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Dusting ourselves off and ensuring our legs remained quite intact, we put them to use walking towards a semblance of civilization. Dismounting a moving train is tricky and bloody and gravel-embedded-in-fleshy.
We had managed to travel some four hundred miles, if not more, clinging to the back of a pair of freight trains. Prior to this, the idea of hopping trains had been somewhat abstract. Just an idea, a story, an unforgettable crime to write about later in life.
It was something I figured went on, as people do tell stories about it going on. But those stories took on meaning for me.
It breathed new life into an idea of freedom and liberty. Not the GOP’s version, where one is free to deny gay-marriage licenses. Nor the Democrat version, where one is free to steal billions from investors as long as that cash is donated to the right campaigns.
That’s the hogwash of the civilized monster. The law is their weapon, not your shield.
I mean the kind of freedom one enjoys outside the cozy, curated, restrictive, and suffocatingly comfortable confines of a society ruled by law. A society determined to be ruled by law harder and harder every year. It just can’t get enough of laws.
My man Tacitus once said, “The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.” He’s not wrong. There’s statistical correlation at least. Probably causation, too.
And I don't mean the freedom to piss in the mayor's gas tank, or to piss in a real person's beer, or any of the other things I don’t remember doing but probably did. I mean the understanding one is free no matter what happens around them.
Freedom is not something one gives, but something exercised. An action. Like love. It doesn’t matter if it is illegal. Except pedophiles, they deserve the loving caress of one hundred tons of rusty steel separating their mortal coils from their immortal evil.
And they deserve that whether it is illegal or not. If there is a victim, we have a problem. If the victim is a train and the crime is me hopping on it, we don’t. Trains aren't people. Yet.
I do make space for people waving weapons or badges at me, however. Ignoring cops or the Swiss Guard means a possible maiming, death, and/or eternal damnation, while ignoring a Karen-fueled lynch mob on Twitter is merely hilarious.
The Karen-type just gets so mad, even when you leave them alone. Sometimes, that just makes them furious.
But one picks fights with pigs at their own peril. Even if the swine starts it. It’s best to not pick fights at all with anyone, but sometimes you’re in tolerant Portland, Oregon and it can’t be helped.
But we weren't in Portland just yet. We were in Vancouver, Washington. And deadly hungry again. I’d mastered the art of not shitting into the wind on the train and now my greedy little tummy needed a top off.
This time, we had no money, having spent our entire food budget on Taco Bell and the customary constricted bowel movements which accompany it. I had my pull tabs from McDonald’s but once again there wasn’t a golden arch in sight.
As productive, motivated, hungry, modern millennial men, we sat down on our asses at the intersection of two busy streets and started begging for spare change. I’ve done quite a bit of spanging on street corners over the years. But now I do it on Substack.
We must have looked and smelled fairly scraggly and hungry, beyond the usual look and sense one gets of teenaged boys, anyway. I assumed I was lightly scented from my improvised swan dive in Pasco. It was probably like pouring fish oil on a campfire.
My Ho-Bro smelled like rancid sour dough dipped in moldy and molten mozzarella drizzled over a chocolate crust. If it existed at the time, he would have garnered a scathing One-Star Yelp review.
Still, we hooked a few fish, mostly couples walking by. Couples are great marks for this kind of thing. Exploiting psychology isn’t just profitable for social media ads, it can be fun, too!
We almost always managed to get the woman in a couple to browbeat the man into giving us something. Usually to the tune of the poor dears, or what a shame, and other suffocatingly stupid statements like that.
The men knew damned well we’d be spending their hard-earned blood money on drugs. The joke was on them of course as we already had plenty of drugs. Hell, we had drugs for sale at that point. No point in munchies if you got no Cheetos.
At no point did any women give us money themselves. But gosh wasn’t it such a shame we had to be out there.
They always guilt tripped their male companion into digging deeply and if they didn’t shovel out enough cash, they heard about it. Gods bless those women for being so free with someone else’s wallet. Still, we didn’t get much. A couple bucks.
Eventually, a cop shooed us away. What we were doing was panhandling apparently. I guess it’s illegal. Properly chastised, we moved camp and ended up in front of a large church. A big old thing, grown fat panhandling and soliciting souls over the centuries.
We had less luck begging for shekels here. Somewhat ironic, I suppose.
After an hour or so of fruitless labor, someone walked out the front door of the church and approached us. My Ho-Bro tensed up at the approach of this churchy fellow. I had never seen a problem with charitable religions, personally. But Ho-Bro hated them.
For my part, I don’t put much stock in gods as something existing outside the human mind and imagination. But the stories they star in have lessons human beings have learned across the millennia. We try to pass the lesson through stories.
Because no one likes a scold who loses the plot. To quote Screeching Weasel of all things, “You ought to realize every myth is a metaphor.”
Anyone who outright rejects religious stories makes themselves vulnerable to new brands of snake oil salesmen. They willingly carve out a void in their understanding of what it means to be a human being. It makes them a willing sucker for new scams.
Besides, if the stories make people more charitable, they’re worth keeping around.
The Stranger asked if we were hungry, to which I enthusiastically replied we were quite starving. This being the reason we were dropping their property values with our stink and fashion-sense.
Whether our particular Ned Flanders from that big, old church was peddling snake oil or not, we never learned. All they sold us were free sandwiches and donuts, which we dutifully devoured like dope sick squirrels stashing heroin nuts away for winter.
Teenaged boys and food have a somewhat obsessive relationship. I seem to recall always being hungry from the age of maybe eight until the day turned twenty-nine. I could even eat spun out on amphetamines. Cold Spaghetti-O’s, usually. Or cold chili.
But I’ve never been what you would call fat of belly. Nor of arm. I’m also short. So, kind of like Gumbi, damn it.
In fact, I had a vaguely toned, heroin-chic Iggy Pop look going for me for a while. I never did have the six pack one gets from banging groupies eight at a time, however. Seems too much work. Groupies seem needy.
I have ballooned a bit now by my forty-first year, more closely resembling Mr. Potato Head than Gumbi, though I can still look down and see my penis. If I lean in like that Facebook executive tells me to.
To return to Vancouver though, this specific church was never identified by us at the time. Nor do I recall the name of the Ned Flanders type who provided us with so much food. That dude was a mensch.
These days, I’m able to peg it with some certainty as the Proto-Cathedral of St. James the Greater. St. James is the patron saint of charitable causes, plugged noses, and friendly ostracisms.
I would like to express my thanks to the saint who parted with such a bountiful meal to two kids obviously up to no good at all, in return for absolutely nothing.
He didn’t preach, he didn’t interrogate, he simply provided food when we needed it and directions on how to get to Portland and the hell out of Vancouver.
This was likely what he wanted, now I think about it more. To be rid of us. But the man was St. James himself and I hope he’s living well somewhere on earth. Failing that, I hope he enjoys the slice of heaven he was promised.
Maybe seventy-two virgins. Seems a penalty to me. Who wants a virgin? Never mind six dozen of them. Who even knows what virgins eat? Do they go in a box or the lawn? I hope he finds out, if that’s what he’s into, anyway. He deserves groupies.
I’d heard stories of Portland but had never been. Jello Biafra tells a good one in Night of the Living Rednecks, for example.
My understanding consisted mostly of crusty, dumb hippies who couldn’t be trusted to pump their own gas mixed with rare but present KKK types. My visit didn’t dispel this bias much.
We rode a bus across the bridge for about ten minutes before dumping into downtown Portland near a massive, orange brick plaza of sorts. It was called Pioneer Square and with the sun just passed the noonday mark it was a blindingly sick thing to look at.
And that was before one tried to analyze the seething mass of stinking humanity loitering all over its surface.
At my public high school - my failure school enrolled in after being ejected from my real one - I’d picked up the game of Hacky Sack. This is definitely a hippy game, akin to soccer in method and masculinity.
I was never terribly good at it, but I could always blame my deficiencies on my heavy-soled Doc Marten boots. Whenever I kicked that infernal sack, odds were good it was ending up on a roof or some other out of reach place. Out of bounds in any event.
But I still liked to kick a sack now and then and sometimes I wore Chucks. It was a decent chance to try to sell some weed anyway. It usually is. I’d be interested in hard statistics regarding a link correlating hacky sacks and weed. I bet it's there.
Along with delinquent child support payments.
Fortunately for us, if not Portland at large, Pioneer Square was lousy with amoral, unbathed people like us. A few seemed quite open to the idea of buying illegal drugs from complete strangers stinking of dumpsters. We found a buyer immediately.
People like this were my preferred custy base. Custy is slang for customers. Hippies are horrible at business, economics, thinking, science, and any other number of things, putting them at a disadvantage. I believe the technical term is suckers.
Safe suckers, too.
Sulphur-pit stinking individuals interested in buying drugs are never undercover cops. Police officers have homes with showers and some semblance of pride. They never smell like hippies or crusties or anyone else they throw into prison for pot possession.
At worst, they smell like coke fiends, the kind of person they don't throw into jail for longer than an overnight. Calvin Klein cologne, frosted tips, and aviator sunglasses. Whatever that smells like.
In Portland, some of these coppers ride horses. I couldn’t tell you why exactly, but the city didn’t strike me as a particularly practical place. In retrospect, I guess some pigs do smell of horse shit, after all. But it is rare.
What I can tell you is these officers of the law don’t much appreciate it when you smack their vehicles on the ass suddenly. I guess they’re a bit high strung down there with all the hippies loitering around.
He chased me for a bit with that gods damned horse and it was terrifying. He kept screaming something, probably stop. Who knows. I certainly didn’t. Nor did I stop.
If you’ve never been chased by a human being, mounted with malice upon a gigantic, four-legged animal through downtown streets you should most definitely keep it that way.
Don't slap horse ass. It could and will slap back at you, girl. The Rose City has thorns.
Horses don’t seem to turn that well, so I lost the pig and pony show by ducking through a few alleys. Crowded sidewalks meant he couldn’t ride the thing hard, so I’m curious why the city would even bother with the trouble of mounted cops at all.
Taking that idea even further in 2020, one could be forgiven for believing Portland takes its police seriously even on their own two feet. The place looks lawless from the outside and presumably fiery from the inside. I’m sure this is ignorant somehow.
But as the Ignorant, I’m unclear how exactly.
Returning to Pioneer Square, I managed to break in on a game of Hacky Sack with some local degenerate lowlife-types.
It was getting on well enough for a while and if I’d paid closer attention, I’d have noticed they only ever served the sack to each other. No one served it to themselves, except for me, who got punched square in the sternum for the crime.
Staring down my assailant with murder, the cowardly hippy cried, “No self-service in Oregon!”
I wanted to strike him. With my fists. Not only for hitting me, but for internalizing that ridiculous fucking law preventing people from legally pumping their own gas to the point it became a rule in Hacky Sack. This is slave-brain stuff.
That law has since been repealed somewhat, but only in certain counties and only at certain times of day. There are helpful maps online showing the areas one is allowed to be an adult at what times. It’s a total shitshow.
I didn't end up striking him with my fists or any other tips. But I did rip him off by overcharging for a dime bag of sickly, mostly useless weed. The jerk. Small victories.
Having made a couple bucks and evading law enforcement, I wandered to a park I’d agreed to meet my Ho-Bro at. I can’t recall the name of the park, but it overlooked the river and had huge lawns full of people sitting around. Portland is great for loitering.
It was crowded but I eventually found my companion sitting with a few lovely ladies who looked to be in their early-twenties or so. I remember they were immaculately tanned and came in brunette and blond flavors. My favorites, since red threw salsa all over my living room once.
They were at least old enough to drive with some confidence, if not with licenses, as we would learn. But not old enough to tell us to buzz off. Ignorance plus confidence is a winning combination for the young.
Through general schmoozing and smarmy charms, we learned these ladies were driving down the coast to San Diego and would be more than happy to cart our sorry, stank along with them. I’d been looking forward to another train ride, but even I couldn’t turn down this obvious horror movie premise.
The temptation to exchange tetanus and exhaust fumes for tits and ass was just too great. No matter the risk involved. There wasn’t a risk too severe that could keep me from hopping into the backseat of that car at the low cost of a few bowls of weed.
It’s almost a shame Washington State - and Oregon - have since legalized marijuana.
For some time, it was the currency of the underworld. A little bit of weed went a long way and doors opened for the individual with some of the stuff. These days, people just want money. Or coke. Or bitcoin, whatever that is.
We paid upfront with the remainder of our stash, and I forked it over. I figured if they were going to tolerate our intolerably rank presence, they deserved a little hazard pay in the bargain. Also, tits and ass remember.
They also let us plug a little Sublime into the tape player of the car.
Yep, a tape cassette player in a convertible. It was a simpler time. I seem to recall we got mostly through the Second-Hand Smoke album before our glorious ride came to a screeching halt. That’s barely thirty minutes.
This album has, to date, the only tolerable song featuring Gwen Stefani on it. It isn’t even her fault the song is great. She just manages to not ruin it. You can tell, listening to the thing, she did her best to anyway. The song is called Saw Red.
We sped south on Interstate 5 to our Sublime soundtrack, shooting the shit and flirting as well as I could. I have never been good at this flirting thing and the only moments I bagged a woman on purpose were when I made fun of my hilariously tiny penis.
I’m not above a little pity sex and neither are some women. Very little pity sex, by the way. It’s basically charity. But as already suggested, I have no beef with charity.
These girls were troopers. They laughed a lot and looked at each other, sharing mysterious glances and divine, feminine kennings between themselves. As if they couldn’t believe how charmingly stupid their hardly civilized passengers were.
My traveling companion never seemed to have troubles with women. He’d talked us into the ride somehow, after all. I suspect it helps his face doesn’t resemble a Portland dumpster or a well-worn America’s Most Wanted mugshot.
Alas, this leg of the trip came to an end with flashing police lights behind us, pulling us over. I’m unsure what prompted these portly paragons of public safety to pull over our attractive chauffeurs. But I seem to recall they determined the car was stolen at some point after the stop.
They did the usual rounds of identification checks, a truly uncomfortable position for all involved. Particularly me.
It turned out they weren't after me for any of the reasons I wagered they should have been. They weren’t after me at all. Not for train hopping, not for drug dealing, not even for slapping an equestrian officer of the law square on the ass.
Turns out my parents back in Spokane were somewhat curious about where I’d run off to exactly and reported me missing. My trip was over and my freedom of movement rescinded. I’d been arrested for adventuring without a license.
Traveling privileges revoked and firmly in the hairy hammed hands of Jonny Law, they plucked me out of that wonderful, stolen car and eternally separated me from my Ho-Bro and our criminal chauffeurs.
I do not know what happened to our two lovely car thieves, I assume they were fine.
They were too pretty for prison. No jury of men would ever convict, but at the same time, any jury of women likely would. I wager a properly diverse jury of men and women would hang themselves over the topic.
Or at least the women would convince the men to hang themselves, anyway.
I suspect they did get dinged for marijuana possession, which is a shame. I hate to see young people get involved in drugs, it puts their future in jeopardy. I wonder what low life scum they got it from. If anyone has information regarding this, let me know.
I got stuck into the back of a squad car and driven back to some cop shop in Portland.
At first, they just put me in a back room at the station to hang out while they figured out how to get me back to Spokane. But when I walked outside to smoke, I guess they noticed I wasn’t in there anymore and had a moment.
So, when I walked back into the station, they went ahead and cuffed me to a cot to make sure that didn’t happen again. By the time I slipped my hand out of the cuffs to smoke outside a bit later, they’d managed to get me Greyhound tickets anyway.
I would soon be my parents’ problem once again and out of their hands entirely. At this point, both Vancouver and Portland seemed eager to be rid of me. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since I’d arrived. Tolerant Portland, Oregon.
The drive back to Spokane on a piss-reeking Greyhound bus was somewhat shameful. I’d been caught. My adventure had safely landed on boring, boring, boring rather than inside a car thief, or in a dumpster outside Gilman Street in Berkeley.
Every time a train creeps by, it gets its hooks in me and only through effort am I able to resist its pull. One day, possibly, I will just disappear. Civilization is not so grand I can’t give it up. Just look at what we do with it.
We pile into offices to make other people money, accepting such a tiny fraction of it in return. Just enough to keep us fed. We think it’s a great perk to have “free” food in our kitschy cafeterias when we know that’s just a bigger paycheck we’re being denied.
We worry and we want. We covet shit and we don't really know why. Worst of all, we become more fearful day after day.
We buy and we sell useless crap, ourselves and our time most of all. We are made stupid by convenience. We think this is all there is to the world and thus we must protect it at all costs. Even to the point of murdering the world itself.
But I won’t leave it just yet. I do have things keeping me here among the civilized. My wife. She isn't an anchor, or a lodestone, or anything of the sort. She is a wonder. But I know if she wasn't mine, I wouldn't be suffering the strain of civilization.
I would be out living a dirty, dangerously free and unfettered life.
I didn't know this during my bus ride. I had not yet met her. But I pondered similar themes on that shameful bus ride. I wondered what to say to my parents. Some sort of lie, to be sure. I couldn’t see a lie getting me out of it, but the truth wasn’t cutting it.
Finally, I was deposited back in Spokane, where my mother was waiting for me at the bus station.
She just looked at me in that same way mothers have looked at naughty sons over the hundreds of centuries we’ve been getting on. It must have been like how Mary looked at Jesus that time he pushed a kid off the roof and killed him.
Look it up. He resurrected him, of course. But he straight murdered that child in the Gospel of Thomas. I wonder why it wasn’t approved in the Council of Nicaea. Those dudes loved killing kids.
But Mom didn’t need to say anything. In fact, saying something could quite possibly ruin the effect entirely. Silent disapproval has always cut me deeper than shouted disapprovals and I believe she knows this quite well.
Besides, I strongly suspect she was trying quite hard not to laugh.
The adventure continues at The Warped Tour.