The Chris Gethard Show Cross Country Adventure: Sleeping in a Wal-Mart Parking Lot

I am writing this entry from the back of an RV that’s parked in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Selma, North Carolina. This is also where I slept last night. In a Wal-Mart parking lot. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Yesterday was a good day. We didn’t have to drive too much to get to Carrboro, North Carolina where we had a show with the cool cats at Dirty South Improv. The shitty part is that our generator is still busted, but hopefully we can get that fixed today.

A girl named Molly Buckley was talking shit on Twitter about how they had this burrito called El Gigante at a restaurant called Bandido’s and how I couldn’t eat the whole thing. Being that I’m a rage filled maniac, I said “Fuck that,” met this lovely woman in Chapel Hill, and was way too aggressive with her about how I was going to conquer this fucking burrito. Unfortunately, the thing weighed seven pounds. That’s like eating a newborn child. There was no way it was going to happen. I almost vomited in the restaurant. Our waiter told us that people vomit from it all the time. This almost made me vomit more.

The LLC decided to help us raise money to fix the generator by walking all over Chapel Hill singing “Chapel Hill, Surf City” by The Kung Fu Monkeys. Instead of busking normally, where you’d stay in a stationary place and allow people to choose to give you money, they ran aggressively towards individuals, shouting loudly about how “Without a generator we won’t be able to charge our MacBook Pros!” They gained a whopping four dollars from the lovely people of North Carolina.

We put on a show and felt really good about it. DSI is definitely one of the better improv theaters in the country. Zach Ward’s put together a real good thing there, and all of the performers who come out of there are good and very, very nice. The crowd was super kind, even though the guy who won the raffle to send a text from Robot Riley’s phone made him send the girl he has a crush on a text that says he got her best friend pregnant.

After the show, we realized we had a tweet from a girl offering to show us some fucked up haunted places about an hour south of where we were. We drove down to Wilson, NC, and met up with Maia Miller, who brought us to a place called Acid Park. This is a huge field full of giant iron pinwheels and whirligigs, all covered with reflectors. It’s really awesome looking. Legend has it that the guy who built it did so because his daughter died in a car accident on the spot. The convoluted tale is that the kid who was driving was on acid, and when the girl’s father asked “What happened?” he describe his drugged out vision to the dad, who in his grief, built a replica of exactly what the kid told him. We did see a crashed car wrapped around a tree on the property, so who knows? All I know for sure is that standing in the middle of a fucking field surrounded by a bunch of crazy ass artwork at two in the morning with a bunch of strangers is a cool, odd feeling.

After that, we had our first night in the RV. I was really excited about this. It was fucking cracked out. Fitting ten people into a seven person RV is not as difficult as you would think. I stayed in a bed above the driver’s seat with both Shannon and Will. It was pretty fun, like a weird sleepover with a 40 year old man and a married homeowner of a woman. The only problem is that Will Hines snores like a fucking asshole. And when he wakes you up, and you have to see his stupid smug face covered by a fucking sleeping mask, all you want to do is PUNCH.

We woke up and all brushed our teeth in a Wal-Mart, which is about as degrading as you would imagine. I should mention that while parking the RV, I crashed into a concrete pylon. I laughed. This is a sign that I’m going insane, and this trip should get even more fun fast.

We are about to head to Tennessee. A dude is going to get us barbeque and show us the world’s largest rubik’s cube. If we have time we might go to Pigeon Forge, which I hear is a bizarre place. Can’t wait.

Chris Gethard is a comedian from New York and the host of the Chris Gethard Show.

The Chris Gethard Show Cross Country Adventure: […]