Today's Blind Items - One Night At The Border Part Two

By the time the band got off the stage it was around 230am. Last call was long gone and the booze backstage was running out. Carlos was summoned and he offered two more bottles of booze but then was closing the place down. Two bottles of booze might sound like a lot, but there were about 20 people drinking from those two bottles and they just rotated around a circle with each person taking a swig and then passing it to the next person. No ice, no mixers, just booze. No one complained and no one asked for anything else. Men, women, young and old, people just kept the stories flowing as fast as the booze. The two guys who had been up on stage singing decided they needed to commemorate this special night. Ideas were discussed and discarded. Finally they agreed on a tattoo. Not just any tattoo though. This was something special.  They decided together that only one person could do the tattoo. Unfortunately that person was in Mexico. Just across the border they said. They were not exactly sure which street but they were sure that once they got there they could find it. Nothing like wandering around a Mexican border town half-drunk in the middle of the night asking around for a tattoo guy that was only known by a nickname. Surprisingly, almost everyone in the room agreed to go. The next thing you know the group of twenty had been installed in PK’s tour bus. The driver was passed out so PK did the driving. Yeah, looking back, perhaps it was not the best idea but he said he could drive it. It was only after the first policeman pulled him over after 30 miles that he figured out how to turn the headlights on. Everyone was still buzzed and flying on the trip down.

There was no one sleeping and I don’t even remember anyone passed out. I do remember that during the entire trip down there was a porn movie playing on a loop on the television. When  conversation would lag enough all of a sudden you would hear some loud moaning and realize the porn was still playing. JL and I hung out towards the back with two of her friends, one of whom she was repeatedly trying to set me up with and another who was JL’s business partner in a venture that had nothing to do with music. This was before you needed a passport to cross the border by land. We thought that at the border, the Mexican border guards would at least want to have a look inside the bus or have everyone step out. Nope. In the middle of the night, the guard just waved the bus through and PK barely had to slow down. During the drive, RH was trying to draw the design that they both wanted on their bodies and they had a big back and forth that at one point had me look up and see that PK was taking a turn drawing and doing so while not even looking at the road. When I think about who could have died that night, it would have been a much bigger deal than the night Buddy Holly and Richie Valens died.

Final installment tomorrow