. We would feel disappointed in ourselves if we weren’t completely spent by the end of our set. I would be sore for days after.

  That went on for a couple years. I really felt like part of Trouble Bored. Like we were brothers, all fighting for the same thing. We wanted to make it out of Rotterdam. Our EP was getting radio play; we even did a couple on-air interviews. I was hunting down shows through MySpace as often as possible, hungry to tour. But no one else was willing to take the time off of work.

  I don’t know what all the hesitation was about—none of us had jobs that mattered. But as we crept into our twenties, everyone suddenly felt old, like they had to settle down soon. I didn’t really give a shit. Any job I had seemed temporary. The constant grind of looking for shows, inventing new merch, and looking for label support felt like my true job. Wolf, Steve, and Bungie didn’t feel the same way. Then again, they'd never known the pain of being bandless.

  I understood the clock was ticking. We just needed something to stick...a killer music video or a show with a bigger band that would bring new people to see us. We hadn’t landed any shows with national bands as Trouble Bored. We were doing great in our hometown but it wasn’t going to be enough to stop everyone from eventually walking away, which was my biggest fear.

  Five

  “It’s Ryder. Over.”

  “Christ. I still get itchy thinking about that,” I said to Nico as we reminisced about the night we got robbed. We had both gotten poison ivy on our legs when we had walked off the beaten path in the woods behind the strip mall that night. It lasted for a couple weeks, too, and we both had scars from the rash.

  “Fuck those motherfuckers anyway,” Nico responded. “I’m just glad I got this new hookup so I can keep those assholes out of my picture.”

  Nico eventually got over being robbed and never tried to retaliate over it. He called it a twenty-dollar mistake he never intended to make again. He also never intended to rely on anyone else to find drugs again and had spent the last two years blooming a quarter ounce of pot into a full-time narcotics gig.

  It was Summer 2005. I was nineteen. We were sitting in Nico’s mom’s apartment at the corner of Congress and Cutler Street in the Mont Pleasant area of Schenectady. It was a long first-floor two-bedroom flat. There was a couch and a loveseat set up in the living room with a thirty-two-inch CRT television in the corner, sitting on a wooden TV stand. The TV was always tuned to the auxiliary channel displaying the security camera feed Nico and I hooked up. The apartment was generally Nico’s base of operations.

  Nico’s mom was always either working or at her boyfriend's house. She basically paid rent and bills while Nico lived there alone. The only other person around was an old retired lady who lived upstairs and never complained about the noise or smells. Once in a while, she would knock on the door and ask Nico to help her open a vodka bottle.

  Nico wasn’t a gangster. He was swimming in drug culture, but it paid his phone bill faster than any of the part-time work he could find, and he was addicted to the social aspect of it. Meeting people and being their guy. He was an incredible drug dealer, not just because he wasn’t a piece of shit; he was also extremely tuned in to what made people tick. He was an informal psychologist dissecting why people are and why society is. Drugs played a major role in his research and for good reason. People tend to show their true selves when it comes to drugs. Maybe not to their families, but their drug dealers get the full show. Nico became a therapist to many of these people.

  I went on hundreds of drug deals with him. Ten a day, easily. It’s not hard to bop around on a summer day, dropping weed off to friends. When Nico was delivering for Zeng Chinese, our friends would order food and we would drop off the drugs along with it.

  Once, back when we worked at Tommy’s, a drive-thru burger place on Curry Road, we got off work around one in the morning, ate food in Nico’s car in the parking lot, then decided to go back through the drive-thru and fuck around with our friends who were still working the intercom. A cop drove by, saw Nico cursing at the intercom, and pulled into the lot. The nose of his car was facing ours as we pulled up to the drive-thru window. Nico told our friends inside Tommy’s to pass us drinks and a bag of food with an extra bag inside. He then filled the extra bag with $1200 cash, two ounces of marijuana, and a ten-strip of acid while I pretended to check the food bag and act like our order was messed up. Right in plain sight of the cop, Nico handed the bag stuffed with money and drugs back through the drive-thru window. They actually put it in the safe for us overnight. That cop followed us all the way to Chris’s house, then drove off.

  The laws back then were much more strict than they are now. Especially for weed. I was never in business with Nico, and I didn’t sell. I was just hanging out. And if you were hanging out with Nico, drugs were happening. That was just a part of it. It didn’t make him any more or less my friend. We were always going to some new spot to meet new people where you just never knew what was going to go down. I wasn’t fucking with any of the higher profile drugs; so when Nico started to grow his operation, I shot down all offers to help him expand.

  * * *

  “Come on, Gray. Come with me next weekend. I’ll buy your ticket, and you’ll make $500 if we sell this entire bottle of ecstasy,” Nico offered.

  “Dude, I appreciate it, but I don’t want to sell.”

  “You don’t have to sell. All you have to do is carry a walkie-talkie and walk about thirty feet ahead of me on the dirt road that goes through the camping area while I’m selling. You just keep a lookout all weekend.”

  Nico picked up a small gray walkie-talkie and chirped the radio twice with a big smile on his face. I couldn’t help but laugh despite telling him “no” about this same shit a dozen times.

  Suddenly, the walkie-talkie chirped back.

  “Yo, son.” Chirp. “It’s Ryder. Over.”

  Nico’s eyes lit up. I started laughing. Ryder Montgomery was a friend of Freddy’s, quickly becoming Nico’s right hand. He was younger than us, probably eighteen at the time. He had gone to Schenectady High School. I think he dropped out, same as Nico and I. He was a short Black kid, and he genuinely loved selling drugs.

  Nico chirped back. “Ryder, how far away are you?”

  “I’m over at the Family Times on State Street. These walkie-talkies really be gettin, like, three miles range. Over.”

  Nico and I were cracking up. Family Times was the kind of restaurant that hung old bobsleds and tennis rackets on the walls and expected you to throw peanut shells on the floor for whatever fucking reason. My parents used to take me when I was really young. What we found hilarious about the situation was that the place had been abandoned.

  “You’re at the fucking Family Times?” Nico asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Nico paused and waited for an explanation but didn’t get one. Just as Nico followed up, Ryder chirped back in.

  “Yo, is Gray with you?”

  “Are you with me?” Nico asked.

  “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t,” I spit back.

  Nico responded, “Yeah, Grayson is here. Why?”

  Ryder chirped, “Ay, Grayson, you want to come pick up me and Freddy?”

  “What the fuck is he doing with Freddy at the Family Times?” I asked Nico.

  “What the fuck are you doing with Freddy at the Family Times?” Nico asked Ryder.

  A couple seconds went by. The walkie-talkie chirped, but Ryder didn’t say anything. A few more seconds passed. Then—

  “Yo. Freddy got in the back door...so, like, we went in here...and they left mad shit, but we can’t carry it. We need a car.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ. Can we kill the walkies for a secon
d?” I asked.

  Nico took out his cell and called Ryder on speakerphone.

  Ryder answered, “Ay yoo. You gonna come through?”

  “Hold on a second, bro.” I hesitated. “So you and Freddy broke into the Family Times on State Street, and you want me to come pick you up so you can take a bunch of shit? What are you taking?”

  “These guys left all the liquor bottles behind the bar and a big-ass helium tank that’s still full.”

  I could hear Freddy murmuring in the background.

  “Yeah. And this vacuum, dude,” said Freddy. “This vacuum is one of those industrial ones. This is a mad nice vacuum. I’m taking that shit too.”

  “So a bar-full of liqour bottles, a helium tank, and a fucking vacuum?” I asked.

  “Yeah. You park in the back, and we’ll load it all into your station wagon and be out,” said Ryder.

  “No. I don’t think so, guys. Cops are always posting up in that parking lot, trying to catch people going right on red at that intersection. If a cop sees us, there won’t be a way to explain why we were back there or why all that shit is in my car.”

  “We’ll give you some liquor, though,” said Ryder.

  “I can’t, man. That’s sketchy. Natalie isn’t going to appreciate me getting arrested today. See if Chris will do it.”

  Natalie was my girlfriend. She was trying her best to help me live up to my potential while I dipshitted around with my friends. Staying somewhat out of trouble while still fucking around all the time was the tightrope walk of my early twenties.

  “You coming to the show with Nico tomorrow, bud?” I asked Ryder.

  “Hell yeah,” he said. “Alright. Freddy is calling Chris.”

  Nico hung up.