You know why this is fucking difficult? Because I danced with the Devil. For years. Because, when I think about my life, and where I have been and what I have seen and what I have felt, I am terrified. I want to kill something. Floods of anger and sorrow rocket through my veins like lightning, my hands shake, my stomach hurts, I am developing rashes on my skin. And that does mean I have to do it. I don't have a choice. Its a goddamn miracle I am still alive. If I can express this, if I can find the words to piece together my own story, maybe it will help me. Maybe it will help me shake it off my back; the weight, the chip, the sadness, the guilt, the shame, the fear, the anger--all of it. I don't expect it to fly off into the night cackling but, if there exists a mental version of throwing a bucket of water on the wicked witch in my mind, then this is it. I have, honestly, never done this. Hell, I've never really told anybody I was bulimic. Fuck it! Pass my sword, its battle time. Besides, I'm waiting for a weather window to make my single-handed passage across the gulf of mexico aboard Dolphin, so I don't really have anything else to be do besides attempting to write a book in a week.
When I came home to Virginia, in October of 2006, my pops was in the midst of remodeling the entire first floor of our house. He had begun dating a woman he would one day marry and they, together and without my permission, had decided to transform my teenage-years bedroom into a snazzy new bathroom slash walk-in closet, complete with a toilet with a self-warming seat and a bidet and dual showerheads in the shower and everything. Lovely for them, and, today, its a terrific bathroom, indeed, but what it meant for me was that when I returned from my thru-hike my momma had raised a middle finger to the rednecks (did I mention I usually tell folks I am from West Virginia, just to paint a more accurate, more confederate, image?) and vacated to New Mexico to revel with the sagebrush and magpies and my pops was staying with his fancy new girlfriend while they dismantled my house. I stayed upstairs, in the spare bedroom, for a bit, and there wasn't any electricity. So's to say, I continued camping.
I can't recall how the specific process of decision making went from this point onward, but, reeling from post-thru-hike depression, which is a very real thing, somehow it was determined that I would help my mom move the last of her belongings out of a storage unit, load them into a U-Haul truck and drive them to New Mexico with her. This was crazy, as my mom and I could hardly inhabit the same space for longer than five seconds without one or the other of us being reduced to tears at this juncture, but we did it anyway. I don't really remember what it was like, except that she wouldn't let me drive, asserting that I "drive way too fast" and, instead, we maintained exactly the speed limit all. the. way. to. new. mexico. and I sat, heaving, in the passenger seat. We stopped at a lot of shitty motels. Probably ate something or another once in awhile, I don't' know, post the trail and lack of incredible amounts of exercise everyday I lost a dramatic amount of muscle and weight and took up anorexia as well as continuing my adorable bulimic propensities, taking to clever ideas like making myself sandwiches and then throwing them into the wood stove. Smart.
Anyway, we got the U-Haul out to Amalia, which is a little town 14 miles south of the Colorado border at over 8,000 feet in highland New Mexico, and unloaded it into the house. Somewhere along this story, I have neglected to relate the period of time I spent living with my momma in a canvas tent in the middle of the mesa outside of Taos, the funniest memory being when a dust devil caused the tent to collapse with her inside it and seeing her trashing around inside the disaster when I returned from a run. I think I laughed so hard I peed.
As I said, at this juncture in our ability to relate to one another, my momma and I were pretty much driving one another bat shit. So, having nothing really "to do" and no place particularly "to go," I would take mom's green Ford Taurus (the official vehicle for crazy people!) on long, long drives, to wherever. Thanks, mom! This marks the period of time that I wasted a lot of my inheritance on gas, fancy hotel rooms and fuck tons of fast food that I either threw out the window or did that other thing that is gross with. I don't know, man, but it was what it was. I went to the Grand Canyon by myself, to my mom's chagrin, which turns out, yep, is a real big hole in the ground, and I also started picking up many of the vagrant hitch-hikers that I saw along the New Mexican highways and taking them wherever they needed to go. Hitch-hiking is pretty popular in New Mexico and there were plenty of 'em runnin' around to keep me entertained. That, or I'd take folks flying signs around town out to lunch at Subway and then, if I liked 'em, I'd bring 'em home with me to mom's house where we'd have a rollicking good time. I had adopted a vegan diet at this time as the first of many efforts to combat my own demons and I would take that book "Vegan with a Vengance" with me to the local grocery and go buck wild buying exotic things like arrowroot powder and garbanzo beans. Hoo, wee, who knew food could be so fancy! I was raised on a diet of egg sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, eggo waffles and shake'n'bake pork chops with applesauce, so the vegan thing was pretty amusing. Hopefully all those hitch-hikers enjoyed their egg-free broccoli casseroles and milk-free chocolate pudding. Sounds pretty fucking weird, but beggars can't be choosers. Or CAN they?!
This one day, November 17th, 2006, it was, specifically, I was driving toward Taos for no particular reason and saw two men sitting on their packs with their thumbs out at the gas station on the north end of town. I drove by them, because they made me nervous, and then flipped a bitch and went back, pulled into the parking lot, stopped, got out and walked up to them. From a distance, I thought they were hot. As I got closer, I could hardly breathe. Golly, child, let me tell you about these two boys. Dressed in all variations of dark, smelling of a campfire, wild as the desert from whence they came and probably drunk as skunks at that exact moment, too. I asked 'em where they were heading and they told me "Tucson." I hadn't the vaguest idea where Tucson was, but I said I could drive them there.
At first, they balked at this idea, saying it was too far, naw naw. I tried to be as cool as I could possibly be as I was totally freaking out, super casual man, and stopped at a film developing place to pick up some rolls of film from the Appalachian Trail that I'd had developed. While I was in the store, the two geniuses talked amongst themselves and agreed that, if I reeeeallly wanted to drive them all the way to Tucson, they would let me. How very kind! So, I got out the road map, realized Tucson was like eleven hours away, and asked them their names. Sleepy and Danno. Brothers. Also Hojo, the sweet mannered pitbull.
Sleepy was taller, darker, bigger, with brown, puppy dog eyes and a facial tattoo that met between his eyes, arched over his eyebrows and curved around his cheeks, mimicking the face of an owl. The attraction between he and I was immediate, undeniable, and he sat in the front. Danno, in the backseat, didn't talk much. When he did speak, his eyes darted like a ruffian and his laugh was more like a cackle than anything else. They were both trouble, absolutely, but I was smitten. I called my mom, I think, and let her know where I was going. For whatever strange reason, she seemed cool with it. I may have been rather vague with the details.
We talked non-stop. Danno seemed mystified, and maintained that he had never actually seen Sleepy talk like that before, ever. Who knows what we spoke about, I don't remember, but I imagine it involved our childhoods, our lives, our dreams, our passions, that sort of thing, because, by the end of the ride, I was completely in love and, also, completely overwhelmed. We stopped for food once and I recall being intrigued by Sleepy's leather bag of coins--he was the gypsy I had dreamed about, when I had penned in my online journal during my conflicted days at EMU, "i just want to be covered in tattoos, follow Native American teachings and travel around the world, leaving a trail of art and writing in my wake," here was the kind of man who could handle a life like that. Also, did I mention how beautiful he was? And that he smelled like smoke? Did I mention that part?
We drove and drove, and talked and talked. They chain smoked cigarettes, drank beer and ate burritos that they bought on food stamps at the gas station. They pissed me off by leaving the windows wide the fuck open, even in the freezing night, but I didn't speak a word, afraid they might think I was a ninny. It became dark, it was November, and it was cold. I realized I had nothing to sleep in, besides the car, and asked where they had planned on staying. "The tunnels" and "I have two blankets" were the answers I received, which satisfied me, somehow. When we got to Tucson, the first stop was the corner store for 40's of Old English and cans of Sparks, and then they slung their packs on their beautiful backs and we followed Danno, who has the gait of a true cowboy, into the tunnels.
In case you aren't aware, there are a system of tunnels underneath Tucson, Arizona, for runoff during the dramatic monsoon season. Apparently, you can walk from one end of the city to the other without ever seeing the light of day and, in most places, these tunnels are very tall, probably twelve feet high, and rather wide, maybe eight feet. Not unlike the dimensions of the tunnels through which subway cars cavort in New York City. The floors of the tunnels are sandy and, truly, they are rather hospitable. I did, however, start a vocabulary list when I first met Sleepy and Danno and words like "double stack" (meaning two shipping containers atop one another on a gondola car on a freight train) "tweaker" came into my life. These very folk are the ones who have taken refuge in the Tucson Tunnels and are, probably, still there today. Also affectionately referred to as the "Manson Tunnels," being as how the illustrious Charles Manson and his followers rested their heads down there for a period of time in the 60's, the company we kept, or could potentially have encountered at any point, down there was far less from intelligent. A tweaker is somebody who imbibes large amounts of methamphetamine, resulting in a lot of teeth-gnashing, twitching and a general aura of attempting to be everywhere at once and do everything at once while actually accomplishing nothing at all besides utter mania. Sleepy and Danno had spent an enormous amount of time down there and had, apparently, once even set fire to a campsite of said tweakers in an attempt to encourage them to "git gone, motherfuckers!" Danno laughed real hard when he related this tale to me, especially the part where the flames came shooting out of the manholes and the fire department arrived on scene. Well done, boys.
This was the point at which I added yet another word to my new hobo vocabulary, "sidewalk slammer." This is a drink (I will pause while all you bartenders out there scramble for a pen and paper) that involves imbibing 16 ounces of 40 ounce glass bottle of Miller High Life and filling the void with a can of Sparks. At this point, Sparks were a particularly illustrious malt beverage involving both guarine and taurine and the can, visually, was reminiscent of a battery. Sleep used to joke that he wanted the Sparks emblem tattoooed on one bicep and the PBR emblem tattooed on the other, as they were the sources of his great strength. Praise the Lord this never came to pass, at least not during my days in his proximity. Anywho, the boys made their cocktails, ripped one of the cans apart and put a candle in it, a "hobo light," and we settled in around the firelight for some story telling as they proceeded to become tomahawk wasted. I politely declined the consummation of said sidewalk slammer as I was still on a heavy dosage of cyproflaxin to combat my Lyme's disease and everyone knows the combination of antibiotics and alcohol simply isn't wise. Whereas, the combination of strange, drunk men and tunnels named after Charles Manson is quite smart, indeed. I was very, very good at getting some stuff right and some other stuff wrong. Apparently that's like, youth, or something, but I think I took it to a whole new level on many an occasion.
When Sleepy said he had two blankets, I assumed he meant one for him, and one for me. As he laid one blanket down on the ground, and the other atop it, I realized that wasn't exactly what he had in mind. My trust in this very large and, apparently, visually frightening individual, however, was immediate, and I cuddled right on up. He loved to relate how he "wooed me with the feather down," cause that's exactly what he had. A fucking feather down comforter that he crammed into his Alice pack and carted around with him. It was November, and he had been living in an abandoned van on the Mesa, so I'm glad as hell that he carried that crazy thing. Anyway, we laid there, talking more, and i think he kissed me, and he still definitely smelled like a camp fire, and the comforter was actually pretty comfortable, and things were warming up nicely, and that's right about when a sudden and completely unexplainable waterfall began cascading through the manhole that was between where we had set up our camp and Danno had passed out in the dirt. Apparently, the tunnel was slightly graded, and Sleep and I were, bless up, uphill from the torrential downpour. Danno, however, was very much downhill, and, with alarming rapidity, his campsite became centered in an impressive river. All we could figure was that a car hit a fire hydrant on the streets above us. Either way, Sleepy laughed his ass off, and Danno was so drunk that he didn't even wake up. That's right, folks, so damn drunk that he slept right through a flood. Sleep got up and went down there, tried to wake his brother, and was nearly punched in the face. This was a preview of Danno's incorrigible character, a ruffian and a rake in every way. Honestly, I love that motherfucker so much. So far as I understand, he's got himself a baby these days and is pretty happy. That's awesome. He wasn't happy, though, when Sleep tried to alert him to the fact that he was now sleeping in the middle of a raging river, and he muttered something like, "Fuck you, motherfucker," or "don't touch me, you son of a bitch," so Sleep laughed some more and came back to the comforter, were we reveled in our brilliance at choosing the better campsite and then fell asleep. Until Danno woke up, anyway, shocked into sobriety by the sudden realization that he was completely drenched and about to freeze to death, and crawled into bed with the two of us.
And that is how we spent our first night together.
