Celebrity weight of Rushdie/Jagger/Wenders, but it is clearly going to try to win the big fame bake-off with sheer numbers.

In my sleep-deprived, semihallucinatory state I decide that between Germany and here I have switched the hemisphere of the brain with which I observe this circus. I have been going out on the road with rock bands since the late seventies; a lot of my friends are musicians; I thought I knew what it was like. But something Dennis Sheehan said to me a year ago turns out to be true: you don't know what it's like after a week on the road. It takes a lot longer than that to feel touring the way the musician and crew feel it.

When you go out with a band for only a few dates—no matter how well you know them—your internal compass is still fixed to the real world. So the band's world seems funny and out of whack. As a journal­ist, that oddness is what you focus on and bring back to readers who also live in the real world. But after a long time with the same band on the same tour, that perspective turns inside out. Eventually the tour world—in this case Zoo World—starts to seem natural and sensible, and the real world begins looking flat and black and white. Stopping into my office in New York yesterday I felt as if I was stepping into some bland old episode of Father Knows Best. When you get adjusted to tourworld, regular life appears very much like adult life did when you were a kid on summer vacation: "Wow, look at all those men with briefcases and ties going into offices to move paper around! Yuck! I'm going fishin'!"

I mentioned this to my friend Richard Lloyd, who plays guitar with the band Television, and he said, "Oh, yeah, you got it. On the road you don't know where you are, the name of the hotel, the name of the venue. You find yourself looking out one night and saying, 'Hey—how come everybody in the audience has black hair?' ' 'Cause we're in Japan.' 'Oh.' When Tom [Verlaine] and I were in Cincinnati we'd been up all night and in the morning decided to take a bus downtown. We got on with all the people going to work and just started laughing hysterically, that kind of laughter where you think you're going to suffocate, because to us they all looked like bug-eyed aliens. They looked like they were bolted to the bus seats. We knew that tomorrow we'd be in some other city but they would be on this bus again. And the next day and the next day and the next. That's part of why it's so hard to readjust when you come home to your family. It's not only that your body is used to the

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adrenaline charge of playing for an audience every night; your mind is used to constant stimulus. Every day you're seeing new places, eating new food, meeting new people, sleeping in a different room. It's hard for the brain to get used to absorbing so much and then have it all stop."

I was home in May for my daughter's school play. Keryn Kaplan (who, U2 connections aside, is a neighbor) brought over the final mix of Zooropa. I was listening to it while painting backdrops for the kindergar­ten production of The Little Mermaid with my kids, and it flipped me right out. To be pulled so fiercely back into the tour head while I was engaged with my children's world gave me vertigo. I understood then viscerally why it was so hard for Bono to leave his family to come back out for Ellen's farewell party last winter. Not because the Zoo World isn't fun, but because it is fun—and knowing it's out there is like seeing yourself leading another life in a parallel dimension.

Larry got annoyed with me one night when I said that being on tour feels natural because it allows people to revert to the state in which they spend the first five years of their lives: someone else feeds you, someone else picks you up and puts you where you're supposed to be, someone else pays the bills for you, and when you do a trick everybody applauds. Subconsciously, we are probably all in shock that it ever stopped being like that.' Going on a big tour feels like a restoration of the natural order. Larry stopped just short of punching me in the nose, letting me know that he hates that old line. Far from being babied, he said, the sort of luxury U2 lives in is what is the necessary minimum requirement for the band to focus on carrying this monstrous creative/financial/logisti­cal burden around the world for two years on their four backs. It's the same for any business executive jetting around doing big deals, Larry pointed out. It is not infantilism—it is clearing the decks of petty distractions in order to do a mammoth job.

I don't disagree with him, but neither do I think the two things are contradictory. I think that a side effect of having the decks cleared to undertake a mammoth, stressful job is the imposition of a sort of babymg that is very, very seductive. Especially for those of us who are not behind the wheel, but riding in the backseat.

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