My summer with PETA2, part one.
First, three days and nine hours on a fucking bus.
June 1st - 4th.
I ran several errands on my last day in Schenectady. I filled out a change of address form at the post office; I went to the grocery store and picked up some cream cheese, bagels, and Kiss My Face sun tan spray; I took out $100 from the bank so I could have someone pay two months of my cellphone bill in advance. I had my most essential things packed in my bookbag: electronics, hygiene products, two books and a zine, a little notebook to keep notes in, my fingerboard, silverware, and my hoodie. Everything I wound up putting in my rolling luggage was clothes. I'd never packed that much clothes before, but Christ at PETA suggested bringing a lot of extra underwear and socks. Since I'm well aware I'm a smelly dude, I took his advice. To try and make sure I actually ate during the three-day bus ride, I brought along a huge container of rice mixed with black, kidney, and pinto beans and bacon bits. I took the bus down to the Greyhound station by myself with a bit of the jitters. A sketchy Juggalo pacing around while I sat on the ground inside reminded me of how great it was that I was leaving. Surprisingly, the bus was on time. Sitting across from me with his cheeks puffing in and out like a fish out of water, a young Asian guy slept, letting out the loudest, most choking and phlegmmy snore outbursts all the way to Utica. The guy sitting next to me caught me laughing to myself and told me he'd been snoring like that since Boston. I was awake and anxious, so I stayed with my eyes out the window and my headphones on, sometimes reading some of Contradictionary. I normally didn't get off at stops unless I was told I had to. In Syracuse, I found out the Carousel Mall is now being called Destiny USA. Only in America would the mall be considered a destiny. It rained a lot of the ride headed toward the mid-west. By 3:30am, I was in Cleveland at one of my least favorite Greyhound stations in the country, where bottled sodas are $2.25 a pop, the employees treat your questions as insults, and lines are subject to random searches of their carry-on bags in complete police state fashion. My container of beans and rice had been treating me well, but by that point it was beginning to stink pretty bad. The first night on a bus wasn't as bad as it could have been. I avoided contact with anyone else and mostly kept my eyes on the ankles of the single mother of two.
The next bus we got on smelled as bad as a Chinatown bus. It was almost unbearable how choked with the scent of an unchanged septic tank it was. The single mother brought along her own thing of marshmallow scented Febreze or something and continuously sprayed the back of the bus where we all sat every time the bathroom door was opened and let out a new blast of piss and whatever that blue water is supposed to be. She meant well, but it only wound up creating a new smell more intense odor that made my entire face hurt. Two bus drivers in a row made the same joke: "If you were not happy with the service, write a complaint on a $10/$20 bill and hand it to me on your way out." Our next changed bus in Columbus was packed to capacity. No one would move for the mother of two so she could sit with her kids, so I did, and wound up at a broken chair next between a redneck whose cellphone wallpaper was some generic bikini-clad blonde woman and the bathroom door where what had to have been weeks of piss had accumulated. Buses remind me how selfish people can be. The bus had no working AC and smelled like a piss-soaked alleyway from back to front. The mother again tried to combat the bathroom odor with her Febreze, but after her kids gained control of the can, I found myself gagging more on the synthetic sweet smell than the urine. Driving through Ohio was the usual highway assortment of fireworks outlets that try to maintain their sketchy allure even though they're legal and one porno super-center after another. Indiana welcomes you immediately with an obnoxious series of billboards owned by an RV salesman who is also an evangelical Christian, going between advertisements of his RV lot and reminders that you're going to hell.
By the time I got to have a stop in Indianapolis, it was daytime and I was feeling cranky due to leg pain and excruciating hunger. Because of the business relationship Greyhound drivers and McDonald's seems to have, we hadn't stopped anywhere with vegan-friendly options; rather, we stopped at a single McDonald's and then drove through giant lots of fast food chains minutes after getting back on the highway. We were running late, so our substantial layover was made into a half hour one. I was able to find a nearby Subway and finally get real food into my stomach. The driver we got from there was an angry one who would look you right in the eyes and refuse to answer your question. He proceeded to drive fast and honk every chance he got. We unfortunately had the same bus with the smelly bathroom and the broken AC. It wasn't until our last half hour on it that he opened the roof hatch to let some air in for us and to shut us up. I slept all the way to St. Louis, where I wasted a couple bucks on potato wedges that I didn't even finish. I had to walk across the way to an obscenely fancy Hilton hotel just to use an ATM. When I got back on, I found myself sitting next to a Juggalo with tattoos that at first glance looked like scrawlings he'd done himself using a BIC pen. One went down his left arm and said in big letters "DADDY'S BOY"; the other was on the back of his left hand and said "Rest in peace daddy I love you". On his right arm, of course, was a messy hatchetman with the words "Juggalo Homies" in olde gothic lettering. Being seated next to a Juggalo has become a Greyhound tradition for me, I guess. I slept a lot more. It had taken me a while, but I eventually realized my printed ticket and the route I was on matched neither routes proposed for sale online. By the time I hit Kansas City, I was running out of things to do and ways to keep myself sane. The outlets on our bus didn't work and eventually my laptop died, followed by my laptop. Then I finished the book I was reading. All I had left was admiring the darkness of the flat Kansas strip and the cool night air during a half-hour break outside of some truck stop. All I could see was the simultaneous blinking of red lights from wind turbines.
At 8am in Burlington, CO, I was able to get some french toast sticks at a Burger King. It was really beautiful in that small town. Despite being a gorgeous city, Denver's Greyhound station was as shitty as always. Thankfully, we weren't there for long thanks to how classically late our bus had gotten there. Riding through Colorado was breath-taking, honestly. It might be the most beautiful state in this country and it kept me glued to the window with my camera like a tourist almost the entire time. The humbling mountainous backdrop that sets a standard all its own compared to other beautiful states like Oregon; the way several different climates and weathers clash right before your eyes: snow-capped mountains underneath a bright sun and a blue sky; the old wooden evidence of goldmining past still clinging on to the mountains they once dominated; the animals that stand off to the sides of the road unintimidated like elk. It almost completely distracted me from the "dudes" in the back discussing "chicks" they would "smash". The sights even got to them, though, evoking lamentations like, "That shit is tight!" We had several good stops where I got off just to experience the climate and views while the smokers scurried off like crackheads to get their next hit of nicotine, including a very pregnant woman with one small child already by her side. No one had an issue with donating cigarettes to her, sadly. In one town, I had to go far off to a 7-11 for a soda and had to chase the bus down on my way back as it prepared to leave without me. I had so much stuff in there on my seat and no one said a thing about me missing. An annoying kid sitting behind me blasting metalcore music from his laptop without headphones at one point said the words, "Cocksucking bus driver. This is why I hate black people." I have no idea what provoked that sentiment, but I was amazed. In the cute little town of Grand Junction, I was able to walk off on my own for a little bit, talk on the phone with Kara and Tia, and even found a little cafe called Roasted where I was able to feed myself a delicious and healthy veggie wrap that mixed hummus with teriyaki. Outside of it was a trashcan with a sticker on it that said, "Where people can smoke without harassment." Smokers have some of the biggest victim complexes I've ever seen.
All of these were taken throughout Colorado.
Exiting Colorado for the outer desert areas of Utah, some shit went down that caused the driver to pull the bus over. I had my headphones, so I missed the beginning of this, but there was almost a stabbing due entirely to farts. An old black man sitting in the far back of the bus had been nonchalantly farting the entire ride. Even I smelled it a few times. Sitting in front of him was the pregnant woman who was constantly smoking. She was loud and obnoxious and was her own megaphone for anything and everything she observed and was annoyed by, so she did not hesitate to say things to him like, "Dayum, if you gonna be shittin' yo'self, go to the bathroom like an adult!" Somehow, this offended the old man and he retaliated with some words of his own; what words, I do not know, because by the time I took my headphones off, the annoying kid who "hated black people" was standing up, prepared to fight the old man in the pregnant smoker's honor, calling out phrases like, "I don't give three fucks!" and, "Crip gang, crip gang, crip gang!" all in series of threes like most gangstas. Despite having hated black people only an hour or so prior, I watched as he desperately tried to impress black people on the bus, even going as far as suddenly listening to hip-hop (Immortal Technique, to be specific) on his laptop nice and loud. He had a problem with the old man "disrespecting women" somehow. The old man responded by pulling out a knife while the pregnant woman got between them and called to the front, "Excuse me bus driver, this man got a knife and he about to use it!" before in a very bored tone telling the kid, "Don't do this, yo. I got a child with me and this man got a knife, it ain't worth it." I could tell she was loving the drama, though. The bus driver, who could barely speak English, came back and tried to diffuse the situation by merely asking what had happened, allowing them to talk over each other, and then accepting the blatant lie that the old man didn't have a knife on him. The kid requested to be seated further toward the front so he could "calm down". It was ridiculous. The old man never stopped farting his ass off and the pregnant woman never stopped loudly ridiculing him for it, but the kid was eventually gone and unable to mediate their interactions.
That driver gave us little to no breaks for the next half a day of driving. After three hours of driving, we got a five-minute break in a creepy little town of abandoned motels and local businesses with hand-painted signs called Green River. Then he drove for a couple hours straight. We got a ten-minute break in Parowan, NV, and then he drove for a couple more hours. I hadn't eaten anything anything since 4 or 5 in the afternoon back in Grand Junction and was starving as well as feeling totally sore and frantic. I got a bag of Doritos and a soda in hopes of calming myself down, but it didn't help. I started getting spontaneous spots of burning around my legs and ass cheeks. I could feel my ankles swelling from how long they'd been in the same awkward positions and shoes. I could hardly sleep and had little battery left on anything I brought along with me to keep occupied. Meanwhile, in the back of the bus, a young gangsta had a loud phone dispute with his "bitch-ass nigga" of a friend that lasted for about three hours and then continued through one of our breaks before hitting Las Vegas around 2 or 3 in the morning. Las Vegas was exactly what I'd expected it to be: very uniform, very bright, very smooth looking, with homeless people's bodies strewn about the outskirts like littered corpses being swept under a concrete rug. We had a half-hour break at the station there and most people were asleep across various parts of the stained floors. The workers there were unusually perky. Again, there was nothing I could eat.
I slept the hunger away until the sun had risen and we'd stopped in Barstow, CA at a--you guessed it--McDonald's. I wandered around and watched the crows, who were as big as dinosaurs and huddled together in very large murders. We were stuck in traffic for a long time and I didn't have headphones to drown out the human noises surrounding me. I was about to go insane. We had to pull over at some point because the bus had died, but it thankfully started back up a few minutes later. For a couple miles, we were lost in a thick fog that completely devoured us and our surroundings. I did somehow manage to get dropped off in Los Angeles on time, though. I got a text from someone named Ken who was supposed to be picking me up from the station and bringing me to the PETA headquarters. This was not without confusion at first, though. Chris, the guy who had organized this summer's teams and given me my interview and whatnot, never informed him of which station I was getting dropped off at. Thanks to one shared street, we couldn't find each other or talk about where to get me. I wound up walking around a long block in muggy weather through piles of Chinese food containers filled with rotting food, human-sized piles of feces, and blood-stained panties hardened to a permanent form. He eventually found me, though, riding in a small silver car owned by PETA. He was a good person to start my face-to-face relationship with PETA with. He had been with them for a while and was a nice guy. I was the first person to get into town and would be the only team member there for a while, as everyone else was normal and coming via plane later in the afternoon and evening. I shook hands with Adam, a dryly sarcastic guy who answers phones and buzzes people in through the front doors. There's a soft and fuzzy carpet when you first walk in and his desk looks like it was literally crafted from a tree. I quickly met Chris, who I had been exchanging e-mails and phone calls with for two months at that point. He looked overwhelmed and at a loss as to what to do with me. He was a busy guy and literally had several consecutive meetings throughout the day. Ken gave me a quick tour of the beautiful Bob Barker building. It's named after him because of his $2 million donation to PETA to get it. There was an office named after Pamela Anderson. There are no cubicles, but there are a lot of people doing work on computers, each row separated by fields like marketing and whatnot. Everyone there looked like a model and was sporting tattoos no matter their age. It was very businessy, but very relaxed at the same time. The building is very dog-friendly and there were at least six or seven of them laying or walking around while I was there. Going upstairs, you see a wall collage of names, varying in size signified by the amount of their donation to the organization.
Upstairs, you can go outside to the roof deck where people can sit in the shade or sun and do work. They had started setting up this summer's campaign's new tent. It looked amazing and very visually engaging. The campaign they had crafted for this summer was unlike any other past PETA2 campaign in many ways: not only was this their biggest tent in Warped history, in part thanks to Warped giving them more space than ever before, but this was the first campaign to deal with veganism and animal enterprise in its entirety rather than focusing on only one aspect of animal enterprise. The tent had a funhouse theme and the name of the campaign itself was "WTF?!" focusing in a youthful and accessible way how fucked-up the things we do to animals are. When you first walk in, you're prompted by a sign to take lots of pictures and tag them on sites like Instagram. To your right is a banner wall split between an animated picture of a man sucking milk straight from the utters of a cow and a real image of a suffering dairy cow covered in mud with her big eye glazed over in shining misery. Ahead of you is a cage with a laminated card on it saying, "HUMAN (Homo sapien)", parodying what you would see at a zoo. Kids are encouraged to take pictures in it next to a banner showing you an animated image of a human man sitting on a toilet behind bars while a monkey points at him and below it a real picture of a miserable monkey sitting on a dirty tire at a zoo. Going around the corner, I saw a picture on a hanger of a woman wearing a coat that was still in the works at that time: a 30-pound coat covered in detailed pieces of babies to signify wearing a leather coat. Kids would be encouraged to try it on and, again, take pictures and tag them online. Next to it was an animated image of an ugly blonde model wearing a coat made of babies above a graphic picture of cows having their throats slit for their skin. Finally, you have an area where whoever's in the tent stamps three bloody tears on the faces of kids in front of another wall banner of an animated woman who is half-human model and half-rabbit with pus and shit coming out of her eyes, next to a real image of a white rabbit that had undergone the standard Draize eye irritancy test that animals tested for cosmetics, household cleaning items, and medicine routinely go through. Upon exiting, you're supposed to hit the game area that is outside, which is again like a carnival. One of the things they had was a game called "Gone Doggin'" where you "fish" for puppies. They had fishing lines with strong magnets that would either catch a stuffed puppy or a very graphic picture of bloody and impaled fish from an aquafarm. Everything looked so fucking cool, much of it was very DIY despite the budget, and I was instantly excited to be a part of this particular campaign. We were going to tell kids to go vegan and talk about all of the things we do to animals. I knew right away that kids would be into this and that it really had the potential to open minds.
Surrounded by fog on the highway somewhere on our way to LA.
The PETA headquarters.
After that, I was told to go get some food. I took advantage of the opportunity. I ran into Ken again and found out that he was straightedge! He made sure to tell me the names of all the other straightedge people working inside the PETA office and it made me feel great. I smelled terribly and still had not eaten since 5pm the day before. After finding an ATM and figuring out the crosswalks, which are separated by very long blocks and terrifyingly fast and heavy traffic, I stopped in at a small cafe that was open called Hedgehog and got a big, leafy green sandwich with a cinnamon bun. It was excellent. I sat online for a little bit and then called Kara. I was so fucking nervous. Everyone I had gotten to meet so far was ridiculously nice and looked genuinely happy with what they were doing with their lives. Their confidence, determination, and work ethic intimidated the shit out of me. I started sitting and worrying about whether or not I was cut out for this thing. But I was there. So at noon, I texted Chris and asked if I should come back over and have them find something for me to do. And when I got there, they proceeded to do so. I got to meet Ryan, a very gentle and happy guy who was responsible for a lot of the technical stuff behind the WTF?! campaign. The first thing they had me do was dismantle the "Gone Doggin'" game so I could go into a back driveway and spraypaint all the PVC pipes it was made out of blue. They left me alone to do that as homeless people stepped by me to leave the giant, empty, fenced-in lot they had been sleeping in behind the next door business owner. All alone, a dapper man with two dogs and slicked-back hair showed up and asked me, "What's going on here?" When I told him, he asked me happily, "Oh, are you with PETA?!" Unfortunately, he still wasn't happy I was getting the ground or the fence blue while painting those pipes. I immediately pulled the, "I'm just an intern following orders!" line. While doing that and getting my hands completely plastered in blue paint, the weather quickly shifted from muggy to scorching hot. Next, I had to fill these bases up with rocks so they could weigh some stands down. First, I had to empty the water that was in them. I tried to do this through the dining area and, of course, wound up bringing one in that had a hole in it and spilled water everywhere. I felt like Anne Hathaway in Devil Wears Prada. Another girl on the team showed up named Tree. She was very perky and talkative and we became acquainted while I proceeded to carry out physically exhausting tasks for PETA. She was my security blanket the rest of the day.
After the pipes dried, I had to bring them upstairs and try to reassemble the entire game. While originally painting them, I had to also renumber them so they would still coincide with the directions included with them. However, one was missing a number before I painted, so I had to deduce what number it was. Well, we had forgotten a piece up on the roof, too, so all my numbers were wrong. Thankfully, this was not entirely my fault. It took me two hours to get that thing back together, renumber them, and draw a whole new diagram of directions. It was kind of fun, though, and completing the task left me feeling accomplished and good about myself, even though I also felt ugly, smelly, sore, and exhausted. Then I had the pleasure of being the only person capable of unscrewing some metal pipe, too. As soon as Chris saw the final product, he told me to take it back apart. I totally didn't want to, but it was almost funny in its unfairness. Then we spent over an hour taking everything apart and bringing it two floors down and into the back storage room, some of it by dolly and elevator. I put a small hole in the upstairs wall that I hope no one ever found out about. The day finally ended and it was anti-climactic in many ways. I had already developed intense sunburn across the back of my neck from being out in the hot sun all day on my hands and knees. It felt fulfilling, though. It had been such a long time since I'd last been physically exerted. I walked down the street with Tree to our hotel, which is completely paid for by PETA. I was supposed to be sharing my two-bed room with two other guys, but neither of them had showed up yet. Miraculously, the hotel was next door to a place called Vegan House, which as you probably assumed was 100% vegan. I was finally living the suite life of Zack and Cody, except vegan. While Tree and I had made plans to eat, we both wound up just crashing in our room. I made long phone calls to my friends back at home and sat online, enjoying the AC on full blast. I was too exhausted to even take the showed I knew I desperately needed.
I met my tour administrators, Ingrid and Vivian. Both them were really sweet and cute. They would, as a team, be running our group for the entire summer after having done several tours together themselves. I liked knowing they were our bosses right away. Later that night, I met back up with Tree and Ingrid and some of the other teammates at Vegan House for dinner. I got to meet Tayler from Chicago, Kelli from some little town in Illinois, and Katie who was actually local. The company was nice and it was cool to meet some of the others, though I didn't feel like I fit in and being around women always makes me feel even more insecure. Per the suggestion of several people at the PETA office, I got some crab rangoon and a giant plate of jasmine rice topped with various vegan analogs for meats like fish and even shrimp. Everything was delicious, but vegan shrimp tasted disgusting and creepy. Granted I have never tried real shrimp before. On our way out, we ran into Sacha, a tall and heavily tattooed kid with empty stretched ears and a low eye lid blase attitude that I immediately hated. In fact, I zoomed past him and returned to my room, where I ran into my other roommate, Bo, a tall and lanky kid who within a second I assumed would also be terrible. I asked him to bring me back a soda, though, and he did. When he got back, he asked me how I was doing and next thing I knew we were digressing from one topic to another, discovering how much we had in common with each other. He was fiercely sarcastic and very intelligent, and straightedge to boot. He was full of anger, too, which made me feel even more comfortable around him. He came from a small town in Maryland and had just recently finished up a college tour for PETA. He was so passionate. I basically fell in love with the kid that night. It was way later when our other roommate, Michael, showed up from Kalamazoo. He was some variation of Latino and ridiculously handsome with long hair and the beginning of a well crafted beard. He was wearing a fedora with feathers in it, toe shoes, and came with an acoustic guitar in his hand along with all his other stuff. He was a nice kid and jumped right into the conversation about music Bo and I were having. He got his guitar out and played covers of Eminem, TLC, and Bayside for us. It was so weird. Unfortunately, alongside Kelli, Michael was a vegetarian, and we found out that night that he was very resistant to the idea of actually going vegan. The idea of him and her preaching veganism without being vegans themselves was strange to me. Of course, PETA2 requires its tour members to be vegan at least for the duration of the tour. We stayed up way later than we probably should have that night. Even after all the lights were out, we couldn't stop talking. Bo insisted on bringing Pokemon up every chance he got. I could feel the comradery right away. It was nice.
Yes, a free stay at a hotel that is next door to a fucking vegan restaurant.
Top: Michael; bottom: Bo.
Oh, and I made this thing that I think should be a patch or shirt or sticker while on the bus...
June 1st - 4th.
I ran several errands on my last day in Schenectady. I filled out a change of address form at the post office; I went to the grocery store and picked up some cream cheese, bagels, and Kiss My Face sun tan spray; I took out $100 from the bank so I could have someone pay two months of my cellphone bill in advance. I had my most essential things packed in my bookbag: electronics, hygiene products, two books and a zine, a little notebook to keep notes in, my fingerboard, silverware, and my hoodie. Everything I wound up putting in my rolling luggage was clothes. I'd never packed that much clothes before, but Christ at PETA suggested bringing a lot of extra underwear and socks. Since I'm well aware I'm a smelly dude, I took his advice. To try and make sure I actually ate during the three-day bus ride, I brought along a huge container of rice mixed with black, kidney, and pinto beans and bacon bits. I took the bus down to the Greyhound station by myself with a bit of the jitters. A sketchy Juggalo pacing around while I sat on the ground inside reminded me of how great it was that I was leaving. Surprisingly, the bus was on time. Sitting across from me with his cheeks puffing in and out like a fish out of water, a young Asian guy slept, letting out the loudest, most choking and phlegmmy snore outbursts all the way to Utica. The guy sitting next to me caught me laughing to myself and told me he'd been snoring like that since Boston. I was awake and anxious, so I stayed with my eyes out the window and my headphones on, sometimes reading some of Contradictionary. I normally didn't get off at stops unless I was told I had to. In Syracuse, I found out the Carousel Mall is now being called Destiny USA. Only in America would the mall be considered a destiny. It rained a lot of the ride headed toward the mid-west. By 3:30am, I was in Cleveland at one of my least favorite Greyhound stations in the country, where bottled sodas are $2.25 a pop, the employees treat your questions as insults, and lines are subject to random searches of their carry-on bags in complete police state fashion. My container of beans and rice had been treating me well, but by that point it was beginning to stink pretty bad. The first night on a bus wasn't as bad as it could have been. I avoided contact with anyone else and mostly kept my eyes on the ankles of the single mother of two.
The next bus we got on smelled as bad as a Chinatown bus. It was almost unbearable how choked with the scent of an unchanged septic tank it was. The single mother brought along her own thing of marshmallow scented Febreze or something and continuously sprayed the back of the bus where we all sat every time the bathroom door was opened and let out a new blast of piss and whatever that blue water is supposed to be. She meant well, but it only wound up creating a new smell more intense odor that made my entire face hurt. Two bus drivers in a row made the same joke: "If you were not happy with the service, write a complaint on a $10/$20 bill and hand it to me on your way out." Our next changed bus in Columbus was packed to capacity. No one would move for the mother of two so she could sit with her kids, so I did, and wound up at a broken chair next between a redneck whose cellphone wallpaper was some generic bikini-clad blonde woman and the bathroom door where what had to have been weeks of piss had accumulated. Buses remind me how selfish people can be. The bus had no working AC and smelled like a piss-soaked alleyway from back to front. The mother again tried to combat the bathroom odor with her Febreze, but after her kids gained control of the can, I found myself gagging more on the synthetic sweet smell than the urine. Driving through Ohio was the usual highway assortment of fireworks outlets that try to maintain their sketchy allure even though they're legal and one porno super-center after another. Indiana welcomes you immediately with an obnoxious series of billboards owned by an RV salesman who is also an evangelical Christian, going between advertisements of his RV lot and reminders that you're going to hell.
By the time I got to have a stop in Indianapolis, it was daytime and I was feeling cranky due to leg pain and excruciating hunger. Because of the business relationship Greyhound drivers and McDonald's seems to have, we hadn't stopped anywhere with vegan-friendly options; rather, we stopped at a single McDonald's and then drove through giant lots of fast food chains minutes after getting back on the highway. We were running late, so our substantial layover was made into a half hour one. I was able to find a nearby Subway and finally get real food into my stomach. The driver we got from there was an angry one who would look you right in the eyes and refuse to answer your question. He proceeded to drive fast and honk every chance he got. We unfortunately had the same bus with the smelly bathroom and the broken AC. It wasn't until our last half hour on it that he opened the roof hatch to let some air in for us and to shut us up. I slept all the way to St. Louis, where I wasted a couple bucks on potato wedges that I didn't even finish. I had to walk across the way to an obscenely fancy Hilton hotel just to use an ATM. When I got back on, I found myself sitting next to a Juggalo with tattoos that at first glance looked like scrawlings he'd done himself using a BIC pen. One went down his left arm and said in big letters "DADDY'S BOY"; the other was on the back of his left hand and said "Rest in peace daddy I love you". On his right arm, of course, was a messy hatchetman with the words "Juggalo Homies" in olde gothic lettering. Being seated next to a Juggalo has become a Greyhound tradition for me, I guess. I slept a lot more. It had taken me a while, but I eventually realized my printed ticket and the route I was on matched neither routes proposed for sale online. By the time I hit Kansas City, I was running out of things to do and ways to keep myself sane. The outlets on our bus didn't work and eventually my laptop died, followed by my laptop. Then I finished the book I was reading. All I had left was admiring the darkness of the flat Kansas strip and the cool night air during a half-hour break outside of some truck stop. All I could see was the simultaneous blinking of red lights from wind turbines.
At 8am in Burlington, CO, I was able to get some french toast sticks at a Burger King. It was really beautiful in that small town. Despite being a gorgeous city, Denver's Greyhound station was as shitty as always. Thankfully, we weren't there for long thanks to how classically late our bus had gotten there. Riding through Colorado was breath-taking, honestly. It might be the most beautiful state in this country and it kept me glued to the window with my camera like a tourist almost the entire time. The humbling mountainous backdrop that sets a standard all its own compared to other beautiful states like Oregon; the way several different climates and weathers clash right before your eyes: snow-capped mountains underneath a bright sun and a blue sky; the old wooden evidence of goldmining past still clinging on to the mountains they once dominated; the animals that stand off to the sides of the road unintimidated like elk. It almost completely distracted me from the "dudes" in the back discussing "chicks" they would "smash". The sights even got to them, though, evoking lamentations like, "That shit is tight!" We had several good stops where I got off just to experience the climate and views while the smokers scurried off like crackheads to get their next hit of nicotine, including a very pregnant woman with one small child already by her side. No one had an issue with donating cigarettes to her, sadly. In one town, I had to go far off to a 7-11 for a soda and had to chase the bus down on my way back as it prepared to leave without me. I had so much stuff in there on my seat and no one said a thing about me missing. An annoying kid sitting behind me blasting metalcore music from his laptop without headphones at one point said the words, "Cocksucking bus driver. This is why I hate black people." I have no idea what provoked that sentiment, but I was amazed. In the cute little town of Grand Junction, I was able to walk off on my own for a little bit, talk on the phone with Kara and Tia, and even found a little cafe called Roasted where I was able to feed myself a delicious and healthy veggie wrap that mixed hummus with teriyaki. Outside of it was a trashcan with a sticker on it that said, "Where people can smoke without harassment." Smokers have some of the biggest victim complexes I've ever seen.
All of these were taken throughout Colorado.
Exiting Colorado for the outer desert areas of Utah, some shit went down that caused the driver to pull the bus over. I had my headphones, so I missed the beginning of this, but there was almost a stabbing due entirely to farts. An old black man sitting in the far back of the bus had been nonchalantly farting the entire ride. Even I smelled it a few times. Sitting in front of him was the pregnant woman who was constantly smoking. She was loud and obnoxious and was her own megaphone for anything and everything she observed and was annoyed by, so she did not hesitate to say things to him like, "Dayum, if you gonna be shittin' yo'self, go to the bathroom like an adult!" Somehow, this offended the old man and he retaliated with some words of his own; what words, I do not know, because by the time I took my headphones off, the annoying kid who "hated black people" was standing up, prepared to fight the old man in the pregnant smoker's honor, calling out phrases like, "I don't give three fucks!" and, "Crip gang, crip gang, crip gang!" all in series of threes like most gangstas. Despite having hated black people only an hour or so prior, I watched as he desperately tried to impress black people on the bus, even going as far as suddenly listening to hip-hop (Immortal Technique, to be specific) on his laptop nice and loud. He had a problem with the old man "disrespecting women" somehow. The old man responded by pulling out a knife while the pregnant woman got between them and called to the front, "Excuse me bus driver, this man got a knife and he about to use it!" before in a very bored tone telling the kid, "Don't do this, yo. I got a child with me and this man got a knife, it ain't worth it." I could tell she was loving the drama, though. The bus driver, who could barely speak English, came back and tried to diffuse the situation by merely asking what had happened, allowing them to talk over each other, and then accepting the blatant lie that the old man didn't have a knife on him. The kid requested to be seated further toward the front so he could "calm down". It was ridiculous. The old man never stopped farting his ass off and the pregnant woman never stopped loudly ridiculing him for it, but the kid was eventually gone and unable to mediate their interactions.
That driver gave us little to no breaks for the next half a day of driving. After three hours of driving, we got a five-minute break in a creepy little town of abandoned motels and local businesses with hand-painted signs called Green River. Then he drove for a couple hours straight. We got a ten-minute break in Parowan, NV, and then he drove for a couple more hours. I hadn't eaten anything anything since 4 or 5 in the afternoon back in Grand Junction and was starving as well as feeling totally sore and frantic. I got a bag of Doritos and a soda in hopes of calming myself down, but it didn't help. I started getting spontaneous spots of burning around my legs and ass cheeks. I could feel my ankles swelling from how long they'd been in the same awkward positions and shoes. I could hardly sleep and had little battery left on anything I brought along with me to keep occupied. Meanwhile, in the back of the bus, a young gangsta had a loud phone dispute with his "bitch-ass nigga" of a friend that lasted for about three hours and then continued through one of our breaks before hitting Las Vegas around 2 or 3 in the morning. Las Vegas was exactly what I'd expected it to be: very uniform, very bright, very smooth looking, with homeless people's bodies strewn about the outskirts like littered corpses being swept under a concrete rug. We had a half-hour break at the station there and most people were asleep across various parts of the stained floors. The workers there were unusually perky. Again, there was nothing I could eat.
I slept the hunger away until the sun had risen and we'd stopped in Barstow, CA at a--you guessed it--McDonald's. I wandered around and watched the crows, who were as big as dinosaurs and huddled together in very large murders. We were stuck in traffic for a long time and I didn't have headphones to drown out the human noises surrounding me. I was about to go insane. We had to pull over at some point because the bus had died, but it thankfully started back up a few minutes later. For a couple miles, we were lost in a thick fog that completely devoured us and our surroundings. I did somehow manage to get dropped off in Los Angeles on time, though. I got a text from someone named Ken who was supposed to be picking me up from the station and bringing me to the PETA headquarters. This was not without confusion at first, though. Chris, the guy who had organized this summer's teams and given me my interview and whatnot, never informed him of which station I was getting dropped off at. Thanks to one shared street, we couldn't find each other or talk about where to get me. I wound up walking around a long block in muggy weather through piles of Chinese food containers filled with rotting food, human-sized piles of feces, and blood-stained panties hardened to a permanent form. He eventually found me, though, riding in a small silver car owned by PETA. He was a good person to start my face-to-face relationship with PETA with. He had been with them for a while and was a nice guy. I was the first person to get into town and would be the only team member there for a while, as everyone else was normal and coming via plane later in the afternoon and evening. I shook hands with Adam, a dryly sarcastic guy who answers phones and buzzes people in through the front doors. There's a soft and fuzzy carpet when you first walk in and his desk looks like it was literally crafted from a tree. I quickly met Chris, who I had been exchanging e-mails and phone calls with for two months at that point. He looked overwhelmed and at a loss as to what to do with me. He was a busy guy and literally had several consecutive meetings throughout the day. Ken gave me a quick tour of the beautiful Bob Barker building. It's named after him because of his $2 million donation to PETA to get it. There was an office named after Pamela Anderson. There are no cubicles, but there are a lot of people doing work on computers, each row separated by fields like marketing and whatnot. Everyone there looked like a model and was sporting tattoos no matter their age. It was very businessy, but very relaxed at the same time. The building is very dog-friendly and there were at least six or seven of them laying or walking around while I was there. Going upstairs, you see a wall collage of names, varying in size signified by the amount of their donation to the organization.
Upstairs, you can go outside to the roof deck where people can sit in the shade or sun and do work. They had started setting up this summer's campaign's new tent. It looked amazing and very visually engaging. The campaign they had crafted for this summer was unlike any other past PETA2 campaign in many ways: not only was this their biggest tent in Warped history, in part thanks to Warped giving them more space than ever before, but this was the first campaign to deal with veganism and animal enterprise in its entirety rather than focusing on only one aspect of animal enterprise. The tent had a funhouse theme and the name of the campaign itself was "WTF?!" focusing in a youthful and accessible way how fucked-up the things we do to animals are. When you first walk in, you're prompted by a sign to take lots of pictures and tag them on sites like Instagram. To your right is a banner wall split between an animated picture of a man sucking milk straight from the utters of a cow and a real image of a suffering dairy cow covered in mud with her big eye glazed over in shining misery. Ahead of you is a cage with a laminated card on it saying, "HUMAN (Homo sapien)", parodying what you would see at a zoo. Kids are encouraged to take pictures in it next to a banner showing you an animated image of a human man sitting on a toilet behind bars while a monkey points at him and below it a real picture of a miserable monkey sitting on a dirty tire at a zoo. Going around the corner, I saw a picture on a hanger of a woman wearing a coat that was still in the works at that time: a 30-pound coat covered in detailed pieces of babies to signify wearing a leather coat. Kids would be encouraged to try it on and, again, take pictures and tag them online. Next to it was an animated image of an ugly blonde model wearing a coat made of babies above a graphic picture of cows having their throats slit for their skin. Finally, you have an area where whoever's in the tent stamps three bloody tears on the faces of kids in front of another wall banner of an animated woman who is half-human model and half-rabbit with pus and shit coming out of her eyes, next to a real image of a white rabbit that had undergone the standard Draize eye irritancy test that animals tested for cosmetics, household cleaning items, and medicine routinely go through. Upon exiting, you're supposed to hit the game area that is outside, which is again like a carnival. One of the things they had was a game called "Gone Doggin'" where you "fish" for puppies. They had fishing lines with strong magnets that would either catch a stuffed puppy or a very graphic picture of bloody and impaled fish from an aquafarm. Everything looked so fucking cool, much of it was very DIY despite the budget, and I was instantly excited to be a part of this particular campaign. We were going to tell kids to go vegan and talk about all of the things we do to animals. I knew right away that kids would be into this and that it really had the potential to open minds.
Surrounded by fog on the highway somewhere on our way to LA.
The PETA headquarters.
After that, I was told to go get some food. I took advantage of the opportunity. I ran into Ken again and found out that he was straightedge! He made sure to tell me the names of all the other straightedge people working inside the PETA office and it made me feel great. I smelled terribly and still had not eaten since 5pm the day before. After finding an ATM and figuring out the crosswalks, which are separated by very long blocks and terrifyingly fast and heavy traffic, I stopped in at a small cafe that was open called Hedgehog and got a big, leafy green sandwich with a cinnamon bun. It was excellent. I sat online for a little bit and then called Kara. I was so fucking nervous. Everyone I had gotten to meet so far was ridiculously nice and looked genuinely happy with what they were doing with their lives. Their confidence, determination, and work ethic intimidated the shit out of me. I started sitting and worrying about whether or not I was cut out for this thing. But I was there. So at noon, I texted Chris and asked if I should come back over and have them find something for me to do. And when I got there, they proceeded to do so. I got to meet Ryan, a very gentle and happy guy who was responsible for a lot of the technical stuff behind the WTF?! campaign. The first thing they had me do was dismantle the "Gone Doggin'" game so I could go into a back driveway and spraypaint all the PVC pipes it was made out of blue. They left me alone to do that as homeless people stepped by me to leave the giant, empty, fenced-in lot they had been sleeping in behind the next door business owner. All alone, a dapper man with two dogs and slicked-back hair showed up and asked me, "What's going on here?" When I told him, he asked me happily, "Oh, are you with PETA?!" Unfortunately, he still wasn't happy I was getting the ground or the fence blue while painting those pipes. I immediately pulled the, "I'm just an intern following orders!" line. While doing that and getting my hands completely plastered in blue paint, the weather quickly shifted from muggy to scorching hot. Next, I had to fill these bases up with rocks so they could weigh some stands down. First, I had to empty the water that was in them. I tried to do this through the dining area and, of course, wound up bringing one in that had a hole in it and spilled water everywhere. I felt like Anne Hathaway in Devil Wears Prada. Another girl on the team showed up named Tree. She was very perky and talkative and we became acquainted while I proceeded to carry out physically exhausting tasks for PETA. She was my security blanket the rest of the day.
After the pipes dried, I had to bring them upstairs and try to reassemble the entire game. While originally painting them, I had to also renumber them so they would still coincide with the directions included with them. However, one was missing a number before I painted, so I had to deduce what number it was. Well, we had forgotten a piece up on the roof, too, so all my numbers were wrong. Thankfully, this was not entirely my fault. It took me two hours to get that thing back together, renumber them, and draw a whole new diagram of directions. It was kind of fun, though, and completing the task left me feeling accomplished and good about myself, even though I also felt ugly, smelly, sore, and exhausted. Then I had the pleasure of being the only person capable of unscrewing some metal pipe, too. As soon as Chris saw the final product, he told me to take it back apart. I totally didn't want to, but it was almost funny in its unfairness. Then we spent over an hour taking everything apart and bringing it two floors down and into the back storage room, some of it by dolly and elevator. I put a small hole in the upstairs wall that I hope no one ever found out about. The day finally ended and it was anti-climactic in many ways. I had already developed intense sunburn across the back of my neck from being out in the hot sun all day on my hands and knees. It felt fulfilling, though. It had been such a long time since I'd last been physically exerted. I walked down the street with Tree to our hotel, which is completely paid for by PETA. I was supposed to be sharing my two-bed room with two other guys, but neither of them had showed up yet. Miraculously, the hotel was next door to a place called Vegan House, which as you probably assumed was 100% vegan. I was finally living the suite life of Zack and Cody, except vegan. While Tree and I had made plans to eat, we both wound up just crashing in our room. I made long phone calls to my friends back at home and sat online, enjoying the AC on full blast. I was too exhausted to even take the showed I knew I desperately needed.
I met my tour administrators, Ingrid and Vivian. Both them were really sweet and cute. They would, as a team, be running our group for the entire summer after having done several tours together themselves. I liked knowing they were our bosses right away. Later that night, I met back up with Tree and Ingrid and some of the other teammates at Vegan House for dinner. I got to meet Tayler from Chicago, Kelli from some little town in Illinois, and Katie who was actually local. The company was nice and it was cool to meet some of the others, though I didn't feel like I fit in and being around women always makes me feel even more insecure. Per the suggestion of several people at the PETA office, I got some crab rangoon and a giant plate of jasmine rice topped with various vegan analogs for meats like fish and even shrimp. Everything was delicious, but vegan shrimp tasted disgusting and creepy. Granted I have never tried real shrimp before. On our way out, we ran into Sacha, a tall and heavily tattooed kid with empty stretched ears and a low eye lid blase attitude that I immediately hated. In fact, I zoomed past him and returned to my room, where I ran into my other roommate, Bo, a tall and lanky kid who within a second I assumed would also be terrible. I asked him to bring me back a soda, though, and he did. When he got back, he asked me how I was doing and next thing I knew we were digressing from one topic to another, discovering how much we had in common with each other. He was fiercely sarcastic and very intelligent, and straightedge to boot. He was full of anger, too, which made me feel even more comfortable around him. He came from a small town in Maryland and had just recently finished up a college tour for PETA. He was so passionate. I basically fell in love with the kid that night. It was way later when our other roommate, Michael, showed up from Kalamazoo. He was some variation of Latino and ridiculously handsome with long hair and the beginning of a well crafted beard. He was wearing a fedora with feathers in it, toe shoes, and came with an acoustic guitar in his hand along with all his other stuff. He was a nice kid and jumped right into the conversation about music Bo and I were having. He got his guitar out and played covers of Eminem, TLC, and Bayside for us. It was so weird. Unfortunately, alongside Kelli, Michael was a vegetarian, and we found out that night that he was very resistant to the idea of actually going vegan. The idea of him and her preaching veganism without being vegans themselves was strange to me. Of course, PETA2 requires its tour members to be vegan at least for the duration of the tour. We stayed up way later than we probably should have that night. Even after all the lights were out, we couldn't stop talking. Bo insisted on bringing Pokemon up every chance he got. I could feel the comradery right away. It was nice.
Yes, a free stay at a hotel that is next door to a fucking vegan restaurant.
Top: Michael; bottom: Bo.
Oh, and I made this thing that I think should be a patch or shirt or sticker while on the bus...