Diary entry for Saturday March 21. (Gratuitous name dropping and foul language to follow: you have been forewarned!)

I wake up around 10:30 or so, fairly hungover from the festivities on South Congress Friday night. We saw the guys from the Jayhawks for free--that was pretty cool. Anyway I got a call from Marc Maron who said he wanted to join our entourage at the music party at Maria's Taco Express hosted by Alejandro Escovedo, so I picked him up around 1:30. The day was fairly uneventful until it was time to head downtown for my friend Mario's (Alejandro's younger brother, and my houseguest for the weekend) Showcase, featuring his girlfriend Maren Parousel and her band. This meant we had to leave at the beginning of Alejandro's set, unfortunately. He always puts on a great show!

The plan was to catch a cab and bring Maren her amp and a guitar around 7:30-7:45. The cab is supposed to arrive at 7:15, giving us plenty of time to travel less than two miles. Theoretically. That's when "the fun" all started....

First problem: The cab never came. All of a sudden it's 7:35 and Mario and I are standing by the street with a borrowed amp and a guitar case, our dicks in our hands because we are stranded and fucked. He has a borrowed amp, because his girlfriend's amp is unfortunately being used by Alejandro's violin player, and he couldn't exactly walk up onstage and take it away from her in the middle of the first song.

Out of nowhere, "some guy" runs over to where we are standing (I still don't know how he knew what was going on) and tells Mario "Here, take my car down there, and I'll come get the keys from you later at the club." Neither of us had any idea who the fuck this guy was, but we're desperate, right? But first he wants money for a cab to get downtown, so Mario runs into the Walgreens and gets $20 from the cash machine to give the guy. He gives the guy the money, and he gives Mario the keys and he drives us  off in the late '80s Celica with all sorts of laundry and trash in the back seat. The whole way down there, we're going, "I can't believe that guy just gave us the key's to his car like that??!!!"

We get down to 5th street at the proper cross street so Mario can run the guitar and amp into his Maren. It's probably 5 or 10 til 8:00 at this point, and she must have really been panicking! So I jump out of the passenger seat as Mario takes off running with the gear, and I try to start the car back up. Only it WON'T!!!! It won't fucking start again! I'm stuck in the middle of the intersection in a car owned by some guy I don't know, who's fucking name I don't even know, and I have no fucking idea what to do!! To say I'm panicking at this point would be putting it mildly.

One thing that started to calm me down a little bit was that my options were realistically so limited at this point that there wasn't really much I could do. It didn't take long before a sxsw employee came over to inform me that I would have to move the car. No shit!! Then a cop comes over to see if he can help, and I'm thinking "Great! I don't think I've had that much to drink...." So the cop and the employee push the car while I'm steering in neutral, to a relatively safe, yet totally illegal parking space. She informs me that I can leave it there for 30 minutes or so before they call a tow truck and give me a ticket.

I call Mario to tell him how fucked I am, as if he's gonna be of any help since he's at the club frantically trying to help Maren set up. He eventlually comes back over, but there really wasn't anything he could do, either. We pretty much figured out that there was a problem with the car's starter, but really, there's no one in the world who knows LESS about cars and car maintenance than I do. For whatever reason, I decided to call my wife, Sue. (Again, as though she's going to be of any help.) She's still back at the Taco place watching the end of Alejandro's show. So she goes about trying to find the owner of the car.

Pretty quickly, one of Alejandro's managers gets involved and throws a first class hissy fit screaming at my wife that "she needs to get this fixed, blah blah blah..." How the fuck is this HER fault? What's SHE supposed to do? Just as she gets him calmed down, they find the owner of the car, and the first thing he says to Sue is, "They may have just run out of gas. There was no gas left in the car."

I mean, "What the FUCK!!!" He gave us a car with no fucking gas? Are you shitting me? He gets on the phone with me, and also explains that the starter is indeed "kinda funny" and you just need to turn the key really, really hard." No shit, dude. I had already desperately turned that fucker as hard as I could a hundred times! Lo and behold, after the car sat there for a bit, I tried it again, and the fucking car magically starts! I almost died right there!

So I drive the car back out into the traffic and the first thing I thought was that I'd better get a little gas in the car before it runs. That makes sense. So I'm stuck in grid-lock, downtown Austin, 8:00 sxsw traffic, hoping I can make it to a gas station. Half the streets are closed or blocked off because of the festival. I'm driving in circles for a while, and I finally make it to the gas station, and it dawns on the that I'm still fucked, because how the hell am I supposed to turn the car off and put gas in it, since it's 99% certain to NOT start back up again!

So I just said "Fuck it" and pulled back out of the gas station to find the nearest parking spot and just walk away. I'm stuck in more grid lock traffic, still driving in circles, still freaking out, and praying that I can park before it runs out of gas. Things are made so much more complicated by the fact that half the streets are blocked-off/closed!! I finally found a lot with an open space, payed the chisler at the lot $10 and let out a huge sigh of relief as I walked away from that car.

It's now about ten til 9:00, and I've missed Maren's entire set. I also realize that I have the keys to the junk heap, the keys to my car, AND I still have the keys to my wife's car from when I took my wife's car to go pick up Marc. I called and informed my wife that she has no way of getting back home, or into our house until I got home a few hours later.... She just loved that!

I got to the club and breathed a further sigh of relief as a hand the car keys to the guy's car back to Mario. I couldn't get rid of them fast enough! After all that, I needed money and when I went to the ATM for and asked for $60, it double fed one of the $20s and actually gave me $80! I looked at the receipt and it said, "$60," so I have to say, that was a pretty cool, happy ending! The guy finally showed up to get his car and take the borrowed amp back, and Mario and I actually had to act really super nice and thankful, since it really WAS a kind gesture, on his part, despite the issues with his car.