Picturesque - CRAZY TOUR STORIES Ep. 952

Hey, what's up guys, we're Picture Us. We're currently out on tour with Scary Kids, Scary Kids, and here's tour stories. So we were, prior to this guy, we were in a green Chevrolet, it was a 1998 Chevrolet van. It was a 16 passenger. We bought it for $100, and it took 10 years off my life. It broke down 13 times on one tour, and before it was all said and done, it cost us about $7,000 in repairs. So get yourself a good van and this won't happen to you, but the story starts with, we'd had a long night. We were going from St. Louis to Detroit, and we decided to go home for a night, and when we stopped in Louisville, my deal was, hey, I'll get us to Louisville, but I can't drive in the morning. So I go to sleep, and I wake up to, I'm kind of the van mechanic, I should say that, and I wake up to everybody yelling for me, and I look up, and we are careening into Cincinnati, Ohio at about 85 miles an hour, and it's climbing, and they tell me that the throttle cable is hung, and so I start crawling, and I'm like, pull it, pull it. Our merch guy at the time, his name was Jeremy. Jeremy's underneath Dylan, who's driving, and he's yanking it as hard as he can, and they're trying to get it unstuck. They're finally like, what do we do, what do we do? I'm like, put it in neutral, turn it off. They're like, what if it blows the engine? I was like, I don't care. At this point, we're doing about 90, 95, and we're going downhill. So they're yanking on it. They finally throw it in neutral, kill it. Hit the first exit, and we coast into a parking lot, at which case, we realize that the throttle cable has started to unwind, and it's stuck, and every time you push the gas, it's just gonna hang the throttle wide open. And everybody's bummed out. We think we're gonna have to cancel Detroit, and basically, I remember my brother used to run Demolition Derby cars, and in Demolition Derby, one thing that happens is if you get hit too much in the front end, your throttle goes through the floor, and you can't operate your throttle anymore. So they take a coat hanger, and they put it onto the carburetor, and they tie it up, and they make themselves a little hand throttle. Well, you can kind of see, like in this van, the engine is right there where those cup holders is. So it's actually right in between your legs. So I took the dash out, and yeah, we took a coat hanger, we uncoiled it, and we ran it to the carburetor, and we decided to drive from Cincinnati, Ohio to Detroit with a coat hanger, and I had a beanie or toboggan. It was wrapped around my hand. It was about 220 degrees. So I had a pit crew. You know, they had a cup of ice water, and they would pour it down the front of me, and yeah, that's the story of how we drove from Cincinnati, Ohio to Detroit, Michigan with a coat hanger. So from my perspective, all of that started whenever I was in what we had called the dungeon. So we were just hearing everything revving up and a bunch of stuff while like sleeping, and so what it is is you have a piece of wood, and then you're just cut off from everything. You have to crawl under a seat to get out, and then like we sleep under it, and then another pair of dudes sleeps on top. So I'm down in the bunk. It's getting hot because we don't really have AC to begin with, or actually at this point, I don't think we had AC at all. So it's hot. We just hear everybody screaming. The engine revving, and we're like, what the **** is going on? So crawl out from underneath. I think I crawled over. It's kind of all like, it's all kind of distant now, but ended up just watching Dylan panic and Jeremy panic and not know what to do and having to wake up Zach, but we were like looking at it, you know, and like you said, it's about 95 miles an hour before we're like, we don't know what the **** to do, and Jeremy just tugging on the gas pedal and ----, trying to get it all out. But yeah, you know, I've just made my peace, and I think we all did in that moment, and we were very accepting of the fact that we were all just about to die, and it was what it was. The craziest part of it all, I think after we got stopped, there was a moment where we thought we had it fixed. We turned the van back on, and then it just revved and like pegged again, and then just shut it right back off, and we just were like, all right, we're fucked. We don't know what to do. But then for some reason- You guys like left for a second, right? All I remember is meeting you guys around the corner. That's all I remember is saying, get in the van, and you guys were like, what? That sounds right, because we all got out of that thing, because we were like, it's going to explode. It was wild. We all thought we were going to die. We kind of just made peace with it. But for like a year straight, every issue that we had, we fixed with a coat hanger. So it was kind of beautiful. It was probably the same coat hanger too. It was like a magic coat hanger. Everybody wanted to drive after that. It was like in the beginning, nobody wanted to drive. And then once they saw me like whipping it, you know, like boat style, you know what I mean? Everybody kept trying to get me to let them drive. And I was like- How many opportunities are you going to get to drive with a hand throttle? Parallel parking was crazy. But yeah, a couple of days we did that, and then we put a new throttle cable in it as well. I remember specifically, Kyle was excited. He walked around. He's like, let's go baby. He's like, this is wild. Our motto is no good story ever started with we almost drove to Detroit with a coat hanger.