 
### Flailing

Graham Derry

Published by Graham Derry at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Graham Derry

### Table of Contents

Intro

Chapter 1: Spring in the East

Chapter 2: Training

Chapter 3: Morocco and Spain

Chapter 4: LA to the Border

Chapter 5: Salsa Coming out of My Pockets Already

Chapter 6:DF to Gringolandia

Chapter 7: The Reunion

Chapter 8: Spell Your Hobo Signs Right

Chapter 9: The Night Is on My Mind

### Intro

I spent the summer trying to find the experience of the post grad twenty something. I knew it had something to do with Portland, fix geared bikes, small shoe sizes and the color green, that it existed wherever people had college educations and worked in the service industry, tasted like cheap beer with a whiskey back and smelled like rollies.

I traveled on a budget, without a car, hitchhiking because it is romantic, using craigslist rideshare because it is cheap and convenient. I had done rideshare few times before. I rode home from college one ride which took 18 hours through the night from Colorado Springs to Oakland, driven by Mike Stone in his Dodge Charger, with the sun rising over he castles of he Utah desert. I took another from Chicago to Seattle. We spent the night in a house in the woods by a river outside Missoula, Montana. Another ride from Santa Barbara to Palo Alto, another from Sacramento to Eugene. I had also done some hitchhiking. From San Francisco to LA, around Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and in southern Turkey from the Syrian border to the Mediterranean via Gaziantep.

I had savings from teaching English in South Korea, and a summer job lined up to lead a trip of high school kids to Spain and Morocco. With twenty two countries on my passport and a working knowledge of Spanish, Japanese and Arabic I felt like I could talk to anyone.

I sought the young, intelligent, and energetic. I wanted to create my own narrative out of my experiences, so I could drop gems to Boise State girls like, "I hitchhiked here from Juarez, Mexico."

I went out to the intern bars in DC, everybody with their name badge still clipped to their pocket, sitting on top of pool tables drinking whiskey out of ketchup squeeze bottles and sweating liquor. I hung out in Noe Valley with the Stanford guys working for tech startups, talking about how they had taken classes with the Snapchat guys, passing around a vape, their friend's product, already gone to market. I went to Brooklyn on a hip-hop pilgrimage to leave a Welch's Grape juice on the doorstep of Biggie's mom's one room shack, now inhabited by a lesbian looking Asian woman, who I said Hi to as she stepped out the door with her fixie on her shoulder. Brooklyn is Portland four years ago. I browsed Echo Park thrift stores selling $30 chambray shirts which were worn on the set of 'One Life to Live'. I found friends growing up, growing bellies at desks, growing out of constant and obsessive pot use. I now have friends who have been to rehab. We all knew it would happen one day to a few of us. It wasn't too surprising who it ended up being. I crashed with college grads working in restaurants, saving up a couple grand to buy a plane ticket and a month's worth of blow in Colombia. I met up with friends who were in jobs that related to their skills and interests. The types of jobs people refer to as 'real', with salaries, button up shirts, desks, and office parties. The jobs where you go out for happy hour, look forward to the weekend, and listen to your 30 year old co-workers talk about their boat. Some of the people I come across were doing it right, self-actualizing, shinning on their own grind, while others were stagnant, bored, and sleepy at ten in the morning. Most people will not admit they are unhappy. It is a great sacrilege to Americanism is to say you're unhappy. That means you're doing it wrong.

I ate Kimbap in Koreatown, taco trucks on the West Coast, fried chicken hoff style in Boston, $1 pizza in Manhattan, Amish pretzels in Philly, $8 falafel, the cheapest meal in Adam's Morgan, Indian burritos in North East, grocery stores across the country, hit them up with a calorie per dollar mentality, demi baguette, six slices of salami, free butter pads at Whole Foods, the only grocery stores available in hipster villages, fried chicken strips and jojo's, bananas, 24 oz. PBR cans, peanut butter and saltines, thirty racks for when you arrive at a friend's to crash for a week, peanut butter sandwiches, quesadillas and grilled cheese, life changing burritos in The Mission. Traveling from San Francisco to LA to DF all I ate for three weeks was Mexican food.

I have an incessant desire to explore, adventure, and meet strangers, even at the sacrifice of my personal relationships. I get more thrill out of talking to the barfly next to me than my date.

What the fuck are you not doing? Hipsters GAF when they should be flailing. Why don't you hit the road and make experiences you will look back on and shake your head at and think 'ahh youth'? It's all there, you have the resources, why not? Travel is education, and education is an investment that never goes bad. Or you can just read my book and live vicariously through my experiences. 

### Chapter 1

Spring in the East

I walked looking for the art museum, but my machine gave me bad directions, so I just walked. I came upon a Mexican neighborhood. I saw some black guys loitering. I made eye contact with each of them and was returned glassy stares. I went into a convenient store. It was a liquor store. They spoke five percent English. I went up to a man whose job it was to stand by the refrigerator and ask to help people. The man looked at me.

"Where are the prices?" I asked.

He said, "Can I help you?" I figured he spoke English, because this utterance was not heavily accented.

"Prices, beer prices," I said.

"El Presidente?" He thought I said _El Presidente_. I went along with it.

"Sure. El Presidente." He pointed to El Presidente in the fridge. A beer in a green bottle. "How much?" I asked, rubbing my fingers together in the gesture for money.

"Three fifty," he said. He got what I was trying to communicate. Language barrier breached. I pointed the PBR, "How much?"

"One fifty." Great price for a 24 oz. I took it from the fridge, and went up to the register. I slid my ID through the little divot under the Plexiglas. The man behind the glass looked at it, then looked at me, and asked, "Washington D.C.?"

"No, Washington State. I'm from Seattle." Jeez, nobody has made that mistake with me except outside the United States. I really am in a ghetto.

"Where are you from?" I asked.

"Dominica. You speak Spanish?"

"Pequito." I smiled.

I paid, and he gave me my receipt through the little divot. He bowed touching his head to the counter, and said something in Spanish with the cadence of a religious utterance. I was surprised by the gesture and the movement, and I gave him a wide eyed look, and he looked back at me like he was used to people thinking it was weird that he did that, but he was going to do it anyway and DGAF.

I went next door to a bakery where I bought a coffee and one cookie. I stood on the street and drank the coffee from a Styrofoam cup. A young black male came up and addressed me. "You got weed, man?" He asked.

"No."

"Oh, you don't smoke?"

"No, I smoke. I'm traveling through. I'm from Seattle"

"I got weed. I got Sour, you know? Dimes and dubs, I got dimes and dubs." His eyes scanned behind me, and over my shoulder as he hawked, never making eye contact. His lips were chapped and ashy. He moved on. Why did he ask if I had weed if he had weed?

I got lunch at a restaurant called _Cinco de Mayo_. The windows were completely covered hand written menus on neon cardstock, so I could not see inside. I opened the door and saw tables occupied, so I went in. I ordered the special, tacos with nopal. I asked the waitress what nopal was. She pointed to a picture in the menu, which showed brown strips of something.

"Is it meat?"

"No, it's a...." She searched for the word

"Vegetable?"

"Yes." Vegetable was not the specific word she was looking for, but it would work.

Nopal is grilled cactus, and this nopal was greasy, salty and tough. It was not good, but edible.

After lunch I went looking for a bar. I found Skylark, a brown wood panel building with a leather door and no windows. The bar doubled as a liquor store, selling fifths and six packs. Inside had dim lighting, and short Mexican men leaning against the bar facing out watching pool. Everyone seemed to be drinking Heineken, so I ordered one to fit in. There was no English being spoken. I was the only nonhispanic in the place. The white guy with the red reservoir tip cap who sat at the bar and wrote in a notebook. The only woman in the place was behind the bar. She worked it with the owner who spoke to me with Indian accented English, and to his clients in Spanish. He told to me, "Education is the only thing you can cash anywhere." A nugget of wisdom. He asked me if I was writing my thesis.

"No. I'm just writing. I'm a traveler, from Seattle." He gave no outward sign that he had understood what I had said. "I'm visiting my sister. She lives in New Brunswick. She is getting her masters." I wrote a bit, and left after one beer. It was time to get on to Philly.

It wasn't hard to get from New Brunswick to Philly. I took the train a couple blocks from my sister's place, had one transfer in Trenton, NJ, and paid for two tickets, $8.50 each. I waited outside third street station in Philly for a Megabus to DC. In line in front of me was a man with a bald, shaved head, a gap in his teeth, eyes that were yellow-whitish with brown and red veins, who wore a grey jacket over blue jeans.

"I signed up for the navy when I was 18," he told me in northern urban black American English. "I trained in Scotland, 3 years. In Scotland, Monday at noon everybody off work, drinks like a national holiday. Next I worked as a contractor on a compound in Kuwait. Don't listen to what people tell you about the Middle East. When I go to foreign cultures I ingratiate myself. There they got Bluetooth cafes. What you do is write your number down, and put it on the edge of the table, and the girls in burqas they walk by and see it, and they'll send you photos of themselves. They told me they wanted to be made love to by an American, because their men can't do it right. Those girls in burkas are freaks. They have a slave society over there. You know in Kuwait, you get forty five thousand dollars just for being born? That's why their family's so big. Ten people, that's four hundred fifty thousand dollars. Then below them is the lower class. They come from India, Philippines, Africa, all over. They have no rights. No rights. You like to party? Yeah? They party over there. Oh yeah they drink. You'll see the Bentleys, Mercedes, all in a row on the side of the road 'cause they crashed them, and they go out and get a new one. Don't bother with it." The man had no trouble thinking of things to say. He spent the whole ride to DC talking on the phone to his girl.

If the place has free milk and sugar for coffee, have a caloric coffee. Put in as many sugars as you can stand, stir, and drink the coffee down a quarter of the way. Fill it with cream. Drink it down halfway. Fill it back up with cream. Keep filling with cream until you feel awkward about how much you've taken, or can't stomach any more. Doing this you can probably achieve 500 calories for the price of one coffee.

I stayed with my friend Charlie in DC. We have known each other since middle school, and went to the same high school and college together. It was not like we planned to go to the same college; I was out of the country at the time of my decision, but when we found out we were both going to the same place we were pumped. We both got into Arabic in college, and lived together in the Palestinian Camp of Yarmouk in Damascus in 2010 while I was studying Arabic at the University of Damascus. In my room at my parents' house there is a picture of Charlie and me sitting on the Mediterranean in Latakia. Latakia is in the northwest of Syria, and is the region of the Alawite sect, of which the ruling Assad family belongs. Charlie was into Middle Eastern studies, and living in Washington to try to get a job in that field. We liked to refer to the Middle East as _The Durka_ , or _Durkastan_ , when I told Charlie I was going to Morocco that summer he asked me to bring him back some cool things from _The Durk_.

One day I rented a city bike and we rode from his house to the Mall. We saw the lady who stays outside the White House protesting war. I walked up to her to see what her deal was. She spoke softly, and had an accent. "Too many people die for no reason," she said, searching the ground with worried eyes. She had an umbrella set up with a tarp draped around it, giving her shelter an igloo aesthetic. Obama's neighbor.

Charlie had to go to work so I biked back to the Howard neighborhood near his house. I came upon a girls' softball game. There was a nice spot to lay on the hill in the sun and watch the game. About 20 supporters were on the sideline of each team. They seemed like family, friends and close neighborhood locals. We lounged and enjoyed the first day of spring.

One fan was vocal. I heard his big round barrel voice from behind me. "It has to be good," he called out, "It has to be good. Don't chase anything now. It has to be good."

The girls in the dugout chanted in unison, "We will shout out 'til we get a hit. We gotta get a hit. We will shout out 'til we get a hit. We gotta get a hit..."

The man behind me kept up his banter, "Don't leave it up to the umpire _CLAPS_. You gotta make contact. It gotta be good _CLAPS_. Anything close you gotta make contact." He turned to someone near him, "I've been watching that old College World Series. They drag bunt." He turned his voice back to the game, "Don't leave it up to the umpire _CLAPS_. Anything close make contact. Make sure it's a strike."

The batter showed bunt. The pitcher wound up, slapped her thigh with her glove, released the ball then slapped her thigh again. Was it a decoy o distract the batter? The batter knocked a dribbler up the third base line, third base hucked it across the diamond and it beat the runner by three steps. The inning ended, and rap hits from the 90's, 2000's and today played on the speakers.

When the game picked back up the man behind picked up his chatter, now directed at the defense, especially the pitcher, number eleven. "Let's go One One," he called, "You and the catcher, you and the catcher, you and the catcher playin' catch _CLAPS_. Come on One One, all about the pride now. C'mon One One, it's all about the pride, now, c'mon, get the ball across the plate. You fine, it's all about the pride now, keep it in front of the catcher, keep it in front of the catcher, the ball can't go nowhere if it's in front of the catcher." One One threw the ball in the dirt. "You and the catcher Eleven. Let's go Eleven. C'mon Eleven, you playing catch with the catcher."

The coach of the defense called out, "C'mon lays, game ain't over yet!"

From the dugout, "C'mon ladies let's get our cheering up!"

From behind me, "Gotta be a batter now, Eleven, let's go Eleven, _CLAPS_ don't have to be a hero, just make contact Eleven" Eleven struck out looking. "Ohhh, I just tolt you!..." The voice trailed off in quiet frustration, but quickly picked up again, "We need to pinch hit somebody and get them on base, pinch hit somebody and get them on base."

From the dugout came a call and response chorus, "Uh oh,"

"Uh oh,"

"Oh no,"

"Oh no,"

"Get it through,"

"Get it through,"

"Oh Two,"

"Oh Two,"

Oh Two was a left handed batter, and she was short but able to take control of the game's timing. She casually stepped into the batter's box, and took her time to get comfortable. She controlled the rhythm of the at bat.

She exchanged hand signs with the first base coach; multiple exchanges back and forth. A sign conversation. Her first pitch she ran at showing bunt, but missed. The second pitch was in the dirt. More hand signs. Her- pat head touch face, pat arms touch face. Him- pet left arm, right arm, pat head, left arm, right arm, _CLAPS_. Her- touch head touch face. She stepped into the box with her hand extended back towards the umpire, dug in and lowered her hand. The

umpire squatted. The pitch came. It was swung on running and missed. With two strikes against her, Oh Two stepped out of the box, adjusted her gloves, stepped back in. The pitch came, was swung on and a connected into a roll up the third base line. Third base was playing in, expecting bunt, so she had an easy grab. She slung it to first with a throw that was soon enough to beat the runner, but it bounced in the dirt causing first base to miss, and Oh Two rounded first to be stopped at second.

The next batter grounded to second base. Second base bobbled, and the runner was safe. From the offensive dugout I heard, "It's on you second base it's on you _CLAP_ _CLAP_." The coach in the dugout shook his head at his player. The assistant coach went over to chat with the chant leader, and put a stop to the bad sportsmanship. Can't be negative, we are all out here to have fun.

Big number 15 stepped up to bat. She smacked it, big butt big bat, and it hit the left field fence off two hops. A stand up double.

I decided to check out the Howard Campus. I walked across the grassy quad and found the library, but it was closing, so I headed across the street to a bar and ducked inside. There were pictures of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Obama on the American flag, and a Redskins flag, on the wood panel wall. I sat at the bar next to a loud man drinking whiskey and water. I listened in mid-sentence to his conversation, "...but what I like about you," he leaned in to his neighbor, "No one gets wrong, you gets right. I don't agree with this shit, and I'm innocent. I still like to drink though. Still like to drink at the bar. I don't smoke a pipe though, I ain't that type of nigger." An incoherent discussion followed of the words nigger and homo between the two men, neither listening nor responding to the other. I started a conversation with the guy next to me, and he asked me if I was Japanese.

"Do I look Japanese" I laughed. Was he signifying? People were looking at me. They were curious why I was there. They didn't see many white people in the bar. I thought the drunk was highly aware of signifying. He turned to me, "Tell me how to get some money."

"Why you asking me?"

"You look like one of those whiz kids." He touched his eyes, indicating glasses.

"I'll take it as a compliment."

"It's a compliment. I ain't trying to go against you." I had one beer and left, feeling a little awkward.

The river winds through Boston, the city doesn't determine its route. The development of the city came before the ability to channel and bank the river. Buildings are built far enough back to allow for flooding. The Chicago River goes straight and has changed directions twice. The LA River trickles over concrete. The river in Billings, MO charges with more power than the main street. In Boston, roads follow along the river, acting as levees. The town feels like it was grown up around animal trails.

In Boston I did a lot of walking; six miles one day, ten miles the other. I covered almost all of Boston and Cambridge on foot. Saw MIT and Harvard. MIT is very open and public. I wandered up into the Linguistics department. It was difficult to locate in its labyrinthine building. There were tons of different elevator shafts leading to different garrets and pigeon holes, like an academic Wonka factory. The difficulty of locating the department made it seem private.

In Boston I stayed with a friend from high school. He was a Tufts graduate and was now working as an engineer. He didn't remember I asked to stay with him a month before on Facebook chat. This fact came up when I was leaving. He said, "Yeah, you hit me up a day before, and it was fun."

I felt like I had surprised him and his roommate when I came. They kept asking me, "So...what's your plan? How long you gonna stay?" I felt like I had to leave after three nights. I was disappointed I didn't get a weekend in Boston.

I hung out at Dunkin Donuts near Cambridge. Sitting at a high counter, facing out the window, I watched and listened to the people in the shop. They were a crowd of worker boots, carpenter pants, short hair or bald white heads, and beards. A few men sat around the table next to me drinking coffee, and I could hear their conversation. They spoke in Irish Catholic Bostonian. "Randy can't go one minute," one said, "No, heeya me, Randy can't go one minute widout interrupting. I can't go on a one minute spiel widout Randy jumping in bof feet first into the conversation. The kid can't listen for minute widout jumping in."

The man's spiel about Randy was too long, and his friends got impatient. "What are you done yet? What is this lunch hour?"

"Hold on, man." He sat back in his chair. "I drink too much coffee."

"I do too," said a friend.

"I had one on the way in and one when I got there, now this one, I'll probably have one at home watching TV."

He stepped outside for a cigarette but remained in the doorway because he had a bit more to say. "It drives my wife crazy. I can get up at 5:30, she's like, 'Are you kidding me?' I like to get up, watch the news, if I don't see the weather, the news, I don't feel right."

The smoker came back in and started right up again on his monologue about poor Randy. "The other day he was doing something, and he didn't caye. Drives me nuts. Randy was doing something he didn't caye. I was gonna tell the boss. And it's not even fair cuz Randy's asking for Easta, but I worked Saint Patty's, so I'm not working Easta." He tapped the Styrofoam coffee cup on the orange laminate table to accentuate the syllables of his last point.

Like that moment when the lick you've been humming in your head all day is played by the tenor sax.

I rolled into New York on a Peter Pan bus. The bus driver said over the speaker, "I'll be your pilot, ahem, driver." The bus had free Wi-Fi but it was too slow to stream Netflix. I met up with my sister and her boyfriend to go to a show in Tribeca. A friend from Seattle was playing trumpet. My sister Anne, her boyfriend Patrick, and I met Michael in the audience before he went on. He had a beard, was soft spoken and observant. He jammed with his head to the music, and drank beer from a pint glass. My sister's boyfriend offered to buy a round, and asked what we wanted. I asked for the cheapest beer, which turned out to be a tall can of Bud Light for $5. The sign printed on the bar advertised the Bud 'While Supplies Last'. They ran out during the second set, so I went outside to a bodega, bought a six pack of the same, squirreled three in a bush, and brought the other three back in my pockets. I had a real thirst for beer that night, and $6 bottles weren't going to slack it.

The reggae band that opened was hot. The singer danced quick leg and foot movements in skinny red pants. They had a guy jumping from the stage down into the audience and back up who danced with the crowd and got us excited. They all wore the same type of shoes, they had a sponsorship. I asked Michael if his band had a shoe deal, he laughed, and shook his head no.

In Michael's band, the bass was done by a tuba. She was a round dark skinned girl resembling a bowling ball. She took off her hat when she got hot, and her head was shaved on the sides, but not on the top, where it puffed up in a 3 inch wide strip pillow Mohawk. She had the stamina to blow continuously for every song of the set. Michael played technical trumpet solos. He also played a steel necktie with ridges which he wrapped up and down on with thumb rings. There was a German who played sax, he was probably about 40, had a shaved head and wore an orange t-shirt and navy cargo pants. At the end of the show, both bands played together on stage. Everybody danced. I found a sticker to go on my notebook at the schwag table.

Michael had to catch bus to Boston. Anne, Patrick and I left with a couple Seattle folks who knew Michael. Michael groupies. We went to a hipster dive bar.

_The Hipster Dive Bar_ is something you'll find in any major American city these days, anywhere there's young people with expendable income. These places have the appearance of a dive bar; dim lights, wood wall paneling, a boozy smell, but are instantly distinguished as hipster dives by their clientele. There are no sad drunks slumped at the bar. Regulars don't come alone. The people are young and in groups of mixed genders. Females are smooth skinned and unbeaten. The menu contains four to eight beers on tap, usually hoppy IPAs and a stout, and cost $5-7 a pint. They have a happy hour deal on PBR tall cans and pitchers of draft beer. Whereas pull tabs were a staple at a traditional dive bar, they are rare in the hipster dive bar, because hipsters find them boring. "Oh, I know this great dive," they say, referring to some squeaky joint where everybody sings along to Biggie's chorus 'If you don't know, now you know, nigga'. A dive is not about the look, it's about the people inside. They have to be sad, and alone, drinking away their social security, or arriving after work to drink until bedtime. The bartenders look bored and take no shit. They dispense soda into whisky with quick pulses of their leather hands.

I walked into a true dive bar in a fantasy once. The bartender noticed me as I came in, and asked, "What can I get'cha, hun?" She looked at my young face with mild pity, and heavy tiredness. _Too young to start_ , she thought. She has seen too many fall. Made her living off of filling the sorrowful hole in her clients' lives. She knew it, but didn't like to think about it. The place got in full swing around eleven. Most of the clients were too old to have the stamina to go 'til closing. I walked around during the witching hour and the place swayed like the hull of a ship. Someone shouted to no one, there were responses, unrelated except in volume. The pool table smacked and Weezer came on the juke box. It smelled like liquor drunk, booze seeping out of pores, oily slicked back hair, vodka exhaled in deep sighs. At the bar heads bent over whiskey cokes like question marks, hairy knuckles before rolled up sleeves, fingers on the bar tapping the jingle to a commercial, eyes glazed over flickering blue television light. There was a man named Snake, who stood at the end of the bar and shared a pitcher with two women. He had a black beard which made his gaunt face seem more round, and a felt black hat with a brim all the way around, and was at the pool table as usual. If you find this place, ask how Tanya how Christal's chemo is going. She hasn't worked since the cancer. 
Chapter 2

### Training

I left Seattle on a jet plane headed for San Francisco. From my window I looked down on the row of volcano cones evenly spaced in a chain. Rainer, Hood, then what was that way in the distance? Shasta? The last time I had seen Shasta was from the road, lit by the moon, coming out of the fog, driving through the night with a Moldavian rideshare. He made me drive his car that night while he slept. I fought off bat hallucinations until the sun rose. Rainer sat in proud posture with soft sculpted slopes above billowing fungal clouds. I wanted to fly naked across the cool cloud surface and feel them whip up and around me, run my hand through and scoop them up like Peter Pan in the cartoon version.

I was going to San Francisco to take a Wilderness First Responder training course in Petaluma, California. The course gave me basic medical instruction which was necessary for my upcoming summer job as a trip leader.

The course was at a KOA surrounded by brown grass hills with clumps of oaks and cows. Highway 101 was visible from the campground, but was barely audible. It was close enough that once I saw a police car with its sirens on, and could hear the cop telling a driver to pull over through a loudspeaker.

The KOA was high class camping. Entering the camp required a code, 1782. That opened the arm of a gate so you could drive in. The same code got you into the bathroom where they had hot showers. There was an office where you checked in, and they gave you an orange wristband. In the office they also sold snacks, beer, ponchos, s'more kits, and advertised the theme of the week. The theme of the campground that week was pirates, so they had pirate ponchos for sale and showed pirate movies at night on a screen in front of the pool.

The pool was not deep, about four feet at the deepest part, and there was no lifeguard. There was a hot tub, lounge chairs, and umbrellas for shade. Kids flocked to the pool at all hours of the day, and DGAF that it was cold in the morning.

Below the pool was a basketball court, and a rockwall attached to a hitch on wheels, which could be flipped up to be climbed or down to be towed.

We had our classes in a big white event tent which was next to the arcade. Sometimes we heard kids slaying vids in the arcade while we were trying to learn about hypernatremia or some shit.

A fun game to play is the _Anal RV_ game. Add anal in front of the name of any RV, and hilarity ensues. Walking around the KOA I found some gems _Anal Retriever_ , _Anal Explorer_ , _Anal Trail Sport_ , and _Anal Jazz_.

I saw a poop tube coming out of the bottom of an RV going into a septic tank in the ground. It was supported by little black legs like a centipede. I imagined it was the dad's job to set up the poop tube.

I had a dream. I was a traveler in a new land. I entered the town with my travel companions, all male. Everyone was dressed in modern clothes. My companions wore blue, tight fitting pants. Per local custom, we had to stand in a line and bend over, showing our asses to the crowd. A young woman shot at our asses with a pellet gun. One by one she shot my companions and they went away. Then there were two of us left, me and a young version of an elementary school friend, Ben Fletcher. The tension became too much for Ben so he yelped and hopped away. The girl with the rifle walked up and shot him point blank and he yelped again. I guess I was the winner, because I was the last one standing.

I met Aaron at the WFR course. He lived in the same neighborhood, at the same time as me in Korea. He even thought he saw me once. He said I was standing outside my building, escorting kindis to their bus. Very likely, because that was something I did. He drank coffee at Answer Cafe in the same building as my school. He ate at the hand cut noodle place. He was tall, had pink freckled skin, blonde hair and light blue eyes. His eyes were set slightly far apart in his head. We all had _blood clothing_ for the course, which were clothes that were okay to get stained with fake blood. His blood shirt was one he had stolen from a Jim Jil Bang. A bloody Jim Jil Bang shirt seems like it could come out of a Korean horror film about a mass murder at a bath house. When I looked at him he would usually smile with closed lips, and look back at me. It was like we both of us thought something was funny. He had a girlfriend, and had been with her since college. She was pretty, I met her through the fence of the pool. She was tall, with thick thighs, like a mom, but still young, so they were nice, but looked like she might put on weight after the second child, or at least struggle with it in the future. Aaron and I liked to talk about Korea. His girlfriend had gone there with him. A lot of our conversations would start with, 'Hey did you ever go to X' or 'Hey, did you like eating X?' We talked about Hongdae, Itaewon, and Gangnam. My time there was more freewheeling than his because he was girl friended. Aaron and I studied for the final in the same way. Amy made flash cards of all the terms we needed to know, and she quizzed the group. We sat in the back, listened, and joked around. It was relaxing.

Part of our WFR training was to simulate a night rescue scenario. We were told that one of our instructors, and our boss Malorie, were somewhere in the campground (pretending to be) hurt. We needed to find and save them. We set out in groups of four or five, and Aaron was in my group. We walked along the road through the campground, and our instructor pointed us down an embankment to where the patient was supposed to be. I had an increased heart rate. Aaron took off running down the embankment, then tripped and fell. Oh shit, Aaron actually hurt himself! We did a physical exam and found a bloody bone sticking out of his ankle! Oh, no wait, it was just a chicken bone rubber banded to his calf with fake blood squirted around it. Seeing the bone and blood was shocking, which was the intention. Aaron broke character and reassured us that he was not actually injured. With my adrenaline kicking, I was antsy, dancing around, and not being helpful. The scenario was designed to help us learn how we acted in traumatic environments. We went on to treat his exposed compound fracture. We discussed the situation among our group. The bone had been exposed, which could lead to infection. We knew not to traction femur bones, because it could lead to volume shock from internal bleeding in the pelvis, but traction everything else, unless it was dirty. I talked Aaron through the traction. "All right Aaron, Susanna is going to hold your knee, and Sharon is going to pull down on your ankle, and the bone should go back in. Squeeze my hand, 3, 2, 1..."

"Ahh," Aaron sighed in relief. We had done it. High fives. We dressed the wound, making sure not to disinfect the bone tip. We splinted him up with the _jelly roll_ method making a splint out of a sleeping pad. Finished with our work we huddled under a tarp, looked at the starts, and Aaron pointed at things in the sky and taught us about astronomy things he had learned in an online course.

After the shock of the night scenario we felt we needed a hot tub. We went over to the pool area and got in the hot tub with a couple of middle aged couples. One couple was more talkative. The guy had brown eyes, brown hair closely cut, and straight teeth that were a little yellow. His wife's teeth were white, but yellow in the nooks up near her gums, a dark yellow like ear wax, and some black too. The hot tub smelled like and old swimsuit. At first I thought it was the lady next to me, but then I determined it was the sandals behind me.

The man was a trucker. He told us, "I was never able to get an education, but I put this lady through nursing school." He put his arm around his wife and smiled at her, and she cuddled into his wet hot tub body and smiled at us. "I drive a truck five days, sixty hours a week, and work hard for my family. I'm just about ready to retire, just a couple more years, plus then all the kids will be gone, and we can really see the country. I have five daughters, and one son. He's the youngest. That's him over there." I looked over and saw a skinny looking 13 year old boy ready to jump in the pool, braces and all. The family was Mormon, and he dropped a polygamy joke, "I'm not a polygamist, but I feel like one. I got my wife and my navigation system both telling me where to go!" He was a trucker who took vacations in an RV. I would imagine that if I was a trucker I wouldn't want to drive for my vacation.

On my last day at the KOA I sat at the picnic table writing. The sun warmed my back. I heard crows _caw caw_ , twittering little birds in a group, a sprinkler _chss chss chsssssssss_ , a car driving through the gravel parking lot crunching rocks, the hum of the highway, someone talking on their phone too far off to hear what they were saying. I smelled my t-shirt fresh from the laundry. An earthy hot pine smell came in waves, in between breaths of the wind. The breeze blew from my right side over to my left, and made a _whip whip whamumumum_ sound across my right ear. It moved a few of the hairs on my head, but some of them stay in place because they were still wet from when I washed.

There was a group of what seem to be Slavic men staying a few sites over. They woke up around 8am with lots of loud banter and guffawing. I walked by the pool a little later and saw their bronze bodies in speedos sitting in chairs, sunbathing and chatting. Seemed like a good bro time they were having. I took them to be Serbian by the mouthy rolling sound of their language.

I dreamed I was in India. I had a feeling of freedom. I went to the market. I forgot my sandals. I searched for new ones. I found some. There were guys at the shop getting their shoes shined. A white guy was arguing about the price. The other locals told him it was a fair price. I bought a pair of sandals, but the shopkeeper needed to find someone else before I could complete the purchase. I followed him through the market. I passed a BBQ spot on the corner. It had an open fire grilling huge delicious chicken, and shredded yam pancakes.

In another dream I was looking in a mirror and found a bald spot on the left side of my head. Receding hairline! I'm balding!

I had a dream where my parents and I had a weekly dinner with Bashar al Assad as if he was a family friend. After dinner I lead a yoga session, and he joined.

We played football out on the windy field in the golden Nor Cal sunset. I could smell the sea breeze, but couldn't see the ocean. I said, "Give me the rock" and ran a no huddle offence. I got a pass off to Amy. Next play Aaron streaked across the center, and I hit him in the chest. Fourth down came and we had another fifteen yards to the end zone. They rushed me. I hail married. It wobbled in the air, came up short of the intended receiver, and was intercepted. Then Aaron was QB because he threw spirals. I caught the ball once, but couldn't go full beast mode because of my healing ACL. After football, I cracked and orange soda and chugged it like a boss because I was thirsty.

We went to the _2am_ in Mill Valley to drink $5 20oz PBRs. You could also hop next door to Joe's Tacos, and bring back $7 burritos and $9 quesadillas. The crowd was drunk for a Saturday afternoon. Their image could be summed up in the description of one client, a tan middle aged man in a white t-shirt and cargo shorts who called you _dood_ , or if you were a child _little dood_.

It was warm in the bar, and the little ceiling fans didn't do much to cool me where I sat next to the exterior windows. We shot pool, and in between shots I pulled up a stool at a table which wrapped around a column. My feet did not touch the ground when I sat in the high stools, but I could rest them on the cross bars. There were five flat screen TVs playing a hockey game.

A man in a yellow t-shirt and fedora with a moustache called out his shot on the pool table. He made it. "YES YES YES!" he yelled like Billy Mays and high fived three people in our group, but only one of them was paying attention and knew why they were getting high fived. The other's high fived back and smiled sheepishly.

A skinny wrinkled man with hollow eyes and a pony tail wrote his name on the pool board. EV. Simple and straight. Not clear if they were initials or short for something. EV stood at a tall table, and watched us butcher a game of pool. He drank a copper colored beer. He wore shorts, a baggy t-shirt with some stains, and a hat that said '外人', with _gaijin_ , the English transliteration of the characters written underneath the characters. _Gaijin_ means foreigner in Japanese. I could see the sinews in his pale calves, and he had some teeth missing from his top and bottom gums.

We had one girl in our group, Marty, who was not cute, but healthy, young and vibrant. The bar guys liked to play against her, give her advice, and one arm hug her when she got a shot. They knew they had no chance, but were happy for the young energy.

I hung out with Graham and watched the hockey game. Graham was still in college, from Boston, and looked like Michael Phelps. He was still very much in a college _let's party and get fucked up_ mindset, which I respected. When the game ended we both really wanted to smoke pot, but didn't have any. We hit the streets of Mill Valley looking for weed. "It's fucking California, someone's gotta have some."

Graham said. I felt awkward asking random strangers passing by, but Graham had no qualms. We saw a dood walking out of Joe's Tacos wearing a tie-die shirt, rolled up khakis, white socks and vans. Graham slouched up to him and said, "Hey man, we're not from around here, but we were wondering where we could get some weed?"

He looked at us, and appeared to make a judgment behind his eyes. "Sorry man," he said, "I can't help you. But just keep asking stony looking doods, you'll find some, this is Mill Valley." We saw some peeps walking up the street towards us. Maybe they were stony looking enough to ask. They got closer, and looked 13. Maybe we were going to be there trip leaders this summer. Abort. Don't ask.

Graham wanted some hostess products, so we went to a 7-11. We got in line at the counter, feeling a little lit. A guy buying Heineken asked Graham about his shirt. Had he ever surfed there? He had. The guy had an accent. New Zealand or Australia. Graham and the guy chatted, and got each other off about having been in the same place. Dood was probably in his 40s, white moustache, and a ball cap. Graham stepped up to buy the cupcakes, and the guy left.

"Yo, Graham, ask that guy."

"Who, the old guy? You think?"

"I dunno, maybe, you were talking to him."

We walked to an Audi where the guy was getting in the passenger seat. Driving was a middle aged woman with a low hat and baggy, masculine clothes which hung loose on her thin frame. Graham introduced himself to the woman. "Hey, we're not from around here, I'm actually from Boston, and my friend is from Seattle..." The women looked at us like, 'So what?' Graham continued, "And we were wondering where we could get some pot."

"Yeah man. You're lucky you found me. Hop in, as long as you don't mind walking a few blocks." The response was so quick and assured it caught us off guard, but it sounded like she had what we needed so we hopped in the backseat, and she drove us to her house a few blocks away.

She pulled into her garage, then turned around in her seat to look at us. "I only have one rule in my house," she said, "no shoes." We took off our shoes on the step and entered an immaculately clean house; Granite counters with nothing on them, a flat screen, and a coffee table with no clutter, white carpets, and a clean smell. She brought out a Tupperware from her bedroom. It was full of zip lock bags of pot each containing about a quarter. She gave us one, and we tried to give her money "I'm not a drug dealer. Just take it"

"But it's way too much!"

"Just take it man. You think I care? Okay fine" She went into her bathroom. I heard the opening of a medicine cabinet, and a label being torn off. She came out with a pill container. "Okay, just fill this up."

"Gee willikers, thanks ma'am" Or something along those lines.

She rolled up a joint and gave it to us too. We offered to smoke but she wasn't trying to. Okey dokey. We thanked her, left, high fived and-oh-my-goded to each other, giggling as we walked back to the bar. We rolled a blunt and smoked it under the full moon.

Have you ever thought about the change in your pocket, the life of each coin, and if any two coins have come in contact with each other, or have been traveling together for a while, or have had past encounters, maybe in the same change drawer 20 years ago, then came back together? Two 1980s pennies that have been traveling together since their minting, through palms, cash registers, and bank vaults.

I looked at the two 1980 pennies in my hand and pondered questions such as these as I rode the CalTrain to Berkley. I looked up at my reflection in the window and tried to cast what my face might look like as it grew with age. I tried to see the old face superimposed over my young face. I entered a tunnel and the reflection of my face jumped out white and clear lit by the fluorescent lighting of the train, stark against the tunnel wall. The train light from above cast stark shadows under my cheekbones and eyes, shadows that were wiped away like new moons with each passing orange light in the tunnel. Blink swoosh, blink swoosh, blink swoosh. The train came out of the tunnel and my face was shocked clear from the reflection by the daylight, the luminous cement wall was too bright a background to hold a reflection. I looked out over the scenery. My conscious view was different from the locals I was riding with. I saw the grand scenery, the cranes of Oakland, the clouds, the shimmering bay, and the populated hills of San Francisco. While I saw scene differences, the locals saw slight changes. They had seen the grand things before, and now tuned them out. They noticed the small differences in the view like the new tag on the wall or the car making a left hand turn. There are always things to notice, from a grand scale down to the micro details. 
Chapter 3

### Morocco and Spain

This is a marvelous era we live in. The glory age of international travel. I can count the countries I can't get visas for on one hand. Two weeks of work at minimum wage is enough to buy a one way ticket anywhere in the world. Compare that to four years of indentured servitude it cost some people to cross the Atlantic three hundred years ago. This is a golden age, and it won't always be like this. World travelers are the modern _beats_. Realizing the wild expanses that are available to us, and pushing the limits of our new found freedom.

I had a job to lead a group of six high school students on a service and language trip to Spain and Morocco. I had one female co-leader, and a couple of in-country guides in Morocco. I had done a lot of international travel in my life, so I wasn't afraid of the language barrier, and looked forward to the culture shock. I was nervous about leading high school kids for three weeks. Would they respect me? Would I be able to teach them anything? We met them in the JFK airport, and flew together to Marrakech.

When we got to the hotel, the kids settled into their rooms and I helped them figure out their AC. They needed my help. I went and sat on the balcony of our hotel to watch the main drag. Taxis passed of different makes and models painted the same Dijon yellow/gray.

Tourists' pale legs walked on the sidewalks and I could almost smell their sunscreen. A two horse carriage trotted by with a couple of tourists, then trotted back the other way a few minutes later without them. Robes and headscarves sped by on motorcycles and scooters. A man rode a big wheeled bike with one hand, using the other to casually pull a donkey on a rope.

When the sun was three quarters set, or halfway between the afternoon call to prayer and the evening's, our group went out to a mist cooled terrace with views of the market. Over the rooftops the view was drying rugs, curtains, satellite dishes, ornate window grates, wire, air conditioner units, and a skinny orange and white cat napping on cement dust, paw extended over a loose wire. The kids ordered Sprites, Cokes, and Fantas. I can't believe I woke up at the Best Western this morning. It was a world away, and what feels like an eternity.

When the sun had set we went out to the Marrakesh night market of wild, pulsing humanity, musk and myrrh, monkeys, honks, horse piss, dancing gypsies. We watched a cobra slither into the dark crowd, heard shrieks, then a charmer ran and caught it by its tail and asked for tips.

We went to the food stalls which were set up outside the market. There were fifty stalls lit by hanging light bulbs, each with a guy who made his livelihood off bringing in customers. I was the leader, in charge of finding a place to eat. We decided we would make one round through the stalls, reconvene and discuss what looked good, then decide where to eat. Walking through the stall land the guys came out and grabbed me, trying to pull me into their restaurant. One offered one free drink, the next offered free drinks for all, one wouldn't let go of me, and the other said he wouldn't touch me. Any eye contact set off a flurry of sales pitches, showing me the English menu, then the German then the French. They asked me if I spoke English, I replied in Japanese, some of them spoke that too. Each knew the same 50 words in six different languages. I looked back at the group and everyone's face showed they were just as overwhelmed as me.

We finally passed all the stalls, and stood off to the side to decide where to eat. All the places looked the same. I was too distracted by the restaurant guys shoving me to notice what the food looked like. We went to one spot that looked good, but it turned out all they served was liver sausage. We went to another stall and sat down.

We had been given the advice to write down what we order and the price of the item. When we tried to do this it pissed off the waiter and he tried to kick us out, but the big fat mamma manager let us stay. She still charged us a buck for each piece of bread we eat. Everywhere else in Morocco we went bread was complimentary. We tried to order some kebabs, couscous, chicken, soup and salad. What comes were meagre portions, the chicken was on the bone and we had no utensils, the meat skewers had too much fat and the kids thought it was gross, everyone said they were fine and didn't want more, but no one ate anything. One kid asked me how I was feeling, and I told her overwhelmed. Never have I had to order a meal for a group of high school kids, let alone in a foreign country, let alone at a street market in Morocco where I have to bargain for every grain of rice. The kids saw I was stressing about getting a good price, and they started to feel conscious of the trip budget, which we were trained never to mention. It was serious culture shock, exciting, and stressful. It was overwhelming, but my brain was firing all synapses. I felt alive and in my element.

We headed south in our private bus. Following the highway, over the mountains, into the Sahara. Shepherds, their professions unchanged for millennia, roamed the hills on the sides of the roads. We saw a few clustered tents with smoke coming out the tops, some dogs running around, and laundry flapping on the line. A shepherd carried his teapot down to the road. He wore orange robes, and had a well-trimmed black beard. A boy with a big straw hat stumbled and kicked following his goats over dry dirt in the ramshackle way a boy will walk if he has his own choice of pace.

The hills were brick red in some places, grey rock in others, with green stream beds growing dates in the valleys. Along the valley floor were villages, the buildings all the same color as the earth, sometimes painted to look like it and sometimes made from it with flat roofs, and hand packed stone walls. Above the villages were stepped hillsides for farming, some abandoned, some still in use, growing olives, corn, and fruit. Men, women, and children stood by the side of the road with big bags bundled together waiting for rides. Down in a pit men piled rocks into a truck bed with shovels. Each village we passed had a minaret as its tallest and most ornate building. Some were painted earth red with white geometric patterns, some were not decorated.

The bus was stopped by two police in baggy blue uniforms. They greeted our driver with a _salaam_ and a salute. They told our driver to put his seatbelt on, and exchanged a tit-for-tat, which our in country guide translated:

"Where's your seatbelt?" asked the police man.

"I don't have it," said our bus driver.

"Where's your paper work?"

"I don't have it."

"It's a big van, you should have it."

"I don't have it."

"Okay just go."

We passed rest stops with Coca Cola signs and gift shops selling local crafts, mostly tagine pots and geodes.

Riding in the bus one of the kids kept asking me are we there yet, but cleverly worked the semantics to make it sound like a different question. He asked me, "How long 'till our next stop?"

We came over the middle Atlas range into a high rocky plateau where the chaparral grew like New Mexico. Not many cars on the road, but we saw the occasional tourist bus, motorbike with a husband and wife, and a few mini vans packed with _shabaab_.

We passed through the mountains of cedar forests where monkeys and roaming herder people lived. The monkeys in the market in Marrakesh probably came from there.

Another police officer stopped us and our in-country guide called the regional police chief. The officer who stopped us said we were speeding. He said there was a 60km sign back there, didn't we see it? The police took the phone from to talk to their boss, and after a short conversation and we were allowed to go after paying a 50 Dirham ($6) bribe.

We stopped at a roadside cafe for coffee. It cost 10 Dirham for an espresso, pulled fresh, bitter and strong, no cardamom like they put in Arab coffee in Syria. It was hot even in the shade. I heard a pounding from inside the kitchen, and hot tea pouring at the table next to me wafting the smell of mint tea and cigarettes. My co leader's twangy voice asked the kids how they felt, if they need a granola bar, one after the other, as if they couldn't hear the question being asked to the person next to them. One kid suggested the pounding was from them building something because he saw bricks out back when he went to the bathroom. A good suggestion.

We stayed with a farming family in a fertile green part of the country. They had a two building house complex connected by a courtyard. Attached to the house was a barn where they kept hundreds of rabbits, and a stable where a few cows and sheep lived. Around their house they had a vegetable garden, pomegranate and apricot trees, and a few football fields of corn and fallow land.

We spent most of our time in the covered courtyard sitting in plastic chairs on mats on the ground. There was always family around, always people, dogs, cats and chickens coming and going. We ate our meals at tables on the ground. For breakfast we ate two types of bread; one a flat bread baked in a wood oven, the other a fried bread made in a pan on a gas burner. We ate the bread with margarine and jam, and shared the peanut butter we had brought. For lunch and dinner we always ate _tajin_ , a stew cooked in a clay pot. It has meat, potatoes, vegetables and special spices. You always eat it with bread. The pot is circular, and placed on a circular table. If you have polite Moroccan table manners you only eat the part of the dish that is in front of you. If the dish were cut into pie pieces corresponding to each person sitting around the table, you would only eat from your wedge. You should not reach across the table to grab food from another part of the dish. Most of the vegetables are eaten first, then then head of the table divides the meat into each person's section of the dish.

We all got Arab names because it was fun, and easier for the family to remember. My Arab name in the village was Driss. There was a little boy named Osama. The Grandma got annoyed with little Osama playing around too much and being noisy during naptime, so she started hitting him with her cane. She looked at me with her tattoo chin and cataract eye. I smiled. It was funny to watch the mild child abuse. The kid laughed mischievously and ran away. She threw a shoe at him.

There were always flies everywhere. I learned to ignore them unless they landed on my face. Chickens pecked around day and night, and often wandered into the house. Some people slept outside, but they had to be prepared for chickens crawling on them in the night.

Two dogs started to fight. The kids stopped dead in their tracks, stunned. Nadia came by with a bamboo stick and hit them off of each other. One of the kids told me he had never seen dogs fight like that, like, over food.

We taught English in the courtyard to the village kids. Little legs swung from chairs. The older people sat around the outside. Women shucked chick peas, men laughed and carried on side conversations. Chickens pecked around the edge, and flies hopped around our feet. We split the children into two educational groups, the 'What's your name?' group and the counting group. The counting group got excited as the counting chant rose in number, and distracted the 'What's your name?' group. Cell phones rang, and were answered. The 'What's your name?' teachers had trouble teaching what a question was, and what a response was.

A chicken hopped up on the table. Claps didn't scare it down. Neither did shushes. Finally two women had to shake out their aprons and stand up from their chick pea shucking to shoo it down with their arms. It flapped away. DGAF chicken.

We were to re-finish the mud wall of the sheep stable. Yesterday we went to a pile of dirt that was adjacent to the aqueduct. The government had tractored the mud out of the aqueduct to clean it out, and piled the sludge alongside. The result was earth that was good for building. We sat on the back on of a donkey cart with our shovels and picks. The donkey was reluctant and disobedient, trotting sometimes, sometimes standing still. We made our way about two minutes down the dirt road to an open hole in the mount of dirt. We picked the hard dry stuff off the top then shoveled the softer soil into the cart. We followed the full donkey cart back to the house, and dumped it in a pile next to the mud building.

The next day the work continued. First we picked off an old layer of mud and straw that was covering the bricks of the stable. We used hoes to scrape it off and expose mud bricks underneath. Next Muhammad, the most able bodied of the family, filled up a barrel with water from the aqueduct and rolled it back to the dirt pile. He poured it onto the middle of the pile, then hoed a moat around the outside to contain all the water within. He kicked off his sandals and stomped around in the mud, mixing the water into the soil. I jumped in with him, hoeing up the soil, mixing the water in. We went a few rounds, gathering a barrel of water, pouring it on the mud, letting it sink in, turning it up with our feet, hoeing out the sides. Then we gathered hay, and mixed that in with our feet. All the kids got into it at this point. Stomping the mud, churning it up, Muhammad adding more hay, until he came in with a pitchfork, turned it a few times, and deemed it ready. Dustin and Ryan shoveled it into a wheelbarrow, then dumped it next to the wall. We learned how to apply it; Fling it on the wall, then spread with the heels of your hands. It took six of us about half an hour to cover the wall.

After the mud work we swam in the aqueduct to clean off. Built by the French colonists decades ago, it carries water about five feet above the ground in an open half pipe about three feet in diameter. When it hit a road, it went underground and came up on the other side. There were pools, about five by five feet on either side of the roads it went under, and they were deep enough to jump into.

Swimming in the aqueduct was typically only for boys, but that day we took a few of the young girls from the house with us. It was probably the only time they will ever swim in their lives. They loved it, and didn't want to leave. I didn't want to make them either, but it was lunch time. This was my job, building mud walls, swimming in an aqueduct, drinking mint tea. I thought about friends grinding under pewter skies in Seattle. And there I was, doing my job, sitting in the shade of a mint grove.

For our first meal after the village we went to a hip cafe in Fez. The menu was in French. Groups of men and women reclined back in their chairs to smoked cigarettes, drink milkshakes and order extravagant ice cream sundaes. The place had two levels, and we were on the upper balcony with a dandelion bulb chandelier at eye level. The decor was black and white. White marble floors and drywall, black pleather chairs, woven placemats, glass tables, and mirrors. Behind us was a zebra pattern mosaic from floor to ceiling. Above was a ceiling with in-layed geometric patterns. I could not tell if they were drywall or preformed plaster. I'm always impressed with the drywall and plaster moldings in the ceilings in Arab countries. They have got that down. Waiters in white button ups, black pants, and grey aprons bustled with trays of ash trays. The cafe smelled like restaurant mixed with cigarette smoke and air conditioner. The smell reminded me of travel abroad. Fast Latin dance beats played on the speaker system.

I ordered chicken strips with fries and a Kit-Kat milkshake. When the waiter came, we couldn't tell what he meant when he said "mik chick kit kat", but realized he was saying 'milkshake Kit Kat,' using the word order an Arabic speaker would naturally use.

I got sick as fuck. We went to hot Roman ruins in the sun and I was feverish with explosive diarrhea. The toilet at the ruins didn't flush, and I had to hit and run, the bus and all the kids were waiting. I couldn't imagine stomaching lunch, so the wait staff laid out a sheet for me in the corner and I slept while the kids ate. I got up and vomited in the bathroom, and it was a loud retching vomit that the whole restaurant heard. I laid down in the backseat of the bus, skipped dinner and slept through the night, trying to drink water whenever I was awake. In the morning I felt weak, but I knew the sickness had passed. I think it was caused by water or food because it passed so quickly.

We headed into the mountain town of Chefchaouen. It is located in the Rif Mountains, the region of the world the word _reefer_ comes from. All along the side of the road were huge pot fields. Marijuana is not legal in Morocco, but its cultivation is permitted in this region.

At night we went out to a cafe overlooking the main square of the town. The square was made of stones slicked by feet, and was buzzing that summer night with activity. Children roaming, groups of women shopping, young men sitting cross legged, alone, looking for tourists to practice their English. In the middle of the square was an old sand colored castle, with ziggurat parapets, and evenly spaced holes. Our guide told us they were from the way the walls were built. Scaffolding poles were used to support boards, earth was pounded between the boards, the boards and scaffold poles were removed, and the holes from the poles remained. The building was illuminated by orange street lights, some partially covered by trees which cast dramatic intricate shattered shadows against the mud wall.

Up in the cafe groups of Arab men got stoned off hash cigarettes and drank cola. We heard live music coming up from the ziggurat in the square. There was a stage set up in the courtyard of the castle for a free show that night. Our group, the loud group of Americans, drew sighs and rolled eyes when we came in to the cafe. The kids argued over who owed who money while women's voices, thumping rhythms, and exotic scales rose out of the fortress. The men at the tables next to us stared blankly down into the square with their arms crossed, playing with bottle caps and biting the chap off their lips. Below us were roofs which spurred my imagination into a chase scene fantasy: tiles shatter with automatic weapon fire as the guy jumps between buildings, over narrow alleys. Cats scatter with their ears down and their tails between their legs. The pursued takes a big leap, falls short clinging to laundry lines, falls through an awning and busts open a storefront full of _tagine_ pots. Covered women with their shopping bags in hand turn to look, a group of Korean tourists snap pictures of the man in a pile of broken pottery, a group of Spanish students cover their mouths and point.

I took two of the boys back to the hotel. One was being a squirming pussy and not feeling the hash cafe. The other did not want to make his feel alone. Walking down the hill a group of girls was walking up. Probably 16, _quinceaneras_ , maybe local, uncovered, so maybe Spanish. Their dark earnest eyes looked right at mine. I felt them, and smiled down as we passed. They rippled with giggles. We walked four steps and I looked back, the one I made eye contact with was looking back at me. She kept looking. I smiled and turned away. I told the boys that the girls had been checking us out. The pussy could not have given less of a fuck. The friend took off his hat and smoothed his hair.

"What girls?" He smiled nervously, all braces.

"The ones we just passed." I told him.

"I didn't even notice them." He said.

The age old game of eye sex. The boys had so much to learn.

We crossed the straits of Gibraltar by ferry and landed in Tarifa. We had left the land of shukrans and passed into the lands of lisped grassy asses. I found I had little patience for the kids' inexperience in foreign travel. Off the boat I went with one kid to look for a bathroom. His stomach hurt. We walked into a kebab shop, him holding his stomach. He turned to me expecting me to ask for him.

"How do you?" He whined.

"Ask him in Spanish." I told him.

"I don't knowww. Bathroom?" He kept saying "Bathroom?" to the Turk and holding his stomach. The guy had no idea what he wanted, and looked at me. I said "baño." and he pointed to the back. The kid dragged his feet to the bathroom. One kid in particular was a struggle fest. He pigeon toed and dragged his feet when he walked, but had no physical disability aside from adolescent laziness. He was the only one on the trip with a roller suitcase. His mom packed it, so he didn't know what was in it when he started the trip. He was really close to his mom, and had to call her every couple days. After a week in he started to carry a big blue plastic bag with an assortment of toiletries, medicine, and souvenirs, that didn't fit in his bag. He didn't start out the trip with it, but he bought so much shit it wouldn't fit in his roller bag anymore. He asked me in the gift shop at the artisan pottery factory in Fez "What is the biggest thing I can buy?"

"Well, David, I'd say it would be whatever you are willing to carry."

"I was thinking like that." He pointed to an urn the size of his torso.

"Looks a little big, David." He settled on a pizza platter.

He carried it around the next two weeks in foam in a plastic bag.

We hung out all day on the beach in Tarifa, and in the evening we made pasta for dinner. One of the kids didn't know how to slice avocados for a salad, so he crushed them up like he was making guacamole. He said it was the only way he knew how to prepare avocados. I took one look at the crushed avocados and moved on. It would be fine. My co-leader came by, saw the crushed avocados, and explained to the kid how to slice an avocado.

The pasta boiling on the stove made the hot kitchen hot, so the boys took of their pants and started cooking in their boxers. Then they had to lock the door to the bungalow so none of the girls could come in and see them in their boxers. My co-leader stopped by the kitchen and asked, "Boys, why is the door locked?"

"It's hot in the kitchen!" comes the ruckus response.

"Huh?" She said in the way Southern girls say it, drawn out and rising in inflection.

"It's hot so we're in our boxers, so you can't come in."

"Well, I don't think it's a good idea to cook in your boxers, boys." She leaned through the window, and a kid shut it in her face. After more music and yelling from the kitchen the boys decided to put pants on.

In Seville we went out to a bullfight. I got the kids stoked early on about going to a bullfight, because I really wanted to see one myself. I tormented them a little bit the day leading up to it, saying things like "I wonder what those bulls are doing right now.

Probably chewing some grass. They have no idea it's their last meal." Like Hemingway, I will be the writer in the crowd, scribbling notes then looking up, trying to absorb the moment, and also put it down to pass on to posterity. The difficult task of the artist is how to fully engage in the moment to experience it while stepping back from it enough to capture and convey it.

The fight started under a deep blue evening with a fingernail moon. It was the beginning of Ramadan across the strait. Here we partake in this bizarre spectator sport theatre, a hand down from the Roman gladiators. They would probably understand this game better than any other of our sports, but may find it over stylized and effeminate.

We bought sweet and salty snacks from a table outside, and brought them in to eat while we watched the killing. Killing is better enjoyed with food in your mouth. I'm sure the Romans understood this too.

The guy next to me struck up a conversation with me in un-annunciated, old guy Spanish that was impossible to interpret. From him gesturing to my notebook I understood him to be asking why I was writing, do I work for a newspaper? No, it's just for myself.

People shushed each other, and the crowd hushed. I felt some climax building. The bull, worn out by red capes and pokey sticks, huffed and puffed, its fur damp with blood. Shit was about to go down. The guy drew his sword. The bull charged. The guy stepped out of the way, and stabbed it in the back of the neck. This pissed the bull off, and it jumped around. More guys waved capes, it bucked and ran towards them, and they ran behind walls on the side of the ring. The bull settled down, first to its knees, then with its belly on the ground, and looked around breathing hard. A guy came in with a small knife and stabbed the bull in the spinal cord. It laid its head down. No moan. A chill ran through me. Holy shit, it just died. The crowd clapped, then some rose to their feet, waving white handkerchiefs or tissues. Tourists rose to their feet to snap pictures of the waving white handkerchiefs. The band picked up a rump-a-thump tune. There were no loud speakers in the stadium, no announcers or pump up music. Instead, trumpet calls signaled the death. The bull carcass got dragged out of the ring by dressed up horses, with little ninny men running alongside. The guy who wielded the sword took a strut around the ring, waving to the crowd and beaming like a champion. He looked maybe 16, just a boy, handsome with dark eyes and a moonshine smile. Fans threw their hats into the ring, and he tossed them back into the crowd.

People settled back down, rolled cigarettes and puffed cigars. They let in the late comers. Boys slapped hands between rows over our shoulders. A boat shoe stepped up on the brick stadium riser at my feet. It was attached to a youth wearing a polo shirt. Him and his buds smelled like beer, but had controlled manners and smiles, waving up to their friends in the crowd above us.

The bull never wins. The tragedy is that everyone in the stadium knows the bull is about to die, except for the bull. Tormented, poked and prodded, it fights back to the best of its nature, flips its tail, charges the cape, and gets its horns caught in the dirt. It has lived its whole life for this event. Even when panting and exhausted, it always charges the cape. Every bull does the same movements, similar enough to make the whole thing a play, a theatrical, choreographed dance.

I sat in a plaza in Seville with a hot _cafe solo_ in front of me. I wished every sip could be as good as the first. _A life of only first sips_. I was wearing my crazy Damascene shirt which was the shirt on my back when I got kicked out of Syria and hitchhiked from the border to Gaziantep. I drank a coffee with my co-leader, then she went back to the apartment. She left her Nalgene with stickers on it behind. I put it on the table so I wouldn't forget it, but now I was embarrassed to be flying this American flag. Fucking Nalgenes, why do only Americans have them? With their NOLS stickers and dangly friendship bracelets. I can't be seen with one.

It had been fifteen days of almost complete sobriety. No booze, tobacco, or weed. One day of Provigil, an anti-narcolepsy drug I got from the internet. Caffeine almost every day. What would it take to give up caffeine too? A drastic change of place which excited and inspired me, or no access to it, but where in the world would there be no access to caffeine?

Spanish girls are beautiful, but not the hottest percent I have seen worldwide. Not at the levels of Croatia, Cuba and Gangnam. Max put it well, comparing them to Mexican girls. There is a higher percentage of 6s and 7s in Spain, but the 10s in Mexico blow any Spanish girl away.

I sat and watched the people. Two blue suits, and two business females pushed their chairs back, and stood up from their table. The pigeons flapped in, landing first on the backs of the chairs, and then hopping onto the table to peck at egg sandwich crumbs. To move they flapped a little, and in their clumsiness they knocked over a glass and _cafe con leche_ , _drip drip_ onto the cobblestone. The glass rolled near the edge of the table. Frightened by the clink of the glass, the pigeons hopped back onto the chair back and caused a woman at an adjacent table to pull her shoulder closer to her neck and lean away from the pigeons. The waiter looked over from his bussing of another table to see if the glass was going to fall. He watched it roll to stop, then went back to bussing without lifting his droopy eyelids or twitching a muscle in his pimply cheek.

An old man in perfect view in front of me sat at a table in front of a newspaper which he used an edge of to clean out a fingernail. He was slouched with age, and opened his mouth to inhale. His head was bronze, and there were brown spots on either side of his dramatic grey widow's peak. Thin hair slicked back, all in place, luminous like overcast skies. He wore a powder blue shirt, white khakis, and leather shoes without laces. His accessories were a gold wedding band, black framed reading glasses on his face, and sunglasses and a pen in his shirt pocket. His wife appeared younger than him in her hairstyle and fashion, but her wrinkly face gave away her age. She took a call on her smartphone witch had a union jack flag on it. They spoke Spanish, and had a little dog at the table with them. I labeled them as locals. She got up from the table and returned with food. When she brought it the dog put his paw up on her chair. It was used to her feeding it from the table. The request was a polite one, and after being ignored it dropped back down, but still looked, expectantly, with its ears twitching when her hand moved towards food.

I read part of Washington Irving's _Tales of the Alhambra_ , which gives a depiction of Spain in the Romantic era. The world described was sublime and rustic. He stayed at an inn the countryside where the whole village came out to party; the cobbler with his waxed whiskers danced a jig with the buxom inn keeper's daughter; the dragoons piled their muskets in the corner and the cavalier never let his saber leave his side. He ate lunches of lamb shank, figs, oranges, nuts, raisins, rolls and wine, and shared with the poor beggar.

Reading these travel descriptions now, in modern Spain, gives the sense of a bygone time of simple people and rustic travel. I think this is the way most people view the world: it was once a place of romantic adventure, but those days are now paved over by autobahns and McDonalds. This is a defeatist attitude of meek and feeble people. People thought the same way about the world when they were living in the Romantic era. It is true that Spain is not the rugged place it used to be, but other rugged places still exist, where farmers dance in hand made clothes, people have a strong spirituality, and beggars beg for food and not drugs or booze. It is the job of the traveler to find those places, live there, party, then document the experience so that a hundred and fifty years from now, when those places are paved over and colonized by the culture of the next world empire, people will read the writings and long for the bygone simple days that are today.

The ones who settle down this early are the soft who dream of freedom from inside their house on their Ikea couch next to their wife watching Rick Steves. It burns in their forty year old eyes, they would not have _not_ fallen in love, they can't imagine life without their boo boo, but they still wonder in the back of their mind what could have been if they took that other path at the fork in the road. History doesn't hold up the soft and content. It raises the salted and sun hardened adventurers, mavericks, and individuals who struck out to grab the world and claim it for themselves, leaders of the mild and selfless.

I have no debts to pay and no promises to keep. I have freedom. I feel very fortunate for the position I am in. Past lives have conspired for this one, the odds have been stacked in my favor. If I seek contentment I will become restless. I need to push at the edges, that is my nature. Stand up and rock the boat, because maybe the water is nice for swimming. You didn't forget to bring a towel, did you?

We had an hour to kill in the Seville train station. The boys saw a McDonalds and made a beeline for it. It had a fresh looking design inside with stylized graffiti walls, green, purple and white chairs and stools, an automatic touch screen ordering system, and a play place for tweens to work off the caloric meals with a basketball hoop and a timed obstacle course. The boys tried to order from the machine, but it only accepted one of their cards. They ordered full meals at 11 am; Coke, fries, burgers, nuggets, some breakfast sandwiches. One of the kids ended up with two hot milks but he didn't know how. His first sip burnt his tongue, after which didn't drink either. The kids had a hard time communicating with the locals, even if the locals spoke English. They made too much use of the American idiom, and didn't simplify or internationalize what they said.

They boys wanted to go to Burger King for lunch, so I went with them. McDonalds for breakfast, Burger King for lunch. American cultural colonialism. Everywhere we go we can taste home, listen to home, and watch home. Maybe the Brits in India in the 19th century felt the same way drinking Earl Grey tea in Bombay.

One kid ordered, then wanted to change his order, but ended up confusing the register girl and ordering two meals. The result was a free whopper for me. The kid went back to get a refill. I listened to him at the counter, "Ummm, uno refill?" At least he was trying with the language. She wouldn't give him a free refill. Goddam Europe.

Seville had tourists and _fresa_ locals. Every youth there was dressed the same; Polo, Lacoste, khaki shorts, boat shoes. Madrid felt gritty and urban. Chinese immigrant shop owners. When I talked to them we spoke a pigeon Spanish, trying to find curry among their dark dank shelves. Madrid had a diversity of styles: crust punk, Rasta, bohemian, suits, tank tops over Adidas, black vans with white tube socks.

We went to the Nike store after lunch. The boys did not bat an eye at dropping 50 Euro on a soccer jersey. They had a lot of expendable money, and probably always will. The rich stay rich. I leaned on a railing outside the store and watched the street pass. Some Ray Bans around a rat tail above jorts above red Nikes walked by. Then a couple of guys holding hands. Then a black shirt with a mosquito and the words 'Give blood, Visit Minnesota', above acid wash Muslim shorts and white converse. I saw a black tank tucked into white short shorts, high white socks, Nikes, a black belt, leather fanny pack, black moustache, slicked back hair, muscular arms and shoulders, tatted, obviously proud, must have been in his mid-forties. He walked by three times, strutting the strip, always looking looking looking for something. I watched a man with rippling veiny quads, tiny jorts, a black tank, sunglasses, bald head, and headphones in. He saw me watching him, and looked at me. I looked back and he opened his lips. I looked away and he walked past, I looked back and he was still looking at me.

We rented bikes and rode around the town. One of the kids was really reluctant to bike, but we thought he was just being a pussy and forced him to. It turned out he was really scared to ride, and not very good at handling a bicycle. I had a very difficult time feeling sympathy for him struggling so hard with a bike. I tried to ask myself, 'When was a time I felt left behind, because everybody was able to do something and I wasn't capable?' I thought of skiing, but I was never a complaining pussy about it; I still wanted to ski, and to improve, so that I could eventually keep up. Has everything in my life come easy to me, so it is hard for me to empathize with people who struggle?

Maybe it is that I have gotten pretty much whatever I wanted. I was raised being told that I could be whatever I wanted to be. Not everybody's parents believe that for their child. Mine did, and passed that belief on to me. Now I believe I should have whatever I want, to the detriment of my own spirit, because this is an impossibility, and I will inevitably be disappointed when I don't get what I want. The ones who have always gotten what they wanted will naturally lack empathy, because they don't know what it is like to not have. I believe I have internalized the fallacy that being whatever I want is the same as having whatever I want. Now back to the bike ride. In my mind, the kid was being a pussy. If he just bucked up and stopped bitching, he would get through the ride just fine. He didn't have to enjoy it, just do it, ride along, so as not to spoil the fun for everyone else. My co-leader, master of empathy, was frustrated with the group. She saw them speeding ahead, and leaving their group member behind. She saw them being insensitive, and not caring about their teammate, who was obviously miserable. She empathized with losers, I aligned myself with winners. I wanted to go fast too. Biking is so much fun. Why did I not feel empathy for the kid, while my co-leader did? I saw what she saw, but I thought he shouldn't feel that way. This type of thinking is a major roadblock to empathy. It is not about how someone _should_ feel, it is about how they _do_ feel. I did not accept his emotion as valid. I saw him unhappy, believed he shouldn't be unhappy, and decided to ignore his feelings. That showed a disconnect in my ability to empathize. Why am I like this? This is not the best way to live. If I am to love fully, I will need to be able to empathize. How can I train myself to feel something I do not feel? My current solution is to intellectualize the problem. I can intellectually know that in the situation of the bike ride, the kid needed empathy, and the group needed to be reined in. This was the right thing to do because it was inclusive and loving. My problem will be situations where I don't recognize empathy is needed, or allow my competitive side to overtake my intellectualization of empathy. It comes from boys don't cry, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, rugged individual, don't need nothing from nobody, make my own success jargon.

I dreamed a terrible war dream. I was with others, defending a fortress in the Middle East. I went to the gate, looking for water because I was thirsty. A man drove up, and talked to one of our guards. I stepped back, afraid the car was a suicide bomber. He drove off, and a van drove up, armed. They squared off with our guards. It appeared they were about to fight. I woke up, relieved from the war scene, relieved to be traveling recreationally, to have a safe, leisurely job, and the only problem in my life being finding what I want to do. I'm lucky. The dream was an omen for me to appreciate of what I've got, because I have it pretty good.

We all flew back to the JFK airport together. My co-leader and I drank some well needed beers at the airport bar until we saw that all the kids' flights had taken off. Then we high fived and the screen froze and changed colors like at the end of a happy 80's sitcom. We had done it. No kids had died. Next it was out to Brooklyn to visit my sister.

The train stopped and exhaled a warm breath of pier wood pine tar. The doors closed, and I felt the car's air conditioning. As it picked up speed out of the platform I heard it chatter-clapping. An adolescent girl across from us drank a cherry cola with a straw and sucked her thumb. You seen molly tonight?

We stepped out into the steamy evening, across the platform, and onto the 'C' train. _Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me_ in. My co-leader's mom gave her some advice for New York, "Now don't smile at everyone, ya hear, sweetie, 'cus not everyone's gonna smile back." Sweet southern lady advice. Everyone's got some advice for people going to New York. When my dad went to New York in Junior high, my grandma told him he needed to wear slacks. Everyone in New York wears slacks.

A beautiful couple sat diagonally across from us. Her hair was done up on her head, her skin was clear, her breasts humped like soft sleeping mammals purring in her yellow tank top. They swung braless with the start and stop of the train. Painted toes, attention to detail. She was sexual and unashamed. She was not trying to display herself, she was just a woman who did not feel like hiding her marvelous body. And him just a man. Tall with dark skin, lean with muscular arms and legs, athletic but not gym sculpted. He entwined his hands with hers, and leaned his in his ear in a tender movement to hear her better. She looked down at their hands together, and pursed her lips, amused and titillated by his affection. He kept his ear buds in while they held a conversation in soft black. Both were clear eyed and young, but not adolescent.

Another lady across from us had huge thighs that pressed together so tight they could make a penny flatter. Her eyes were narrowed and shifting around in her permanent resting bitch face.

We got off the train in Brooklyn and bought two deucers and a Welche's Grape Juice. We drank the deucers out of brown paper bags and dropped the grape juice off on the stoop of Biggie's mom's house. It was the second I had left that year. Hip Hop pilgrimage. We went out with my sister for drinks, and crashed on the floor of her sweltering apartment. The next morning we caught a flight back to San Francisco. 
Chapter 4

### LA to the Border

Ahmed took my German cousin and me from San Francisco to LA. My German cousin was visiting America for a few months, and we decided to meet up and travel together for a bit. Ahmed was Persian and came to this country seven years ago. Like so many immigrants I meet he was happy for what he had in this country, things most people take for granted, like a job, a car, and enough money to drive somewhere on weekends.

Ahmed picked us up outside of Moises' place in Noe Valley. We waited on the sidewalk in front of Moises' skinny house sitting on top of our backpacks. When he pulled up we stood up and waved. He parked, and came around to shake our hands, then opened the trunk. It was already packed, but we stuffed our stuff in, shut it, got in the car, and drove to the Mission District. Ahmed pulled over in front of a bar where Clayton was drinking. My German cousin and I had never met the guy. Ahmed had drove him up at the beginning of the weekend. He called Clayton. A round man came crossing the street. I got out of the car to meet him, and shook his hand, jiggling a bare arm coming out of a white tank top, with a bicep tattooed with a man's face. My German cousin sat in the back behind me, and Clayton sat behind Ahmed. When he first got in the car Clayton launched into a discussion of the female form, "What is it with Brazilian woman always having huge asses? How can a whole race of women be blessed with such asses? Some of them have small tits, and that's too bad, but they'll still have big bubble butts, like, wow."

He asked my German cousin what type of music he liked. He said everything. Clayton asked if he liked house. No. My German cousin said he liked music with natural instruments.

Clayton took a gold spray painted boom box out of a bag. "I like to party," he said, in a tone of apology for having a gold plated boom box in a duffle bag. The boom box was out of batteries so he played a couple songs out of his phone, then fell asleep. He woke up a couple times to ask if we could turn on the AC, we turned it on, and he fell back asleep. We got cold and turned it off then he woke back up and asked for it. He was a big guy so he probably got hot easily. When he woke back up for a final time, he asked my German cousin what type of music he liked to listen to. I looked at Ahmed, and Ahmed made eye contact with my German cousin through the rear view mirror. We chuckled together. I imagine the women who date him hear him have the same conversation with every new person he meets. I hope those girls don't find it annoying. I couldn't put up with that.

We arrived at James' place around eleven. James came out on the street to greet us, and we hugged under buzzing power lines. He lived in a triangle between the LA River, the 5 and the 2. They spoke the SoCal dialect there, using the definite article to distinguish freeways. There, where Feliz street is called _fee_ liz, Los Angeles is _Las Anjealous_. The syllable emphasis and the phonetics have been anglicanized. Even those who speak Spanish say the place names in the native way.

You wear your car in LA. It is a part of your self-identity. It is an expression. Like your body it determines how you will move around, but unlike your body you can buy it. Well, some people buy their bodies in LA too. There are expensive vehicles with twitch responses. They can lurch and peck forward at stop signs, like a football player at the line of scrimmage, full of powerful potential energy. Poor people have lesser vehicles, which have to roll to a stop, then grind through gears to pick up momentum. James drove us around in his parent's old purple minivan, reminiscent of an eggplant. It was kind of nice how messy James' car was because IDGAF about dropping crumbs and leaving trash.

We saw a Ford Explorer driving on the 5 with a license plate that said _DUDES EX_ , which looked a lot like DUDE SEX. Laughter rattled the insides the eggplant and we pulled up alongside of the car to see what type of person would have a _DUDES EX_ license plate. It was a middle aged man, 50-60 years old, white moustache, polo shirt, wearing a dead serious expression, with a wife looking women in the passenger seat. Glancing at them for half a second made it clear they were the type of rubik's cubes who didn't what their license plate could be read as, and would be mortified if they did.

My German cousin and I went out to drink beer in LA. We walked to a place near James' house which had a few score of beer on tap. I asked the bartendress if they had whiskey, and she looked at me like _Who the fuck are you to ask if we have whiskey?_ And said, "This is a beer bar."

We sat at a table in the corner, and waited to play pool. The pool table was occupied by a nymphet, bending over to stick her ass out when she shot, dancing around the table, stroking the pool cue, and thoroughly enjoying the performance the pool table allowed her. She was skinny, looked north Indian or Iranian, and would have been beautiful with ten more pounds on her. But she was a tiny thing with a severe jaw line and biceps I could fit my hand around. She had a tattoo that extended from the top of her hip bones, on the iliac crest, down through her little jean shorts, and out onto to her left thigh. I told my German cousin I would like to see that tattoo in full form.

She was with a friend, a blonde girl, who looked like the type of girl black guys would be into. She had round thighs, healthy tits, blue eyes and a straight smile. Her face and arm tattoos gave her a look of severity like she grew up poor, smoked cigarettes, and liked cocaine on weeknights.

My German cousin went to the bathroom, so I took out my diary and started jotting down notes. The dairy always works with self-absorbed women, because they think I am writing about them, which I was.

Anorexia came and sat next to me. I ignored her, and kept writing. Can't you see I'm working here? My German cousin came back from the bathroom, and told Anorexia that was his seat. She scooted aside just enough that my German cousin could sit between me and her. I put my journal away and opened myself up to conversation.

The three of us started talking and Blondie came over. When Anorexia got up to take a shot at pool, my German cousin turned to me and said, "She's very touchy, and it is a little but weird. I want you to sit by her so you can feel it." Anorexia came and sat back down, this time next to me. My German cousin was right about her being touchy, and it wasn't a normal touchy, but a bit aggressive, grabbing my arm when she laughed, or slapping me on the shoulder. That was the first of many red flags with her. We chatted and I found her to be very excitable. She threw her eyes open wide and said "I loooove life. I just want to fucking experience it, every moment! I fucking love living! Ah!" She shrieked and hit me in the stomach, "Why do you look so tired, you're boring, c'mon, let's dance." My German cousin and I stood up to dance, and sang the Trinidad James line "Popped a molly I'm sweating, woo!" and interchanged it with "Hot tamale I'm sweating, woo!", and threw our hands in the air at the 'woo!' part, and the girls followed us, and chanted along, and thought it was a great game. When Anorexia heard the word molly she turned to us with her big eyes and said, "I looooove molly! Do you have any?"

More red flags rose. I dropped some weird conversation starters, like I tend to do, and she gave me unexpected and dark responses. I asked, "What do you dream about?" and she turned to me with a look of all seriousness and said, "Only nightmares." Okay, _stretch my collar_ , this is a little awkward. I tried another one, "What were you in a past life?" Going to a liberal arts college, I was used to responses like, "a deer," or, "a koala bear." She turned to me and in a low tone said, "A raped victim."

She was too crazy, so I started to work on her friend Blondie. I did not need to say much. I put my arm around her waist, walked her to the bench behind the pool table, sat her down, and sat down next to her. Once the touch was established with my arm around her waist, I continued the contact, putting my hand on her thigh, stroking her arm or her knee. She responded well with light touches back at me. They said they had to leave, and asked if we wanted to come hang out.

Blondie drove back to their place. They had an apartment on the second floor of a two story building, LA style with outdoor access apartments around a garden, street parking. I sat next to Blondie on the couch, and we started making out. My German cousin left on a walk with Anorexia. Blondie got completely naked. I asked if she wanted to go back to her bedroom, but she didn't. She grabbed me and tried to pull me inside herself, but I refused to have sex because there was no condom.

Then Anorexia and my German cousin came back. Anorexia stood at the couch over me and said, "Now, this is when I get jealous." Blondie put a shirt on but still no pants, and sat on my German cousin's lap on the couch next to me. I reached out from my lying position of the couch, and with one finger undid Anorexia's jorts, and they fell off her little frame like an undone towel. She took off her shirt. So naked, so fast. I saw the tattoo in full form, a tiger clawing from her stomach down her hip and thigh. We got to hooking up, and she too begged for sex, but once again there was no condom, so I didn't. Brazilians, the both of them. Part of me thought I was about to crack and just stick it in, but I was also enjoying the power of denying them.

My German cousin gave me a look like he was ready to leave. I found my pants, zipped them up, and told the girls I had to go. That was when all the red flags from earlier in the night came ripping up out of the ground.

Anorexia stood up from the couch naked and started to tear into me, "What, is this not good enough for you? Are we not good enough to fuck?" Her little tits shaking with her angry body. "You think you can just come in here and not fuck us?" She started beating me on my head. I couldn't find my phone or shirt. "Get the fuck out." She screamed, pummeling my head with her fists. The banshee wailed, "GET OUT NEEOWWW!"

"But by shirt!"

"Just get out now." Blondie said. Seeing her friend erupting, she seemed to know the drill.

The tornado descended on us, and we ran out of the house. Anorexia followed, and she got up in my face and ripped my glasses off. I tried to pry them out of her hands but she wouldn't let go, and I didn't want to break them. "Sit down. Sit the fuck down, right here." I sat down in her driveway, shirtless and myopic. She yelled at me, pointing her finger in my face, and hitting me on the head to accentuate her points. Her friend tried to calm her down. They went back inside. The neighbor had his window open, and I could hear his hacking cough, over and over. My German cousin and I looked at each other, like, 'What the fuck just happened?'

"We need to go back in there man." I told my German cousin, as if I was convincing him to go back into Medusa's lair, "She has my glasses, and my phone."

We knocked on the door, then waited on their porch. After about 15 minutes, the door opened a crack and Blondie handed me my glasses. "Thank you!" I whispered, "My phone, too!" We waited another fifteen minutes, shaking our heads and looking at our feet, then the door opened again, and my phone came out. "Thank you!" The door closed. That night my German cousin was wearing two shirts, so he let me borrow one. We walked back to James'.

Somewhere in LA my purloined t-shirt is floating around. It's grey, has a skeleton drinking tequila on it, and says _Cuaderno No. 2_. It was left behind in my apartment in Seoul by the guy who lived there before me. The guy went back home to LA. I like to think the t-shirt had a grand design to return its self home, and I was just a pawn in its scheme.

"What time did you set the alarm for?" I asked.

"3:10 in the afternoon" James said, and laid his head down to sleep. His Sonics corduroy backwards cap was set on top of the couch, his hand on his crotch. The music on the turntable was a record of breaks. They came from an album covered with black tape, and earlier we peeled off the tape to find the original album cover, like finding a hidden masterpiece behind a garage sale painting.

My German cousin lay on the couch that folded out into a bed. The couch came off craigslist where the selling point was that it was in the movie _Elf_. The add had screen shots of Will Ferrell sitting on a brown couch, and claimed it was the same one. I heard the rivers around us, and the crackle of electrostatic outside the window. Cars and big trucks drove by on James' street every two minutes, even at 3am.

We had just come home from a bar on top of a building in downtown LA. It was on the 15th floor, and you had to take two elevators to get there. It was a nice view to take pictures from, and a PBR cost $7.

Before that we drank at a brewery. It was a large warehouse space with paintings for sale on the wall. One artist made western images out of particle board. The place had great bathrooms, the way bathrooms should be; well tiled with green, white and black; black urinals; linen towels to dry your hands; mirrors in thoughtful places so as not to make the urinals visible when the door opened. The brewery sold condoms with its name on them. I bought a few, so as not to have to back out of any three somes in the future.

There is a spot above the toilet or urinal that a guy looks at when he pees. This is a place of power and significance that female decorators overlook. It's the spot a man looks at a few times a day, very closely, while his penis is in his hand. I've seen weird shit put here by girlfriends and wives. In a family friend's house there is a round mirror, right at my face height, framing my head. I look myself in the eye when I start my flow, and make weird faces because it is awkward to make eye contact while you pee, even if it is in the mirror with yourself. At James', his girlfriend hung a framed picture of Britney Spears in an open legged stance, baring her midriff, performing in concert. I don't want an up-close view of Britney first thing in the hangover morning. A waterfall, or an image of the ocean would be nice, and a cool, blank wall to lean my head against would be the best.

Last night the Graham mojo was flowing. We went to a club in downtown LA where everyone got patted down at the door. It was just a gimmick to make the place feel hood. You could also take a mug shot, and there were mug shots of various celebrities on the wall.

I ordered a whiskey and a Corona. James pointed out that nobody was dancing. I suggested we make ourselves personally responsible for getting the dance going. We started dancing, me double fisting my drinks, wearing my red V-neck. Not too long after I started I was tapped on the shoulder. I turned around and saw a bubblin' brown Latina woman enticing me to dance. We danced, and she told me I was cute. She spoke LA Mexican English, with all the correct words in the right places, but Mexican sounding phonetics; a higher, more tensed 'i' vowel; flapped 'r' consonant; a 'd' substituted for 'th'. She yelled over the _unz unz_ club music, "You look like dat guy, he's bin in di news, in RRussia or someting, rrunning from di gobernment, what's hiis name?"

"Umm, Snowden?"

"Yeah, hehe, hyim." I guess because I was a white guy with glasses I looked like Edward Snowden.

She was thick, had a couple rolls over her pants, and smelled like vanilla. She pulled me up on stage. We gyrated together. She said she'd be right back, and gave me over to two dancing little blond girls. They were all smiles and copied my moves. I was on fire, so I had to give them the back. I jumped off stage and sat down at a table to finish my beer.

I went back to dance with the Latina girl. We gyrated more, and she kept laughing and saying how cute and funny white boys were. I tried to kiss her but missed and hit the side of her mouth. She laughed at my fumble then said, "Ohh, you want to kiiiss?" then took my head with both hands and went in for the make out.

James came over and told me to we had to leave in five minutes. Okay. I said goodbye to the Latina girl. Both of us enjoyed the excitement of meeting a stranger and were all smiles and light touches. She ruffled my hair, took one more kiss, then pushed me away. I jumped of the stage, closed out, and we left.

We ended the night at a taco truck in Echo Park. Fucking around with James freestyling and acting drunk, a girl came up to me and complimented my Redwings. _Why thank you kind lady, would you like to sleep with me?_ We talked, I made fun of her for looking like Waldo in her red and white striped dress, and asked her for her email. I felt it was cool and hipster to just get her email, plus I could show off my notebook. I handed her the notebook.

In the morning I saw she gave me her email, number, and wrote 'Soul Mates' below it all. I thought it was a good omen, and I wanted to have sex, so I texted her and invited her to James' show in Santa Monica that evening. Maybe I could have sex with her in the back of James' van, on top of banana peels, crushing coconut water cans under our heaving bodies.

And then it happened exactly like I hoped it would, minus the banana peels and crushed coconut water cans. She came to the bar in Santa Monica. We listened to the band, and played video beer pong. It's a game of confidence, I told her. James' band mate 6 sang "Who's speaking through you" and James followed 6 with rolling drums, going into things only they knew and understood. James came up to us afterwards. "So what's the plan?" He asked.

"I dunno. What's your plan?" I said.

"I dunno."

"Okay."

I asked Waldo if she wanted to hang out more. "Yea, but where would we go?" She asked.

"We could go back to your place." I suggested.

"You want to come back to my place? I have to warn you, I haven't done the dishes in a while, and it's a little messy."

IDGAFed.

We drove back to her place in her Volkswagen SUV. She was nice, had a steady job, and her place was clean. She wasn't pretty, but wasn't ugly. It was calm and relaxing to be with her after the crazy LA bitches. We had sex, went to sleep together, woke up, had sex, drank some coffee, and went to a Dodgers game. After the game I hugged her goodbye in the parking lot. She told me to come back to LA, I told her it wasn't in the cards, but if I did I would let her know. I did not feel guilty about the one night stand because I was honest from the beginning that I was only in town for two days of playing, and wasn't planning to wind up staying.
Chapter 5

### Salsa Coming Out of My Pockets Already

Max was an old friend of mine. We studied Japanese together in middle school and high school, and spent a summer in Japan together as exchange students. Both of us shared an intellectual passion for linguistics. He had just spent a year teaching in Spain, and I had taught in Korea, so we shared similar career experience. He had always been tall. In middle school we looked like the odd couple hanging out, him 6'2" with face stubble, me prepubescent and high voiced. He told me about the international trip leading job, and we both worked it that summer. It was his second year, and he led a trip to Costa Rica. After our trips, we decided to go to Mexico together. He met me in LA, and we headed down to Tijuana where we could get cheap flights to Mexico City. We were still a bit of the odd couple, I was homeless and down for anything that sounded adventurous; he was looking for a teaching job in Mexico City. I told him most people go the other way to look for jobs.

We took a bus from the LA bus station to the border. People from LA don't take the bus to Mexico. They don't even take the bus to go to Santa Monica. When we told people our plan to take a bus to the Tijuana airport, they thought we were recklessly endangering our lives, and told us to be careful. The bus was full of young and old middle class Mexicans chatting quietly or listening to their devices.

Max and I passed the time on the way down learning the International Phonetic Alphabet. We giggled at ourselves being linguistics nerds, looking up definitions and discussing pronunciations of different phonemes. At the border there was a scanner to put your bags through, and podium with a big red button. There was a security guard standing next to the red button. When you pressed it, a light shined either red or green. Max pressed it, and the light shone green. YES! I walked up and started to press it, but the security guard shook his head. I walked into Mexico without pressing the red button. From the border there was a shuttle to the airport. We got to the airport with a couple hours to spare, so we drank.

Three beers at the Tijuana airport before the flight. I tried to communicate to the woman I wanted the cheapest beer with the most alcohol, but she didn't understand immediately. Max jumped in and filled in the blanks, then apologized to me for doing it, because I'm gonna have to learn to fend for myself, linguistically speaking.

Four beers in the TJ airport. Ran out of cash, so I paid with a card. It was time for my flight so they gave me the beer in a Styrofoam cup; _just say it's café_ she told us in Spanish. We drank in line to board. I held Max's beer for him while he put his luggage in the overhead compartment. He was tall enough to reach things in the overhead compartment without getting out of his seat. I finished my beer while the plane took off. I felt pretty lit, but also tired. I was awake long enough to notice the sexy flight attendants. I thought of tying their wrists off with their green scarves as I slipped into sleep.

We arrived in Mexico City, DF, or just Mexico. We were in a different country with different rules and different roles for us. We got eyes, mainly from females, and mainly directed at Max with his scraggly beard shadow.

We took a cab to Max's Mexican house. The cabbie could not find it using his 3rd party GPS system, why don't you use fucking Google, _cabron_?

The cab pulled up to a house on a dead end. A VW Bug was parked in the carport of a walled-in garden. A young bearded man came out of the house looking like Rasputin, backlit by orange window glow and exterior garden lights. "Pedro!" Max greeted the man with cascading Spanish. They hugged. I introduced myself. We shook. A female appeared in the doorway. Pedro's girlfriend, slim, beautiful.

I was soaked up by the family's love. Reyna, the mother, hugged me to her breast, kissed the top of my head, called me _hijo_ , held my hand and stroked my arm. She made us dinner and I sat around the table with Pedro, Pedro Sr. and Pedro's girlfriend. Max had a lot of catching up to do with the family, and they went at it in Spanish for a couple hours. I could follow the broad strokes of the conversation, but missed the details.

Max, Reyna and I drank whiskey with ice. We ate eggs with hot dogs, quesadillas, and beans. It was the first calories I had had since the McDonalds breakfast sandwich in LA, except for beer. I went to bed in a little room off the side of the dining room, separated by a sliding glass door and a curtain. Reyna came down with clean sheets for my bed. They were the first clean sheets I had slept in since Spain.

Reyna worked as a secretary at a real estate office. She was in her sixties, and very ready to retire. Her husband, Pedro Sr. made handicrafts and gambled on soccer games during the day. I got the lowdown about their relationship from Max. Pedro Sr. fathered two sons around the same time with two different women who were living in his apartment building. He had one son, Pedro, with Reyna, and another son, Guillermo, with another woman. Guillermo grew up with the family, but now lived in an apartment in the city center.

In the morning Max and I explored the neighborhood. Max knew it well from living with the same family for six months a year before. We walked down to the dead end and took a left to walk along a tree shaded pedestrian trail, then passed through a narrow way between an apartment and a recycling building. We dashed across four lanes of traffic, and stood on the grassy median waiting for a clearing in the next four lanes of traffic while six men cut grass and four others leaned around. We walked into a business district with hand painted signs on cinder block buildings. We had to avoid walking by a burger shop because the guy there always came out and bothered Max with his knowledge of America. He asked him questions like "You know Sylvester Salon? Rambo! Bang Bang! Haha! Americancowboy. Where you from? Seattle? I have family in Columbus, Ohio." It is the earnest and genuine conversation of someone who doesn't meet a lot of outsiders. I applaud people like this for their curiosity, but I can only deal with so many 'Where you from' guys in a day.

We passed a couple guys who sat in camping chairs selling bootleg DVDs out of the back of their truck while they watched TV. I had some laundry to drop off, so we went to the _landraria_ Max knew. The lady remembered Max, and held his hand and stroked his arm. Kisses for both of us. I love that part of the culture. The laundry cost 50 pesos, about $5, for her to wash and fold a big bag of laundry. I love that part of the culture. The shop also did repairs and alterations. I feel like Bob Dylan would say, "I got this little place in Mexico City where I get my clothes fixed."

We asked a lady on the street selling magazines where the market was. She pointed down the street, and said something about a bakery. We found the bakery, then found the market, and had breakfast in the market. It was an open seating area with, stalls around the sides. The menus and prices were handwritten on big signs above boiling pots and frying griddles. It seemed like there were a lot of different choices, so we sat down at a random table next to some guys eating eggs. The table had plastic vinyl covering, and we pulled out wooden stools from underneath to sit on. They were low so our knees were above our thighs when we sat. We ordered _huevos Mexicanos_ , which came with bread and Mexican coffee. Max and I each got unique coffee mugs, and mine had a Coca Cola logo. After one sip I immediately had to shit. _¡Bienvenido a Mexico!_ I found the toilet in the back. There was a lady in front of it at a table with her two children. The kids were watching a movie on a laptop. I paid four pesos and she gave me some toilet paper.

We got back to the house and a neighbor woman, Maria, was out in the street. She had long wirey black and grey hair, and when she kissed me I could smell apples. She wore house clothes; a brown sweatshirt, blue pants, and sandals. Her face was old and wrinkled, and her nose was thin and long. I could tell she had been a cute young woman, and she still had energy in her presence. She, of course, was happy to see Max again. Kisses and cascading Spanish.

" _Que hace_?" She asked me.

" _Viajar_." I travel. Apparently in Mexico, the question 'What do you do?' has the same connotation as it does in the United States. It is not a question of how are you spending your time, but rather how do you make money, contribute to society.

She asked me again " _Que hace_?" because travel is not something someone _does_. I told her I was an English teacher in South Korea. The questioning stopped.

The trash men were on the street, ringing their bell, turning the truck around in jerky diesel movements, with a couple guys hanging off the back. The neighbors sauntered out of their houses, a woman in an apron, Pedro Sr. in his town jacket. Max helped Pedro Sr. take out his trash; I helped Maria take out hers.

On his way out Pedro Sr. told Max that he had left a letter for us, and if we didn't understand it we could use Google Translate. We found what he was talking about written on the kitchen whiteboard. It was addressed to Max, which he spelled 'Marks'

MARKS

FAVOR

DE

TENER LA COSINA

LIMPIA DE TRASTES

Y

BASURA

USO, LAVO Y GUARDO

...!

The cheeky bastard just wanted us to clean up the kitchen. He did not do shit around the house, just told people what to do. Reyna was the saint who worked all day and did the housework.

In the afternoon we walked around to find a bank. Out of the subway, past a monument, through side streets of people in plastic chairs at plastic tables covered in vinyl tablecloths eating soup with tortillas. We went into a sleek air conditioned mall with escalators and a food court with hamburgers and Chinese food. We asked shop owners where Max's bank was. They showed us on a map on a display iPad.

We got to the bank and there was a line of fifteen people waiting to use the ATM. Men in suits, jeans, women in business pants, heels, a cop in uniform. Two cops directed traffic on the corner and blew whistles. Why do we never have to wait in huge lines to use ATMs in the US? What is the difference between our banking system and theirs? Is it a matter of them not having enough banks?

The next day we went to play basketball at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), with a couple of Max's Mexican friends. We met up with them in the subway station. They gave daps the same way as we do in Seattle; a hand slap then slide out into a pound. The subway dropped us off on the edge of campus, but we had to take a taxi to the courts because the UNAM campus was so big.

The courts were on a quad, surrounded by academic buildings facing inwards. The building's walls were decorated with Aztec mosaics which showed four story faces, snakes, and corn. The quad was sunken, surrounded by sets of three or four stairs. The whole place had the feel of an Aztec ball court.

We played a full court game, 6 on 6, with one girl on each team. The girls were treated softer, like different types of players, and were allowed to double dribble.

Our team was tall and wore shorts and basketball shoes. The other team wore jeans, were chubby and short. We lost when we expected to win, and laughed about it on the sideline.

UNAM was active even though it was summer break. Groups of scientists in lab coats walking in white pants and white shoes. We laughed at a FOBy looking group of Asians squinting around and looking confused. After playing basketball we drank _caguamas_ , Mexican forties, in the shade and watched the girls pass by. Adjacent to the courts was an area of trees and trash spangled dirt. Groups of students gathered in the shade and weed smoke wafted on the wind.

Reyna wore blue mascara on her eyelids every day. Her eyes always looked tired, even though her face was happy. She had pouches under her eyes, little jelly beans of skin. What were they filled with? If you pricked them with a pin would they ooze?

We went to meet Reyna for lunch. We saw her waving across the street. Max waved at her. She waved back. I waved and smiled. She waved and smiled. She was wearing her work uniform; a shirt and jacket with the Century 21 logo, a skirt and panty hoes. We crossed the street and kissed when we met her. She said we were going to meet some of her friends at a restaurant for _posole_. In Mexico, Thursdays are for _posole_. No other days are special for any other foods, but on Thursdays restaurants have _posole_ deals. I asked Reyna why. She said, " _No se_ " and shrugged.

On the way to the restaurant a woman popped out of a garage. She knew Reyna and Max. They kissed and exchanged pleasantries. She came with us to the restaurant. She wore dark purple eye shadow. I learned she was Reyna's sister.

The restaurant was full of people eating _posole_. Each of the fifteen tables sat four people, and each table was occupied. One table in the corner held four women, all about Reyna's age. Reyna went up to them. She knew them. There was a man sitting alone at the table next to them. Reyna went up to him. She didn't know him. He looked hesitant about a request from Reyna, but then stood up, and helped push the two tables together. We went and sat down at the two tables, with the stranger man. He quietly ate his meal with us. When he left, the women laughed that he had probably come to eat a solitary lunch, and ended up eating at a table with six women and two gringos.

Reyna's friends left, and Max and I stayed with Reyna and her sister. Reyna asked if we wanted a beer. Sure. Max told me how to offer Reyna a beer. She declined, saying it would make her tired. We drank a couple of Victorias, and Reyna's sister called her relatives, then gave the phone to Max to talk. Max knew them all from the time he spent in Mexico a year ago. Cascading phone Spanish.

After lunch we went to Sanborns, a glorified Walgreens with expensive shit you don't need. Reyna and her sister spent like an hour browsing, Max and I kept rolling our eyes at each other. I had to pee, and was tired from the beer. Twice we thought we were about to get out of there, but the women went back in for another round.

Reyna's sister parked in the garage underneath Sanborns. She had a two door VW sedan. Max folded his long legs into the back seat. As we pulled out of our parking space, I noticed a man waddling around our car. He reached in the driver's window, and Reyna's sister gave him some change. I asked Max WTF, and he said that the guy's job is to help cars in the parking lot back out, then ask for money. Anything for a peso in DF.

We crossed DF in midday traffic. I had only a vague idea that we were going to a colonial part of town, but I didn't know why, or for how long, or what we would do there. Hanging out in foreign cultures I have learned not to ask too many questions about what is going on, and just go with the flow. I tried to fight sleep in the back of the car, but I succumbed, and had a refreshing 20 minute nap. We came to a traffic circle with a pillar with a golden angel on top of it. It was an important thing to see. Reyna's sister cut across two lanes of crawling traffic and parked on the side of the traffic circle. Max and I were supposed to get out here and look at the traffic circle. There were twenty or so police in a group off to the side of the circle, with shields and riot gear, and a couple spaced out around the circle every ten meters or so. Reyna said she thought it was for a soccer game. I didn't understand why they would need a bunch of police near the traffic circle for security at a soccer game. This is Mexico.

We pulled to a stop at a traffic light. A guy in a football jersey and sweating clown makeup was working the stopped traffic with a hustle. He appeared to throw a bucket of water on our windshield, but instead of water it was a dirty red towel. He startled the aunts because the windows were down and we thought we were all going to get splashed with window washing water. While I stared at the spectacle, the aunts give a throaty laugh, impressed by the comedic display. Then he asked for money through the car window.

At another intersection, a mother in a pink tracksuit bounced up and down, holding her eight year old daughter standing on her shoulders. Both flailed their arms, and smiled in a pitiful and grotesque spectacle. Together they looked like one of those waving air figures car lots have. It could have been the first day they had done this, there was no apparent skill to the performance.

We drove through more traffic then came to a colonial part of town. It started to rain. We parked with the help of a parking lot prowler. Max said if you do not pay them they key your car. Max and I followed the aunts inside a building. It was Reyna's sister's son's office and living space. He owned a company that edited videos of medical conferences. I did not understand how one could find a lot of work doing this, but he seemed to be doing pretty well. He had about 15 employees working for him, owned the building he was in with his partner, and had just bought a new building in another part of town. His name was Felipe, and his partner's name was Sergio. Sergio was more effete than Felipe. We hung out at the office for a half hour, looking around at the computers and their living space. They had a lofted bed above a kitchen, and a bathtub on a loft above the toilet. I don't know if they could use the bathtub, or if it was just for storage. I didn't nose around too much, but I didn't see a way to get up to the bathtub. It was weird, the bathtub up there.

We left Felipe and Sergio's place in the pouring rain. It smelled like dusty wet stone. We pulled out of the parking space and the parking guy reached his hand towards the window for money. This time Reyna's sister didn't give him any. Max asked why not? She said because we had not been there that long. It was a dusky grey, wet and shiny drive with car lights flashing off the splatters on our windshield. The traffic was gridlocked, with frustrated honking immediately after lights changed.

I learned we were going to the new house of Felipe and Sergio. They were in the process of remodeling it, and had just painted the outside purple. Reyna's sister didn't like it. She asked my opinion. I said it was their house, not mine. In truth, I thought it was funny that two gay guys painted their house purple.

We went to see the purple house. The house was on the corner, in colonial style, with big windows lined with stone masonry, and a decorative yet decrepit cornice. The purple didn't look gaudy or out of place among the other pastel colored buildings on the street. Inside it had 20' high ceilings and a walled in courtyard. It was going to be offices and a place for the two of them to live.

Sergio came to the house in a black ford SUV with his mom, a little round and brown woman. Felipe drove up in a red two door Chevy. When they arrived they realized neither of them had brought the house keys. Sergio would have to drive back through the rain and traffic to their office to get them. In the meantime, Felipe, Reyna, Reyna's sister, Max and I went to a park then to a cafe.

The park had diagonal and perpendicular pathways lined with low hedges and fences containing beds of manicured trees and roses. In the middle was an Islamic style pavilion. It was not like something one would find in an Islamic country. It was octagonal and had a dome in the center. In its geometry it was similar to mosques you see in Istanbul, but this was an outdoor space, open to the elements, which a mosque would never be. The carvings of the pillars and roof of the structure were beautiful and ornate, but came from a European's orientalist mind. They contained depictions of flowers, vines, and leaves, but in Islamic architecture no living thing is ever depicted.

There were groups of kids hanging out in the pavilion, out of the rain, and a couple cops in bulletproof vests leaning against the railing. Felipe asked one of the kids to take a picture of us. Then Max took a picture of just the family. I talked first world problems with Felipe about why he preferred his old iPhone to the Galaxy he bought a couple days ago.

We went to a coffee shop adjacent to the park. It had a pleasant atmosphere of coffee smell and steam. I was hungry and there were tons of pastries. We shared a plate of pastries, I had one with honey, nuts and cinnamon and drank an Americano. There were donuts with icing, croissants, and empanadas with cream. Reyna paid but we should have. I felt bad about it. She had paid for lunch too, and she worked so hard for so little money. Ugh, bad feelings of guilt. A wonderful woman.

The coffee was pleasant, and lasted about an hour and a half before Sergio returned with his mother and the keys to the house. Then they too had tea and coffee, another half hour. I had a Spanglish conversation with Felipe about traveling. He asked me if I had been to Las Vegas. I said I had. What did you think? I thought it was an awful place. People go there with the intention of drinking and gambling, and are mostly sad and lonely, with the occasional spasm of fleeting and baseless excitement. Felipe was surprised by my answer. He said that he and Sergio loved Las Vegas. The architecture was marvelous, everything was gilded and marble, and the roller coaster was fun.

We went home at 10pm. What started as just a lunch turned into a whole day of hanging out in Mexico City with Max's Mexican family. Max apologized for dragging me along. The apology was unwarranted. That is exactly the type of adventure I look for. You can't get 60 year old women to drive you around all day when you stay at a resort.

Max and I hit the town. We walked from his house to catch the _micro_ to the subway station. We saw a couple twenty something girls, not too pretty, walking towards us. They gave us direct stares, and I looked at them and smiled. They kept staring as our shoulders passed and one said "Oh my god" in English. I smiled up at Max, and he rubbed his face, and said he shouldn't have shaved. Too much attention now.

We drank _pulque_ , a sour viscous local spirit, at a ruckus wild bar known to be frequented by _lucha libre_ wrestlers, where the girls were ugly but friendly. I went to the bar and ordered 'dos _caguamas_ ', not ' _dos cervezas_ ' but ' _dos caguamas_ '. Max gave me a pound for using the Mexican slang. "Bad accent, but like a fucking Mexican." After a mug of _pulque_ and a _caguama_ a piece we went to the _lucha libre_ match.

The wrestling stadium had an overwhelming smell of popcorn and stale spilled beer. The girls came out first to wrestle. They came flying off the ropes at each other, one kicked the other in the vagina, and the crowd cheered. The bell rang. We chanted for Torta, the big girl, whose name meant sandwich.

Next it was the men's turn. They come down the steps lined with sexy dancing women, and jumped acrobatically into the ring, using the ropes like springs.

It was fake but real, and all about working the crowd. The athleticism was real, as were the crowd's reactions to it. The winners were not real, and neither was the violence. It was more akin to a dance than a sport. All the archetypal wrestler characters were represented. There was the fat one, the super buff one, the Chinese one, the emo one.

An argument over seats broke out between the fans in front of us. A guy with his stomach coming out of his shirt and a beer in his hand pointed at his ticket and then at the seats occupied by a young couple. The young couple backed down, stood up, and found some other seats very near.

Horns blared, and like the bullfight in Seville there was no speaker system music, only mariachi. The fat wrestler was named Porky. He was too fat to enter the ring in an athletic way, so he straddled the ropes, one leg over at a time. The horns of the band tooted encouragement to him.

Only Mexican wrestlers get to wear masks, and the masks hold a spiritual power. If a wrestler gets unmasked during a match it could mean the end of his career. Porky was Mexican and did not wear a mask, but we didn't know why. He must have gotten damasked at some point, but was able to overcome the shame. He was a crowd favorite.

Porky blasted the little Asians out of the ring like bowling pins. He body slammed a dood by jumping up onto his shoulders, straddling the guy's neck with his leopard clad legs and bringing him to the ground, Porky's ass landing on his chest. I bought a beer from the vendor walking past, and he poured two Coronas into one paper cup the size of a big gulp.

The emo Asian stripped of his pants to reveal a speedo, and a high pitch feminine scream erupted from the crowd. The ladies went wild for his sexy bod. The midget who has been running around the ring dove into the action and body slammed one of the Asians. It was not clear which team he was on. There was a big hit up against the ropes which sprayed spit and sweat in the stage light. Porky's team won, and Porky stood in the middle to absorb the cheers while his teammate jumped on the ropes and flexed his pecks.

The match ended and the crowd disgorged into the street. I got caught up with a group of high school boys all in matching sports jerseys, and they lifted me on their shoulders while Max took a picture. They high fived us and asked where we were from.

We went back to the ruckus bar, but it was closing down. Some of the girls we had met there before were standing around outside smoking cigarettes, and they invited us to another bar down the street. There was a homeless looking man was wearing a sick second hand shirt with a hand drawn image of a bearded man. I told him it was _padre_ , he told me he made it, and suggested we trade. I was wearing a nice button down shirt that my ex-girlfriend's parents gave to me for Christmas. I traded to rid myself of the trigger, and gain a unique piece of art.

We followed the crowd to the other bar and bought a couple more caguamas at a convenient store on the way. At the bar we poured them into our beer glasses and shared to make friends. I stumbled around and tried to talk to girls in Spanish with the delicacy of a drunk sixteen year old trying to pretend he's not drunk. Somehow I got to talking to the waitress, one of those glorious Mexican bombshell 10s, a brunette with a little body and big brown eyes. She said my pupils were big. I didn't know why. She asked me if I had taken any drugs that night. No, but I would like to. We went outside on the street and smoked a bowl out of her little pipe. Max got her number, but it ended up being fake.

Dancing with Mexican girls is not a good way to pick them up. They don't gyrate like we do in _Gringolandia._ Mexican girls like to salsa dance, and Mexican men know how to. I know the basic step, but I am still less smooth than the slimiest guy in the shadows of Plaza Garibaldi. Max and I got asked to dance by a couple girls. Max was reluctant to because he knew what normally happens. I wanted to dance with girls. We got ditched after one song.

I did my old move of sitting alone and writing. It worked as well in Mexico City as it had in LA. The girl I had danced with earlier came up to my table. I just saw her blue bracelet out of the corner of my eye and I knew who it was. I kept writing. She leaned over, and tried to see what I was writing. Her friend came over. It was loud in the bar, so we had a written conversation in my notebook. Looking back over it in the morning, it didn't make complete since, but I got her email out of it.

Her: I want to know I'm glad to meet you.

Me: Okay. I can tell you. Give me your email.

Her: Sure, my email is lora_1aa@hotmail.com

Me: I will send you pictures of tonight.

Her: Please! Ok but which is your email?

I wrote mine on her hand. It was sexy to hold her hand while I did it, tightening the skin of her palm so I could write. Her hand received my pen and shifted to give me the right angle.

We took the train back. I wrote on my thigh and observed out of the corner of my eye. A foot tapped in the corner of my vision. It was a black and white Adidas, male. A man came through the car hawking chocolates in a rhythm. _Chocolates ten pesos, get your chocolates ten pesos_. The train lurched and started. It seemed the driver was inexperienced. My water bottle crunched between my thigh and the stainless steel armrest every time we jammed to a stop. The benches were shiny and slippery and the lights of the tunnel waxed and waned in the seat's curved backs and bottoms. The only small noises were a couple's mumbling across from me, the whooshing of the train's rubber tires on the track, and a baby's mild cry of discomfort in the back of the car.

The young man sitting across diagonal in front of me wore a chambray shirt, spicy mustard pants, suede skate shoes, and listened to an mp3 player through orange Sony headphones which covered his whole ear and wrapped over the top of his head. He played with his curly hair, and Max picked at his beard.

Someone sat down next to me. A male with a clean smell. Off the side of my notebook I could see his jeans. They had a lot of superfluous stitching, and on the top of the thigh was a golden zipper opening to nowhere. The car jolted to a stop, and my thigh bumped into his. He jiggled his leg and spoke softly to the woman he was with. He reached for her hand and intertwined his fingers with hers.

A pair walked by passing out pink paper slips. I was enthralled and occupied by my writing, so I did not take one. They said nothing to anybody in the car. Everyone understood what the slip of paper was about. They came back to pick up the papers and a few people gave them coins.

A woman walked by rhythmically hawking cell phone chargers. She had ornate stitching on the back of her jeans, and well done up hair. From her appearance she did not seem desperately poor, more like a housewife making money on the side.

A man got on and sat down one seat away. I see his jaw moving. He was chewing chewing chewing. He looked over at what I was writing, and watched me write. I was confident he couldn't decipher the script so I continued to write about him. He was clean, with black shiny shoes and black pants. His leg started to jiggle when we came to a stop, then came to a rest when the car moved again. We came to a stop. Hands brushed off black pants, chewing chewing, he scratched at his sock. We moved again, and he was still. 
Chapter 6

### DF to Gringolandia

I woke up in Mexico City and thought about the day ahead of me. I had to fly into a war zone, cross a border, then hitchhike five hundred miles to a secluded mountain town.

I got a cab at 4am to the airport terminal. The taxi dropped me off at the international terminal but I was flying domestic. I walked a lot and found my way to the gate, then fell asleep in the chairs. I woke up, got on the plane, put on my seat belt, then fell asleep in my seat. When I woke up I was in Juarez, Mexico. _La Frontera_ , known for its kidnappings, cartel wars and coyotes.

Juarez was insignificant other than more security than normal at the airport. We needed to show our baggage claim ticket to get our bags. I went to a travel agency inside the airport to ask how to use public transportation to get to the border. They told me I could take a bus to the town center, then another bus to the border. I decided to take a cab instead of walking around town all day with a big backpack.

A cab pulled up with a fresh license plate and dice in the mirror. I yelled to the cabby, " _A la frontera_ ". Trumpets blared, the ranchero music picked up, Pancho Villa galloped up alongside us, and salsa came out of my pockets. I walked over the border and I was finally there, to sit on my throne, as the prince of _Gringolandia_.

I sat on my pack outside Arby's in El Paso, TX, waiting for it to open. Travel is about waiting. Waiting and feeling my breath. The freeway roar was anxiety producing. Two other guys were waiting for the Arby's to open as well. I asked one of them if it was 10am, and he nodded. He had a teardrop tattoo under his eye. The other man was old, wearing basketball shorts and sandals. The pair spoke Spanish to each other. I thought to myself I could keep going without food, I was not that hungry, but I knew if I did not eat I would be heading for a crash.

The Arby's opened. The two guys went in in front of me. They ordered, but then there was a problem with their order so they left. I ordered, and tried to pay with a hundred dollar bill. I always cross borders with hundred dollar bills. They couldn't break it, and said the last guys had the same problem. I went outside, and caught the two guys as they were getting into their car. I told them I had a credit card, I could buy their meal. They came back inside and I brought sandwiches, curly fries and drinks. I sat at a table away from them. After I finished I set to work on a cardboard sign that said _WEST_. The old man came up to me. The tattoos on his arms were fading under wrinkled dry skin. He had a cataract in one eye. He thanked me for the meal in soft Mexican English, and asked where I was traveling. I told him Colorado, and asked him if he was heading out of town. No, just around town today.

The day got hotter. I feared standing in the sun and not getting a ride. So far I had only seen Mexicans driving, walking, and working at Arby's.

I waited in an awful spot for three hours, in the sun with nowhere to pull over, thinking to myself the only person who was going to pull over here will be a crazy. I helped a guy who's car had stalled push it out of the intersection. Another guy asked if I was thirsty and gave me a sprite, "It's still cold," he said.

My first ride of the day was from two Mexi-texins, twenty-six and twenty-eight in a red pickup truck. One scooted over into the middle of the truck bench so I could sit in the passenger seat. The one in the middle pointed at the mountains to the north and said they ran east west. I saw a big gap in them, and realized that was why they call the place El Paso. It is the pass through the mountains.

We smoked spice. They said they smoked spice instead of pot because their jobs drug tested them. They told me to only take one hit, because it can be strong if you're not used to smoking it, and can make your heart beat too fast and you could die. I took one hit, and after about five minutes felt the fluttery chest anxiety that is the bad part of pot. After about thirty minutes I felt sober again. The man in the middle had some knowledge; "When the North Koreans attack, they'll come from over there, in the west," he told me with eager eyes in barrio sway speech.

They dropped me off and I stood on a corner outside a gas station. A truck banged over the broken curb in front of me, breaking off a few pieces of gravel. Dry mountains stood to the north, flat chaparral to the south, me in the Texan sun, writing this down using my sign that said _WEST_. I scribbled in-between gulps of traffic and thumbed at the cars when they passed by.

Santana and his brother gave me my next ride right after lunch, in a Saturn with a rearview mirror hanging from a rope and a carpet named Lupita. Bob Marley blasted from broken dangling speakers. Santana sang and danced along with Bob, and knew the lyrics about spliffs. He had Mexican cadence to his English and was native looking with thick long dark brown hair in a ponytail. He wore a grey t-shirt. His passenger had wild shoulder length hair, the same color, and dirty khakis.

They dropped me off at another gas station and wished me good luck. Now I was at Las Cruces, the cross, where I-10 hit I-25, and I headed north. I saw a guy with two backpacks filling up his water at the gas station soda fountain and could tell he was traveling. I asked him if he had a hobo sign. He didn't. "C'mon, man, you got to have a hobo sign, it's one of the best parts." Dominique had black dark skin, uncut hair and beard, was wearing a green t-shirt with _COLORADO_ and a picture of mountains with a rainbow above, rolled up jeans, and Nike sandals. It took him four days to get from San Diego to Las Cruces, and I think that's longer than it would have taken me, and I think it was because he was black and I am white. He came from the West, I came from the East, we met at the crosses, and decided to head north together.

We stood out on the onramp and tried to get a ride. I sat on my bag to work on the hobo sign and when it said _NORTH_ I waved it at oncoming traffic. Dominique stuck his thumb out in front of me. After about thirty minutes I realized it was not going to work with two people, so I said goodbye to Dominique and went back to the gas station. I felt bad leaving him but it had to be done. It would be easier for me to get a ride alone.

I saw a young guy filling up. He wore a fedora, plaid shirt, and grey pants, and had an eyebrow ring and an earring. I asked him for a ride, and he agreed. "I saw you out there and was thinking about picking you up." He said, "What about your friend, does he need a ride too?"

"He does need a ride, but I can't vouch for him, I just met him thirty minutes ago, and he seemed like a good guy."

"Okay, we can give him a ride too."

We drove out of the gas station and onto the onramp. I waved at Dominique and we pulled over. Dominique got in smiling.

"Ahh, thanks for the ride. And thanks, Graham, for coming back."

"Sure man."

Henry gave us a ride all the way to Albuquerque, and Dominique spun yarns from the backseat. He was one of nine children, but didn't know any of his siblings because he was put up for adoption when he was a baby. He was an orphan until he was eighteen. He had recently impregnated his half Filipino half Cambodian fiancée, and went on vacation with her to San Diego, where he was robbed, and had to use his last three hundred dollars to buy her a train ticket back home to Pueblo, Colorado. He told me he was a computer programmer, and if I ever needed him to build me a website he could do it. He knew a little C, too. He was carrying a book called _The Story of God_ with a picture on the cover of a book with a plant growing out of it. I asked him about it. "A woman gave it to me at a truck stop. I'm not religious, but I believe in God. Buddaism, Muslim, I take from all of them. I waited at that truck stop for a day, no one would give me a ride. But the guy at the gas station was nice, and let me eat whatever I wanted." Dominique smoked cheap cigarettes, I didn't recognize the brand when I saw the empty box in the trash can in the bathroom in Socato, NM.

Henry said he was originally from Minnesota, and he liked it there because he liked the cold. Dominique had been to Minnesota. He said, "It's easy to get a job at Mall of America, they're always positions open at all those shops. I knew people who would just take a job for three months then quit." I thought to myself that would be an interesting way to spend a summer. There is probably a scene among the employees at Mall of America.

I got dropped off on the south side of Albuquerque, and needed to get to a highway north of the city. Mid-sized cities present difficulties to hitchhikers, because they don't have adequate public transit to get you to the outskirts. I caught a bus to the northernmost terminal. That still left me about ten miles from where I needed to be. The sun was setting, and I decided to walk it. It was one straight road all the way there, and now that it was evening it was not too hot. I stopped in at a Walgreens and bought water and a chocolate milk. The attendant saw my backpack, and I told him I was hitchhiking to Telluride. "That's a long way." He said, "I have a friend like you. She backpacked all over Europe. But I'd never do it. I like to sleep in my bed."

"It's not for everyone." I said.

"No, it's not." He agreed.

I walked for forty five minutes and came to a gas station. The second guy I asked gave me a ride. He was washing his windshield, wearing a Land Rover shirt, driving a Land Rover with a lay and air fresheners hanging from the rear view mirror. He said he worked at the Land Rover dealership. We started to drive and he told me it was his daughter's car, he was just getting it tuned up. He showed me pictures on his phone of his camping trip in Colorado the previous weekend. He held the phone over the center console and swipe scrolled through with his thumb, glancing down at the phone then back up at the road. He had lived in this place his whole life. I asked him if it would rain tonight. He said no, and I knew he knew.

He took me out to Highway 550 and turned off into his housing development. By now it was night. I walked down the road, away from the orange street lights at the turnoff, into the dark desert. On either side of the road was fenced off Indian land. I found a big cactus tree near the fence, and thought it would be a good place to sleep because it was far enough away from the road I probably would not be struck by a careening car. I felt like Don Juan in the spiritual chaparral. I made three circles around the spot where I would sleep because I didn't want to be sleeping on top of a snake pit. I set out my sleeping pad, and put my bag on top of it to make my bed. I took off my shoes, and stepped into bed. I sat down and took off my socks and glasses, and put them in my shoes. I took off my pants, and folded them up next to the bed. I got in my sleeping bag and looked up at the stars. I couldn't see them too well, because I didn't have my glasses on, so I put my glasses back on. Cars rumbled by on the highway with their headlights shining down, but the beams did not touch me because I was a little lower down below a mound. The air was cool and smelled like dust and sage. I felt like I had accomplished something that day and deserved my sleep. Tomorrow I'd make it to Telluride.

I woke up in the golden dawn light, packed up my stuff and headed across the road to catch a ride. The air was still cool, but the sun was already strong so it was hard to regulate my temperature. I stood on the road with my thumb out. I got flipped off by a guy in a Toyota with his girlfriend. Why the animosity, man?

I waited about an hour for my first ride. The first ride of the day is always the best rush, better than a cup of coffee. It reassures you that this hitching thing is going to work; the magic from yesterday hasn't worn off. I saw the truck coming and thought, _never but might as well try._ I waved and held out my thumb. Then brake lights; I ran, he reversed. I leaned in the passenger side window. "I'll let you ride in back, I don't let nobody ride in front," the driver said. He had a round native jawline and dark hair in a ponytail under his ball cap. He only turned his head a quarter to the side as he talked to me so I only ever saw his face in profile. I threw my bag over the truck bed side then hopped in after it. I love riding in truck beds, it feels real.

In the left lane we passed a silver sedan which had passed me a few minutes ago. The driver nodded to me and I nodded back. There was a boy in the passenger seat who appeared to be the driver's son. I could read the driver's lips, "Hey, someone picked up that hitchhiker." Maybe he felt relieved.

Bumping in the truck bed I was happy and clear headed, it was the way I want to feel all the time. Risk and freedom and fresh air. On all sides were areas of brown shrub and brown grass among green cliffs with sheer walls red and damp falling into sandy sides, levels of iron rich pink soils, then white flat land with shrubby ten foot trees among mud puddles.

We passed through Castro, New Mexico, a pueblo by a river with four-walled, one story houses with dirt yards and vehicles with open hoods and dogs running free with their tails in the air.

I hopped out of the ride, and walked to the window to thank the driver. "Next town will be Cuba, then Farmington, then Bloomfield, then you'll skip into Colorado," he told me. The truck pulled away out of the gas station, and I went inside to get a road breakfast.

I sat on my backpack to take my coffee and Slim Jim. A sheriff pulled up. I watched him the whole way from his vehicle into the shop, no eye contact the whole way. He came out with a cup of coffee.

A guy pulled up in a janky van. He was wearing a grubby white tank top, basketball shorts and sandals. I nodded at him when he walked in but he barely nodded back. He came out with a package of Marlboro Reds and a Gatorade. I asked him for a ride. "Yeah, dood. I can take you a little past Cuba, to the Twin Teepees." I walked to the van door to put my stuff in. I heard the click and budge of the door, it was one of the automatic ones, but had broken, so now you just needed to pull it along its track and it dragged like sand bags.

I sat in the front seat, and could smell his sour body and breath. His teeth were yellow, brown and jagged, and he smiled unabashedly. He reached for his cigarettes.

"You smoke?" He asked.

"Not cigarettes," I said.

He lit a cigarette, then grabbed a pipe from the cup

holder.

"You smoke this?"

"Sure, thanks" I took a hit of the pipe. Fortunately it was just weed, and not that spice stuff.

"Sorry for back there. I was just afraid of the trooper." I guess he was apologizing for not nodding when he went in the store.

He told me about his problems with the law. He had a couple dooies, so he wasn't supposed to be driving without the Breathalyzer to start his ignition, but this was his wife's car. What kind of woman would choose you? He was a kind man, and meant well towards me. "I don't want to have to pay the fucking $4,000 to get that shit installed, then you gotta pay for upkeep every month. Fuck that. If I get pulled over, I spend a couple nights in jail, then I'll be back out doing the same shit." The prospect of jail was no deterrent for him. I told him I had come from Mexico.

"Fucking Mexico, man. They have it hard in the prisons there," he said.

"Yeah," I told him, "I watched a documentary on their justice system, or lack thereof. So many people wrongly accused. There, you're guilty until you can prove your innocence. Plus once you're in prison, they don't feed you, your family has to bring you food. It's all fucked up."

"Yup. No Bob Barker in Mexican prison."

"Bob Barker, like _The Price is Right_?"

"Yup. Everybody in jail loves Bob Barker. Bob Barker is the reason you have sandals and a toothbrush in prison. He donated 10 million to the prison system. So when you wake up, and everything else is fucked up, at least you can put your feet into some sandals and thank Bob Barker."

He flapped down the sun flap to show me a picture of his wife/fiancé/girl with their kids pinned to the ceiling. He dropped me off at the Twin Teepees. He had to get out to his job out on an oil rig.

At the Twin Teepees Casino and Gas Station, I asked the clerk where the historic photos in the hall came from. They were interesting; photos of natives in native clothes, juxtaposed with turn of the century modern items. One family stood in blankets in front of a Model T. A man in buckskins held an umbrella.

"There's a shop in Dorsey, about sixty or seventy miles away that sells them."

"Oh, I can't walk there."

She saw my backpack and chuckled at my joke. I turned around to leave and bumped into a robot arm attached to a camo cut off tank top. I looked into a man's face, with a hat on top, and gave him a firm lipped nod. He nodded back.

I stood outside asking for rides, and I pondered the rhythm of the gas station. It is something I only became aware of after hanging out in them for hours. People come for fifteen to thirty minutes, unless it's a casino gas station, where some people come to gamble and stay longer. You get two chances to see people, when they're going in, and when they're coming back out. I ask people for rides on their way out, so they have had a chance to see me already, and less of a chance to complain about me. On the way in I try to make eye contact, and give a nod. I've seen the decision change across people's eyes. The immediate 'no' response, then the look over, then a softening of their eyes and shoulders into a 'yes'.

From where I waited at the Twin Teepees I could watch the turn off, and see who was coming from where. I could see how many people were in the car. The dumpiest cars are always the most likely to give you rides. The people who walked by me into the building were not strangers to me. I knew where they came from, who they were with, and if they were getting gas. I knew about them before they noticed me. I had the advantage of data.

I got a ride from an Arby's area rep. He apologized for the clutter in his car, he said he lived out of it. I asked him if he had been to the Arby's next to Interstate 10 in El Paso. He said he had, but it was not his territory. He took me to Durango, CO.

I found a piece of cardboard in a dumpster and made a _TELLURIDE_ sign, then used it as a pad to take a nap on down by the river. Thunder opened my eyes, and butter flies fluttered across my vision, so I decided the omens were telling me to leave. I walked to the road, and waved down the first car I saw, pointing to my sign. It was a young guy. He rolled down his window and said, "Get in, I can take you to Hesperus." I got in. "I wish I could take you all the way to Telluride, I just don't have any money for gas." I told him I could pay for gas. I gave him $60 to fill the tank and bought him a milk and myself an energy drink at the gas station. We took the road heading west out of town.

Gabe was nineteen. He had left home after graduating high school to work on a fishing boat in Alaska. Then he had medical problems, back problems, so he had to come back home to Durango. He wanted to be a UFC fighter, and had won two amateur fights. He got his will to fight as a wrestler in high school, where he learned to cut weight. Once he cut 20 pounds in two months. That takes discipline. We talked about our life philosophies, the yin and yang paradox, what would happen if aliens came to earth and exterminated all humans in order to preserve the diversity of life on the planet, ayahuasca and peyote ceremonies, the spiritual, the natives.

We freestyled for the last twenty minutes riding into Telluride. _Ride, ride, into Telluride, we gonna ride on down into Telluride_... It started with him asking me to spit a rap verse. I spit one I had written about buying beer at the liquor store near my college. He spit one, then I freestyled off of it acapella. He freestyled off my freestyle, and I beat boxed with a timid lip snare, then I took the rhyme back and he beat boxed energetically but without much rhythm. He took the freestyle back, and I banged out a rhythm on my Monster can, then I took it back and he banged out a rhythm on the steering wheel.

He told me he was glad he met me because he needed someone to talk to. These were the types of life experiences he wanted. He longed for love, and said he had a lot to give. I remember feeling that way before I had a girlfriend. He had never been heartbroken. "I want a girlfriend but I fuckin' don't," he lamented. Gabriel was the angel that dictated the Koran to the profit, and this Gabe was looking for life, and finding it picking up hitchhikers.

Gabe dropped me off on Colorado Avenue in Telluride. I got out of the car and hitched my bag over my shoulder. Gabe asked to keep my cardboard _Telluride_ sign as a souvenir and I let him. He pulled away.

I was planning on crashing with a couple friends from college in Telluride. They lived in a house of guys, skied during the winter, mountain biked and climbed during the summer, and partied at night. One of my friends, Chris, owned a bar called the _Fly me to the Moon Saloon_. Gabe dropped me off in front of that bar, and after he pulled away I looked around and saw Chris walking down the steps into his bar. Crazy timing. It was still daytime so there was not anything in the bar except for boxes of liquor and the smell of stale beer, it as reminiscent of Chris' house in college. The saloon was an old Telluride staple. They say Phish played there once. It is the only bar that had live music in town, so everyone kne about it. They had $2 PBR pints, which was the same at all the bars in town, and was the only bargain in Telluride.

That night I went out to Chris's bar and drank $2 PBRs. The bar was pretty hopping because it was a Saturday night, but everyone said it was dead because Telluride Bluegrass Festival had been a week before, and the town was burnt out. I sat at the bar, drinking, writing, and talking to people that came across my path. I asked one guy if Oprah still lived in Telluride.

"Ahh, Queen Oprah, no, she doesn't live here anymore, but she comes to Telluride every once in a while with an entourage of little black orphans. She stays at a hotel when she comes. My friend works at the hotel, and gave the orphan ducklings ski lessons, and they loved her so much the Queen invited her to Maui for two weeks. The Queen likes to give her money away so people will love her more."

A beautiful and vapid bid came up to me, and flipped through my notebook. She was looking for something which related to herself, no doubt. Not finding anything, she started the conversation which she was obligated to after flipping through my notebook. I asked her what her emotional outlet was. She said "What answer are you looking for?" WTF kind of response was that? I was taken aback. I wasn't looking for any sort of answer, only her pure and original answer. I gave her some examples of emotional outlets like exercise, writing, music. She looked away when I started to speak for more than two sentences on a topic that was not focused on her. There were people in that bar who would fulfill her selfish and narcissistic conversational needs. I turned back to my writing to let her find them.

Chris closed the bar and we stood out in the street with a smoking crowd of people deciding where to go for an after party. One guy mentioned he had a lot of cocaine, and invited all the girls standing around to go back with him. Most of the men followed that group. I stayed standing, talking to Chris and some other guys, smoking spliffs and making fun of a guy that was too drunk to remember he had already introduced himself. Then we saw a bear walking down Colorado Avenue, and we decided to chase it. A dog joined in the chase, and barked us along. We chased the bear into a parking lot, then out the other side of it, through an alley, then back out onto Colorado Avenue. I ran across the street to channel it along the storefronts. It found a passage through the buildings, and turned to look at us in the light. Chris threw his keys at it, and it trotted off. I felt a little sorry for tormenting it. The bear now boring we walked home.

I woke up with a headache, popped two Advil I found in the bathroom, and took a shower. Then I laid back in bed holding my head in recovery position. I needed to do laundry, but I smelled spliff upstairs.

I smoked with Chris's roommate Adam then felt weird and antisocial. Adam's girlfriend Jennie came over and I called her Jamie even though I had met her before. I drank Adam's coffee after he left. I looked out the window with Chris, and with arm gestures he showed me the lines they take down the mountain. There were mountains on all sides of the little town, holding it in, protecting it like Switzerland.

There was a free gondola over the mountain from Telluride to Mountain Village. I found it wandering around town half looking for a hiking trail. I saw a crowd of people so I walked over to the and found the gondola shed. I read a sign that talked about the _Free Gondola Project_ , designed to limit car and road use, and shrink the carbon footprint from a size 8 to a women's 5 1/2, UK.

While I was waiting in line for the gondola I felt a person standing behind me. I turned to see what it looked like. It was a young male, white, rain jacketed, khakis. He was looking ahead in line, intent on watching the gondolas board. His eyes flashed, then he cut forward in line, hopping into a gondola that was leaving with five people and one empty seat. It was apparent he rode the gondola a lot, and maybe was in a hurry on his way to work.

I rode with a baby boomer couple and a pair of high school boys who were on vacation with their family from Annapolis, MD. The boys talked about the run they'd just shredded on their bikes in the same way a skier would; discussing different sections, and future lines they wanted to try.

The boys got off with their bikes at the top of the mountain, and I continued over and down the other side. The boomer couple was from Mississippi. They told me their son had played college football, and the father beamed with quiet pride. "Yeah, that was a fun time," he said.

I wandered the circuitous cobble brick streets of Mountain Village, called my German cousin, and saw the trampoline back flippers. A little girl ran to her mom, "I need a chocolate," she whined. Not want, _need_. Must have for her survival.

The mom said, "Okay honey, we're going to go to the shop just now."

Pizza wasn't even on my mind until I smelled it, then I had to have it. I waited in line behind a lady, and while she had a conversation with the pizza guy I pulled out my pad and wrote this. The pizza was greasy and cheap. The Pepsi was good. I had chapped lips from dehydration and altitude. Two days on the road sleeping rough took it out of me. If I was homeless my lips would be so chapped. Wait, I am homeless. Being on the road takes constant vigilance. If you're not in a ride, or actively looking for one, you're going nowhere. It wears you down.

My head felt fuzzy. I felt tired, my body was a little achy. It has been a long trip, a wild summer. I was living the summer vacation dream; going around, exploring, not paying rent, crashing with friends, going out at night, bands, beer, weed, hangover, aspirin, water, English muffin with peanut butter and coffee in the foggy morning, slice of pizza for lunch, eating where I find it, but I pay, I have money, what a luxury, my life. When Chris left this morning the house was empty and I felt it was the first time I had been alone and comfortable in months. I had been living out of a backpack for two months, but I was not tired of it. I just needed to make sure I took care of my body, drank water and ate enough.

On the TV at the pizza restaurant was a constant and mesmerizing stream of outdoor extreme sports clips, mainly focused around cycling. I looked up to think and got distracted by watching it.

The boy on television rode his bicycle down a hill, jumped it onto a wooden platform, then spun his bicycle around in the air as he hopped off the platform. A remarkable feat of athleticism.

I sat at a tall round table on a stool, next to the window. The other seating option was a booth, but I didn't take it because it would not have been as conducive to writing. The stool and high table were good because they kept me above my notebook so I could hunch over and tear into it. A cool breeze came through the open window from the street. The room had a red felt pool table, and was decorated with eclectic ski paraphernalia and beer signs. It had exposed wood beams and pillars in ski lodge style, and fake wood slat wainscot at 4' AFF. The wallpaper looked intentionally stained and weathered with spots of brown. It looked like an adobe wall painted white.

I rode the gondola back to Telluride, and kept getting kissed on the knee by a panting golden retriever. The dogs rode the gondola to the top of the mountain to go on a walk, and take in new smells. I talked to the owner about his dog while the other two passengers messed with their smart phones.

Chris's roommate Paul gave me a ride from Telluride to a crossroads south of Moab. He was going south on Highway 191 to rock climb, I was going north.

I stood at the crossroads and waved when the cars came in spurts of five or so, usually with a semi among them. After about fifteen minutes I saw a van pulling up from the road I came in on. I hoped they were turning right. It looked like the kind of van that would pick up a hitchhiker. It was an Astro van with a dingy paint job. I saw the guy in the passenger seat as the van pulled up to the crossroads. He was tan, young, with wild hair, sideburns, and looked awfully like, wait, it was, Chris's roommate Adam. I leaned in the passenger window I told him I was headed north. He was headed south to climb with Peter. He gave me lots of high fives, Jennie smiled, and wished me good luck. They turned left and I stayed standing out on the road. A few more spurts of cars passed, two or three. No one was stopping. Cars came by in noisy roars, then left, and I was alone in silent desert. I felt discouraged, but I was in a beautiful place, with a nice evening temperature, cool breeze and golden light. Another spurt of cars came. I held out my thumb, waved, and watched them all drive by. Silent desert. Then down the road I saw a Subaru pull over. Fuck ya. I grabbed my jug of water and slung my bag over one shoulder, using the good strap. The left strap had broken back in Las Cruces. It is curious in my life that my injuries and weaknesses have always been on my left side; a sprained left ankle, sciatica in my left leg, and a torn left ACL. The driver was in his mid to late 20s. I threw my stuff on top of his bedding in the folded down back seat of the hatch back. I sat in the front seat, crunching my feet on empty beer cans and tonic water bottles.

Mark was going to Moab to mountain bike. He was a nurse, going to med school at Dartmouth in the fall. He was wearing a green camo t-shirt with the collar ripping away from the chest, cut off jorts and boots. He had a word tattooed to the underside of his left wrist I could partially see when he gripped the wheel, but it was in a difficult script, and I couldn't make out what it said, but it started with a _V_ , and looked something like _Voltaire_ , but it was not that.

He had another tattoo on the inner side of his left bicep, and it was mostly concealed by his t-shirt. He had brown hair cut a little longer on the top, a big hooking nose, and symmetrical snaggle teeth. He liked to joke, "God, this place sucks. All quiet and beautiful and shit."

The first thing he said to me when I got in was, "My hitchhiking karma is in the red." I hoped he meant that he hadn't picked up as many hitchhikers as he should have, and not that he had done nasty things to hitchhikers that needed redeeming.

He dropped me off on the main street of Moab, and told me he could give me a ride out to a campsite when he was done riding, in an hour and a half or so. I looked for a place to hang out, and found a lot of knick-knack stores and kitschy looking bars. I went into a music shop, looking for a pipe to smoke the weed Adam had bought me.

"You don't sell pipes, do you?"

"No, you have to go north for that."

"North, like where?"

"Like, Salt Lake City. Not around here man, they don't even drink caffeine, you gotta be careful." He smiled and sipped his coffee.

"Thanks, man"

"Yeah, good luck."

I looked in the window of one coffee shop bar combinations and saw a cowboy playing guitar with a harmonica strap-on. Not for me. I wandered and found _Club Rio Sports Bar_. I noticed it off the main street, and thought it might have a darker feel, and not be so German touristy.

It was gloomy inside like a good bar should be. The place was large, but only occupied by four bar flies. TV screens, video game screens, golf and deer hunter, and two pool tables. Two guys who sat at the bar were throwing backgammon. I listened to their conversation.

"You son of a fucker."

"What are you doing? 4?"

"What? 3?"

Another patron in a khaki shirt with tan, hairy arms had a perma smile and stared at the pre-season football game, leaning back occasionally to put his hands on his head. The bartender stood with one hand on the bar, one on the liquor shelf, weight on one hip, staring open mouthed at the game. Hairy arms switched in to play backgammon.

I asked the bartender, "Is there a brewpub in town? Like a place that brews their own beers?" He propped himself in the corner of the bar to talk to me.

"Yeah, there's the Moab brewery. It's on Main Street, the south side, near McDonalds."

"Cool."

He nodded, and stared off towards a group of tourists sitting at a table near the back. They were a middle aged white couple, and three younger, 20 something, native looking girls. He was trying to telepathically communicate to them that he would not come to their table, they needed to order at the bar. They got the message, and came to the bar. They ordered two Red Bulls between the five of them, and split them in frosty glasses. Were they Mormon? Only slightly breaking the rules by drinking caffeine?

Mark came back from his ride and we went out on a data finding mission to the bars. He picked me up in front of City Market where I sat on the curb eating bread and salami. We drove to the brew pub. They had 3.2 beer on tap, but 5.8 in a can. It was labeled as the same beer, but had a different alcohol content. How could that be? We drank two beers, and Mark yelled out "Are there any single women in this bar?" People stopped talking to turn around and look. It was a family brew pub restaurant kind of place, and Mark was right, there were no single women. The bartender laughed a little awkwardly, and joked about cutting Mark off, but he was also a bit serious. I asked the bartender for a recommendation for a dive bar, and he directed us to a DJ bar with a dance floor and a cover. The man didn't understand the meaning of dive bar. I took Mark to _Club Rio Sports Bar_ , where we played pool with a couple young women. One of them wore a tank top, and when she high fived I could smell her bad smell. Hey, it's the desert, man.

I waited for a ride in Moab at a gas station. I tried asking around, but after about an hour I had no luck. I saw a red truck coming towards me, and waved at the driver but he was an old man and didn't notice me. He pulled into the Wendy's parking lot in front of me. I walked over and said 'hi' while the driver stepped out.

"Hello, sir. If you're headed north, think I could get a ride with you?" The man was really old; it took him a while to climb down from his truck, turn and look in my direction, then size me up.

"Well, I'm headed as far as Salt Lake City. You have a driver's license?" He asked in a creaky old guy voice.

"Yep," I said.

"Well, if you're willing to drive, I can take you there."

"Perfect. You going into Wendy's? Need anything inside?"

"Well, yeah, I was looking for some breakfast," he said. I ran over to the entrance, but saw they would not be open for another hour.

"They're not open yet. You want to wait around?"

"No, let's just get going. We can stop down the road. I don't even know what time it is. Yesterday I stopped at Wendy's and they told me they weren't serving breakfast anymore. I can't eat another meal until I've eaten breakfast, so I ended up not eating anything all day."

I got in the driver's seat, adjusted the mirrors, found the brake and e-brake, figured out how the lights and windshield wipers worked, then fired it up and backed out of the parking space. We headed north out of Moab. I had a ride to Salt Lake City.

I noticed he had a pack of Parliaments. I told him I didn't mind if he smoked them. "I don't give a damn if you mind or not, I'm gonna smoke them anyways," he said, and lit one. He had a mucus cough, and it made me not want to smoke.

He had stories to tell, and I was glad I was able to give him a ride for his own safety and the safety of the other drivers on the road. He had driven up from Texas, but got lost yesterday, and ended up in Colorado. "I got pulled over two times yesterday, they must've thought I was drunk. It's a good thing they have those bumps on the side of the road and in the middle of the lane. They kept me awake all day, I was weaving between them."

He told me about his hitchhiking days in his youth, back in the 30s. "When I was fourteen, I hitchhiked from New Mexico to California. It was different in those days. There wasn't the interstate, only highways, and the speed limit was thirty miles an hour. I got a ride with one guy who would pull over every time a car came by going the other way. When he saw it coming, he pulled over on the side to a stop and let the car pass, then got back on up to thirty miles an hour. Must of taken us a whole day to go forty miles." I was happy he was telling stories. I kept him going with little question here and there.

"You ever been to Vegas?" I asked.

"Well, yeah, I have been to Vegas. Me and a buddy spent a week there living off a quarter. We could get a couple hamburger sandwiches for a nickel, and when we got down to our last nickel, we just put it in the slots and got more. We came to town with a quarter, and left a week later with a quarter. I've got a son in law, and he runs a vending machine business out west from Seattle to Portland. From the way he tells me, he's doing pretty well, got quarters rolling in day and night."

We stopped on the outskirts of Salt Lake City to pick up his brother. His brother was older than him, I think ninety two. I went to the door to help him carry his bag out. The old man did not seem to notice me, until he got right up in my face, and said, "Ahh, a young one!" I drove the two of them to an exit south of Salt Lake City, where I got out to meet my friend Jake. We shook hands, and I thanked them for the ride. "I think you helped me out just as much as I helped you. You have a good time, there, traveling, son. And be careful."

"Thank you, sir" I said.
Chapter 7

### The Reunion

I met up with my friend Jake in Salt Lake City. Jake and I went to college together. Since college he had lived in Thailand leading college kids on outdoor expeditions. Now he was back in the States, and planned to move to Jackson, WY to ski for the winter. We were going to drive from Salt Lake City to Jackson together.

I spent the night at Jake's aunt and uncle's. They liked to drink. His uncle Don put on _The Dead_ , and brought out a bowl to smoke after dinner. His wife was a bit surprised by the appearance of the weed. "How long have you had that? It must be ten, twenty years old? Where did that come from?"

"My drawer. Yeah... hmmm...must be pretty old..." Don said. The bag did not look ten or twenty years old. It looked rather fresh, in fact, and was a good quarter. We passed around one small bowl and all got stoned, then went into the kitchen where Don kept pulling beers out of the fridge. Don brought us a Dalai Lama book, and kept apologizing for proselytizing us. He was raised Mormon and very conscious of proselytizing.

They went to bed, and Jake and I rolled a fat doobie and walked out in the streets to smoke it.

We met our friend Ed in Jackson. Ed was my freshman year roommate at college. I almost requested to switch roommates because he bugged me so much. It was not his personality, but his constant sniffling. He had facial tics that made sniffling sounds and it got on my nerves. He was such a great and loving guy that I never had the heart to transfer rooms.

When we lived in the dorms together our room was a dump. We made a fort in October, and we slept in it until Christmas break. The fort became famous in the dorm, and girls would stop by to smoke or have sleepovers in it.

The messiness of Ed's house came as no surprise. There were two dogs and four people living in it, plus the odd couple people crashing on the couch at any given time. Ed welcomed Jake and me to sleep on the couches on the porch for as long as we wanted, but his roommates were not stoked.

Ed worked as a busser at a restaurant. He was prone to monologues about food. "The French toast is really good. They're like _this big_ , and they're all, like, lumpy looking, and they're really good. They're like, sliced, and they're not like giant pieces, they're like _this_ _big_ actually. The burgers are good too. You should get a burger. A single burger with brie and bacon. If you're into that type of thing. It's two pieces of bacon for fifty cents. It's a pretty good deal. And they come with kettle chips. The donuts are churros, too. If I were to get the chocolate fondue, I would get all churros, no fruit."

Jake, Ed's girlfriend Savannah, her dog Ray Ban and I went to find somewhere to swim. We sang along to _Hey Jude_ as we drove through the Elk Reserve outside of Jackson. The Grand appeared as we came over the top of a hill. Its craggy glaciated peaks shone pink behind the haze of a summer forest fire. A bike trail paralleled the road. We saw a group of thirty or so kids riding by on bikes. I yelled out 'tykes on bikes' and Jake and Savannah laughed, and repeated after me. The amazing amount of resources we have in this country to put thirty kids, helmets and all, on bikes on an August day.

We took a right at the junction, and stopped behind a row of traffic. It smelled like asphalt tar. A man walked up to us with a stop sign. When he came to our window, he told us it would be a long wait, maybe twenty minutes, before the lane would be clear of road work and we would be able to pass. We exchanged some small talk about the weather and the extent of the road work, then broke eye contact and he walked away.

We found the pond. A low lying water feature, near the road and in the sun. We pulled up in the parking lot and there was a horse trailer there, with three horses tied up. We walked down to the pond with a stack of towels. We walked around it, to a side that was a little more private from the road, but still visible at some angles. There were three boys, related to the horse trailer, in their jeans, t-shirts, and bent brim caps, throwing rocks in the water. As we came down they walked back to the road, and I saw one had a pistol in a holster at his waist. We sat down near the water, took off our clothes down to our underwear, and waded in. Then Jake decided to give no fucks and got naked. I followed suit and got in naked as well, then Savannah did too. Ray Ban was already naked.

The muck of the pond was very fine, and a couple of feet deep, so when you walked in it the mud went up to your knees, but it was very light and airy so you could wade through it. The pond was a hot spring, so it smelled like sulfur, and little bubbles came up and tickled you when you sat down. I was afraid a worm would crawl up my butt and lay eggs, so I tried to keep my butt hole closed.

Two more college friends, George and Issac, came to town. George was a Geologist and worked on an exploratory drill. He was going through a rough time in his life because of legal problems. I did not feel too bad for him because he brought the problems upon himself. He was at a law school party in Boulder, CO, and got in a discussion with an environmental lawyer in training about fracking. George felt the man insulted his line of work, so he head butted him. The guy sued. While we were in Jackson George was waiting to find out if he would have to go to jail. Isaac was more stable. He lived in Boise and had a summer job testing water around Idaho. Ed, Jake, George and Isaac were all good college friends of mine, and when we got together we were prone to binge drink.

Jake's family had a second house near Ashton, Idaho. We went there to get away from the hustle and bustle of Jackson, and have a space where we could sing the blues as late as we wanted.

We went out and hit the town in Ashton, ID. First to the Frost Top, to flirt with the quinceaneras. There was a grumpy young couple next to me, quiet, unhappy, and bored. God I was glad that was not me. We bullshitted with the waitress girls, asking them about items behind the counter; a tin shaker, a faded ribbon that said _bullshit award_. They giggled and bustled about their work. Two of the girls had started working there last May. It was a summer job for them. After dinner we went to the bar.

The bartender was the owner, and poured us four pints when he poured us our first pitcher. Gracias for your graciousness. He saw that we were travelers, new to town, and he wanted to show us generosity. We played pool, but the balls kept getting stuck in the table. I guess we chose the wrong table out of the two, because when a couple of locals came in, they started playing at the other table, and had no problems. They were young guys, and I went up to ask them if they came here a lot, and see if they knew about the pool situation. They were surly; one with the flat brim, the other with wet looking gelled hair.

I tried to make up a new joke at the bar. I wanted the punch line to be _dirt baguette_ because I read it in the monthly brewing periodical and thought it was a great word.

"What do you call a loaf of bread that hits on your mom?"

I saw a couple putting money into the bum pool table, and went up to warn them that it didn't work. They were gracious of my warning. The young guys at the other pool table noticed me warning them. I went back and sat at the bar, and the flat brim came up. He introduced himself as Shane. He shot the shit with us at the bar, then asked if we liked to smoke weed. Sure do, but we didn't have any. I ordered a round of whiskey shots. We took them, he finished his beer, and we rolled out in Jake's Mitsubishi back to Shane's house.

We walked in and it was apparent the place was inhabited by males. Low cushy couches, cups, cans, Xbox controllers and a big TV. We met the dogs, two beefcake pit bull mixes.

I stood next to Shane. Wet gelled hair came in wearing a white tank over his wiry thin tattooed chest. He gestured aggressively with his arms when he spoke. I sat down next to Shane. Shane passed me a bowl. We freestyled, and Shane used 'nigga' as a filler in his flows.

They left us alone in their living room. We thought we should go, but not without saying goodbye. I wondered if it was a test, to see if we would say goodbye, or just ditch. The guys seemed a little nervous about having us over. They probably were not used to inviting strangers into their home.

Eventually Shane returned, we shook, gave daps, and said goodbye. We drove home and on the way George told the story of Falling Rock, in winding and expanding detail.

The (Abridged) Story Of Falling Rock

"All over the west you will see signs on the highway warning drivers to 'Watch for Falling Rock.' Like every rock, tree, hill and molehill on our land, my people have a story for these signs.

It used to be that when a boy was to become a man, the village sent him out into the wilderness to fast until he found his spirit animal. One spring three boys of our village were to become men. There was Soaring Eagle, Leaping Deer, and Falling Rock. The three boys walked out into the dawn mist of a spring morning, and the village lit three fires to be tended until their return.

After three days, Soaring Eagle was the first to return. He looked weary and dehydrated, but entered the village on his own power. He told the village he had seen his spirit vision, and they swaddled him in blankets, put out his fire, and he became a man.

Two more days past and the villagers started to worry about Leaping Deer and Falling Rock. On the morning of the fifth day a little boy left his dwelling to relieve himself in the dawn light. He was startled to find his stream landing on the familiar deerskins of his tribe. He called for the elders, and they dragged Leaping Deer back into the camp. Within a day Leaping Deer was nursed back to life. He recounted his journey into the spirit realm. They put out his fire and he reentered his community as a man.

Six days passed and Falling Rock's fire still burned. Then seven, eight, nine days passed but still no return. On the tenth day the villagers solemnly put out Falling Rock's fire, but did not want to give up hope that maybe Falling Rock had wandered too far, gotten lost, and was still out there trying to find his way home. The village banned together in a massive effort to dot the highways of the Western United States with signs that said 'Watch for Falling Rock,' in hopes that their Falling Rock would one day return."

I woke up slowly, reddited for a couple hours, and drank coffee and water. I really needed the water because my lips were chapped as fuck, they had dark scabs and it looked like I had been eating Oreos. I smoked a bowl out on the terrace, the second drug of the day. Still no food, and it was 1pm. Jake joined me, took a hit, and said to himself out loud, "I've got to keep writing." He carried his computer out to the terrace to peck away at a cover letter. I saw the combine harvester out doing its job, harvesting the barley for beer. Harvest season, work non-stop. George said some combines are like Roombas, you set them to a GPS coordinated area, and they robotically select the best lines. Sharkcat.gif. A dust cloud followed the combine as it worked, and Jake wondered if the cumulative effect of the dust from all the combine harvesting in the country had a measurable effect on the climate.

We started the night off with a game we invented. Start by pouring yourself a stiff glass of whiskey. Everybody sits at their laptop with a drink. The goal is to write a _4chan green text_ story using _the mom's spaghetti_ meme. Put on a power hour playlist of rap hits from the 2000s. You must take a drink of whiskey every minute when the song changed. You had to finish your story and your drink at the same time. Jake was the first to finish, then Isaac, then George, then me. We all shared, and the rule was no criticism.

We felt a little drunk after that game. To entertain ourselves we turned Frasier mute with the new Earl Sweatshirt album. Driving, heavily technical, lyrically dominant, gruesome horror core sound, with images of Frasier and Niles fluttering around. We played another game where we took turns paragraph for paragraph writing a novel in a shared Google doc. On each of our screens we could see the other's cursors editing in real time.

We made a dinner of all the protein in the fridge; frozen sausage, hamburgers and eggs. Then we played liquor pong with vodka and water. That devolved into a half hour cup fight running through Jake's house. Then we played rock-paper-scissors best out of a hundred.

The next night we were back in Jackson on the stoop freestyling and drinking 40s with a few of Ed's neighbor friends. I brought up a couple freestyle games. The first was say your lines in four bars then pass it to the next person. I brought up this game because I thought Ed was freestyling longer than his fair turn. What ended up coming out was dope punch lines and hard hitting intros. It was a good exercise. Then I brought up one of my favorite topics to freestyle about. I first heard it around a campfire in Muir Woods from a woman in my training. It caught on with the group, and everyone was singing ruckus versions on the same riff, _fuck Santa_. I brought the riff to LA, and shared it with James. We spun off it, laughing at each other's ideas.

I sang it with Gabe on my ride into Telluride. He brought up _fuck Santa_ out of nowhere, I don't know where he got it. I caught on, and we riffed on it.

_Fuck Santa_ topics included: his red jacket with the fur, his jolly red nose (fuck that), how he drinks coke, I fucked Mrs. Claus, the reindeer, Rudolph, the North Pole, elves, credit card debt, how I wanted Legos for Christmas but you brought me Play Mobil instead, fuck you Santa, up in the North Pole in your factory, I poisoned your cookies and milk, you sick yet?

The Fuck Santa freestyling devolved into yelling and laughing. I brought out my harmonica and started blowing the blues. The cops came, and told us, "Boys, you just can't be singing the blues at 2am." They were very right, so I put the harp away and we quieted down.

We went tubing on the Snake River. It rained and was cloudy most of the time. There were a few rapids, nothing too big. There was a rock drop off right at the beginning. I saw the drop coming from up river, and paddled out of the way. Behind us was a platoon of large Latina women wearing t-shirts; wet, heavy, and sinking in their tubes. I could have yelled to them, told them to avoid the rock, but I really wanted to see them topple over it. I like seeing fat people in clumsy fails. They had no idea what was coming until right before they went over and it was too late to get out of the way. I meekly yelled out, "There's a rock." They all bailed out with flailing arms and big asses rolling over the rock like land whales. They emerged looking like wet scared dogs paddling and floating towards each other, hair slicked down to their scalps, wide eyes looking at George as he casually floated past with his 'hi guyz' derp-face.

We got out of the river and I couldn't stop shivering. We turned on the heat in Ed's truck. I rode in the cab and George and Jake sat in the bed bumping with the tubes up the road. We stopped at a truck stop and drank hot chocolate. I bought a bag of chips, a new flavor, BBQ ruffles MAX Flavor, and the package had a picture of a BBQ rib on it that made them look bomb.

I went back out to Jake's place to spend the weekend with Jake and his family. One afternoon Jake's mom had errands to do in Driggs, ID, so Jake and I rode with her into town and got dropped off at a bar. We sat down at the bar and Cathy served us. She was the same girl who served us last time, two weeks ago. She remembered us and where we had sat. She talked about Driggs and how she ended up there. She was living in Alaska, she met a couple, they told her to move to Driggs, so she did. "Been here five years," she said, "Lots of outdoor activities to do, shit place to live if you don't ski in the winter."

A young guy walked into the bar. He knew Cathy. He wore a blue shirt, plaid pants, and told Cathy he was getting supplies together to go to burning man the next day. I asked Jake, "Is Boise on the way to burning man?" I thought I might get a ride. It's not, Jake said, and looked at me like I was stupid. It was a funny way to phrase a question.

A guy came in with sunken eyes. He needed a place to charge his phone. Everyone knew him as Dan. He had just been in Denver. He said drugs are cheap there, $130 for an 8 ball. "People take fuckin' four lines before dinner. Don't know how you could eat after that."

A guy walked into the bar with a baby girl hanging from his chest. He ordered a coke and rum. He was known as Kip. He wore a white mesh cap with a brown front with a moose in a golden circle.

The baby fell asleep on his forearm, at the bar.

Dan turned to talk to the Burning Man guy, "I didn't see you for a couple weeks, where were you?"

"I was on a birthday bender," said the burning man guy.

"With Kip? You two gay? You two going to burning man together?" Dan said.

"No. Well, yes, but no, he's just my friend."

"You guys touch penises?" Dan touched the tips of his

two index fingers together.

"We don't touch penises, we're just friends."

Kip saw that Dan was already drunk, and was annoyed with Dan's pestering of Burning Man. He turned to Dan, "Why did it happen, Dan?"

"I went on an airplane. When I go on an airplane, I get hammered."

"You afraid of flying?" Kip asked.

"No, I just like drinking," said Dan.

Jake's mom picked us up, done with her errands. I wonder how differently we would have been acting if we had pounded two pitchers of water between us during the hour. It was funny to sit in the backseat, tipsy, while Jake and his mom carried on a discussion about if Jake's dad wanted a one gallon or five gallon can of gas.

I got back from the bar feeling fuzzy from having been day tipsy. I saw there was a Kurosawa movie on TV about warring clans in feudal Japan. What Kurosawa movie isn't about that? I stood above the couch, looked at the screen, and saw two hour nap written all over it. I decided to celebrate and live my life instead of sleeping, grabbed a beer from the clinking beer fridge, and went out onto the patio.

I sat and watched a storm come in with Jake's dad. Arazi wanted to join. The door was left open, and she padded out on soft white paws.

The storm came in from the south over a butte. Arazi smelled something on the wind and stood up to sniff the air. I watched the rain fall and fill up the cement. Some drops dried before others fell, and the dryness held out in the battle, the rate of rain was not great enough to saturate the patio. We counted the time between the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls. At first it was fortry seconds, about 8 miles, then it got closer, 25 seconds, 5 miles. I started to smell the wet soil and grass. I pondered about the ability of two men to hold two analogous and simultaneous thoughts. We carried on a conversation, while we counted the seconds until thunder. When the thunder sounded, we interrupted the conversation to call out a number. We kept the course of the conversation, and kept count in the backs of their heads the whole time. "You gotta keep moving." Jake's dad told me, "If you just sit around and stop, nothing is going to happen. That's my advice."

Jake, Ed, Savannah and I decided to go camping in the Wind Rivers range. Jake and I went up a day before Savannah and Ed. On our way up we stopped at a pizza joint in Pinedale, WY. We ordered a couple of draft beers, they were out, so we ordered a couple bottles of Fat Tire, but they didn't have that, so we ordered a couple of Coors, and she brought us Coors Light. The waitress had a bruise on her fleshy arm, and a snaggle tooth. The SX Satellite Radio station was set to _Today's New Country_. The restaurant had log walls and rustic wood pine knotted tables and chairs. We read the signs on the wall, which looked like they were all purchased from a kitsch sign supplier, maybe the same one that supplies Chilli's. One puzzled me. It said, 'Hope is the ability to dance to the music of the future; faith is the courage to dance to it today' a real mind twister. I thought it might have appealed to the decorator because it contained the words 'hope' 'faith' and 'courage'. All good words. On the walls were two signs identical except for their color. They read, 'Out of my mind...be back in 5 minutes' the decorator must have thought this was a doubly important message. There were three other groups of diners in the place, and after waiting ten minutes, none of them had food. I felt a low blood sugar tired but not sleepy feeling.

A boy outside ran by the window with the light of childhood. He took off his green flat brim hat, put it back on, side skipped, and yelled to a friend. I heard his feet scuff by in the gravel, his shrieks of victory, his orders to the other boys, which there seemed to be three of. One in a red shirt, with his back to the restaurant window, it looked like they were playing fliers up.

I drank my Coors, enjoying the bubbly burp, with my legs crossed at the knee, jiggling my foot at the end of a loose ankle in time to the country music.

We woke up and Jake looked out the tent. No Savannah and Ed, they were supposed to meet us here last night, make the three hour drive after Savannah's shift ended at 10:30. I thought maybe they decided to wake up early and come this morning. Jake went on a walk.

Five minutes later I heard a jingling, and Jake calling for Ray Ban. Ray Ban made it! If he was here, he probably brought Ed and Savannah too.

We tied Ray Ban to a tree with some p-cord and gave him enough length to roam a bit. In his roaming, he wrapped the cord around the tree three times and limited his roaming sphere. He leaned against the taut rope and whined a bit, then settled on his belly in the piney dust with a cloud that smelled like pine sap.

I made a fire. Jake and I sat by it, on a log, on the same side, to avoid the smoke. Jake read from his Kindle _For Whom the Bell Tolls._ It's about this guy named Robert Jordan who is sent to blow up a bridge. I never finished it because I left it on a train, in Spain.

I heard the flames of the fire being stoked in the breeze, and the crackle of bark separating from stick. I heard Ray Ban sneeze then shake, little chirpy birds, a stream over rocks, car doors closing, murmuring conversation that was too far to hear anything except gender and age, my own breath, as it passed through my morning nose, not all clear yet. Ray Ban whined, trembled and yawned at the end of his rope when Jake trotted off to use the bathroom.

We hiked in twelve miles and camped in a big cirque. While we hiked we played a word game called _contact_. In the game one person must guess the word another person is thinking of based on hints. I wondered how my brain found solutions to the word puzzles. It was like a black box. I heard the puzzle, thought about it, and an answer became apparent. I did not have any images in my head while I was thinking about the solution, nor did I have words. I have no idea what was going on, what goes through my head to solve a word problem. Do some people understand math in this way? Like Rain Man?

We were the only tents we could see. A stream came right out of the mountain, and we drank straight from it. The probability of giardia was low because we could see its source, plus Ray Ban drank from it so it must be chill. The creek ran over a waterfall where I showered in the morning. There were groves of short alpine pine trees with ample firewood to gather. We made a fire that night and I played harmonica and we sang. We went to bed soon after it got dark.

Jake woke up in the middle of the night, he never remembered why. He saw light against the side of the tent, and got out to investigate. He saw the fire had sprung back to life, and was spreading over the grass. He woke me up, and we rushed to gather water from the stream to put it out. That time we really soaked the coals, and stirred the pit Smokey the Bear style.

In the morning we hiked out and headed into town looking for a place to drink. We saw the Purple Rabbit advertising food and cocktails. It looked perfect, so we parked out front and walked in.

A chalk board told us to seat ourselves. We walked around the corner and into a crowded room. There were about twenty five people sitting at tables which were all full except for a two person behind a pine column. I sat on the bench, Jake in the chair. When Savannah and Ed came, they could sit in the booth next to me, and pull up another chair. The lady next to us heard us discussing the seating situation, and assured us she wouldn't bite our friends when they came.

There was a stage set up with musical equipment. An old man was fiddling with the stuff. It appeared to be an open mic, and this was confirmed by the menu, which had _Tuesday Open Mic_ listed under the weekly specials. The old man played bass, and another guy sat in a chair and played guitar. They invited people to come on stage and sing.

I had to pee, so I wandered around to the back of the place, to the right of the stage, and found a door that led outside. I stood in the doorway deciding whether to pee in the back lot, or find a real bathroom, and breathed in the drizzle smell. I didn't want it to look like I was lost, so I stayed there a minute, then ducked back inside and ran into the waitress. She had a baseball mitt face, heavily made up eyes, and big straight white teeth with black gums in between. "S'cuse me ma'am," I addressed her, "Where's the restroom?"

"It's right back through the purple door." I walked back through the purple door. It was a single restroom, with a sit down toilet and no urinal. I looked at the posters on the wall while I peed. They were all faux vintage 1960s hippie band show ads. One said, 'What a long, strange trip it's been' and was a commemorative Jerry poster. Another was a fresh looking advertisement for Woodstock, boasting headliners Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin, and 'Plenty of space to roam.'

I finished my pee, walked back out through the purple door, and sat down at the table with Jake. The waitress came up to us in a huff, acting like she was busy as fuck.

"What do you guys want to drink?"

"I'll have a Whiskey soda."

"Sure, can I see your ID?" I slapped it down on the table. Jake needed to run to the car to get his.

The waitress walked away, and said back over her shoulder, "Bourbon soda, right?"

"Yeah," I said to her back then added, "well whiskey." Is bourbon going to be a well whiskey? The drink that came wasn't strong, but they didn't stiff me either.

Ed and Savannah arrived, they were a little late because they had fucked the camper out of position, and had to drive slowly along the dirt roads winding out of the Big Sandy trailhead unless the camper's jacks would scratch the sides of the truck, but it was already scratched so they didn't care too much.

Jake bet Ed a dollar that the waitress would ID him and Ed was confident she wouldn't. "It's the beard, man," Ed said. Ed called out his drink order to the waitress as she bustled by to tend to the eight top of frackers drinking Coors Light and eating wings. The waitress brought Ed's drink back without checking his ID, and Jake put a dollar on the table.

A young woman got up on stage. She played the banjo and was shy about it in a really cute way. She sang airy, quiet songs, and smiled and blushed when the crowd clapped. She wore a blue t-shirt and blue jeans, and had thick hair tied in the back of her head in a loose bun. Her face was round, and she had a matronly body, good for child bearing. She walked off the stage beaming after three songs and I had an insta-crush. She sat down at her table with a couple of middle aged women, a guy with effete hipster glasses, and a girl with kinky hair wearing a flannel. The girl with kinky hair stood up and took the stage next.

She had a masculine presence, and gripped the microphone firm but delicate. She curled her honey brown fingers around the shaft, and brought it towards her open singing mouth. Something about the way she did that, it looked so practiced yet natural.

Under her flannel she wore a t-shirt tucked into her black jeans. She had low braless breasts, and half her hair fell over her face, some of the ringlets bleached, the other half a ponytail tied in back.

Her facial bone structure was angular. She had a small gap between two crooked front teeth. Her eyes shone silver flashes when she glanced around the room. She was a little nervous, but had confidence in her stance. I was crushing, but I also got a slight lesbian vibe.

She sang two and a half songs. Into her third, her mic went off. Someone from the crowd called out "We can't hear ya!"

"My mic is out," she said.

Jake yelled, "Just belt it."

I said, "Yeah, just sing it. You don't need the mic."

She chuckled and brushed a locket of hair out of her face, which fell back immediately. "I know, that's what Jimmy here wants me to do." She smiled at the old man playing the bass. "I think this was Jimmy's plan all along." Jimmy smiled, shook his head and chuckled. She sat down.

The band asked if there was anyone who wanted to sing. I turned to Jake, "Jake, I wanna sing Bobby McGee."

"Do it man." I turned to Ed and Savannah for further confirmation.

"Do it, YOLO," Savannah said.

I walked up to the band. "Can I sing Bobby McGee, you know,

Janis Joplin?"

"I think so. Jimmy, you think we can feel our way through

Bobby McGee?" Jimmy nodded. "What key you want it in?"

"I dunno, you just start playing and I'll sing along. I think C, maybe?"

I stepped the one step onto the stage and looked out at the audience. I took my hat off, put it back on, and started to speak into the mic to get a feel for it. It was working again. "So, it's my first open mic, here in Pinedale, and um," I smoothed the muscles on the back of my neck with my palm, "and, um, I'm a little nervous, but, uh, I'm gonna sing Bobby McGee for ya'll." The band started up. I hadn't sung all day so I was cold. I sang the first verse, and it was a little shaky and out of key, but I knew the words by heart so I never lost my place. When the chorus hit, I was warm, and starting to rock, and I nailed the 'ain't worth nothin' part in which Janis flies up an octave. Jiggly fat arms whooped up and clapped in the audience.

I went into the second verse, and looked over at the guitarist. He was shaking his head, smiling, looking at Jimmy. I don't know if the look meant "I don't know where this kid is." or "Ha! This is great!"

The song takes a sad turn at the end of the second verse. Bobby leaves somewhere near Salinas. When I got to this point, I leaned in close to the mic, and told it in a low bedside voice from my chest. The change in tone sent a ripple through the audience, and I saw women drop their shoulders, straighten their backs, and look me up and down. I had them.

Janis scats the last verse. I freestyled for four bars, then got self-conscious, ended it on a neat rhyming punch line, bowed, thanked the musicians, stepped off stage and sat back down at the table. The crowd clapped, and Jimmy led the audience in one more verse of 'La da da da da da das'.

Jake high fived me as I sat back down in the booth. My heart was racing and my face flush. "You have any girl in here."

"What?'

"Nothing, man. Great job. That was awesome."

"Thanks, man." I felt high. I blushed and smiled more. The banjo girl waved and smiled dimples at me. The flannel shirt turned around in her seat, and thrust her fist in the air at me. I thrust my fist back. She called out across the room, "You know, there's a three song minimum." I feigned an 'oh really' look, put my hat on and started to stand, then shook my head and sat down. The bar laughed at my joke.

People started to clear out of the bar after a couple more songs. Guys gave me daps on their way out. We paid our bill, and made small talk with the waitress. She said, "Hey, thanks for doing that. It was great."

"Oh, it was a lot of fun." I said, "This is a great place. We just saw it driving through, and thought it looked like a good place to eat."

"Oh, you guys aren't from around here? Where y'all from?"

"Jackson," we answered in unison, because it was true enough.

"Then you'll have to be sure to leave us a review on Yelp."

"Sure, we will."

We walked across the street into the _Cowboy Bar_. It seemed that the table of frackers had also chosen to change the venue to the _Cowboy_ , and they were now getting rowdy, drinking pitchers. Ed really wanted to buy cigarettes, and I felt like smoking one too. I was wearing my Kansas City Royals jacket I picked up at a Mexican flea market for $18.

There was a little space for us at the end of the bar near the door, to the right of the sad video gamble machine. I checked it, and it did not have video beer pong. The waitress was sturdy and brunette. She asked for our IDs, then walked away to fill a couple pitchers. I got my drink order in: a pitcher and four whiskey shots. The total was $18, a great price.

I looked around and saw the place was occupied with curved brim balls caps, hoodies and jeans. Ed said he could tell the guys in the bar were frackers because some of them were wearing slippers. The guys who worked on the rigs in Alaska did the same thing. Anytime they didn't have to be wearing their boots, they would wear slippers or moccasins; to the store, the restaurant, or the bar.

No tables were free in the front room, so we took the pitcher back to the shuffleboard table. We drank the pitcher then got another. They were $5.25 for four pints worth of PBR. It was the cheapest beer I have ever seen in a bar. After the two pitchers, the group was ready to go, but damn, I was just getting started.

We went back to the camper, and saw the waitress in the street again. "You guys still wandering around?" She was wearing a change of clothes, dressed to go out.

"Yeah, we were just at the _Cowboy_."

"Oh, okay, well you boys be careful."

"Thanks ma'am we will. Goodnight."

I spread out my pad and sleeping bag on the floor in the camper. I was torn. I could decide to not drink more, get a good night's sleep, and save money. But I heard ruckus bumping from the Cowboy, and the thought of all the strangers I could meet overpowered me.

I had to go, so I went. I sat next to the sad video gamble screen and talked to Niki, in her forties, recently divorced, two kids, drinking a Michelob Ultra. I bought a round for both of us, because I had never had a Michelob. It was 4.2 percent. It didn't taste much different from a PBR.

There were two groups of men, the frackers and the road crew. I imagine the road crew were building the roads out to the fracking sites. When it was time for the road crew to leave, the foreman gathered up his boys and told them to close out. One guy was not ready to turn in, and a fight broke out between him and his foreman. I sat and watched the fight, sipping my Michelob as the men barreled out the door and onto the street. Once it was outside people turned back to their conversations and the pool was re-racked.

I was drunk by closing time. I had been talking to a couple frackers, and trading buying pitchers back and forth. I tried to play Rock-Paper-Scissors for a pitcher, but the guy said, "Fuck man, I'm not gonna play Rock-Paper-Scissors, I'll just fucking buy one."

I kept asking the same girl for cigarettes, and she finally told me to buy my own pack, but the guy she was with offered me a dip. I took it, and it was just as bad as I remember.

When the bar closed the sturdy bartendress put out two flats of Natural Ice tall cans on the bar, and said everyone was invited to her place for the after party. I followed everyone out to their cars, but realized I did not have my phone, so there would be no way to get in touch with Jake in the morning.

I woke up on the floor of the RV with the taste of dip still in my mouth, shielding my eyes from the poison sunlight. I apologized to Jake before falling asleep for the whole ride back to Jackson.
Chapter 8

### Spell Your Hobo Signs Right

I had been crashing on Ed's couch for two weeks, and felt that I had thoroughly worn out my welcome with his roommates. It was time to head to Boise.

I got an early start out of Jackson. My alarm went off at 6:15, and I didn't want to obey it, but I had to get on, preferably before my friend in Boise started his night shift at 6pm. Time to get up and hitchhike like it's my job.

I went for a walk and greeted the early risers, mostly dogs walking their masters. I passed a master who was bald, with glasses, wearing a hoodie, holding a mug in one hand, a leash in the other. His dog cut me off on the sidewalk, and the master apologized 'excuse me' as if it was he had cut me off.

Coffee moves me; brain, bowels, spirit. In the kitchen at Ed's I had to push aside books, chips, a newspaper, a mesh bag, a Nalgene, and MacBook to carve out a space for a mug and my notepad. A cup of coffee, a banana, another cup of coffee, time to go to work.

While we ere buying weed the day before I mentioned I was going to Boise. Someone said that Amanda, the girl who was sitting on the couch, was also going to Boise. I asked her if I could get a ride. She said I could, but was a little awkward about it, probably because I was a stranger and this was something she had not planned. She bailed on me through texts last night, saying she was going to go a different route. Then this morning she said she could give me a ride, but I should try to find another one. I told her I'd be hitchhiking, so if she saw me on the road holler.

Jake dropped me off in Wilson, WY, at the base of the pass that goes west into Idaho. He said I would likely get a ride there because a lot of mountain bikers hitchhike from that spot, and people were used to giving rides. It started to drizzle, and I hoped it would not rain harder because then I would need to wear my pirate poncho, and who's going to pick up a guy in a pirate poncho? I got picked up by the first car that passed. The man drove a Subaru, had red hair and a beard. I knew him, had just met him the day before. He showed us a house Jake, Ed, and Savannah were considering renting in Jackson. He commuted every day over the pass into Victor, and Jake and I had joked on the way out to Wilson that he might pick me up. Then he did. He smelled freshly showered, and drank coffee from a silver thermos. We talked about the conditions of the pass, and what it was like to commute over it year round. I noticed he had a Colorado College key chain, and I asked where he got it. He said a friend had given it to him. He hadn't gone there, but he had visited a lot.

I got dropped off on a gravely shoulder in Victor, and wandered into some grass to tap a kidney. I didn't wait long for my next ride, another Subaru driven by a single male. He was going fishing, and told me about the types of lures he was going to use. He had a pistol in a thigh holster, and liked to talk about guns. He was interested in my stories about hog hunting in Texas.

He dropped me off in Swan Valley, where I stood on the side of the road with my thumb out. A VW camper van passed, and I waved and smiled at it, and when it drove by I threw up my arms in a 'c'mon, man' gesture. If you drive one of those vans, you have to pick up hitchhikers. The van pulled a Uie, and came back around to pick me up. Jerry Garcia was driving, with his wife in the passenger seat. It smelled like they had just cooked bacon for breakfast. They were from Virginia, and enjoying their retirement driving around the country in their camper. On the agenda today was antiquing in Idaho Falls. I was happy to sit in the back and let Jerry monologue. He had interesting stories about taking the van around Europe and Russia with the kids. They were of my parent's age and creed, and talked to me like a son, or the son of a friend. He said hitchhiking was a lost art. They dropped me off at a gas station in Idaho Falls, where I got a breakfast sandwich, and ate it sitting on my backpack.

After breakfast I started asking around for a ride. I went up to a truck that said _Hyde Drift Boats_. Usually I don't ask business looking vehicles, but I was hot off a ride and thought I'd try.

"S'cuse me sir, I'm looking for a ride South on 15"

"Yeah, not me. Sorry, I'm just here in town bud."

After about fifteen minutes the gas station attendant came and kicked me out. I guess I was not allowed to ask for rides. I walked to the Sinclair station on the other side of the highway. I asked the first vehicle I saw, another commercial vehicle, the _Rolling Shuttle_ van.

"Sure, I can give you a ride, if you've got a hundred bucks."

"Well, I'm just hitchhiking."

"Ha," he laughed mirthfully, "good luck."

"Thanks," asshole.

After a half hour of failed attempts, kicking rocks around, and trying to hide myself from the view of the gas station attendant, I asked a MILFy woman as she walked into the station. I saw her son, in his early twenties, filling up, and made eye contact with him and his mom before I made my request.

"S'cuse me, ma'am, if you're headed south, do you think I could get a ride?"

"You're not a serial killer, are you?"

"I am not," I smiled.

"Well, if you kill us, we'll have to kill you."

"That's fine with me."

They told me the whole ride about all the escaped cons from the prison near their home in Anaconda, ID. She told a story her friend had told her about a serial killer hitchhiker he picked up.

"The guy sat in the back seat, so he couldn't see him so well at first. He seemed a little off right away, talking a mile a minute, scratching a lot. It was a forest road, with street lights at road crossings, every quarter mile or so. As they crossed one of the orange light patches he glanced in the back seat to get a peek of the guy. In the flash of the street light he saw the guy's bloody clothes, then it was all dark again. He drove on until he saw another street light up ahead. He was terrified of what was behind him, but he had to look. When they passed into the light he looked in the rearview mirror and saw a bloody face with ice blue eyes staring right back at him. He went to a gas station, and the hitchhiker said he was going to use the bathroom to wash up. They called 911. It turned out the guy had stabbed his kids o death in the woods that night."

They dropped me off at a gas station in Pocatello Idaho, where I got kicked out again after about fifteen minutes. They guy told me "You can't be bothering our customers. It's company policy."

"Okay," I said, picked up my bag and left. I only ever got kicked out of gas stations in Idaho. I walked across the road onto the freeway onramp. It was under construction so I went up to a construction lady and asked where I could stand if I was trying to hitchhike. She said past that green lamp post. So I walked down to the green lamp post and stood there, but it was an awful spot because the only place to pull over was a steep shoulder into a puddle. After waiting there 45 minutes I went back to the gas station and bought a _Trayvon Martin_ \- Skittles and AriZona Tea. When I walked in the attendant gave me the evil eye. I paid and looked at him. I asked, "Did someone complain about me?"

"If you try to stand out there, I'll have to call the

cops."

"What if I stand on the sidewalk with a sign?"

"If you stand on our property, I'll have to call the

cops."

"Can I stand over there on the sidewalk?"

"Like I said, if you stand across the street, I don't care, but if you stand on the sidewalk, I'm gonna have to call the cops."

With the highway construction, and not being able to hang out in the gas station, there was nowhere for a hitchhiker to stand. I talked to a homeless looking man sitting on the curb. He asked me for a cigarette and I and asked him where he thought I should try to get a ride. "Well, if you stand out on the highway, they'll pick you up and fine you $80. Can't hitchhike here. Boise is worse. Tryin' ta hitchhike out of Boise, no one will give you rides."

I waited four hours for a ride in awful Pocatello, Idaho. It was hot, then it rained and I had to put on my pirate poncho. I made a sign, and after standing on the corner waving it for an hour and a half, a car rolled down its window and told me, "It's spelled 'Boise' not, 'Biose'." Amanda texted me and said she would be rolling through Pocatello in an hour. Thank god. She picked me up, we ate some Burger King, and she gave me a ride all the way to my friend Alex's in Boise.
Chapter 9

### The Night Is on My Mind

Alex and I went to middle school and high school together, then he went to the University of Washington. He was a good wise friend, and practiced in the spiritual realm. He was Czech, and learned the national hobby of mushroom picking from his grandma. As he grew into adulthood he applied his fungal knowledge to the harvesting of psilocybin cyanescens. If you know what to look for they are all over Seattle; in the parks, ravines, people's lawns. One fall Alex gathered a few sandwich bags full, and gave them away as Christmas presents.

He brought me LSD in Korea, and I took it with him as my trip guide. We went to the Modern Art Museum, and I had intense introspection into the intentions of the artists. A room full of drawings moved in my vision like .gifs.

Alex got a degree in Materials Science from Washington State University. After college he started work at a soulless job in a robot megaplex. He worked the night shift making computer chips for Micron, in Boise Idaho.

I made it into September cruising down short days and long nights of smoking pot at Alex's place. Maybe I can attribute it to the healthy mental state I was in, but no matter how much pot I smoked there, I never got the anxiety I was getting before. I felt like I could smoke all the pot in the world and just get more mellow.

Bar hopping in Boise we drank 40s, then fireball shots, then blacked the fuck out. The hop was: The Cactus with Fireball shots to Fatty's with PBRs to Graney's with 40s and $2 whiskey shots, dance floors, Boise Sate shirts on girlfriends with boyfriends with flat brims. On the dance floor I lifted my hands up in celebration, and knocked my glasses on off my head. I told Alex then got down on my hands and knees with my hands sweeping in front of me. I was lost in the blinking colored lights, the glass stomping feet. I stood up and asked if someone had seen my glasses, then went back down, searching, nowhere, but they couldn't have gone that far. Then Alex yelled. He had them in his hand. I hugged him, and we left the place. They got a big scratch on the left lens, and were bent as fuck so they slipped off my nose when I bent over. Battle worn glasses. I saw Syria through them, and Korea too. It was time for a new pair.

We did last call at Dirty Little Roddy's, and were some of the last to leave. I hung and chatted with Alex then heard my beer bottle clank in the trash can. "Hey that was mine!" I said, then turned around and saw the bouncer had thrown it away.

"Time to leave," he repeated.

We had to walk back to the house where we had parked our bike and skate board. We got near, and found an RV. Alex tried the door. Unlocked. We went in. There was a bed. So tired.

Alex woke me up at 7:30, and said it was time to go. I still had my shoes on, and I stumbled out of the RV. The bike and skate were there. I pulled Alex back to the house on the bike using a water ski rope and he shredded on and off the sidewalk, at one point wiping out, skinning his knee and shoulder. We were drunk, hungover, and haggard in the misty Boise morning, just a couple of doods up for their morning shred sesh. A guy in a Scion drove by and gave a groovy _hang ten_ hand gesture. We got back to Alex's and slept until one in the afternoon.

My sleep schedule shifted towards nights while I stayed with Alex. I went to bed around 5am and woke up today around 3pm. Working nights is a tough job. There is no time to run errands because you need to sleep during all the waking hours of the day. Working nights fucks a body up. No matter how much you try to fight it, a body is meant to be awake during the day. The guys that work nights are always tired. You never fully catch up. Alex talked about _two sleeping_ in four hours shifts: sleep for four hours, run errands, sleep another four hours, go to work. When Alex worked nights, it seemed all he did was work and sleep. The Man owned the workers' bodies and minds for half the week. The schedule affected the workers' life. It took over. They couldn't think about anything but work. When they were not at work they were thinking about having to go to work. The Man. He got the workers down by making them wear a white suit and booties, robbing them of their individuality. The Man cleaned the factory rooms with fans from top to bottom, and took away any smell or humanness.

Alex worked in a machine world for machines that made more

machines. His job was to press the button that made the machines go.

Alex got out of bed at 5:30 after twelve hours of sleep, a heroic slumber. He came in wearing his WSU basketball shorts, his shirt off, messy hair, glasses. Slept like a nigga.

We went golfing on Alex's day off with Alex's friend Laura from WSU. Laura had known Alex for a few years, so she was used to his time scale, and only got a little frustrated with us dicking around and moving at the pace of stoned starfish. We were half an hour late to our tee time because Alex and I kept giggling at things in his house. Laura called the course to tell them. She was good at telling them we would be late. Then we were even later when I fucked up on the navigation because I was stoned and forgot I was supposed to be navigating.

The guy behind the counter in the pro shop had a wet little sniffle, and breathed out of his mouth. He did his job with anxious movement, and handed my credit card back to Alex. I offered him some warm pocket gummy bears, but he declined.

We got a cart, three people squashed onto a two, and drove o the tee. I only teed off with a 4 iron all day. I don't fuck with woods. Laura said "I dunno how you can play a round without going to the range first."

"We did!" Alex chimed in. "We have a range, it's my front yard." We giggled, and Laura ignored us.

But Alex did have a range in his front yard. He set out his golf tee pad in his driveway, along with his crimson and grey golf bag, and a dozen foam practice balls. We whacked it at the trees, and the trees caught the balls like a net. Some balls shot under and across the street to the neighbor's yard, so you couldn't shoot while someone was walking by on the sidewalk.

My best holes were bogies on par threes. On one long hole I tried to use Alex's hybrid club. It cost him $100. I kept whacking at it, topping it, with the ball only going about ten yard. Then the course pro zoomed up on his golf cart. He said I needed to keep my left arm closer to my body. I tried it, and got a good straight shot into the water hazard.

He also gave Laura a lesson. She acted nervous while he talked to her, scurrying for clubs and balls. With him were three kids, ages six to thirteen, two girls, and the youngest a boy. The boy enjoyed expressing his thoughts verbally. His thoughts were statements of fact and opinion. "We took the golf cart through the sprinkler, and got wet," he said. Then, as Laura hit, he told us, "I like golf."

"What's your favorite club?" I asked. He gestured vaguely to the club Laura was using. Oh, that one, I guess. Dunce kid.

It started to rain right as we put our clubs in the trunk. We ducked and covered our heads and hopped inside the car. Perfect timing. We went to the restaurant where Laura's roommate Kate worked. A beautiful girl, and an awful restaurant employee. She sat with us at our booth while her co-workers bussed her tables for her. Alex and I ordered five food items off the happy hour menu, and Laura looked at us like we were fat. She had been trained as a skinny girl to cast that eye onto any food consumption she was jealous of. I drank an 18oz. grande Bud Light in a frosty margarita glass. Alex ordered a watermelon margarita, and it tasted like Jolly Rancher. We got comped a couple _Blue Vikings_ , sweet liquor with a Sprite shot, because we knew Kate, and Laura knew the manager. I guess Laura wasn't too hungry, because she only ordered two empanadas. We split the total between Alex and me. I tipped 50 percent, because Kate was cute and I wanted a piece. She had no whit though, and nothing to say, only complained. I would have no interest in talking to her if she wasn't cute.

We got back to Alex's, took two hydrocodone, and grabbed a couple beers. We sat on the couch, vaped, and talked. When the pill hit me, I felt more talkative with less of a filter, and more willing to interrupt Alex during one of his tangential monologues. We freestyled, played harmonica and guitar, then came up with a game. We wrote topics on slips of paper, put them in a bowl, then drew them out one by one as freestyle topics. One would draw a topic while the other beat boxed, then we switched. That game was quite difficult, because it was hard to stay on a random topic for more than one line. Then we played the game I played in Jackson with Ed, where each person only got four bars to rap. That got more interesting content, and we changed it to two bars. Then we played FIFA but by mid game I could hardly stay awake. We played two games then went to bed. I fell asleep almost immediately.

The road was ending, and I did not feel happy about it. If there was more road, there was more places, things to do, adventures. I thrive off the road environment, getting an early start to hitchhiking, the rush of a ride, going out in a new city, $2 wells at a new dive on the outskirts of town. I love the change, the difference, the strangeness, the culture shock. I love telling a new social group that I've been on the road for three months, don't have a job, pay no rent, and hitchhiked here from Juarez, Mexico.

So I write. I don't know what else to do to clear this feeling of anxiousness from my chest waking up at two in the afternoon and not knowing where my life is headed. As long as my pen keeps moving, the ideas will come to me. Everything can be expanded to infinite levels or compressed immaculate details. There is a point I talked about with Alex, which we reach it when freestyling; a point of fatigue, saturation, where no more ideas come. Alex told me he likes to push through in those moments. He enjoys the struggle, and strain on the brain muscle is what makes it stronger. I want to see if I can write for eight hours sober. No amphetamines, benzys, anti-narcolepsy drugs, only caffeine, and sugar. Natural energy. Maybe one of Alex's energy supplements. He spent a lot of money on natural energy supplements, pills, goos, green tea extract, vitamin B12, multivitamins, fish oil, he gave me a cocktail one day, and I pissed Mountain Dew fluorescent.

I sat in a chair at the head of the table that faced out the window. The window was cut horizontally by open blinds. There were flies walking along the surface of the window, between the blinds, on the glass, up the blind string, buzzing off, hitting a blind, then coming back to the window. They made mechanical little noises like a hard drive clicking in action. The fly situation at Alex's was pretty bad. The most annoying thing was when they walked on my face. They bred in the algae covered pond in the backyard. It was thick with green plants, and looked like a wonderful breeding ground for flies. Alex's roommate Joey said he cleaned the pond out twice, and now it was Alex's turn. Alex attempted to clean it for about five minutes, then gave up saying the green was too heavy.

Alex's kitchen table was enchanted. The energy charged my notebook and drew the words out of my pen. There was no running dialogue in my head as I wrote. I was a passive observer of an act of immaculate creativity. It was not any one item that enchanted the table, but the synergy of their energies, like the ingredients in an ayahuasca ceremony where no one ingredient has hallucinogenic powers on its own, it is only their combination in preparation by a shaman that opens the door to the spirit realm. The alchemy of writing. Combining everyday elements into something valuable. Sulfur into gold. The mundane in marvelous.

Last night we drank beer, smoked bowls, ate snacks, and watched random YouTube vids. A very popular genre of video was the _a capella_ _pop cover_. They were impressive displays of vocal skill requiring precise harmony and drum sounds made only with the human vocal tract. I always thought of _a capella_ groups as cringy, mainly because the all-male _a capella_ group at my college made me squirm when they would perform in their matching white blazers and coiffed hair under a cloud of Axe so thick it was about to condense and fall as rain on the audience. The _a capella_ videos on YouTube had a bubblegum teen aesthetic. They appealed to teenage girls, and college boys who lacked masculine father figures growing up.

I saw one video laid out like the Brady Bunch intro, with the screen chopped into boxes, each containing a head. Each head was the same bearded man singing different tracks to Tetris song in eight bit sound. In the middle of the screen a game of Tetris played, and when a point was made he would register the game sound in the audio track. Sometimes a cat appeared in one of the boxes, and the man danced with it. Cats, a surefire ticket to internet success.

We watched another video about the universe. Thinking about the universe makes me feel small and insignificant in a good way, like my problems really are not that big of a deal, and they will all get worked out in the long run. The video said that the term _big bang_ was misleading, because it wasn't so much as a _bang_ , but a _stretch_ , and big is a term that requires something else as a reference in size, but the universe contains everything, so its size is incomparable. The video said a more apt name would be _the everything stretch_. The universe is infinity big, but we know that at one point our known universe was shrunk to a much smaller point, and then started stretching from that point. The video represented the universe as gridlines, and zoomed out and in to show gridlines at every level, no matter how far out or in you go. Zooming out and in of different universal levels gave Alex and me flashbacks to our journeys into the spiritual realm, and the video won our respect.

I never knew if it was morning or evening. Both times of day passed through the same hazy kinda awake lizard brain. The shadows outside were a little long to be morning length, and the light quality was more gold than white. I checked the clock and it was 3:45. Alex was still asleep. I ate my first meal of the day, a bagel with cream cheese, toasted of course.

Alex's roommate Joey came in the kitchen. Joey also worked in the robot factory.

"How's it going, Graham?" He asked in a deep voice, with inflection.

"Sup Joey, you're up early." I said.

"Yeah, just trying to get back onto days."

"Is it your weekend now?"

"Yeah, I don't have to be back 'till Sunday." He pulled out his shoes, and picked up the trash bag near the door.

"You headed out?" I asked.

"Yeah, I just gotta go get a fishing license, run some errands and shit. Might go fishing with a buddy today."

"So you take anything to help you sleep? I know Alex has that melatonin e-cig."

"I do the Tylenol Pm, that seems to do it for me. But it sucks, man."

"Yeah, it seems like you and Alex are always tired."

"Dood, it sucks, but at least I'm on days now."

The flies buzzed around the seeds on my everything bagel plate. One landed on the rim, walked through a section of the plate picking up and testing different seeds and crumbs, found none to its liking and hopped off and buzzed to another edge of the plate. DGAF fly.

The rain came hard and cool, bringing a dry earth dust smell on its first breath, then wet cedar bark on its second. Sitting on Alex's back patio I got little splatters off the corners of the concrete pads where the corrugated roof did not cover.

I smelled the camp fire in Alex's backyard. I imagined the force of the drops falling caused the dust particles of the fire pit to jump up and carry in the wind across my nose. Thunder clapped and waves of patter on the steel roof increased in force. More patters per second, and a harder force per patter. It seems that the patter was at a maximum volume, but then another wave came and the patter increased its force. Part of the sky was blue, part luminous white, part angry dark. Straight beads of water streamed from the channels in the corrugated roof. As the storm passed over the streams narrowed in diameter, and started to break into drips. In the pond the water flowed and bubbled over the slimy green moss making white water in the slippery growth. The storm left on a wind smelling like wet dark earth and brown leaves. My first whiff of fall in America.

The rain stopped. I called Carolyn, my craigslist rideshare. It's hard to nail down a perfect day to leave with craigslist. I always end up staying a few more days than I told my hosts I would. It can get a little awkward, but the best thing to do is be honest with your host about your options early. Carolyn said nine or ten hours to Seattle. A pretty long ride, but not too bad. It will be nice to be moving the whole time, and not stuck in a god awful place like Pocatello. Carolyn seemed middle aged from what I heard on the phone. She was driving a truck back to Seattle, just looking for someone to give her company, and help pay for gas. She contacted me from my own ad on craigslist. She said gas shouldn't be more than $50 or $60. It was probably a little less than a bus ticket, but a whole lot more comfortable and fast. She was not nervous on the phone, she let me speak my full opinions, and responded thoughtfully to my questions.

I went to the IHOP that night to write. The waitress wore a too big blue shirt and black pants uniform. She had a cold sore on her lip. She worked the night shift at the IHOP in a parking lot shared with Fred Myers, Home Depot, Walgreens, and a pop-up Chase ATM island for all your banking needs.

The satellite radio station was turned to a cornball channel. I heard Aretha Franklin, then Billy Ocean with those islandy synth lines. I was the only person in there, but it did not seem awkward because I did not feel watched. The waitress busied herself around the place, putting things on trays, carrying bus bins, washing things in the kitchen. I heard the water run, and a drain bubble.

The coffee was just something to do between thoughts. I smelled it. Too hot. I wrote a page. Put creamer in my coffee, watched it swirl, sipped it, wrote a page, gulped it twice, and wrote more. I refilled my mug from the pot. Sugar that time, just to stir it in. I sipped and observed the costly drywall of the interior ceiling soffits and light wells.

On the table was a copper colored coffee pot, a white IHOP mug with a blue logo, a fork, knife and spoon all rolled into a napkin with a paper band around it holding it together, a white bowl with a blue line around the rim which held creamers in brown, blue, green, and white pockets. There was a black plastic troth dish with mostly white sugar packets but also a few yellow and pink fake sugar packets. To the left and right of the sugar troth were the glass and stainless steel salt and pepper shakers. Against the pony partition at my table was an ornament that makes IHOPs unique; the boat of four different syrup flavors. They are like power rangers, each with their own style and representative color. There's the brown vessel, known as _Old Fashioned_ , the yellow vessel, _Butter Pecan_ , the blue vessel, _Blueberr_ y, and the red called _Strawberry_. The vessels are uniquely designed for pouring syrup: they have a thumb pull tab with the color and the syrup power labeled on it. The pull tab allows for perfect control of the viscous product, you can tilt the vessel and slide the tab back and forth, controlling the flow at two levels. Is there a factory somewhere that makes IHOP pouring vessels and copper colored coffee pots? Probably in China, outsourced. I love outsourcing. I imagine IHOP Inc., provided a factory with CAD specs, the factory produced a sample, IHOP approved, and the factory moved forward in mass production of custom coffee pot and syrup vessels. Someone's job in China is to stick _Old Fashioned_ labels on syrup vessels all day.

The waitress came up from behind me while I was pouring coffee and startled me. I spilled a few drops of coffee on the side of the mug and on the table.

I looked up at her, "Wow, you scared me," I said.

"Hehe. Oops. That pot doesn't hold too much, maybe only two cups."

"Oh, well, I may need some more."

"Sure." She went in back, and brought out another pot. "Sure there's not anything I can bring you? Some water? French fries?" I looked into her eyes, framed by pink glasses, smiled, and shook my head graciously.

"No, thanks. I'm fine."

"Okay." She smiled, and I turned back to my writing. Don't bother me with fry offers while I'm working, wench.

Above the syrup boat was an advertisement:

Prepare for a Stirring

Experience IHOP Splashers

Free Refills!

See menu for details

It had a license plate sized black plastic frame containing a picture of ice filled glasses blasting out of a water and fruit explosion. The advertisement made them look refreshing. Life experience told me free refills meant they come from fountain syrup, and not from fruit explosions.

Above the fruit drink advertisement was a red tab advertising:

Pancake Revolution

Join IHOPs e-club and get three free meals

Use your smartphone to go to IHOP.com/mobilejoin and join now.

The tab had an image of fists waving red flags which said _IHOP Pancake Revolution_ , and _Pancakes to the People_.

More people came into the restaurant, and placed orders for food. The waitress went back into the kitchen, and I could hear her conversation with the chef.

"Pat, can I get three crispy bacon?"

"Huh?"

"Three crispy bacon, please?"

_Addicted to Love_ played on the speakers. The waitress continued to the chef, "One whole waffle, with just strawberries, no creamy stuff, okay? Thank yeeooooo." She started to leave the kitchen, but turned around in the doorway, "Oh, and one more thing, for the two eggs, one over easy and one scrambled."

"On what?"

"On the Ultimate," she said on her way out, projecting the majority of the sound into the restaurant.

I gave the waitress a $4 tip on a $2 cup of coffee and went across the parking lot to buy dinner. I wanted to do something nice for Alex and Joey. I waited back during my stay and got on Alex's eating schedule, so I was hungry for lunch around 11pm. I chose to implement the recipe I learned from Anne's Iranian roommate; chicken breast drenched in egg, then flour, fried in canola oil, with kale sautéed in garlic and olive oil with a drizzle of vinegar and sesame seed garnish. Purchasing and preparing the meal made me feel like a wife whose work revolved around taking care of her husband. I wonder if good women change their sleep schedule to be the same as their husband, and just hang out and are awake at night so they can prepare meals and make love, the chief duties of a wife. I thought that thought driving home with the groceries in back. I enjoyed the night lifestyle. It was more secluded. I felt like being friendly as fuck to the people I came in contact with. I made small talk with the checkout guy at the grocery store. He asked me, "Is your night winding down now?" I felt in the mood to share details about my life.

"Not really, I'm still chillin'. My friend gets off night shift at 7am, and is gonna come home for lunch around 11, so I'm gonna make him lunch." The clerk slouched when I mentioned night shift, like the mention brought up hard thoughts of his own, like he had worked some nights.

"Oh, well, give your friend my condolences for the night shift."

I got back to the place, and had the dinner all prepared by the time Alex got home for lunch. Joey was impressed. He asked, "Where did you learn to cook something like this?"

"I learned this recipe from an Iranian guy who was living with my sister when I visited her in New Brunswick"

"The kale is actually really good. Kale is supposed to be healthy, right?"

"Yeah, it's pretty healthy, but I used a lot of oil. I sautéed the garlic in olive oil to infuse it with garlic flavor." I like cooking for guys who don't know how to cook for themselves. They are always really impressed and appreciative, like I have performed some sort of alchemy.

Drugs, drugs, drugs all day; coffee in the morning, cup after cup ya don't stop, kept the buzz going, cigarette, snaps, food coffee, snaps, half a beer, coffee, snaps, dinner, two beers, hydrocodone, snaps. I had become comfortably numb. My shirt was off, I was in my shorts, laying back on a cougar blanket, on the couch. Flies crawled on my face but IDGAF. I vaped a bowl like it was a hookah, with the hose always in my right hand, propped up on my elbow, watching a documentary on PBS about Winston Churchill. The television music was soft thumping in my ears, like rabbit furs knocking against the side of my head applying a pleasant pressure.

I heard Churchill's tinny radio voice say, "All our guns fired on the coast. We were of course in range on the enemy artillery...All together, it had been most interesting, and enjoyable day." He had a shaky 'r'-less dialect.

The couch felt so soft and warm. There was a vapey taste in my mouth, like steamed herbs. I had a slight ache in my eye sockets, a throbbing from the top of the socket, under the eyebrows which stretched around to the back where my eye sockets pushed into my brain. I had a happy, fluttery feeling in my chest and a fuzzy, heavy feeling in my brain, like my head and sinuses were full of bitter sludge. I was sitting, staring at the TV too stoned to move or to focus my eyes. A trance. An opium induced stupor. My Outlaw Beer can sat on the table, getting warm, flies buzzed around it. The beer was an IPA, quite bitter, not very bubbly, but high alcohol content. I got caught up in the vortex whenever I flicked my eyes up at the TV. It drew me in with the dialogue, a siren call. I tried to exercise resistance and not look up at the screen. Instead I looked down and wrote.

On the TV the narrator told me that, "Churchill had written a novel with himself as the chief character." Is that what I am doing? My feet seemed disjointed from by body, and further away than they should be, my limbs were stretching away from me like Alice in Wonderland. A fly walked on my heel. I could not feel it because the skin there was thick, but I saw the guy walking, tick tick tick tick twitter twitter twittering.

The most important aspect of my creative process is my state of mind. I need to feel excited and awake. In that state ideas come in easy, in rhythmic procession. I can see them coming and set up for them, then use them in a way that sets me up for the next. Ideas rolling steadily by, fast enough to continually produce, but slow enough to catch with my pen stroke. Writing makes me feel productive, opens my mind, gets my brain buzzing, gets my language faculties working.

After some caffeine my ideas come faster. There's a feeling of sleepy boredom that can bring me down. There's also the anxious feeling that there's so much to do; gotta charge my phone, thaw the meal, re-send those emails. If I am not sleepy my mind is anxiously pulled in other directions. It takes the focus of a Zen master to sit down and write, really hash it out.

The spoils go to those who have worked hard on something they are passionate about. Those who are passionate about things become experts, and experts are in high demand.

Trying to two sleep combined with pot makes for a hazy brain most of the time. _Two sleeping_ seems like something a StarCraft addict might do at a PC bang in Seoul. Guys have died in their chairs playing games in Korea. Drug use isn't big there, but the aspect of human nature which craves a mind consuming outlet comes out in other ways like obsessive gaming. When _two sleeping_ breakfast becomes the meal you eat after your longest sleep. Dinner is your last meal before your longest sleep. Beer sounds appealing anytime, so does weed, but a wake and bake is nothing new.

The night doesn't faze us _two sleepers_. We keep the steady constant flow of inspiration rolling through until daybreak, through the zenith of the day, power nap, shower, then the night is on our minds, with fresh nostrils and minty necks, we hit the city streets to enhance our souls.

It was raining outside with sunshine illuminating slanting drops and billowing trees. It was so nice to have Alex's car to whip. I could drive anywhere I needed to go without getting caught in the rain, like a moving fortress through the haunts of the night.

Alex came home from his night shift and woke me up at 7am. I went to bed at two. Five hours of sleep should be good I thought. I packed my stuff up quickly, vaped a bowl, chugged a glass of water, and Alex drove me in his Cougar Crimson Subaru to Carolyn's house.

She was fixing up a house where her aunt recently died. Boxes and piles of stuff lay around. She met me in the street and shook my hand. I said goodbye to Alex, he drove off, and I followed Carolyn inside. I met Jeff, and was not sure what his relationship was to Carolyn, but they kissed goodbye when we left. Carolyn couldn't get the car started at first so Jeff came out. Jeff told Carolyn, "Now, make sure the clutch is pushed down to the floor." Carolyn put her foot down on the clutch and started the car.

The car belonged to Carolyn's son Ranger. He was nineteen and going to go to community college in Seattle this fall. He broke his collarbone riding his bike in Boise so he couldn't drive the car back. The way he broke his collarbone was more stupid than the way I tore my ACL doing hardcore parkour. He was riding his bike just after his morning shower. He had long curly hair that took a while to dry. While he was shaking his lion's mane out he lost balance and fell off the bike. He had already broken his collarbone before so it didn't take much this time.

We got side swiped outside of the Tri Cities by a blue Dodge that didn't see us while we were going the speed limit down the middle of the lane. The truck merged into us, _BUMP_ , and we had to pull over and exchange info. I got out of the car and went over with Carolyn to talk to the guy. He said he just didn't see us.

We stopped for gas in a little green valley town with golden hills above, trees along the river, a railroad crossing and a red Conoco sign. The sky held dramatically contrasted clouds, in a high energy environment of fast winds. Some of the low clouds touched the spine of distant hill, or the spine of a distant hill dipped into the clouds.

We drove, it drizzled. Carolyn said, "I think I'm gonna, uh, do this rest stop. Use the bathroom."

"Okay," I said.

Leaving the rest stop she asked me if I wanted to go through the center of town, or get back on the highway. I chose to go through the center of town, and we drove down Main Street with hundred year old brick buildings, a bridal shop, a hardware store, and a couple bars.

We stopped at a rest stop outside of Prosser, WA, and I walked across the street to a Starbucks and got my second coffee of the day. She offered me a banana, and I took it, and we both ate bananas together as we merged onto I-82 heading west towards Yakima.

We stopped in Ellensburg WA, with the Cascades a dark band shaded by the clouds in the distance. Back into the PNW, the rainy climate.

I don't know what I'm gonna do. I'm not excited to get back. There's no adventure in Seattle. Nothing gets rip roaring. It is all so predictable, settled down. On the road there is always the next destination to look foreword to. That has been my life, looking foreword to the next adventure. But I don't know where it is all going, what the adventures will culminate in. I don't know, so I write.
