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The World According To Dutch: How I Survived The Gathering Pt. 2

Posted: Aug 20th 2010 By: CMBurnham

Time for an update on my activities last weekend at the 11th Annual Gathering of the Juggalos Festival in Cave in Rock, Illinois. In my last blog, I mentioned I had a lot to write about. I do. The Tila Tequila incident is not being forgotten...and apparently little Tila is surging ahead with a lawsuit against the promoters of Gathering of the Juggaloes stemming from her encounter with some 'nasty' Juggaloes last weekend. The purpose of this blog today is to give you a feel how it felt, not only backstage with the other wrestlers, but the general mood of being right in the middle of 20 some odd thousand people who follow two guys, the Insane Clown Posse, all over the country whenever they perform a show. Whether you're a fan of the ICP or not, one thing you will have to admit is that they've tapped into a very loyal fanbase and a fanbase that pro wrestling should be studying. fan base and not only just a fan base..but a loyal fan base that pro wrestling should be studying their blueprint. The closest thing that I've ever seen in the pro wrestling business that even comes close to the loyalty of the ICP fan...was the loyalty that the old ECW fans displayed back in the old bingo hall days.

In case you missed my earlier blog...what is a Juggalo? Hell, if I know, but I know one when I see one. I can't even explain it in words that would get you to understand it. So, in lieu of words, click on this video of comedian Tom Green, who documents his one night stand with the Jugs. The video opens with Tom sitting with Tila Tequila at an airport gate talking about the upcoming Gathering on the Juggalos. Watch it and then come back here..for the rest of this blog.

I've heard so much about the ICP Gathering. I've heard it was dangerous, weird, surreal, loud and the damnest thing I would ever see. I can attest to all of that but I want to add one thing. Even with all those elements in play, for me, and I'm just speaking for myself, I enjoyed my stay more at the Gathering than I enjoyed myself at Wrestlemania, at Starrcade, at any TNA PPV that I've ever done and any show I ever booked in Puerto Rico. I had a blast and one reason is that when you see a Juggalo...you get what you see. They're some real people....albeit a little over the top. To me, it was the most fun that I've had in the wrestling business in the last 15 years. So with that said...on with the blog.

Let me talk about how I even got booked on the show first. My phone rang about three weeks prior to the event when a representative of the ICP Gathering, called me and wanted to book me for a couple of shows. I was already booked on other shows but even if I hadn't been booked, I had heard so much about the Wrestling Shows there...that I had absolutely no interest in going. If you watched the video clip above...when the Juggalos threw at Tila Tequila...at least she was facing them. In a wrestling ring, wrestlers don't have that luxury. The fans would be throwing from all 4 sides at once and more or less reenacting a Biblical stoning scene. So for that reason alone, my interest dwindled.

But two days later, I got another call from Corporal Robinson who said that they wanted me to wrestle in the Legends part of the Gathering. I told him that I had heard that the Juggalos are notorious for throwing things at the wrestlers and he promised me that the problem had been taken care of. How, I don't know but I even made him 'pinky promise'. He did. I agreed to go.

Corporal then laid out what and when I would be going into the ring. I have never heard this in my entire wrestling career. I wasn't given a match number, I was given a time and that time was...4AM. Let me repeat that. 4AM??? WTH? I couldn't believe what I had just heard. I was scheduled to go into a wrestling ring during an event called Flashlight Wrestling, of which I had also never heard of, but that was to be my participation in the Legends part. I don't want to get ahead of my story but I ended up doing exactly like it was laid out...and I set two personal records at one time. I set a record for earliest and latest match in my career. Actually, my match officially began at 5AM on Sunday morning, August 15th, 2010 for those keeping score and for the always vigilant and correct Wikipedia historians.

Now lets get to the actual 'finding of this place." I think I could have found Jimmy Hoffa quicker. I knew it was in Illinois...close to a town called Cave in Rock which was only about 80 miles from Evansville. When I used to work out of Memphis, we wrestled there every Wednesday night back in the day. So 80 miles was nothing. I thought. The plan was for me to drive to Evansville and meet up with Doug Gilbert and Road Dog Jesse James, who were working another show in Evansville that night. After their show, we would all meet and travel together to the Gathering show. So the plan looked good from the beginning.

Doug had arranged a limo service to take us First Class to the Show and we left Evansville at 9:30PM on Saturday night in plenty of time to make the show since none of us weren't supposed to work until 4AM. When I got into the limo, I asked the driver what time did he expect to arrive at the Gathering and he told me around 11:30PM. That was our first ETA time. That was what he said. That wasn't what ended up happening.

So we started driving. The 1st indication that we were leaving civilization was my cell phone dropped its signal about 30 minutes outside Evansville. As I looked outside, I could see nothing but pitch darkness. No street lights, no cars coming in the opposite direction, nothing. But at least, we were on a nice two laned paved highway. Then about 45 minutes into the drive, the driver, who wore sunglasses the entire trip. for no apparent reason other than to appear cook, turned south onto a secondary road.

This secondary road would be more described as a driveway...it was a narrow two lane highway with barely enough room for two cars to fit on it. It was dark because we were in total farmland. No street lights, no red lights, no town or even communities to go through. This is there the Oddysey began. Forget GPS because nobody in the car had any InterNet connection at all. But I thought the driver knew where he was going. I found out that the driver wasn't really a 'real' driver at all. He turned out to be a furniture salesman who just agreed to drive this limo for the night. The limo wasn't even from a limousine service. It was a limo that some guy has just bought years earlier and had been sitting in his garage for years until Doug told him we were going to this show and he offered to let us use it. This was the start of the nightmare.

So we started driving...and I started wondering why the Clowns would pick such an out of the way place to hold their annual Gathering. Later on, I found out. This place was handpicked for several reasons...the most primary reason is that its remote and hard to get to. If its hard to get to, its hard to police and that would mean the the Juggaloes could have their wild ass party with a minimum of police intervention. Perfect.

Since we had no directional instructions..no GPS nor did anybody in the car possess the common sense to spend $3.99 on a Rand-Mcnally Road Map, sure enough, we were LOST. Big time lost. There's wasn't anything out there. No cars moving around, no place to stop and ask and not any houses to speak of and the ones we did see, there was nobody brave enough to go up and knock on the door. The Texas ChainSaw Massacre movies kept popping in my head. After 20 or 30 minutes to driving just to find anything that would give us an indication of where we were, we finally saw a sign that said , Cave In Rock, Illinois. Wow..finally. We all breathed a sigh of relief as we slowly drove into this dark little Illinois town at about 12 midnight. It was late but finally we were at the place we needed to be.

We drove up over a little hill and we stopped dead in the road. We stopped..because the road stopped. BAM!!! We completely dead ended into a big river and we could go no further. We stopped and got out....and there was complete silence. It was hot and humid...adn there were no lights from the houses, no lights from the little storefront business and absolutely no traffic moving around. Nothing. The town literally looked like a ghost town and no movie producer or Hollywood set designer could have produced it better. At the left of the road when it ended, was a small playground complete with swings, slides and a see saw set. But no signs of life. There was a 50 gallon trash can attached to a short post and when I looked into the can, there was no trash. Nothing. Funny, the things you think when you're way out in the country and LOST.

We all got out...and I asked the driver...who still had his sunglasses on where were we? His reply was, "I don't know." Well, if he didn't know then none of us knew. It was already 12midnight and he had predicted we would be at the show at 11:30PM and we were already 30 minutes behind schedule and LOST.

The driver looked like the dead guy from Weekend at Bernie's except he could walk on his own but Bernie could probably read a map as well as this guy could. As I looked around at this straight out of a horror movie scene, I fully expected Michael Myers to come running out between one of those darkened houses with an axe and kill us all. This NIGHT OF THE JUGGALOS might not have been such a good idea I surmised.

We got back in the limo and starting driving some more. I told the driver...it you see a sign that says Evansville, take it and I'll go back home. The driver kept asking us if we were going the right way...and we told him...that we were on our first trip too. As we rolled down the two lane blacktopped road, we saw a trailer off the the left and we got a glimpse of a couple of guys standing in the driveway. We pulled in and asked them where the Juggalo thing was going on. They were completely taken off guard by seeing the limo but they gave us directions.

I had heard so much about this ICP Gathering festival...and that the route was clearly marked as to how to get to the Gathering grounds. I never saw one sign, not one but I heard later that the Juggalos pull these signs up...after the fans get in so that fans can't find their way out.

From the time we left Evansville to the time we actually found the site was over a 4 hour trip. But finally...we saw a bunch of police lights...some of them blue..some of them red. But they were all flashing and as we pulled up, in our limo, the cops knew we were performing on the show. The cops had about three or 4 cars pulled over and were giving the drivers field sobriety tests. Most of the people they had pulled over wore all the Insane Clown Posse makeup.

One cop had a young fat girl...about 24/25 years old going through the paces of determining whether she was drunk or under the influence. I'm not an expert but it didn't take a forensic scientist to figure out that this girl was stone cold hammered. like lift one leg and then walk a straight line. The girl was stone cold hammered and almost fell down when she took the first step. She was dressed in a halter top....and all she had on down below was a pair or red panties. No shorts, no shoes, nothing but panties. She went to jail. `

WHATS YOUR NAME AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?

As we stopped, one of the cops wanted to know who we were and what was our business here? We told him that we were going to wrestle at the Gathering...and it was almost like we had told him we were his long lost brother. He smiled and looked into the back of the limo and said, "Well who do we have back there?"

I spoke up first and said 'Dirty Dutch' and the cop said..."damn, Dirty Dutch, how the hell are you?"

Then Road Dog said his name and then Doug Gilbert..and he knew all of us. Funny thing about being a wrestler, it sometimes works highly in your favor. He then told us we were about 10 minutes away from the front entrance to the festival and to be careful. He said they had already had a little trouble...a singer had been attacked on stage he said. I found out later, the cop was talking about Tila Tequila and the Juggalos were in rare form. He told us to be careful because they (the police) couldn't come onto the property unless there was a death. If I wasn't scared enough, talking to this cop damn sure didn't relieve any of my stress. He also told us that they had arrested a couple hundred people including one wrestler. He said his name was Sabu. Oh and BTW he said, there had just gotten a report of a stabbing.

WTF? OK...now I thought that this was one BullShit show I had booked myself onto. Here I am, out here in this GodDamn God Forsaken Hell Pit of the World..with a bunch of f'n loony tunes not to mention psychotics not to mention dangerous psychotics in the middle of the night with no telling how much they've been drinking or doing drugs. But here I was...and if I could, I would have had Scotty beam me up...and take me out of this situation I was in. I didn't feel scared but I damn sure didn't feel safe. But I was in too deep now to even think about turning around. Damn, where was I to go? It was dark, I was lost, none of us had any idea where we were and it was close to 1AM in the middle of f'n nowhere. Could it get any worse I thought? Maybe I shouldn't have thought that...it could get worse.

We drove a little more but we still didn't see anything. I could not believe that a music festival like this could be so hard to find. The paved road then turned into a gravel road...as we finally got close enough to see where the GATHERING fans were camped out. It was very dark but on both sides of the dirt road and all I could see were hundreds of tents..rows and rows of tents one right after the other. Suddenly, I wished I was in the tent business because whomever had this contract damn sure wrapped up. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of little tents but where were the people? Some of the tents had clothes hanging out to dry, and small campfires left unattended so people were around, but they must be down at the main stages. Past these tents, there were parking lots jammed packed with cars and trucks and you could see feet poking out the through the windows.

We drove for several more minutes through this tent city...and I've never seen more tents erected in my life. Then we started seeing a few faces...white faces painted like ICP and all they did was stare at the limo as we rolled past. There was no moonlight so the only light I saw were a few temporary streetlights every coupld hundred feet or so. It looked surreal and it was very quiet. I rolled my window down in the back and heard nothing but the sound of the tires crunching on the gravel road. After hearing so much about the crazed Juggaloes, I halfway expected to see them chasing each other with chain saws and long butcher knives.

This place was packed to the hilt. We finally saw the light of a HUGE bonfire off a couple hundred feet to the right...and then we came right up on a car that was partially blocking our path. He was in semi-darkness and was talking in Arabic it seemed into a cell phone. I don't know how he even had a signal but he was talking to someone. We motioned him over to ask him if we were going the right way and he told us that he was a cab driver and he had just dropped somebody off and as he was leaving, he was accosted and had just been robbed at gunpoint!!!

F**K!!! WTF? Yeah, this day had been one of the most interesting of my life up to his point...but I don't know whether I was at a music/wrestling show or watching a rerun of Law and Order but what lay ahead scared the crap out of me. I still had to enter the gates of THE GATHERING and what lay ahead I had no idea. I still wasn't even onto the GATHERING GROUNDS yet and the night was just beginning. I had come a long way from Madison Square Garden to an wild, ass underground music show in Cave In Rock, Illinois but to tell the truth, this was a helluva lot more exciting. One thing you can say about these Juggalos...they ain't boring. Inside, had a few more surprises.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Part 3 you'll hear about FLASHLIGHT WRESTLING, A 7' FOOT FEMALE WRESTLER AND HEAR ALL ABOUT THE DOPE BRIDGE AND HOW IT FELT GOING TO THE RING AT 4AM IN THE MORNING.

Stay tuned.