Margarita
Sunset Follower
This was possibly the funniest thing that I've ever personally witnessed/experienced, and a highlight of my California wanderings.
It was early June, right before the Shoreline Amphitheater's Furthur Show, to which I was headed with a large quantity of hippies and dogs, all of us packed into a half-school bus (The Short Bus).That morning, the owner of the bus stole all of our faces and we proceeded to drive south from Nor Cal to Shoreline for the show.
When we stopped in a Safeway parking lot to clean out the bus, one of the hippies told us that he had a pretty serious infection that he had been ignoring for a few days, but it had gotten too painful to continue doing so. We thought it was a brown recluse bite, so we just said, dude, get back in the bus, we're going to the hospital.
Of course, we had nothing more than a general idea of where the hospital might be, and were were all tripping face by this point. Everyone was laughing about the situation, including the guy with the wound.
In typical fashion, we left the parking lot, headed for our general idea of the hospital's location. We were on a two-lane road (two each direction that is) and stopped at a red light in the left lane. The bus driver suddenly opens the doors of the bus and gets the attention of the driver of the SUV next to us. The kid sitting on the steps of the doorway (we were packed like sardines) calls out, "Which way to the hospital?!"
The expression on the woman's face was priceless. She first looked shocked, then concerned, and proceeded to give us directions. But the light turned green before she could finish, and everyone started moving. Somewhere in the back of the bus a bowl was being passed around, with everyone sort of half-concentrating on the ridiculous situation.
Best moment? Ended up, we were driving about 30 mph, getting directions from the vehicle that was keeping pace with us in the right lane, everyone tripping and laughing hysterically, smoking, shouting expressions of gratitude to the helpful driver next to us, generally spewing nonsense and making a scene in traffic.
Add to this the fact that we kept finding ticks on the bus because we accidentally parked for the night in a tick field, and we spent a good amount of time killing them with lighter flames and wrenching them off each other's backs.
Because of the non-urgent but kind of important nature of the injury, to everyone it seemed like we had all the time in the world. It took us between 1 and 2 hours to get to the hospital, counting the lunch and gasjugging break we took. The guy we dropped off at the hospital had a long scraggly beard, a half-coyote dog, baggy pants and a skirt overtop of them, and we didn't know his real name, just his road handle. He got medical treatment but finding him was another matter because he didn't have a phone and the hospital wouldn't tell us shit because we could only describe him.We finally found him. He told us it was not a spider bite, but MRSA, and our next stop was a shopping district where we could spange to get money to buy his Rx. To top it off, I forgot I had strapped a "Need food" sign to my backpack, and while walking through the lot, some middle aged woman stopped and gave me her bag of groceries... containing a loaf of dank bread and a tub of hummus.
Good times!
It was early June, right before the Shoreline Amphitheater's Furthur Show, to which I was headed with a large quantity of hippies and dogs, all of us packed into a half-school bus (The Short Bus).That morning, the owner of the bus stole all of our faces and we proceeded to drive south from Nor Cal to Shoreline for the show.
When we stopped in a Safeway parking lot to clean out the bus, one of the hippies told us that he had a pretty serious infection that he had been ignoring for a few days, but it had gotten too painful to continue doing so. We thought it was a brown recluse bite, so we just said, dude, get back in the bus, we're going to the hospital.
Of course, we had nothing more than a general idea of where the hospital might be, and were were all tripping face by this point. Everyone was laughing about the situation, including the guy with the wound.
In typical fashion, we left the parking lot, headed for our general idea of the hospital's location. We were on a two-lane road (two each direction that is) and stopped at a red light in the left lane. The bus driver suddenly opens the doors of the bus and gets the attention of the driver of the SUV next to us. The kid sitting on the steps of the doorway (we were packed like sardines) calls out, "Which way to the hospital?!"
The expression on the woman's face was priceless. She first looked shocked, then concerned, and proceeded to give us directions. But the light turned green before she could finish, and everyone started moving. Somewhere in the back of the bus a bowl was being passed around, with everyone sort of half-concentrating on the ridiculous situation.
Best moment? Ended up, we were driving about 30 mph, getting directions from the vehicle that was keeping pace with us in the right lane, everyone tripping and laughing hysterically, smoking, shouting expressions of gratitude to the helpful driver next to us, generally spewing nonsense and making a scene in traffic.
Add to this the fact that we kept finding ticks on the bus because we accidentally parked for the night in a tick field, and we spent a good amount of time killing them with lighter flames and wrenching them off each other's backs.
Because of the non-urgent but kind of important nature of the injury, to everyone it seemed like we had all the time in the world. It took us between 1 and 2 hours to get to the hospital, counting the lunch and gasjugging break we took. The guy we dropped off at the hospital had a long scraggly beard, a half-coyote dog, baggy pants and a skirt overtop of them, and we didn't know his real name, just his road handle. He got medical treatment but finding him was another matter because he didn't have a phone and the hospital wouldn't tell us shit because we could only describe him.We finally found him. He told us it was not a spider bite, but MRSA, and our next stop was a shopping district where we could spange to get money to buy his Rx. To top it off, I forgot I had strapped a "Need food" sign to my backpack, and while walking through the lot, some middle aged woman stopped and gave me her bag of groceries... containing a loaf of dank bread and a tub of hummus.
Good times!
