Episode 9: Johnny O'Donnell
Johnny O'Donnell: The two fellas from the prison were also very sweet guys and they taught us about how to do proper push-ups because they said where they were staying they didn't have access to a gym. So they said that you can get huge in prison just by doing these like five or six different types of push-ups. So we spent a lot of time doing push-ups.
Josh Caldwell: Welcome to Atypical Daydream, a podcast about life on the road. I'm Josh, your host, and thanks for stopping by. My guest today is Johnny O'Donnell. He's a songwriter and a filmmaker currently living in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Sometimes life feels like a series of unrelated vignettes. And other times it feels deeply interconnected and spiritual. I love Johnny's story because it strikes a perfect balance between the two.
Johnny O'Donnell: Well, I'd like to begin with an experience I had with a really amazing hamburger, actually. Actually, it was a cheeseburger. We had just crossed the border from Washington state into rural Idaho. It was our first food stop. And I'm going to say it was a Wada burger, but it was some kind of regional chain that we didn't normally see in Seattle. And I really vividly remember standing in line.
There was a beautiful oversized photo of this cheeseburger with all the works — lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, special sauce. And like a lot of kids, I'd grown up kind of a picky eater. I had convinced myself that there were lots of things I didn't like without really having tried most of them. But while I was standing in line I realized, wow, that hamburger looks perfect. I'd never wanted to have all the veggies on a burger. I thought veggies were disgusting for some reason. And while I was feeling a bit like this is a time to be a man, I made that bold move and ordered the cheeseburger with the works. I will never forget that first bite. I just realized, wow, there's a reason for these things. That decision set the tone for the rest of our little trip, which was kind of a coming out of our shells tour.
It was the summer of 2003. I was with two of my best pals and our plan was to do a loop of the country. This was before readily available internet so we had to figure things out as we went along and got to make a lot of decisions off the seat of our pants. Our two biggest obsessions on that trip were basically cigarettes and girls. I was 17, one of the guys was 18 so he could buy the cigarettes and all of us could smoke them together. And obviously our main objective was to meet girls, which we were horrible at and didn't succeed at all.
We finally got into Montana at the end of that first day. We went to a little diner — this was a time you could smoke indoors — and we were just relishing that moment to act like grownups. The waitress was very flirtatious. She was probably older than my mother, maybe 55. She was very gung-ho about our adventure and gave us a lot of positive energy.
The trip did have some darker undertones. When we got to Chicago we ended up staying in a motel — probably the first place we drove to when we pulled off the highway. It was definitely a motel designed for couples, shall we say. The whole ceiling was mirrored. You could put coins in a machine to get the TV going and there were three or four channels of adult entertainment, which we thought was quite interesting. The next day we went down to the waterfront in front of the downtown skyline and heard some yelling from the beach. There was an area where people played checkers or chess and somebody had apparently been stung by a bee or a wasp and we saw them die. So that was a strange moment. A little bit of a dark cloud started forming over the trip.
Johnny O'Donnell: When we left Chicago, our next stop was Pittsburgh where my single remaining grandparent lived. She was a great lady, Mary. She had a wig that was Marge Simpson style, maybe a foot and a half tall. And she wore that till the end and she looked great in it. When we got to her house on the outskirts of Pittsburgh near the old rundown steel mills, which had been converted into shopping malls, we had a wonderful time. She was obsessed with one of my friends who she kept saying reminded her of Buddy Hackett. He was a comedian from the old days. We didn't know who he was and we didn't have the internet to look it up.
From Pittsburgh we moved over to the Eastern Seaboard and made our way down through the Carolinas. We ended up spending one night in Virginia Beach. They have a boardwalk there that seems like something straight out of the 1950s. We were walking along the boardwalk and saw three girls sitting on the curb, very cute. We said, guys, we've got to talk to them, but we don't know what to say. There was a haunted house attraction there. We said, let's go invite the girls to go into the dark ride with us. It'd be kind of romantic, a chance to hang out with girls in a dark space. So they accepted — but then they yelled to their friends who were out of view. They were part of a volleyball team. All of a sudden about 12 other girls came around the corner.
Johnny O'Donnell: Now we had our hands full. So we paid for about 16 girls to go into this haunted house with us. It was interesting. I think maybe some hands were held, but we didn't know where to go from there. We were totally novice about this. We spent our week's budget in that little experiment, which again was another failure. No way to exchange numbers or anything like that. So we left the dark ride empty handed. But we had a laugh. We knew how to laugh at ourselves even at that point.
Josh Caldwell: Hey, Josh here. I love making this podcast and I'd love to make it my full-time gig. Besides telling the stories, I'm basically a one-man band and that takes time. If you're enjoying the podcast, please consider becoming a patron. You'll have access to loads of great bonus stories and you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you're supporting a truly independent podcast. Find the Patreon link in the show notes. And thanks.
Johnny O'Donnell: We were driving out of a 76 station onto the Florida Panhandle heading towards Georgia. There was an older man hitchhiking and we decided to give him a ride because that's the kind of mood we were in the whole time. We were all reading Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson. So anytime there was a chance to take a risk, it was something we were really gung-ho about. So we picked up this guy Bill.
That was amazing. And Bill got something out of it too. Of course we got him a little bit farther down the road, but he also told us — we were going into the water in Destin, Florida, the Gulf, full of jellyfish — and he had tears in his eyes and told us, guys, I haven't had this much fun since I was a teenager. This guy was about 70 years old. So that was a really nice sentimental moment. And we all parted friends.
Finally got to New Orleans. Wow. The city of our dreams. At that time you could basically wander into any of the bars and nobody asked for an ID. I did manage to get kicked out of a karaoke live music joint called the Cat's Meow. I had a dance off with the MC which was going really well and I think I was going to maybe get some free drinks out of it. When I took his hat off and used it for my pseudo Michael Jackson hat flipping routine, he did not like that. The bouncers very brusquely showed me the exit.
When we were in New Orleans we were staying with an old neighbor of mine, Miss Patty. She liked to lay on the couch and smoke cool menthol cigarettes and watch the news. So we were watching the news with her and saw that the motel we were staying at in Chicago had a fire and some people died in it. Again, we started thinking there might be something following us. The car broke down in New Orleans. We had to do a repair job and got laid over there a couple of days, but not such a big deal.
We moved through Texas and then in San Antonio one of my buddies sprained his ankle in a parking garage. He was on a cane for the rest of the trip, which was a funny image — a 16 year old with a cane. He managed to find a really nice, sexy gentleman's cane. When we were approaching the car to leave Texas, there was a dead bat hanging on the door handle of the passenger side front door. We removed it and thought, that's very strange.
Got into Albuquerque, New Mexico. The car broke down again, this time seriously. I had to get back to Washington State to visit a university because I was about to go to college for the first time. St. Martin's in Lacey, Washington. I ended up taking an Amtrak. And I was sad to say goodbye to the fellas.
Johnny O'Donnell: I got on the train and this was maybe the highlight of the trip, because at that time there were smoking cars. I ended up spending the next 48 hours in the smoking car. As we were boarding the train it was kind of like the first day of class — you get to see who you're going to be with. I had a really good class.
There were a group of ex-convicts who had just been released from prison and were going back to their families, some of them for the first time in years. And also a large constituency of Amish, Pennsylvania Dutch Amish. So my smoking car section was wonderful. It was me, two ex-convicts — naturally covered in tattoos, still had the shaved head, very big guys — and two or three Amish. One of the Amish kids ended up staying with us for the whole ride. We had a wonderful philosophical, emotional exchange of goodwill and intellectual ideas. We didn't stop talking for the next 16 or 17 hours.
The two fellows from the prison were also very sweet guys and they taught us about how to do proper push-ups because they said where they were staying they didn't have access to a gym. So they said there are so many different types of push-ups you can do that you can get huge in prison just by doing these five or six different types. So we spent a lot of time doing push-ups — on our fingers, one handed, hand behind the back, one leg in the air.
Johnny O'Donnell: It was awesome. We all got very buff in that short amount of time. One of the guys was the tattoo artist in the prison ward. We gathered the pillowcases from the train pillows — very thin, almost like a cleaning wipe — and he was able to draw anything we wanted in a really cool stylized tattoo style. I asked him to do one for my girlfriend at the time. I described what she looked like and he did a stunning portrait. It looked just like her except she had clown makeup on. I remember that was one thing he insisted on adding but she really appreciated that.
I also just remember going through pure desert landscape. John Ford type stuff. Watching the Amish react to this was fascinating because they explained they were going to a furniture convention in Seattle and had never been on a train. They had never been out of their town. Just getting to see what a desert looks like through the eyes of someone who has never seen one is a pretty riveting experience.
There's nothing quite like a train trip with new people that you connect with, because you know you're never going to see them again. When I got back to Seattle, I opened my bag and there was another pillowcase inside. The tattoo artist had put in an extra pillowcase for me and he had drawn on it a bat. I don't think I told him about what happened in San Antonio, but I thought that was interesting. That night I was watching TV before going to bed. The news of the day was that Buddy Hackett, the comedian, had passed away.
Josh Caldwell: Thank you for sharing his experience. Make sure to check out his music under Johnny O'Donnell. And for more general updates, find him on Instagram at johnny.odonnell. Links in the show notes. This podcast was created and produced by me, Josh Caldwell. Music by Visual Aid, my side music project. General support and copywriting by Miranda Caldwell. If you like the show, please follow, subscribe, rate, and review wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to financially support the show, check out my Patreon page. You'll have access to loads of great bonus stories. You can find the link in the show notes. Thank you for listening, and I hope you come back next week.
Johnny O'Donnell: Hey everybody, this is Johnny O'Donnell here. Just want to lay it out there that smoking is not cool. Maybe it was in 2003 when I went on my road trip with my friends, but we were wrong. Don't even try it. Tobacco kills.
