Ghost Story
A True Don Caballero Ghost
Story
by Damon Che
This here is the story of
when....
About a year ago, Don Caballero were traveling through the far
midwest doing a two week stint of gigs. I mean, fuck it! We were
giggin', right? Anyhow, we rolled into Iowa City. I forget the
name of the club, but it was totally cool and didn't seem out of
the ordinary in any obvious way. Bands were entitled to two
pitchers of tonic water (one before set, one after), a buy-out
allowance of $2 (or free pork rinds all night), and of course, $3
pitchers of draft beer. Situation normal. So far, so good. The
8x10s of some pretty legendary bands were also encouraging. This
was evidence that this was no deadbeat club, or town for that
matter, that we were playing.
Well, right there was where our luck was to run out. We played to this smooth and feminine black jock guy who wore a fluorescent green tank top who demonstrated terrible taste in women. The women had perms and wore flannel lumberjack tent/shirts in the month of July. They heckled us throughout our set and, aside from the support from the opening band, were our only audience. I had to be honest and told them that they were an okay audience.
So we got paid and loaded out. After everything was packed, we went back in the club and made what we called a "John Bickell check." It was right then where we met "this guy." The guy introduced himself as Sam Preston. He was wearing a Meat Puppets shirt, shorts, Birkenstocks and had this moppy kind of frizzy hair rubberbanded back into a mastadonish pony tail. At least he didn't have a beard. He told us that if we needed a place to stay that we could stay with him. However, his seven roommates were asleep and we'd have to be quiet, sleep in his tree bark filled garage, get no showers, and be out by 6 a.m. because everyone had class the following morning. This sounded fine to us so we thanked him and went for it. The only strange thing so far was that we had no recall of him at any earlier part of the evening. It didn't really phase us, though. He gave us directions and split on his bike as we finished our tonic water and argued whether or not riot-boy geeks controlled the independent music world.
Now is where things got wild. We followed his directions to where his house was supposed to be. We noticed that there were no streetlights or lights on at any of the houses so it was really dark and hard to see the address signs through the huge fucking trees. We stopped to look around at the houses, and wondered which could be his. Suddenly, we saw a faint light come on in the vestibule of one of the houses and Sam's silhouette waving back to us. "There he is! Cool."
We then had to park two blocks from his house. We gathered our sleeping gear and made our way back up the street to where we saw him waving at us. Everything was still dark and again we found ourselves not knowing which house was his. "Which house is it?" "I don't know." "Wow." Oh well, what could we do? So we headed back to the club which at this point was closed, but the bartender was still there. He let us in and we asked him if he knew the number for this Sam Preston guy. "Sam Preston?" the bartender asked.
"Yeah, he said we could stay at his house."
"Do you know 'em, dude?"
"Is he cool?"
"The bartender just looked at us like we were "harsh."
"Are you serious?" he finally asked.
"Hell yeah, biatch!" we replied.
"Well, then you definitely don't have a place to stay."
"How do you mean?"
"About a year ago this time, Sam was in a really bad bicycle accident after he left here one night."
"Wow, that sucks."
"Did he get broke pretty bad?" we asked.
"He was hit by a car. He was killed, man. He's dead!"
We ended up doing some coke and drove all night to the next town. This was the second wackest thing that ever happened to us on the road.