26

Borderline Thinking

October 1, '98

From the Hencorp Travelogue,

Dear Diary, 9:00 am, Thursday Sept 24th, 1998, Toronto:
What an exciting day this! Tonight we leave for NEW YORK CITY to do a gig. We have a tour bus and everything. We've got the paperwork all arranged for our border crossing. Mimi's making food for the bus and we can sleep in the bunks and wake up in NYC! There should be no traffic cause we're travelling at night, and we'll have all day to hang out in the city before our big gig. We brought towels so we can have showers at a friend's place before the soundcheck. We can hardly sleep we're so excited!

Thurs 11:15 pm.
Here comes the bus down Bathurst St. towards Mimi's, only 15 minutes late! What a great harbinger. We're all ready to get going to NYC!

Thurs. 11:45 pm, Toronto's west end:
We just picked up our guitarist at the Old Mill after his gig and now we're on the road to fame and fortune in THE BIG APPLE! MAN is this ever exciting!!!! There's me (Don), Mike Billard, Paul Pasmore, Mike White, Geoff Young, Mary Margaret O'Hara - what a cast of characters! This bus is huge!

Fri. 1:15 am, Niagara Falls:
We're having a bit of trouble at US Immigration. I think because it's so late at night the border guards might be kinda bored. I'm sure we can work it out, although we have a tough guy here. It seems he doesn't like an aspect of our work visa. (One of our guys was sick and we had to make a substitution. We have an official letter about that.)

Unfortunately, although I go over this letter very slowly with the man (I'm unconvinced that he knows the meaning of the words 'reciprocal agreement'), he won't accept its legitimacy. We experience, as a group, a distinct sinking feeling.

Fri. 1:25 am:
Uh oh, Mary Margaret just asked him a question and he said, no kidding,
"Are you mockin' me down?"
Oh boy.
Woops, he just said it again, only louder. "ARE YOU MOCKIN' ME DOWN?" Oh dear ... he just asked her if she was hard of hearing.

Fri. 2:10 am:
We're still standing in US immigration, an hour later. At least most of us are standing. My head is on a table, in abject dismay. I'm trying to get the immigration guy, Vigilante Man, to feel sorry for me, from a distance. But feeling sorry for people is not his thing. The band thinks I've succumbed. Vig Man tells Paul, who is trying to communicate with him, about the time a Canadian guitar player tried to come through. Billy Ray Cyrus's guitar player had gotten sick and this guy was asked to fill in. It was this geetar player's (self-described) chance at a big break, something he'd probably dreamt of for a long time. The US immigration man sent him home cause he didn't appear to have the right paperwork. He tells Paul this story with no small sense of pride.

Fri. 2:20 am.
Another customs official, a woman, who's also tough as nails, just said to a group of Oriental people (who she's refusing entry), "Don't YOU PEOPLE ever sleep?"

Fri. 2:30 am
Despite great and overly polite efforts on our part, an official letter from the Canadian Consulate in New York explaining what it is we're doing down there, work visas, and our telling him that if we wait till morning we might not make it to this gig, he says 'there's nothing I can do'. He turns us back. We're told we have to wait till 8:00 am to talk to the visa place in Vermont, to see if they'll okay this controversial substitution of Geoff for Rob. He doesn't actually know how long that could take. For all we know, it might take a week.

Fri. 5:45 am, a parking lot near the Falls, Canadian side:
It's kinda hard to sleep in a bunk on a stationary bus when you don't know if you've just wasted a month and a lot of money getting ready for a gig that's in serious jeopardy because of an old salmon or pork dispute between Canada and the US.

6:30 am:
Standing in the dark in the mist of Niagara Falls, we call Andrea, our connection at the New York Consulate, waking her up at home with the bad news. She gets right on the case. At 8:30 it's all cleared up (our substitution paperwork was perfectly legit, it turns out). We get through without even being asked to get off the bus. The new shift doesn't care - they like our visa and our letter from the consulate. The substitution issues never comes up, and we've just wasted close to 8 hours.

Fri. 5:30 pm, New Jersey:
We've been driving all day. Because it's now rush hour, the lineup into the Lincoln Tunnel is in gridlock. Bad arterial cholesterol. Lincoln needs a quadruple bypass.

Fri. 7:00 pm, Manhattan:
Traffic in Manhattan, vehicular and pedestrian, is totally out of control. His Purpleness is at Madison Square Gardens, which we pass, slowly. The U.N is full of world leaders (none of whom make it to the Bottom Line). In combo with an impenetrable labyrinth of one way streets around the club, we don't get there till after 8:00 pm, 2.5 hours after we lined up for the Lincoln Tunnel. We're supposed to be onstage in 15 minutes and we've been on the road for 21 hours.

8:05 pm, parked across from 15 E. 4th St., Greenwich Village:
The owner of the Bottom Line gets on the bus and is VERY nice to us. He says 'take your time, wash up, get some food if you need it, we have people to move your gear in, relax'. Unreal. This ain't The Horseshoe. Andrea is standing there with a list, taking food orders. Phenomenal. We mosey in to the club and set up. The emcee, Tom Metuzals, explains to the audience that we'll be doing a soundcheck in front of them. No probs. We play, take a break, do the second show.

Sat. 1:30 am:
Andrea takes us out to eat. The gig was great. We did an encore after both shows. When we hit the loud section in the song 'Four Eyes Only', Mary Margaret hit the deck, as if the force of the music had blown her over. We get a chuckle out of a preview listing in Time Out mag about our gig: "...The Henrys (a group whose name does not give us the highest of hopes)..." We climb back onto the bus and head home.

Saturday 7:00 am, just west of Albany, NY:
Paul and I are sitting in the bus, which is parked at a truck stop. He asks me if we have any more gigs. I tell him we might be doing a concert near Stratford, Ontario, in a little town called Sebringville. But it's not yet confirmed. A few minutes later a truck pulls up beside us. Perfectly framed in the bus window we're sitting beside is the name of a trucking company and below, its home base: Sebringville, Ontario. Confirmation enough.

Sat. 8:30 am:
Feeling a little bit grungey, Geoff says "I'm sure glad I brought that towel."

Sat. 1:30 pm, Niagara Falls border crossing:
A nice kid from Canadian Customs climbs on the bus to check our papers.
He says, "What's the name of the band?"
"The Henrys."
"What?"
"The Henrys."
"Pardon?"
"The Henrys."
He smiles sheepishly (he's never heard of us), and waves us on It's good to be home. Lessons learned: 1. Cross the border at Lewiston, 2. Lie about everything and 3. Roll with the punches, it might actually work out..

See you in Sebringville.

Our NY trip photo gallery

 

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