Several hundred years ago I took part in a band trip from Hayden, Colorado to San Diego, California. My job was to play trumpet and buy the dirty magazines.

Much of what I remember about the lead up to the trip involved selling pizzas to fund it. Then I vaguely remember a bus ride with a stop in Las Vegas which is arguably, when you are 15 and it is the early ’80s before Las Vegas became a family resort, the worse possible place to be a teenager. You can’t even look inside the casinos and the circus at Circus Circus Las Vegas is, well, just a circus in Las Vegas.

Eventually we got to California and may or may not have performed at Knott’s Berry Farm. I also remember our performance at Sea World San Diego being cancelled but us getting to have fun there anyway. I also remember a trip to the San Diego Wild Animal Park and hearing from our guide the legend that the “Wgasa” in the Wgasa Bush Line stood for “Who gives a shit anyhow?” (Yeah, and there were some animals there too, but that’s not as cool as the Wgasa story.)

In San Diego, after a trip to Tijuana where several people smuggled back OTF knives and switch blades, we went “deep sea” fishing where we caught a lot of Benito and several fellow band members threw up over the front of the boat. (I’m pleased to say I didn’t, which is odd as I had a bad habit of throwing up on long car rides, but that’s another post.) After we returned to shore we cooked and ate the tuna.

Our rooms were a series of bungalows on the beach. This may have been my first view of an ocean, and we may have gone swimming, but that wasn’t as important as my job.

For some reason (boredom) during our stay at the bungalows someone decided it was necessary for us to acquire “adult” magazines. Because I was the tallest in our bungalow and looked older than I was (more on that in another post) it became my job to take the collected money to a convenience store and buy a copy of Hustler Magazine with the scratch and sniff centerfold. (No, really. Look it up.)

The actual purchase was clumsy as I felt compelled to embellish the purchase by saying it was for my dad earning me a suspicious look as I was so un-California it was pathetic. (Note to criminals: Don’t embellish; just be confident in your lies.) In the end the magazine was purchased and passed around.

Eventually we got home, but I don’t remember anything about that part of the trip at all except that, despite all my work, I didn’t get to keep the magazine.