Lost and Found

The partying from Monday night left us feeling ill equipped to deal with another hot drive. Monday night when we went to go get beer at Safeway, I noticed that the brakes on the minivan sounded a bit weird. I thought maybe there was a piece of gravel stuck between the pad and the rotor. Driving it on Tuesday made it painfully clear that this was no gravel. The brakes still worked, but sounded terrible. We got to Streetlight records in San Jose. The record store had some pretty decent music. Imagine Easy Street Records being fat with irrelevant pop fluff and you will have a perfect idea of how this place looked. The young pony tail sporting sound guy was very nice. I suppose he was more the guy who brought and hooked up the mixer for us, but we have worse. Spirits were not high for this show. We all still felt ill. Playing a show in front of nobody was not going to help. Stencil was all setup when Mr. Ponytail was approached by an old lady. "Are you in the band?" she asked. He said that he worked for the store. "Oh good", she said, "can you get me a copy of Mamma Mia behind the drum kit?". He did and she was happy.

I was actually into our set. I felt like I needed to redeem myself from the previous night's miserable performance. Streetlight Records pays in T-shirts. That is fine by me. We packed up our stuff and headed off to San Francisco. As we approached the bay area the temperature dropped to something comfortable. Lucas's car was no longer a mobile hell emulator. Grant & Green was both the name of the venue and its location. The venue was about as big as the Chop Suey, but the stage was half as big and not the focus of this establishment. Some guys with baseball hats were watching the Giants game on T.V. I was wondering if we were going to be bothering them when we went on later. Brad said there was some square pizza nearby. We ate it and we were happy.

Bay area dwelling friends of Skeletons and Stencil started to file in the venue. When we went on, we rocked. Devon wiped sweaty face with his new T-shirt from Streetlight. The show felt great. The audience was responsive and we were on top of our game. Scott was wearing a Brewer's cap and some drunk guy who also had a Brewer's cap stood in front of Scott pointing to his own hat. Stencil put on a great set as well, Scott and I joined in on Singer's Young Friends with maracas. Some people came in from off the street to listen to us. It always feels good when that happens. Scott procured a place to stay -- his friend Zane's. Actually, it was his girlfriends house, but her and her roommates were in the process of moving out so we would have almost the entire place to ourselves. We got to Zane's house and started unpacking our personal effects. "Were is my bag?" Jared asked. "It is brown. Is it in the other car?". We looked in the other car. Not there. The wind had fallen right out of our sails. We unpacked both cars completely and sure enough, no bag. "It had the money in it" Jared said. It also had Jared's notebooks, clothes, and medication. We knew we left on the sidewalk next to Grant & Green and that it was gone forever.

I drove Jared back to the venue. This was an exercise in futility. Someone already picked it up. We knew this, but we went anyway. Jared hopped out of the car and looked around the sidewalke. No backpack. He looked despondently at the door to the now closed Grant & Green. Just then, the bartender emerged from that door with the backpack over her shoulder. "I am so glad you came back" she said. Apparently, she was trying to get ahold of one of us, but did not have our number. The bartender handed the backpack to Jared and he was very happy.