The Band Trip

In High School the band took a big trip each year. One year they'd go to nearby Six Flags the next we'd go to Branson. Over seven hours in a bus with a bunch of pimple faced teens. God bless Mr. Ashcraft and the chaperones. I only made it to Branson once because I quit before my senior year. To pay for these trips there were fundraisers. Typically there were two campaigns. In the Winter the band sold candy and in the Spring there were car washes. I never sold any candy. I'm not a salesman, I'm an introvert and too lazy. I hated washing cars, but it was required. Yeah, I was a freeloader. I scorned fund-raising but reaped the rewards earned by all the hard work put in by my classmates. Hooray high school socialism.

Jesse Nichols and I were joking around before the trip. He bragged that he had access to those mini liquor bottles (nips) and he'd bring a few if I could sneak them on the bus. I told him to bring the booze and I'd take care of the trafficking. At home I had a large hardcover copy of Treasure Island. I took a knife and carved out a few hundred pages. We were gonna hide the booze in my hollowed out Robert Lewis Stevenson classic. Stevenson died opening a bottle of wine, so I know that motherfucker would not have minded me putting his book to such use.

RLS approves of any way to ensure the imbibing of spirits.
https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=3770

The big morning came. We all gathered in the band hall at like 5am. Jesse was milling about somewhere. I tracked him down and he had nothing. For a kid bragging about his access to nips, he had nil. He had some lame excuse saying he didn't trust me, that I'd drink all his alcohol and leave him with none. Whatever. This was the same kid who earlier in the year showed a bunch of us in the bathroom his Ziploc bag full of “pot seeds”. Yeah, okay. Cool. Meanwhile, I wasted my time carving out pages from a book. It's very tedious work.

We got on the buses and were off. The two buses in our convoy were actually pretty damn nice. The band chartered two buses with TVs and bathrooms. One cannot discount the importance of a bathroom on a bus. Many nights were spent on yellow dogs with me crouched over in pain needing to piss the last hour or so of a bus ride knowing they were not going to stop. I am shocked that my bladder never burst into pieces.

The TVs were taken advantage of. Somebody brought a VHS copy of the first South Park episode. Oh my gosh I had never seen anything like that before. It was so funny, so irreverent. So taboo. So inappropriate. 

Other classics on board were Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Happy Gilmore. And of course some stupid girls always brought a copy of Dirty Dancing. What? No Ghost? Oh yeah, there was Ghost. Patrick Swayze (RIP) was a fixture. These would all prove to be nothing compared to the feature presentation.

Something else amazing about the buses was that they had tables. The seats were like a train. Two seats faced toward the front across from two seats facing the rear. And there was a table in between. We could play cards. For some reason Spades was a popular game in my circle that included Nick Warren and Jess Foreman. On top of all that, the table could be positioned to make bunk bed style cots. Oh my gosh these were awesome considering it was a seven plus hour trip.

Jesse may not have made good with the booze, but he did bring one cool toy. He brought on a hand-held CB. Yeah, we talked to truckers on the trip. All we knew was that we had to avoid the term “good buddy". That was supposedly trucker talk for homosexual. We did not want to convey that sort of thing. Neither of us made regular use of “good buddy” so that did not prove to be an obstacle.

We made it to our rooms at the fabulous La Quinta Inn by early afternoon. We made it to world famous Branson Missouri! Officially we were there for a competition where we'd perform a few songs from our spring set and try our hands at sight reading. That's boring and I really don't remember any of that, so I certainly won't dwell on it.

After settling in, we were given our per Diem money for meals and told to meet at the parking lot at a certain time for a trip to the strip. I wasn't rooming with my normal friends Nick and Jess, but with my trumpet bro's Adam, Jeffrey and Stuart. Adam paired off with Stuart for one queen bed. I chose the floor because Jeffrey and I weren't comfortable enough to share a bed with each other.

Jeffrey and I were wrestling fans. Particularly the WCW. Bret Hart was (is) my all time favorite wrestler, but the top guy in the “sport” at the time was Bill Goldberg. We loved his “who's next?” gimmick. Back before there were Vin Diesel or Chuck Norris facts, there was Bill Goldberg. We had custom shirts made that said “Goldberg Sunk the Titanic”. Anyway, it wasn't warm enough to use a pool, so I let Jeffrey perform a wrestling maneuver on me in the hotel room. See, prior to departing Bonham I promised I'd allow him to get me in the Razor's Edge (at this time known as the Outsider's Edge) in the pool. That wasn't an option so on the bed it was. I gotta say, that son-of-a-gun did it. It's no small feat either, I wasn't exactly a small guy. I'm honestly surprised I didn't kick the ceiling on the way up.

Sometime after Jeffrey displayed his raw power, a couple girls joined us in the room. Jeffrey had a surprise for us. The feature presentation. He pulled out of his bag a VHS copy of “Dukes of Hazard Reunion.” See, the good ol' boys return to try to save Uncle Jesse's farm from being destroyed by crooked developer's plot to build a theme park. Or so the IMDB entry says. It was just the case to the homecoming of Hazard County's favorite sons. Inside was a completely different movie. It was a classic called “Itty Bitty Bang Bang.”. Not just porn, it was midget porn. Jeffrey hooked up the VCR and popped the tape in. He hit play.

There were midget men on full sized women. Midget women on full sized men. And any possible combination one can contrive. I was giggling at the absurdity of it all and got a glance telling me to calm down. Then I took it up a notch and decided to “fall” off of the bed. Then the screamed, “Hand check!” and I stuck up my hands so they could see. They resumed, Jeffrey, Adam, myself and the girl wood wind players watched in amazement. Stuart wasn't there for any of this. He spent the whole trip elsewhere with his girlfriend Angie.

We gathered in the parking lot to take the bus a few miles away for dinner and entertainment. Our same movie group had dinner at some restaurant. They kept calling me “Hands” and asking for “hand checks”. The waitress caught onto this and asked why they called me Hands. “Was it because,” she asked while making a masturbation motion with her hand. They laughed and nodded in the affirmative. And I was a pervert.

Outside of miniature golf, go carts, arcades and bumper cars, there was not a lot for a group of teens to do in Branson in 1998. I'm sorry, but I'm not paying money to see Andy Williams or Charlie Pride or Yakov Smirnoff. So a couple hours of games and mini vehicles it was. Jeffrey and I ran onto a bumper car track and hopped in gold colored cars. We'd run into people yelling, “Goldberg!” Lamar Haggerty, a freshman trumpet player, tried to get in on the revelry and bumped into one of us yelling “Goldberg!” Without missing a beat we pointed and yelled, “Goldust!” and went after him. Goldust is a lame gimmick for Dustin Rhodes, the son of the legendary Dusty Rhodes, aimed at getting under the skin of homophobes. It was annoying and creepy. You did not want to be Goldust.

It is amazing how many arcades and amusement businesses can be crammed into a small town. We walked in every one of those places. We lost track of time and realized we had to go. We had to be on the bus by like 9PM or get left behind. It was just Jeffrey and myself and we should have had plenty of time to get to the rendezvous point, but Jeffrey decided that he needed to get a bottle of coke. We stopped by a convenience store and he got a bottle of the classic beverage. All good though. It was 9pm but the bus was in our sight. Only it wasn't good. The bus pulled away and left us behind. What the hell?

The bus drove off. They never leave people behind. They always wait 15 minutes for stragglers. Not this time. I guess since the band director hired the charter company, they worked for him and not the school. He ordered them to leave at 9pm and they sure as hell did. Crap. Jeffrey and I started hoofing it. Every block we walked Jeffrey was talking to people at stoplights. “Please give us a ride to our hotel.” “No, I'm sorry I can't. Good luck.” The people of Branson are so polite. After maybe four attempts we came up to an El Camino missing a passenger side view mirror at an intersection. It was a redneck that was happy to help. “Hop on in!”

Jeffrey rode shotgun and I sat in the back. The guy asked about who we were and why we were there. “Right on man,” he said. “Don't worry about those stuck up bitches that turned you guys down. I can tell you are good kids. This town is full of those skanks.” He also warned us about the horrible “pigs” in town. He was super nice though. He couldn’t shut the hell up. Super garrulous. He dropped us off at the hotel unmolested and we thanked him for the ride. We were dumb but lucky. Of course, had our benefactor been out of line, Jeffrey would have power bombed his ass!

The next morning we had time before we had to load up for competition so a group of us decided to just walk around the neighborhood our hotel was in. Big surprise, there was a go cart place next to the La Quinta. Place was deserted that early in the morning. By the tracks there was a covered area and we just happened to look above us and there was a bat clamped down on the awning. Poor bat was just trying to sleep. We couldn't have that though. We kept daring somebody to grab the bat. Nobody really wanted to. Finally Adam decided he'd man up and grab our chiropteran friend. I warned him about rabies. Adam was like, “Shoot, I got this.” He ripped some plastic from a 10 gallon trash bag on a trash can. He had it in his hand and reached up to grab the bat. He pulled gently but the bat was stubborn. A little more pressure and Adam had him down. Then he freaked out because the bat started to struggle some more. Adam laid the winged mammal on the ground and we circled the defenseless creature. It just laid there helpless, lifting its head and flashing fangs. We left it there. I do regret leaving that poor thing where he surely died. It was minding its own business and we came along and decided to pretty much kill it. Of course at the time we didn't see it that way.

The last thing we did before we drove home was go to Silver Dollar City. I honestly don't remember a damn thing about that place other than actually hanging out with Nick, the closest thing I had to a bestfriend since Bryce and I drifted apart. I guess Silver Dollar City was just awful, or lame compared to Six Flags.

When we finished with Silver Dollar City we took the long arduous trip home. More classic 90s movies like Twister and Ace Venture were shown. We finally got to Bonham and the longstanding bus ride tradition started up. We all started singing Cheers to the BusDriver. It's a silly song you can easily find using Google. Then Dusti, our drum major, led us in our school song.

Hail Alma Mater, Hear our song to thee So worthy art though of our loyalty Thou art the guardian of our youthful days To thee belong our love and praise Thou art the guardian of our youthful days To thee belong our love and praise

I think pretty much everybody always sang that song together. It was a hallowed tradition. However, following our Six Flags trip the next year, when Dusti was now “retired” nobody stood up to sing the school song. We all did the dumb bus driver song but nobody picked up the baton that was being passed in real time. I certainly didn't carry on this sacred practice. I was no leader. I fooled myself into thinking that I didn't care about things like that, but deep down I did. I was too afraid to step up. And so was everybody else. I hope that the next year somebody picked up the fallen torch before the flames extinguished. That the flame of pride didn't entirely diminish.

The bus stopped at the school. We unloaded in the parking lot in the middle of the night, bladders intact. It was a successful trip, despite the lack of alcoholic contraband. Thankfully “Hands” didn't stick as a nickname. Jeffrey and Adam would graduate. In an ironic twist of fate, our beloved Goldberg would accidentally end the career of my favorite wrestler Bret Hart. He may not have sunk the titanic, but he took down the excellence of execution. Stuart and I would lead the trumpet section the next year. I never embraced the leadership role. I should have, but it wasn't my bag. I'd never go to Branson again, I doubt if I had that I would have topped that first trip. I mean really? Hitchhiking, wild life, flirting with truckers, wrestling moves and midget porn. What else is there?

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Lamar and me. 1998

If I had to pick a song to be the soundtrack to this post it would be...