Planet of Sound
Meeting The Pixies part 3/4 of 3/4
It’s October 1992 and I have one of the weirdest jobs I will ever have. I am 20 years old, in year three of a six-year undergrad degree in Creative Writing. I still don’t have an ID that says I can drink but I do have a live-in alcoholic boyfriend four years my senior, a Mechanical Engineering major named Matt. We love each other and have spectacular sex and he is incredibly jealous, which is terrifying but will end up curing me of jealousy forever.
He drinks one quart of PBR followed by a quart of Olde English every night (40s aren’t legal in Florida). I smoke a lot of weed and have done a lot of acid and mushrooms. Matt only drinks, doesn’t do drugs because of a bad experience he had with Robotussin.
At this point, his jealousy isn’t quite scary yet. We live with another couple and they have violent fights where they throw bacon and an answering machine at each other. I am concerned for them but I am also very busy having sex and being in love, listening to PJ Harvey and the Butthole Surfers and Leonard Cohen, reading Brautigan and Philip K. Dick and Jeanette Winterson and Susan Minot and generally being an English major in the 1990s.
My weird job is dealing blackjack.
This company places blackjack tables, manned by coeds in white blouses and black skirts, in a wide variety of bars, clubs, and restaurants in the Tampa Bay Area. Like 40s, gambling is not legal in Florida. We get around this by selling our patrons chips to play with, which they gamble away or give back at the end of the night. When I first start doing this job, we are able to give vouchers to customers who want to walk away while they are still in the black, so that they can cash them in for chips to pay again at one of our tables at a future date, but then the lawyers decide that this counts as gambling.
So myself and my fellow dealers (including my friends Therese and Toni, who I get jobs with the company as well) are basically like human slot machines for lonely people — mostly men — at these establishments, who pay money to play cards with a comely young woman dressed in business casual.
I work for an hourly wage and tips at places like a dive bar in the suburb of Brandon, where a little person dedicates his karaoke version of “The House of the Rising Sun” to me; a 1950s-themed waterfront family restaurant where the servers have to get on the tables and dance whenever “Shake a Tail Feather” comes on*; and, my favorite, a hotel bar on Dale Mabry Highway. I am of an age when hotel bars are incredibly romantic to me — everyone there is in transit from somewhere, and you could meet anyone at any time.
Another reason I love this particular location is that they often have live music by this couple (I assume they are a couple), a man and a woman with enormous hair and even more enormous keyboard setups. Their repertoire seems solely based on whether or not the original artist has hair as big as theirs — they do ballads by Heart and Whitesnake, pop metal by Poison and Ratt, and so on. They are very earnest and funny and I like them in an ironic, bemused way befitting a collegiate music snob with a late-night campus radio show.
One night, I’m at my table at this hotel bar, watching said big hair band and biding my time before calling it a night — I have had no players all night, and I only have to hang out a certain amount of time before giving up, with no oversight other than the management of the venue, who usually don’t pay any attention to me. The band takes a break and I decide to go to the bathroom before shutting my table down.
Outside the restroom I run into a guy who says I look familiar. He’s slender and sly-looking with a small, dark pompadour, and we spend a little time figuring out how we know each other. It turns out that he is the ex-husband of Kathy, a bartender at Club Detroit, a place in St. Pete I go often to dance and see bands. I know Kathy — she has tattoos and seems like a very wise woman. Now that I know that she has an ex-husband, I am even more impressed with her.
“What are you doing in this place?” he asks. I explain my gig and that I am about to wrap up for the night.
“What are you doing here?”
“Hanging out with my cousin. His band played across the street tonight.”
Dale Mabry Highway is a six-lane, major thoroughfare. There are no rock clubs on Dale Mabry, or at least none on this stretch of it.
“Oh, yeah? What band?”
“Have you heard of the Pixies?”
Tampa Stadium is on Dale Mabry Highway. U2 is playing at Tampa Stadium. The Pixies are opening on the tour**.
Have I heard of the Pixies?!? Have I not stood up and danced in a van barreling down 275, dressed in a 70s jumpsuit, tripping balls, and screaming while “Dig for Fire” plays? Is my import copy of Surfer Rosa not worn and scratched to shit? Have I not been hit on by Black Francis?
Turns out this guy’s cousin is Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago.
“Do you want to meet them? I came down to get cigarettes and I’m going back to the room. You’re welcome to come with me.”
“Cool,” I say. (I am sure I said something like that. I am sure that I was very very relaxed about it, telling him that I would close up my table after I finished in the bathroom. )
“I’ll come down and get you,” he says.
“You should bring the band down when you do, “ I tell him. “The band playing here is on break, but they are hilarious.”
Bathroom. Lipstick. Deep breaths. Back to the blackjack table, where I find three people waiting for me.
One of them is the hotel bar manager. He is very angry because two Texans want to play blackjack.
“I’m closing up my table,” I tell him.
He doesn't wish to hear this. He takes me by the elbow and places me back behind the blackjack table. I am staring at these drooling Texan men when I see Joey Santiago’s cousin enter the bar with Joey, Kim Deal, and another woman. They settle into a booth. I shuffle my cards.
“Could you excuse me for a minute?”
They nod and I go to the Pixies table. Kim is wearing a black baseball hat with a silver metal “BOY” plate (as in Boy London). She and the other woman are giggling. A lot. I am introduced to her and to Joey (the other woman remains a mystery, and her face is a blur).
“I have to stay,” I explain. “But you should come over and play blackjack. I’ll give you free chips!”
The girls giggle some more. They are very stoned. I am very jealous. I would like to go up to their hotel room and get very stoned with them. I see the big hair band head to the stage.
“You should definitely stay for the band,” I say, then return to my duties.
The band plays. The Texans play. The Pixies table … gets up and heads back toward the elevator before long.
“You should come see the band play in Miami,” says Joey Santiago’s cousin, stopping by my table. “I’ll get you backstage.”
I am no longer 17. I know what is happening.
“Can my boyfriend come?” I ask.
Joey Santiago’s cousin says no.
At least the Texans end up being good tippers.
* I secretly love this and aways want to do it with them, even though they clearly fucking hate it.
** Meanwhile, in 2024, the Internet tells me that the Pixies did not open up U2’s October 1992 gig at Tampa Stadium. The Internet says that they only opened up on that tour through April and broke up at the end of that year. I do not believe the Internet because, unlike it, I was there.
