Chicago rush hour traffic can be intimidating, to say the least. This seems doubly true when your van, which reeks of body odor and food leftovers from two weeks of tour, insists on turning itself off whenever traffic slows to between five and ten miles an hour. This situation is the one we recently found ourselves in on Sundials’ summer tour. Stuck in Chicago interstate traffic, van turning off, late to the show, the best we could do was keep driving and hope that the van would turn back on every time it cut out. This is not an enviable position.
Chicago rush hour traffic can be intimidating, to say the least. This seems doubly true when your van, which reeks of body odor and food leftovers from two weeks of tour, insists on turning itself off whenever traffic slows to between five and ten miles an hour. This situation is the one we recently found ourselves in on Sundials’ summer tour. Stuck in Chicago interstate traffic, van turning off, late to the show, the best we could do was keep driving and hope that the van would turn back on every time it cut out. This is not an enviable position.
We made it to the venue and played a really fun show and asked some of the guys from local bands if they new a decent mechanic. They were able to recommend a shop to us, but due to the late hour and varying levels of intoxication/tour sickness (our roadie and myself had strep throat), we had to wait until morning to go have the issue resolved.
The next day, we woke at 8:00 am and made the short drive to the mechanic’s shop, where a middle aged Ukrainian man named Kenny helped us. Around noon, we asked if they had figured out the issue. He nodded, and in a thick accent explained that our idle air control was damaged and needed replacing. Cory, the van’s owner, asked how much the repairs would cost. “Well,” Kenny responded, “Right now you’re looking at about $900. By the time we figure labor, installation, all that, you’ve got $14-1500. If you want, right now, I give you $100 for the van. You can take that white car outside.”
The white car in question was a mid 90s sedan that looked like it could barely hold itself upright while empty. We didn’t want to chance filling it with people and possessions. Cory went outside to make a desperate phone call and Kenny started laughing and told us to call him back in. “It’s just a morning joke, man.”
After another two or three hours, the van appeared to be ready to go. We thanked our hosts and piled into the van to take Ramey, our roadie, to the bus station. Tour was just too stressful for her, not to mention being sick. Outside of the bus station, the van turned itself off again. We all sat in a very uncomfortable silence for a moment, broken only by Ramey making her exit. She was leaving us, broken van and all. She saw her opportunity to escape this mid-western nightmare and she took it. I can’t say I blame her. Tour is not easy. Harris mentioned that perhaps the reason he and I have had two female roadies leave our tours (the first, two years ago, was a tenser situation) was that women are more rational than men. This argument makes a certain amount of sense, mainly because what we are doing makes almost no sense at all.
Here’s a scenario. You will be spending a month in a van that is constantly on the verge of breaking down. You are travelling with three other people. None of these people have any money to their name. You will not be paid for this month long vacation, but some of the time you will make enough money on any given day to pay for your gas expenses to your next destination. You never know where you are going to sleep more than five hours before it is time to try and do so. More often than not, you will be sleeping on a floor. Sometimes, you get a couch, which is a privilege granted to members of your party on a rotational basis. You will eat, for lack of funds, more Taco Bell and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches than most people do in a lifetime. Occasionally, someone will cook you an actual meal. These people are deities. You shower rarely, because showers are not often available. In general, you and your party smell so bad that your contact with other humans will be severely limited if not by the smell that you are bestowing upon the world, then by a crippling paranoia about said smell. You will be tired all the time (remember that part about irregular sleeping arrangements?). You will get sick, and because you don’t have health care (remember that part about no money?) you cannot go to a doctor. You forfeit the ability to have a regular bowel movement (remember all that Taco Bell?).
Is this scenario something you consider desirable? Very possibly not.
Back to the story. After Ramey fled the sinking ship, we drove back to the shop, where Kenny scratched his head and got back to work. After another hour, he told us he had it fixed, but he wanted us to take it for a test drive. The van turned off before we had even left the shop. Several more hours went by, and this time, Kenny decided to do the test drive himself. He took Corey with him, and when they came back, he was all smiles. He had bought us gelato. Is this a common move in the auto-repair world? If a client spends eight hours waiting for repairs in the heat outside your shop, is it standard practice to compensate them with ice cream?
The van was fixed, though Kenny couldn’t seem to tell us exactly what the problem had been. “I cleaned a lot of stuff. It was all very dirty.” We gave him one of our tapes and thanked him profusely and got back on the road. Once you confront all of the negatives, and there are negatives, lots of them, tour is a pretty remarkable experience. Sometimes you even get ice cream.
