Chapter Seventy One:     Boston, Massachusetts

THE WANG THEATER at Boch Center, Boston -- Tuesday, June 9
Marcie Alvertson reporting

Yeah, this is Marcie, the butch bitch trucker of the Chrome Squatch USA Concert Tour's roadie crew. Besides usual slave-duties, like loading barges and picking cotton, I drive the big equipment truck, which is an International Dura Star 4300, with a 26' box high cube, a 7.6 16 twin turbo, auto tranny, air-rise suspension. A nice ride. It's not mine, we lease it, don't want to get tied down by possessions. Yeah, it's a diesel, which our climate-crisis critical friends are required to disapprove of, but it burns clean without all the black smoke and gets the job done. And, yeah, I'm a hard-core lesbian, what the fuck you gonna do about it?

Okay yeah, I may be a dyke, but that don't mean I hate men. In fact, my best buds are all men-- I don't really have many female friends, not even other lesbians. Probably because I act too much like a man myself: pretty much predatory. I like women for gay sex, and then it goes bad because I can't bother being faithful-- just like a guy, right? So when we have all these groups of chicks (groupies) showing up after a concert, I'm right there competing with the other roadies for my share of the poontang. And I do okay, mostly with straight chicks who want to bang a rock star but will settle for a roadie, even a girl roadie, just for the "forbidden" experience of trying out gay sex at least once in their lives. So I get to be the teacher breaking in virgins, which is kinda fun. Like all my buds in the band, I'm not really looking for love. Not yet, anyway, cheap thrills are good enough. In fact, they're great.

Being a trucker is a special lifestyle, you're always on the road, it's hard to have any kind of family or friends except for other on-the-road people. That's why I like driving for a band tour like this one: you've got all your friends along for the ride. And an endless supply of desperate groupies to exploit. As for being a lesbian, I am certainly more butch than femme: I dress like a guy, got a guy's haircut and I work like a guy.

Yeah, and just like all the other guys on this concert tour, I'm kinda flamboozled by the Squatch & Friends chicks. Melly and Lissandra, Masnia, Maki: which one to fall for? All crazy hot, no clue as to if they're into kink or not-- I tend to assume they're all Adam's bitches simply because that would be the biggest kink of all, or at least the most amusing. Myself, I'd do any and all of them. There's even a very subtle hint of gayness going on between them, I kinda sense it on my gaydar (gay-radar, for those without a clue). Well, except for the squatch chicks, who are clearly as absolutely straight as females can be. Actually Magga kinda scares me: so big and strong and hairy. Maybe that would be a thrill-- me being the delicate little woman for once-- but I don't have the nerve to offend her, since she's so huge and also clearly not gay.

After Montreal we drove out of Canada back Stateside, our next concert was to be in Boston on Tuesday the 9th of June, but we had to be in town a day early because on Monday the 8th our very own Academic Bigfoot, Adam Leroy Forest, was to give a "little talk" at Harvard University. Ooo, I didn't realize we were on such a sophisticated level, I thot we were just a buncha rock'n'roll grunts. Naturally, Adam wouldn't have all us philistines following him around campus, embarrassing him with our non-scholastic behavior, so it was just him and Melly who went. Pokey dropped them off in Cambridge while the rest of us went to the campsite we'd arranged and took the rest of the day off.

Which was way cool with me: it just happens to be Gay Pride week in Boston.

Normally there's not so much happening on a Monday in Boston, but during Gay Pride Week the LBGTQ scene is cooking. The big parade wouldn't be until the weekend and we'd have moved on by then, but there was still a lot going on in the gay bars around town; parties, concerts, fun stuff. There are lots of them around Boston and just across the river in Cambridge, where you can almost always find some ivy-league Harvard co-eds interested in expanding their sexual horizons. They're rich and snooty and I do love to degrade them just a little. Yeah, I've been in Boston about five times, so I've got some favorite spots: The Alley, Boston Eagle, Club Café Lounge, Jaque's Cabaret...

Massachusetts also just happens to be the first state allowing same-sex marriage, so it's always been tolerant of sexual minorities, abortion and women's rights. I appreciate that because in some states my personal existence is illegal enough that I have to be careful: Alabama, Mississippi, Texas... And I was very careful to keep my lesbian mouth shut while we were in Detroit, where you can get killed for being blatant.

I'm the only openly homosexual human in our entourage, or at least none of the guys are admitting any tendencies, but they're all okay with me being a butch bitch. Musicians and artists usually are, which is party why I work as a roadie. Some of them are even willing to go to a gay bar just for the party atmosphere. My best bud Gene, our computer-wizard and token black dude, sometimes goes into town with me. To protect me, he says, and I appreciate that; just being female can be risky sometimes, gay or not.

But yeah, this time others were willing to dare the dangerous experiment of visiting a homo bar during Gay Pride Week-- just as long as they were safely surrounded by their hetero buds, that is. Someone had to stay back in camp with our stuff, but Ewan was willing to take a turn so that Osmond could finally get an evening off security detail. Old man Ewan isn't a homophobe, but he's a man's man from Down Under, so he wasn't really comfortable in the gay scene anyway. Neither are Lee and Bunny, so they went off by themselves, but Freddie and Sunny came along, so did Scott and Charlie and BJ, Pokey and Maki, Mike and Lissandra, and both squatch chicks. So we were a big crowd.

Me being a lebbo sort of made me the Official Gay Scene Guide, so I showed them the way to The Alley, which is usually pretty entertaining but was kind of dead at the time, so we moved on to Jaque's Cabaret, where female impersonators put on a good show and everybody was laughing. After a few others we finally ended up at the Midway Café for Queeraoke singing.

Our squatch chicks, Magga and Masnia, are kind of obsessed about dancing to live music-- they're really not into big cities, understandable for squatches, but they put up with cities if they get to dance. They fit right into the queer scene and were a hit, really got into it with a team of black dancing girls. Good thing the Midway Café has a high ceiling and a solid floor.

I discovered that I'd sort of like to hit on Masnia, she really is lovely. Bigger than me, but the fur is pretty fucking exotic. Seems so innocent, but I get the feeling that her version of innocence is as deviant from standard hetero as my own. She tries to act like a young American girl, but is obviously a foreigner just recently come into civilization; who knows what rules she lives by? Only thing is, my gaydar gets no blip. We queer folk like to think we have a "spider sense" that tingles to identify other like-minded individuals, but can a Bigfoot ever be like-minded? I get only blank reads off either of them.

Lissandra, however, that luscious latina, reads as pretty fucking hot, queer-wise, definitely bisexual whether she knows it or not. Originally, I'd been intending to go after her that evening, since she was for once not connected at the hip to Melly. But then it became clear that she was with Mike tonight, they were more open about that than ever before, casual but cuddling and kissing in plain sight.

Benny Joe got drunk, as always, and more surly than usual because all the girls he'd tried to pick up were lesbians, so he was having no luck. He didn't pester Lissandra for once, maybe their trip to Cuba together had cured him of that. He never bothers me, I guess I'm too butch for him, or at least I hope so. Not that I've got anything against BJ, we get along okay, but I'm glad I don't have to reject him, since he doesn't seem to take it so well. He went off by himself, probably looking for a non-gay bar.

Adam and Melly finally showed up at the Midway Café too, having tracked us down by cell phone.

All those wild & crazy LBGTQ folk went a little extra crazy when Adam came in: here was someone more outré than they could ever be; a Bigfoot coming from having just given a speech at Harvard. Adam immediately became the star of the evening when he did a Queeraoke song, his very own Mean To Me, performed with Lissandra, since he'd written it about her. They made it pretty funny, a good number.

Altho I did get a little irritated, since I'd been lusting for Lissandra, who'd been overtly romantic with Mike, but then once Adam showed up she suddenly got crazy-cozy with him instead. I looked over to see if that made Mike jealous, but no, he was doing fine all wrapped up in a very hot embrace with Melly. Then both Lissanda and Melly perched together on Adam's lap, innocently enough, nothing blatantly erotic, but my gaydar was blipping that there's some kind of deviant stuff going on between them-- ALL of those S&F folk, Mike, Pokey and Maki too.

I casually asked Lissandra about it but she just shrugged and said "Deviant? Oh, not rilly, it's all pretty much pure True Love", whatever that means. She admitted that her mothers are a lesbian couple, but insists that both she and Melly "require a dick to get happy". A shame.

I couldn't understand why I was getting so focused on about them, knowing that it's never smart to get involved with members of the band or crew. Besides, here I am in a gay bar among all sorts of openly available lesbians to hook up with. Why invest gay emotions on heteros? No fun in that.

Okay, what I was originally supposed to be writing about is our concert in Boston. I've been in this town before, also with Chrome Pie a couple of times, but this was our first show in the new Wang Theater, which is part of the Boch Center in downtown Boston. It's a nice venue, pretty, modern, sits 3500 people and we filled it up. Seems these concerts are getting bigger as we go along, there's evidently no problem selling tickets.

Which is understandable: we put on a good show, pretty much every time, Boston no exception. I've always been glad to work with the Chrome Pie guys, they play good music and we've been proud of the work we do. But now that S&F has joined up with us it's like we've all moved up to a higher level, like a philharmonic orchestra or The Beatles or something. Something special.

Last evening, while we were cruising the gay bars, we came upon a band that was so bad it hurt. Literally. They were deliberately using their instruments to cause pain, making sustained shrill hyperloud tones that put your teeth on edge, and then screwing up the volume for more feedback, equaling more pain. Seemingly without any real musical character, experimental shit in the name of "jazz", y'know. But it was obvious that the musicians thought they did good, proud of just how avant-garde they were, how creative, how unique, etc. I mean, I think they were actually competent musicians who could play their instruments, but chose to make that sound.

Well, I guess all bands do that; choose their sound, I mean. I'm just glad to be on this concert tour with this band, making the sound we do. My personal musical taste tends toward the raw, the harsh anti-establishment, but Chrome Squatch has become my favorite band anyway.

But what can I say about the Boston concert that's not just a repetition of everything said about all the others before? I mean, it was good: no glitches, everything went as planned; the audience liked it, clapped and cheered. It's amazing that we can play the same songs night after night and not go stale, but the energy is still there. And it's always fresh for the audience.

Most important, groupies showed up afterwards, not that it did me any good, but some of the guys got laid. If I sound complacent that's because I'd done okay the night before. So okay that I had a sweet young thing named Cynthia coming back for more.

Yeah, after the concert, which was from 7:00 to 10:00 in the evening, we had to pack up all our stage gear, instruments, cables, amps, so that my truck and our three busses would be ready to head out for New York in the morning. Sometimes we could put off packing until the next day, but this time we had a tight schedule, there was a lot going on for us in New York.