environmentally friendly
A Million Finger
Santa Cruz, 2000
In the middle of the night, in a run-down apartment building behind a Safeway in Santa Cruz, I got in a screaming match with the lead singer of a band named A Million Fingers. I had just gotten up to pee. I lived in one of the two bedrooms with my boyfriend, Kai, the drummer. Vernie, the guitar player, shared the other room with his Chinese Water Lizard, Chicken Legs, and a host of refugee feeder crickets. The band was perpetually between bass players. The singer, Casey, nested in the living room behind a series of thin batik sheets from India. The snoring bodies in the sleeping bags which littered the hall and balcony were passers-through, there at the behest of the ever charming, ever-social, Casey. I had gotten up, stepped over people-sized lumps of bedding in the hall, and made my way to the toilet. Flipping on the light, I saw a bowl of water the color of Guinness and a naked cardboard tube on the back of the tank.
Casey believed in water conservation (i.e. not flushing), spiritual bathing (soaking in a bath water steeped with produce like a matzo ball), aromatherapy (patchouli oil in his armpits), and sharing all that you have to give (letting your home double as a hostel).
I believed in going to the 24 hr Safeway–literally next door to us–when your homeless friends deplete the toilet paper reserves because if your female roommate has to drip dry, she will find an excuse to call the cops on you.
Thus began my life with the band.
