Christmas in Reno

A very strange way to spend the holidays

We’ve all had our share of memorable holidays, for better or worse. Here’s my version. I really don’t have more to add in terms of introduction. This began as a short newspaper story, and rolled into a bizarre and unexpected adventure that includes Reno, Dick Clark, a Blues Brothers tribute band, Molly Hatchet, a vicious snowstorm in the Sierras, a cat smuggled onto a Greyhound bus, and a whole bunch of people vomiting, for some reason. Yeah, I know. Portions of this originally appeared in SF Weekly in 1997.

The Mike Lee casino party bus abruptly veers off Interstate 5 onto an offramp, just outside Sacramento. Our journey began at the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco, headed to the gamblers’ oasis of Reno, Nevada. Because it’s the morning of December 24^th, loops of silver tinsel hang from the luggage racks. A wacky Michael J. Fox comedy about corporate finance plays on the video system. Everyone’s smiling, a few are already drunk. But now something is horribly wrong. The bus is turning around.

“Hey, this is BULLSHIT, man!” shouts a dockworker from the back row.

“Reno!” says a computer nerd. “Go to Reno!” 

The bus loops around the interstate and heads back in the opposite direction to make another stop in Vallejo. Passengers look at each other helplessly.

“What the FUCK?!!” yells the dockworker. “I’ll go up there and drive this fucking thing myself!”

The festive mood is shot. The tinsel seems to hang sarcastically. Everyone stares out the windows. It’s merely a prelude for the horrors still to come.

We pull into Reno three hours late, and stop at the Silver Legacy casino. Our driver wishes everyone good luck and Merry Christmas. The gamblers eagerly spill out for a vacation of wallet-emptying frolic. I check into a cheap hotel and riffle through the entertainment guides. I have no family in California, so for Christmas I gave myself a journalistic mission—go to Reno, seek out the worst possible show and review the predictably cheesy proceedings. Wouldn’t that be ironic and hilarious? I settle on the tribute to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, a live revue hosted by Clark via big-screen video, tonight at Harvey’s in Lake Tahoe. The hotel assures me I can catch the last bus back to Reno right after the show. Perfect.

A casino shuttle deposits me at the Reno airport, just in time to catch a bus to Tahoe. Passengers pile inside—families, ski bums, locals, tourists from Mexico—good-looking, average to upper-income folks who can afford to spend Christmas in Tahoe, all buzzing with holiday spirit. Snow is falling lightly, right out of a postcard. 

The route down Nevada’s 395 is uneventful, until we cut over to 50, which slices through the Carson Range of the Sierras. The bus stops and the driver puts on tire chains. He needn’t have bothered. Traffic slows to a crawl, and time ticks away. The continuing snowfall gives the trip that uncomfortable sensation that you are in a bad made-for-TV movie where George Kennedy dies so that Robby Benson might live. The bus finally comes to a complete halt on a narrow pass.

We’re miles from anywhere resembling civilization. The line of vehicles stretches into the darkness. Snow drifts on either side of the road average eight feet high. Minutes turn into hours. A child keeps kicking the back of my seat. Two guys have bonded under such adverse conditions, and settle into an enthusiastic conversation about the variety of golf courses in Arizona.

“Really? I’ve played the first nine, but they’ve added another 18 recently.”

One, two, three snowplows pass us, followed by a tow truck. But still we don’t move. People are growing edgy. The driver finally agrees to let people out to stretch their legs, and the smokers race for the door. We stand shivering like fools on the sloppy, snow-packed road, milling about like confused insects. We’re trapped in hell, on Christmas Eve. There is no Santa Claus, there is no Jesus. There is only snow and cold. And a teenage girl on a cellphone: “Shut up—let me talk to Dad! LET ME TALK TO DAD!”

Eventually the column lurches forward, and our bus finally pulls onto South Lake Tahoe’s main strip of casinos. I check the time. We had been stuck on the road for over five hours. The Dick Clark show is long closed. I book a hotel room, order three Heinekens and a steak, call my family, and look out the window. I’ve spent Christmas Eve alone before, but this seems extra pathetic.

The next morning’s return trip to Reno is uneventful. The roads have been plowed. Passengers are lively and cheerful, unaware of the near-Donner Party scenario the night before on this same route. 

I get back to my original hotel room, check the papers and settle for reviewing a casino act called Rubber Biscuit, a salute to the Blues Brothers band. It’s no Dick Clark show, but my deadline is tomorrow. And it’s close—just across the street at the Eldorado Cabaret lounge. 

The band plays a few warm-up tunes, and I reflect on the concept—a tribute to the Blues Brothers, which was itself a tribute to Chicago blues musicians. I wonder if someday there will be a tribute to Rubber Biscuit. “Ladies and gentlemen, Jake and Elwood Blues, the Blues Brothers!” Jake and Elwood hit the stage. They’ve definitely captured the look: fedoras, shades, black suits with white socks. The chubby one even enters doing a cartwheel. It’s immediately apparent this act takes its cue from the Blues Brothers as they appeared on Saturday Night Live and not today, because the Dan Aykroyd character is rail-skinny, and the John Belushi character is alive.

“We had a great Christmas, says Jake. “I gave Elwood a blowup doll!”

“I gave him a case of condoms,” says Elwood.

The crowd of pooped-out couples stares at the stage. The band kicks into a string of oldies like “Mustang Sally” and “Do You Love Me?”, with the two doing their best versions of the Akyroyd-Belushi cocaine shimmy-dance. Elwood stops for a quick impression of tennis pro John McInroe on his wedding night: “IT WAS IN!” he screams. A few more tunes, and the two dance offstage to the strains of the Blues Brothers theme. As the curtain closes, it snags on a stage monitor.

After the show, I chat with the ersatz Belushi. His real name is Brian Poirier. He’s been doing Belushi for 15 years, and this band is one of ten currently touring as a Blues Brothers tribute show. He admits tonight was a little slow: “We’re usually pouring beer over our heads, sitting on women’s laps.”

It’s an easy act to maintain, once you learn the songs. Black jackets are $69 from J.C. Penney’s Towncraft, ties and shoes are from Goodwill, and white shirts are $6.99 from Mervyn’s.

“Call me tomorrow,” says Poirier. “We’ll take the Jeep, I’ll show you around.”

Band photos from the archived Facebook page for Rubber Biscuit’s Rockin’ Blues Revue.

The next morning, the bogus Belushi gives me a short tour of below-zero Reno: The “Bomber Club” bar, with its collection of World War II machine guns and helmets. The wall of Sammy Davis Jr. memorabilia at Harrah’s. I mention that Reno is perfect for people who can’t make it all the way to Vegas, and Poirier says, “It’s basically Concord with tits. Hey, you wanna meet my guitar player? He used to play with Eddie Money.”

We head out of Reno into a snow-covered desert, interrupted only by fence posts, an occasional car on the freshly plowed highway. It feels creepy—the kind of territory where missing hitchhikers turn up after the spring melt. Poirier pulls into a trailer park, and up to a mobile home guarded by two big barking dogs. A guy in a t-shirt comes to the door, shouts “Shut up!” to the dogs and lets us inside.

Bob the guitar player lives here with his waitress girlfriend, a haggard-looking blond named Lois, who is nursing a hangover with a cup a soup and a cigarette. We scoot aside piles of dirty clothes, ease down into the tired furniture, and out come the Budweisers. Poirier and Bob start telling war stories about the casino entertainment circuit of magicians, tribute acts and oldies bands. The best gigs are festivals and Corvette conventions, they say, because the crowds are drunk and really get into the music. 

Conversation returns to last night’s show, where poor Elwood, fighting a nasty flu bug, left the stage and immediately threw up into his hand. I had no idea that vomit plays such a large role in the music business, because for the next 20 minutes it’s all we talk about. Bob the guitar player remembers watching Joe Cocker spill his cookies into a bucket during a concert. Poirier once witnessed the singer for Molly Hatchet blow chunks in between verses of “Flirtin’ With Disaster.” “But Elwood,” he says. “I felt sorry for him. He throws up probably once every eight shows.”

This statistic haunts me, as I later sit in my hotel filing a story about Rubber Biscuit. How can you have a band with one of the members vomiting every eight gigs? Wouldn’t they get a reputation? Who would book them? I finish up and stand in line with the tapped-out gamblers, waiting for the fabulous Mike Lee casino bus to take us home. The bus is 20 minutes late. An hour goes by. Someone calls the office. No idea when it might show up. Weather conditions are rapidly deteriorating.

I grab a cab to the Greyhound station and buy a one-way ticket to Sacramento, where I can at least hitch a ride with a friend back to San Francisco. An announcement says the 5:25 bus has been canceled because a driver hasn’t shown up. The next departure is in two hours, which translates into three beers at a nearby casino, accompanied by a simmering hatred of Christmas, Reno, and all human beings associated with the transportation industry.

We finally board the bus, and of course every single seat is filled. A group of guys have spent the past three days on Greyhound, headed from Chicago to Oakland. They’re so punchdrunk that one has borrowed the other’s alphanumeric pager and insists on reading out loud EVERY SINGLE sports score and news flash:

“‘James Earl Ray comes out of coma.’ Didn’t he shoot JFK?”

“I think it was Martin Luther King,” says his buddy from the back row.

“Naw, I think it was JFK,” says the first guy.

One seat behind me is a hippie mountain man, who has smuggled a cat onto the bus, and beside me is his son, wearing a jester’s hat. Both have successfully avoided a shower the past few days. The cat meows every few minutes. Hey, we’re all unhappy. In the front of the bus, a fat drunk man soon pukes up dark purplish vomit all over the lap of his girlfriend, and then dozes off on her shoulder. It’s an all-vomit weekend.

This merry Yuletide scene barrels along the snow-packed Interstate 80, stopping twice, once so the driver can put on tire chains, and then another stop so he can remove them. It’s impossible to sleep. I might miss the final score of the Knicks-Trailblazers game, or get attacked by an angry cat. Or be thrown up on.

Finally the bus screeches to a halt at the Sacramento station. Rain is pouring down in sheets, and the passengers nearly kick out the windows to exit. Inside the terminal, more pissed-off commuters are lining up to catch the buses, a scruffy confluence of ex-cons, drifters, runaways and others too broke to afford plane tickets. Waterlogged bums shuffle through the crowd, hitting up people for change. I page my friend for a ride home, and while waiting for her to arrive, overhear the bald, tattooed guy one phone over:

“Well FUCK you, then! I’m trying to keep out of prison, and I don’t need this shit! I swear to God, when I see you I’ll TAKE YOU OUT! I will take your head and fucking BASH IT IN!”

He continues on this theme for awhile, apparently talking to a woman, because children are mentioned. The time runs out, the line is disconnected, and he slams down the receiver. The phone rings back, he picks it up and says, “No, he’s not here.” He hangs it up with a crooked smirk.

“I’m not gonna pay for that!” he says to me with his Charlie Manson eyes. “Fucking Pac Bell can kiss my ass!” 

He returns a few minutes later, puts in a few coins, calls the same number, and in a low voice says, “I’m sorry, baby.” 

After all, it is the holiday season.