A Luxury Pursuit, the Anatomy of a DIY Tour (Part III)

Me and my band the Assumptions recently toured in support of our second LP, Exposure & Response. This is the second entry in a journal I kept for the duration of the tour. You can read part one here, part two.

November 24th-December 2nd

Architecturally, Laramie, Wyoming’s historic downtown district likely hasn’t changed since the McKinley administration. A wide main road separates two congested rows of weathered, western-style storefronts. It’s 7PM, and the only open businesses within comfortable walking distance from us—the temperature is below freezing—are a Thai restaurant and a head shop. Wyoming takes conspicuous pride in its preservation of wild west culture—it is, unofficially, “The Cowboy State”—but tonight, Laramie looks an awful lot like a ghost town.

“Fuck Laramie,” my Oakland friend said, a couple of weeks earlier when he learned that our route included a stop in Wyoming’s third most populous town. He told us a harrowing story about how he and a bandmate were pulled over in the wake of the 2016 presidential election and arrested for possession of marijuana immediately past the Colorado border. “It felt like some real New World Order shit,” he said, barely joking.

What nobody told us about Laramie is that it is home to one of the coolest venues in the country: The 8 Bytes Game Café.*

8 Bytes is like a speakeasy for Laramie’s peripheral nerd population. At first glance, it just seems like your average, defiantly unhip bar—the bartender laughs at me when I order a Diet Coke, and later, when I request a glass of water before we play, he gives me a pint of straight tonic water. But at the back of the bar is a door that leads to a small, dimly lit room full of arcade cabinets, ranging from the common to the semi-obscure. A separate, narrow arm that runs parallel to the bar area boasts a library of comic books and graphic novels. This is where the bands perform.

I am 8 Bytes’ target demographic to a tee; I love listening to Hüsker Dü while playing Turtles In Time. 8 Bytes also makes me sentimental because it feels like a cross between two Portland landmarks: Ground Kontrol, America’s “barcade” par excellence, and Backspace, a shuttered internet café that accidentally became a nerve center for the city’s punk scene. Ultimately, 8 Bytes’ serves a more vital function than either of those venues: it’s a sanctuary for young people in a town starved for modernity.

Photograph courtesy Morgan Troper

The drive from Laramie to Bozeman, Montana—our next stop—is about 11 hours. In an attempt to cut a couple of hours off the drive, which is the longest drive of...