So I went up to upstate NY on Tuesday to see Allman Brothers and Bob Weir because, as much as I love Slayer, Venom and Exodus I am a hippie when it comes down to it. So I get to this hotel up there and I’m walking to the room and this gigantic man in shorts and sandals that looks like a cross between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Oscar Wilde is coming down the hall carrying a box of wine as well as a big jug of wine and muttering in French to his surrounding family trailing behind him. So he already has one strike against him which you can pick out of two:  a) He’s wearing sandals, b) He’s French. I make my way into the room and it looks like every other hotel room I’ve been in. I of course immediately turn on the air conditioning to the highest setting. I go to the desk and pull the chair out and there is some sort of dried up white stuff all over it (hmmm, milk? Liquid Paper? Queso blanco?). I decide it’s best to just push the chair back in and avoid it for the eighteen hours I live here. I survey the rest of the room, figuring out the often complicated configuration of the lights and their respective switches in any hotel or motel you stay in.  Bathroom is pretty small. Also any mirror in a motel or hotel is somehow made to make you look so ugly and disgusting; I’d love to know how they make them like this. Perhaps some weird trick or voodoo that adds fifteen pounds to a person and removes any kind of tan skin from your body. This reminds me, maybe next time I stay in a hotel I’ll grab a skinny black person off the street and have them look in the mirror in my room and see if it turns them into I don’t know…John Candy or Rosie O’Donnell.

I have two or three hours to kill so I put the television on and end up on some Vin Diesel movie that is beyond horrible. He is an undercover cop, he’s a badass, etc. I end up turning it off and read instead. Out in the hall I hear some commotion so I get up and look out the peephole and there is Mr. Philip Seymour Wilde with his family with towels in full on “we’re going out to the pool” mode.  They disappear and now doors start opening and closing out in the hall. That steel lock sound, like what classroom doors sound like, or doors in a very important office building. Literally the two rooms I’m sandwiched between and the room across from me. It’s like some bizarre video game where you keep going in one door but come out another one. This happens for the remainder of my stay at the hotel. With me getting up every third time to see what the hell is going on, running to the peephole only to see a quiet empty hall.  “Chick-chick!”…”chick chick!” every five minutes maybe.

I open the blinds and notice I can see down on the swimming pool, which is now filled with a dozen or so of what I presume are the French people opening and closing the doors as it has briefly stopped. The Oscar Wilde dude is swinging his arms and talking in a very animated manner to a man who looks like a cross between Vladimir Putin and Hunter S. Thompson. Like he was probably some sort of assassin in the French Army. The Oscar Wilde guy is like an inch from Putin’s face, and I can tell his breath probably stinks of shitty wine and rotten cabbage from three stories up. The children are all in the pool while the wives sit in the sun away from each other. They vacate the pool after an hour or so and the doors start opening and closing, with me jumping up each time, and never catching anyone in the hall. It was like when you try to jump on the head of your shadow and you just can’t.

Even though I don’t really drink alcohol, I’ve been enjoying taking a shot or two of hard liquor and that’s it…maybe some wine. I think my experience with beer is over at this point as I never seem to finish one and almost 100% of the time I feel sick if I drink more than two beers.  So while driving to the show I decide that I should find a liquor store and buy two nips of bourbon to drink when I arrive at the venue. There is a huge line of traffic going left into the traffic light in front of the venue, I pass it all on the right heading into downtown Saratoga Springs, and maybe a block up there is a liquor store. There is a woman that looks like a fitness trainer buying about twelve bottles of wine. The transaction takes what seems like about nine minutes. There is Grateful Dead music playing over the speakers of the liquor store, and it’s an audience recording, probably from the early 80’s. The woman behind the counter is wearing a shirt with Jerry on it so she’s obviously hardcore. I find this odd, as Bob Weir is scheduled to go on stage in about fifteen minutes and this woman is trying to figure out how to add these twelve bottles of wine up with a calculator. I have absolutely no idea what kind of booze is out there now. In the last ten years, I’ve maybe been drunk four times, and if someone says “let me buy you a shot” at a show I usually have no idea what it even is. Tequila? Whiskey? Bourbon? Are those the same thing? I have the nine minutes to think about what I want, trying to read the bottles and settle on “Bulleit Bourbon”, the bottles look like medicine bottles from the 1800’s. The tennis instructor lady struggles with her box of wine bottles and I make my way to the counter. “Two of those little bottles of boo-lay bourbon please”. “Bullet?” she replies. Now I think, “did I really just mispronounce that? Why is that spelled like that? That gigantic Oscar Wilde guy is in my head and making me believe everything is French now, great. I pay for my shit and ask the girl if she’s heading over to see “Bobby” (if you’re hardcore you call Bob Weir ‘Bobby’ and people know where you’re coming from). She says “the guy with the tickets was supposed to be here at six so I can leave…but he’s not here yet”. (6:45 and the show begins at 7:00). I say “cutting it close!” and leave.

Since the venue is now on my right I’m able to avoid that whole line of cars turning left and get right to the red light and turn right into the venue…well, a new line of traffic. While sitting in the line of traffic I wonder how I should deal with these bottles of bourbon. Should I park and then just down them one after the other? I pass a sign that says “NO ALCOHOL IN PARK” (the venue is in a giant beautifully wooded state park) and immediately take the bag on my seat and put it under the back seat, and then three minutes later decide I’m 38 years old, by myself and have worried about worse things than getting caught with two sealed nips of bourbon in a bag. I take one out and decide to drink half of it. I’m now “operating a motor vehicle while drinking alcohol”. Since I’m basically sitting in a line of traffic I don’t struggle with the morality of this for one second. Like I’m suddenly going to be completely shit faced and veer out of the traffic jam into an autistic boy. I now get to an area where there are guys directing traffic into the parking lot(s). I am paranoid that one of them may be a police officer who will smell the booze on my breath and I will be arrested in upstate New York. (I’m reminded of the time I was in Lynn driving along the ocean where there is often summer traffic, the state police had horses out and I briefly got scared the horses were trained like police dogs and would smell the marijuana I had hidden in my bag.) I take out a mint that I just bought recently that taste like RASPBERRY ICED TEA. Seriously. I almost think you could have one of these with a meal to substitute the drink and just eat one each time you would normally take a drink they are that good. I get up to the guys, neither of them are police, however there is a man sitting in a “Park Ranger” truck that could bust me so I should be careful. I am thankfully directed to the best place to park at the venue, in one of the grass parking lots. Driving over grass is one of those simple pleasures one can experience from time to time that is akin to I don’t know, watching a puppy roll around on the floor for twenty minutes, or eating a marshmallow. For some reason parking under trees on grass is one of those things for me. I pull into my “space” and as soon as no one is looking finish the contents of the two bottles, and transfer the two joints I rolled into my wallet where nobody will find them. The band has already started as I walk to the concert area. They are okay, nothing special, without Jerry Garcia Bobby is a bit lost. It’s nice that he does some of the Jerry songs and still sounds exactly the same, but something is missing. The song of the night was Creampuff War, which I obviously never saw The Dead play as they only played it seven times, the last being in March of 1967.

In between bands I walk around the park and find a bench. A grimy looking couple in their fifties come over and sits next to me. They are both wasted on who knows what. The conversation of course revolves around being fucked up/getting fucked up, and then they pull out a pair of binoculars. The woman unscrews the cap on the binoculars and drinks whatever is in it, offering me some. I decline and then ask them where they’re from, they are vague with “here and there…all over”.  After I tell them I’m from Massachusetts the guy tries to explain to me where he is from but I have absolutely no idea what he means “Where route sixty-six and one-forty three meet”. Oh there, right. I just say “I’m from Boston” and leave it at that. They decide to go get a beer and I decide to get an ice cream. I see two security guys walking by talking into their little walkie-talkie things heading over to the beer area where apparently a fight has broken out. I casually walk over to a group of security guys struggling with some guy writhing on the ground telling them to leave him alone, etc. Since I am addicted to any kind of “World’s Wildest Police Whatevers” television shows any chance I get to see something like this in person is a bonus. Since I’m carrying a little dish of ice cream with me it can’t really be any better. Also of note, this took place at an area where there is a tiny stage where they probably do poetry readings, or small plays. The mini-stage is surrounded by a dozen or so long benches, so I grab one of those to eat my ice cream and watch this unfold. I showed up a little late as the guy was restrained and cooperative when I sat down. To my left some “in charge” guys are tending to a guy who is explaining “he just came up and punched me in the face”. The guy has blood all over his face, and although I am not eating anything red I decide to leave the area. Nothing to see here.

The Allman Brothers come out and are great as usual. I’m still adjusting to them without Dickie Betts, but eh, not bad. They play a few of my favorite songs and I make my way to various areas of the lawn to watch it. The crowd is a mix of younger people as well as older biker looking men and women. They play the jam Midnight Rider, you know the one…”I got one more silver dollar” and some woman with a mullet says to her dude with the leather vest  “THIS IS THE GREATEST SONG EVER”, I of course totally agree with her, especially the harmony vocals Warren Haynes adds to these newer versions. They start what I assume is the last song of the night so I make a run for the parking lot. It’s dark and desolate out there and there is a girl walking alone way ahead of me so I change my route a little as I would probably be nervous if I saw me coming. I avoid all traffic getting out of the venue and make the thirty minute drive back to the hotel with no problems.

For some reason I decide that after eating at Fuddruckers for lunch (which included jalapeno peppers), drinking two nips of bourbon, eating a little bowl of ice cream and smoking two joints by myself going to Taco Bell would be a good idea. Fast forward to 7:05 AM. Not the best idea I’ve ever had, really.

In the room when I got back I looked in the nightstand drawer to see if there was a map in the yellow pages as I was maybe thinking of going to nearby Lake George in the morning and taking a paddleboat tour or going to the Frankenstein Museum they have there (!). The yellow pages are all cut up with a knife throughout the book. After watching a Chicago/Earth Wind and Fire concert I fall asleep around 3:30 AM.

I am up so early and obviously feel like shit. The air conditioner is on full blast still, so it’s about 50 degrees in the room, I’m surprised I don’t see my breath. I remember the sign advertising the free continental breakfast which usually consists of mini muffins and the worst coffee you can ever have. I walk down there after looking in the trick mirror and now look like someone who drank bourbon, smoked two joints and ate taco bell, but also someone who hasn’t slept in five months.  I make my way down and there is the French Oscar Wilde guy and his family as well as about nine thousand other people with French accents, British accents. Lots of young people around 12 years old in this line. I unsuccessfully toast a bagel in the toaster and make some coffee. I find a table for four that is empty. Soon after a British couple and their son come and sit down with me. All of the boys are wearing ties. Exactly how you imagine young European boys. I finish my bagel and coffee and go back to my room, realizing I need more coffee. I go back down now there are ATHOUSAND people down there, there is an awkwardly tall priest meandering around. I kind of cut the line and make two cups of coffee to bring back to the room. Unfortunately they only have what is basically the worst coffee ever, French Vanilla. Flavored coffee is bad enough as it is, but this could be the worst of them all. I ask the front desk kid where all these folks are from and what they’re doing, just remembering there are two large buses in the parking lot. “They’re from some choir group traveling to Montreal”

My last two hours in the room are spent listening to the Europeans open and close doors, as they are checking out now. I wonder how much of a mess they probably made in their rooms for the cleaning ladies to clean as when I looked out at the pool after the French people left there were drinks left on the tables. As usual I cleaned the room up as best I could, emptied ashtrays, threw any trash out, put the towels in one place, etc. On my way out there was an older cleaning woman in the doorway of the neighboring room wiping her brow as I walked by “It’s so damn hot in there” she says. I reply “Well, I left the air conditioner on in my room; you can go take a break I’m sure no one will notice”. As I walked away I meant to add “Oh, and I did NOT do that to that desk chair” but I didn’t.