THE LONG RIDE HOME

Bakersfield, CA

This is where I ended up after a fruitful month in Seattle that culminated with a 16 hour trek south to drop off a friend in the Sequoia National park at an elevation of 8,200 ft. It was the end of the line for my nerves, and right now a bath and a whiskey would be preferred to the reality of the 2,800 miles that lie ahead. Have a ton to post. Have a ton to decompress. For now, I head toward Barstow. Following the route that the great Hunter S,. Thompson took to get to Vegas with the big Samoan in tow. Like him, I bought the ticket and took the ride. And life seems more and more mysterious with every mile driven.

Chapter 3

First gun pointed at me and an acid trip I will never forget.

Ralph was a pig. A teenager with a ton of sperm and an ego that reached altitudes unheard of. He was also the greatest liar known to man. Ralph would lie about anything even if he knew he could not get away with it. That was Ralph. My cousin. A bold faced liar with a bad habit of robbing everyone he knew.

He was a character. And during this time he started to hook up with this girl named Gabrielle. She was brown skinned. Not Puerto Rico. Not sure what. Who cares really. She was a great piece of ass and Ralph had her.

And also During this time, my senior year in high school, I drove a jeep Wrangler that I had bought in Brooklyn and drove down to Florida. My father had moved us to South Florida, but as a result of work, he had to stay north. What a fucking tangled web we weave. And what a thrill it was for dad to be living on his own in the goddamn house that I would have happily stayed in.

But I didn’t.

But dad did.  He ruined all of us with this move but he himself decided to stay. I think back and I realize that dad had a vagina nearby. And dad was cheating on my mother. Why else leave us in another state? Why else not be there for us. He had another and I couldn’t care less. All I wanted was the fucking Jeep that dad said these two guys were selling for three grand.

I got a plane ticket. It was last minute. This flight flew me into West Islip, Long Island. An airport that I never heard of and had no idea how I would get from there to Brooklyn, New York. I was 17. A kid. And this flight lasted two hours and change, and I got there, and I walked out into the long narrow viaduct that acted as a terminal and I stood around saying to myself “now what?”

It was snowing out. A thick snow. An old school snow that we were used to in the city. But I wasn’t any longer. And I stood there watching these flakes come down in a barrage, covering everything, and making life so difficult. I was 17, and I had to try and make it to Brooklyn from West Islip, Long Island.

At this point I had not read “Catcher in the Rye.” If I had, I would have found my trip on the Long Island Railroad to have been some type of mystic endeavor. Holden Caulfield making his escape from his mother and the bourgeois life that he had come from. I had none of that ambiguity, nor did I understand why it was so difficult to make it to the city. The LIRR was this strange beast. In later years I came to love it but at that time, it was as foreign as me as a rocket to mars.

But I got on the train. And a man came up and clipped my ticket. And I made it to Penn station. And from there I made it onto an F train. And from there, shortly after, I made it home.

Brooklyn.

I got to Church Avenue. I yelled up to my father. We didn't have a buzzer. Still don’t. He looked through the blinds to see who I was. Then he came down. Dad welcomed me like he would a man going door to door selling hoover vacuums. I was ruining his gig. And he was pissed. The first thing I saw when I entered the apartment was a huge pot plant in the corner of the room, near a window. The fucking plant had sprung up about six feet tall. My dad caught me staring at his behemoth. He turned to me and said “I like it cause of the aroma it gives. That’s all.”

Is that really all? No, not at all. But dad was living his life, and who was I to judge?

And then the two Puerto Ricans showed up the next morning with the jeep. And I realized that I needed to judge my dad a little bit.

It was a black Jeep Wrangler. It had a hard top on the back. It looked like an ’87 model but the title said it was an ’83. The two guys came upstairs into the apartment. We worked over the specifics. My father said he was going to get a coffee and he left. I sat with these two guys. They were stoned out of their minds. The one guy turned to me and said “hey man, do you smoke weed?”

“Yes, Yes I do,” was my reply.

The guy started laughing. “That’s great, bro, cause we are so fucking high we got no idea what this fucking guy is saying to us!”

They both cracked up laughing. I stood there wondering what the fuck to say. They couldn’t understand my father. But they also could not understand me or the simple notion of one man selling his vehicle to another. I found out a year later why exactly that was.

Dad came back and gave these two fuck ups three grand. Three grand and the jeep was mine. Me and pops drove it down to south Florida together. It was the last time we would do such a thing.

So Ralph is dating Gabrielle. And he calls and asks me for a ride over to her place. I am with this kid Tom Vasage. A bulky redneck with a temper and about zero intellect. In later years Tom would fall out of my Jeep and do severe damage to himself. For now, he was co-pilot and loving it. In the back we had Ryan Smith. A pocket-faced hick from the same West Boca neighborhood as Tom. I never knew a hick until I moved to Florida. In the end, you found that they were a dime a dozen.

And they were wild. You did everything you could not to fight these fuckers. They had unending willpower. I read a book on Frederick Douglass, the slave that learned to read and became an empowering figure for the abolitionist movement. He spoke once, in his autobiography, about fighting his white owner. This man, this little redneck. Five feet four and a hundred and ten pounds, if that. Frederick Douglass fought this man and it lasted for hours. This black man, twice his size, could not get him to quit. Tom was that guy. He was a fucking monster. And he is now a federal marshal, and here we are.

The four of us arrived at Gabrielle’s house. It was a typical pre-fab house on a typical pre-fab block. The four of us went to the door. The four of us entered. It was quaint, but sparsely decorated. Money could not be used for frivolous reasons here. Every cent mattered. But it was a nice house. Very clean. The four of us entered this sparsely decorated but clean house. Once inside, the four of us decided to take acid.

A hit of acid is a tiny little square. I cannot tell you the dimensions, nor can I tell you the goddamn ramifications these tiny little hits had on our life. But they were small. And these here hits had an emblem embossed on them. They were black snowmen. Every hit of acid had something on it. I have taken Beavis and Butthead hits. Jesus Christ hits. And so on and so on.

But tonight it was the black snowman. I took this hit, and about an hour later, I was no longer on planet earth.

To try and define an acid trip is equivalent to go about trying to define love. If you don’t know it, well then you don’t need to understand it. Acid was that. And we took it, at Gabrielle’s house, thinking that this was going to be a wild ride.

It was for a bit. But then Gabrielle dropped a bombshell on us. That her other boyfriend, that Ralph did not know of, would be showing up shortly.

I know acid. And I know violence. And I knew that staying there was fucking suicide. So the four of us left. Wounded, we got into my jeep and we pulled off. All of us, tripping heavily on acid.

We got about a mile away when I realized my fuck up. I had left a case logic with about fifty CD’s in Gabrielle’s house. I alerted Ralph, Tom, and Ryan to this. They all were tripping so hard that I might have well have alerted them to the discovery of a flu vaccine being developed in Helsinki.

Without waiting for a response, I turned around and headed to the house. It seemed logical to me. I left my CD’s. I should go back and reclaim what is mine. The three stooges in my Jeep were all so out of their minds that they didn’t put up a fight. Why would they. All of us knew that I would be the asshole walking up the door and knocking. They would just be watching from the bleachers.

When I arrived at the house, there was a beat up car parked out front. I made a U-turn and parked across the street. It is not clear in my mind if I said anything to the other three. All that is remembered is me walking up and knocking on the door. Gabrielle answered. She was nervous.

“My friends are here,” she said.

“I’m just here for my CD’s” is all I could muster at this moment. My head was fried. The black snowman was a bastard of a hit. We took it a few times and I remember all of them being bad scenes. This was about to turn into one.

“Are you sure you left them here?” she asked innocently.

“They are inside. Next to the table,” I replied.

She went to speak but someone else beat her to the punch.

“Let the motherufcker in!”

Gabrielle paused before opening the door. I walked in and was met by two guys. Once was black. He was tall and skinny. I later found out he played football at our rival high school. The other was a paunchy Hispanic guy. He was wearing a grey hoodie, even though we were in the thick of summer. They were both standing guard next to the entertainment center where I had left my CD case.

I walked up to the two of them.

“What you want?” the Black Football Player from a Rival High School asked me.

“I’m just looking for my CD case,” I said with zero hesitation.

“There ain’t no CD case here,” the footballer replied.

“I left it here. It’s definitely here.”

“I don’t see any CD cases here.” He replied. “And I think it’s time you go!”

At this point, the kaleidoscope peripheral haze that I had been navigating me came to an abrupt end once I eyed that the Puerto Rican was holding a gun. I don’t know what type of gun. Those things have never really been my gig. But this man, wearing a grey hoodie in the middle of summer, had one in his right hand. He was holding it by his hip. I could clearly see that his hand was shaking.

I looked up at the Black Football Player from a Rival High School.

“Listen,” I pleaded. “I am just looking for my CD case. That’s all I want.”

The gun came up and was placed by my right temple.

“It’s not here,” the Puerto Rican began. “And you need to go.”

Time stopped. The mixture of acid and this gun pointed at my temple caused an amalgamation of both fear and tepidness. In other words, I could not move.

“You need to get the fuck out of here,” the Puerto Rican reiterated.

Slowly, tiny bits of information made it through the psychedelic tunnel and reached my frontal lobes. It took some time, but soon I realized my folly. I remember trying to say something before turning and racing toward the door. I swung past Gabrielle, and was out in the street in seconds.

“HE’S GOT A GUN!” I screamed as I raced past the Jeep and into the backyard of the house across the street. I jumped over a wooden fence in seconds. Through the next backyard I ran. I hopped over a metal fence and hit the third yard. I made it over another fence in a breath and I kept on running through this wooded area before I came to a road.

Across the street was beat up strip mall. There was a payphone underneath a light. I walked across the barren road, andup to the phone. I dialed a number. It was three digits. It started with a 9. It was followed by another 9. It ended with the number 1.

Moments later, the jeep pulled up. Tommy was driving. Ralph jumped out and ran up to me.

“Jesus, Cuz, are you okay?” he asked.

“They wouldn’t give me back my CD’s,” I huffed. “The fucking one guy pulled a gun on me.”

“I just called 911,” I added.

All three looked like I just called their parents and confessed they were all members of the Manson clan and they have tasted others blood.

“Dude, we’re tripping balls,” Tommy yelled.

“I know that,” I responded. “But fuck these guys! I fucking earned those CD’s! Their mine! I’m getting them back!”

Tommy went to respond but it was too late. The police had arrived. Boca Raton’s finest. I did all of the talking. Explained how the CD’s were left and what had occurred when I returned. The cop nodded the whole way. He told me to follow him to the house. I got in the passenger side of the Jeep and we did just that.

At the house another cop car pulled up. Neither car put on their lights. The two Officers got out of their respective cars and came up to me in the Jeep. They both had on gloves. I later said that they had put on their “Killing gloves.” Might as well have. I told these two officers here that a black and a Puerto Rican had stolen from me, a white guy. They were not having any of that. No, they were out for blood. For restitution.

“You four stay here.” The first responding Officer said. “We’ll be back in a minute.”

The two walked away. They had a brief conversation by the car before heading toward the front door. We watched from the car as the two officers took out their guns. They gripped them with their killing gloves. The first officer knocked on the door. They both waited.

I never understood why these two police officers did this. Perhaps it was the acid. Perhaps it did not go down as I narrate it to you. Who knows? But I remember these two cops doing it just this way, and I always felt like they should have called it in. Or had back up of some type. I told them that inside this house was a man with a gun. That should have been a red flag for SWAT. But no, these two men met at the front of the house and they conferred, and they decided that this was their collar. And that they would roll with the punches. It never made sense. It almost feels artificial writing it. But it’s true. And this is how it went down. 

These two Officers walked up, with their guns drawn, and they waited for the door to open.

It did shortly after. And it was Gabrielle that had opened it. From the Jeep, we could see the Officers say something to her and moments later they were inside her home.

 “Dude, I cannot believe you did this,” Ryan said to me from the back of the Jeep.

“What did you want me to do, Ryan?” I had asked,

“You should of went back there with a gun and got your shit back!” he said with full conviction.

I turned to him. I was incensed. At this point, gangster rap was the new sound on the street. NWA talking about telling the police to go fuck themselves and so on and so on. We sat in this Jeep Wrangler. Four white kids with no idea about Compton. About what it was to be a gangster. For me, growing up in Brooklyn, I knew violence. I knew hate. But I sure as hell did not understand how someone could translate living in the suburbs of Boca Raton with the ghetto style of an in area in Los Angeles that existed over three thousand miles away.

No, I was not a hardcore nigga. And no, one way or another, I earned those fifty CD’s. And I didn’t care how I would be judged by my action. What is an action but just a response to another action? It infuriated me that this pocket-faced fuck, rail thin, the runt of the litter, taunted me with this fairy tale accusation.

“Ryan, if I stayed, there would have been a tombstone that read ‘Rob Coleman, died keeping it real. But I would be dead. And fuck that. And fuck you! No, I am not going to die cause of these assholes. And I did what I had to do, so fuck you!”

Ryan laughed. He saw the stupidity in this whole thing. I think we all did. This whole gangster thing was infecting this town like a virus. Every day became more violent. Every day you saw someone turn and do something vicious and out of the normal. Everyone wanted to be a gangster. Everyone was bitter and angry that they did not grow up in Compton. This suburban life, that their parents worked hard to get them, was nothing more than a prison. And the only place they could go to escape was their imagination. Unfortunately, their ideas became fruition, and soon after, Compton came to Boca. Soon after, we might have well all been born under the crashing tide of chaos, because that’s what we all chose as our governing party.

At this moment, however, there was no Sound. No gunfire. No Compton. No Crips and bloods. Just silence. We all turned our attention back to this fact. Why was there silence? These two Police Officers entered ready for a fucking war, and nothing.

It stayed this way for a bit. Our chemical-filled heads could not handle this. Soon after, a respite came. The two officers exited the house of Gabrielle and made their way to the car. The first Officer was holding the CD case in his right hand. He came up and handed the case to me.

“The gun was a fake,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do about it but here are your CD’s back.”

I took the case from the man.

“Thank you, Officer, I really appreciate it.”

“You boys need to get out of here,” the Officer said. “Just just call it a night.”

We agreed and took off.

Who knows where we ended up next. Who knows. The Black Snowman was a hell of a hit. What you would call an ‘Ugly Little Bastard.’ We drove off, and that was it.

A few days later I came home and heard a message on my answering machine from the Black Football Player from a Rival High School.

“Yeah, I just want you to know that you fucking dead. You hear me? I’m gonna kill your ass. You better look both ways nigga cause you wanted.”

For some reason, I did not believe him. And I knew that he was as much of a gangster as I was one. Nothing ever did come of it. I sit here today writing this without ever having to look both ways. We were young. And this idea of keeping it real was still only utilized in the real urban areas of our great nation. None would be the wiser. And although it got a little hairy from time to time, I knew that the nomenclature of this current movement was still in its infancy. Cannot still say that is the case. But that’s how it stood then.

I got my CD’s back. Tiny little pieces of plastic that over time became a distant relic of my life. They mean nothing now, but how quickly we were ready to die for them. Tiny little pieces of plastic. The world was slowly turning upside down and I had bought a ticket for the ride.

Chapter 2

Breaking into a House

Dom always had the tools. It was a pouch filled with these devices he claimed to have gotten from a dentist. We were none the wiser. All I knew was that Dom had been breaking into houses with Ralph and Merrill and everyone else for quite a while now and I needed to get into the mix. It was Me, Dom, and Wade. We had skipped school. We were looking for trouble. We were three kids who came from a poor section of Boca Raton, but were sent to live with the richest most arrogant people on the planet. And money was needed, to fuel our lifestyle. To fuel our lust for the virtues that was otherwise handed to these ungrateful bastards, free of charge.

The three of us found a house... It was in West Boca. A ranch house. Painted a rust red. In later years, I would tell people that the best way to fortify your home is to have a sign staked in your lawn saying you have some security service. Or a sticker to the left or right of your door saying the same. Those two markers were more of a deterrent to us than a pit bull in the back yard barking for no reason then the shifting of the wind.

We would drive around for hours. Looking for a home that had no sign. No warning. No indication that if I open up the door four minutes later I would have a patrol car pulling up. An overweight cop outside of it with his gun drawn. This ranch house painted in rust red told us nothing. Its lips were sealed and we were hers for the taking. We parked the Ford Fresco a block away and the three of us headed to the house.

So let’s lay it down. The cargo pants and it’s brother, the cargo shorts, were made for people who needed to hold a lot of devices, all of which are considered illegal and also somewhat depraved and usually violent. I would have probably been a fucking Rhodes Scholar right now if it wasn’t for the goddamn cargo shorts. They were invented for deviants.  Those pouches on the side. I kept my pipe in there. I kept the centerpunch which I used to shatter car windows in there. I kept a switchblade in there. And on this occasion, I had a pair of socks that once inside this red rust home, would go over my hands so I wouldn’t leave finger prints. We should have no crime in the world, but we do because of the cargo pants and its brother,  the cargo shorts.

Dominick was the entry man. As the three of us walk up to the house, he would cut off and head to the backyard. Merrill and I would head to the front door. There we would knock.

The entryman, Dominick, he was born a Greek. He had a chiseled face dashed with teenage acne, with blue eyes and tightly knit black hair. All girls in Spanish River High considered him an Adonis. He had his pick of the litter. All of us? We just thought of Dominick as the guy who can break into any fucking house we present him within 30 seconds or less.

He could. And he never said how. Didn’t want to know.  I never cared to be an Entryman. The entryman walks into the dog that was asleep downstairs. The Entryman is the one who comes home to the illegal alien maid who has a snubbed nose .45 that she got from her cousin Julio who lives down near Liberty City. An Entryman is the one who, if there is a problem, is the one who will have to resolve it. While he is resolving it the two guys on point are racing the fuck out of there like Seabiscuit at the Kentucky Derby.

Rule #1: Never let the Entryman hold the keys to the car.

Rule #2: You DO NOT talk about Fight Club.

 I knock. I knock again. Third knock.

“Who is it?” a dumb Greek impersonating a house wife asks.

“Open the fucking door asshole,” is how an Irish guy replies.

The neighborhood was silent. A working class area. No wife staying home to raise and nurture the little bastards. No, it was survival of the fittest. Or better known as “ survival of the have the best ass, suck the best dick, know the best jokes, have the best tits, be the best athletic, sell weed on the side club.”

The three of us, on the cusp of robbing this home, all came from houses that were not holy. Dom and Merrill’s parents separated. The mom’s taken their kids and moved them to West Boca. Only because of the schools. Seriously.

West Boca High Schools were zoned in true Boca Raton. Ground zero for the richest, most Jewish, most arrogant, most obnoxious, most reason why zombie films became popular (the zombie craze began the year after Boca Raton incorporated itself. Honest. Look it up.). So if you’re a single mom, the best thing you can do for your ‘Destined to fail” kids is put them in a good school system.

Now on paper, that premise seems to hold water. Now on paper, me entering my cock in the world’s biggest dick competition seems sound as well… But I digress. The school was a carbon copy of Beverly Hills 90210. The people were horrible. I learned what Goth was. People treated me like I was British because none of them had ever heard a Brooklyn accent so they just assumed it was Hammersmith, London. People drove Porches and Mercedes Benz. The football players were fucking gods (reason #1 why I joined the football team the following year, even though I did not know a single rule nor did I understand the concept of the game. What I did know is that the guys with the football Jerseys banged way more girls then the guys who were reading fucking “Dune” underneath the shaded area to not allow sun to strike them because they may sweat and it may make their globbed on eyeliner run).

WRITERS NOTE: Some of my best friends were Goth. I consider it a suburban thing, but nevertheless, these guys were way talented and they turned me on to “Skinny Puppy.”

So you are poor. And you are going to a makeshift, not entirely unlike the real thing, Beverly Hills 90210 High School (while that show is actually airing on Wednesdays Nights, I might grimly add). And you are seeing this world of wealth. You go to these peoples house and they are 40 room mansions. Indoor Movie Theater. Basketball court. I’m living in a shitbox and look at how these fucking assholes are living! So you decide to rob houses to catch up.

Dominick opens the door and we enter. From the right side pocket of my cargo pants (they were designed for this exact reason. Please see above), I pulled out a pair of socks and placed the pair over my hands. Merrill did the same. Dom already had them on so that means the fuck broke in and got his socks on all within 30 seconds. You have to admit that that is impressive. He was the best.

We started to rummage around the house. There was expensive shit everywhere. The three of us, we were looking around, not sure what to do. Then Dominick snapped to it and gave us a refresher: grab everything that is not nailed down and that may be worth money to the guy at the pawn shop we sell to in Deerfield Beach who turns a blind eye.”

We were stacking all this shit up in the living room. Every minute another one of us found something that the man at the pawn store would buy without blinking an eye. Soon the pile became too big for us three to carry. So I got an idea.

An idea is something where a counsel made up of rationally minded souls from the 1880’s can debate and vote on a concept or mental impression and determine whether or not it should pass. OK, that’s not true. An idea is actually 90% of the time really dumb. And then there are the 10% which are insightful and timeless and probably realized during a bowel movement.

And so I had an idea. We would get the car, pull it into the driveway, and then fill it would all of the stolen goods (don’t worry. I hate myself). Then we wouldn’t have to carry them to the car (hate myself). And then we can drive straight to the pawn store and sell it to that guy who will buy items from us without raising an eye (truly deeply hate myself).

Merrill goes out the front door and pulls the car back and into the driveway. We close the door behind him. Me and Dom are there. Ready and waiting. We load the back of the Fresco in seconds. I get in the front passenger seat. Dom runs over to the button on the wall for the garage door. He hits it. The driveway door goes up. Dom hits the button again. The door starts to come down and Merrill hits the gas and races out The door barely misses us. It was like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom without the underage Asian. On the driveway, Dominick enters and we take off. There was no stake or stickers on this rusted red ranch house. And we, as complete scumbags, took advantage of that.

I cannot remember how much I made off of that. Probably enough to buy weed and so forth. My other activities were keeping things lucrative. Although, all I could think of was the image of this family coming home and seeing this. My house was robbed in Brooklyn a few times. Coming up to see something you loved taken away was a bad scene. And now here I was. No different than the junky who robbed me and my family ten years past. I was that junkie. After that day I never went into a house again without being invited first. That scene was over for me. The others carried on for a bit. But then they started taking the guns. And the guns led to more problems. And the world kept travelling round and round and round.

ON THE ROAD

Heading west to South Dakota.

Chapter 1

I started writing my autobiography. Why? Cause who knows. This is the first chapter. And there will be more to follow.

Our Newest Member

There was a sound on the window. Something like a ping. Dominic was driving. He didn’t say a word. There was another ping. Now everyone was interested. Wade was sitting in the front seat of Dom’s mothers Ford Fresco. I was in the back with Jay smith. Jay was a new addition. A gang member that my cousin Ralph brought into the group. This was our first night out with him. There was another ping at the window. And this kid next to me, chiseled and full of rage, could not wait to handle the problem.

To my left was a Honda CRV. A small compact. All we could see inside was a girl, our age, staring at us. She threw an object at the car and it made another ping. Everyone was restless, and completely stoned. Wade leaned back and said “find a weapon!”

I looked over at Jay and he was already reaching back over the seat and into the trunk area of the fresco. Jay fished around for a bit. He then surfaced with a tire iron. We got to a light and pulled into the turning lane just to the right of the CRV. By this time I had ascertained that this was a couple of college kids throwing penny’s at following cars. There was no malice. No intent. They were being the dorkie college kids they were. But they had no idea what was ahead.

We reached that light. Jay, with the tire iron in hand, jumped out of the car. He raced around to my side and up to the CRV.  Without any fear or hesitation Jay bashed in the passenger side window. Glass was everywhere. The CRV drove straight into cross traffic. They didn’t care. That’s how scared they were. They just did not care.  Cars were screeching everywhere, as this white CRV went right into traffic. It somehow made it through, and continued east, this moment forever ingrained in their mind.

The three of us sat in the car. We were terrified. I remember Dominick saying something along the lines of “Jesus Christ, what the fuck did he do?” We were all asking ourselves the same thing. What the fuck did this guy just do? Jason turned to the three of us. The tire iron still in his hand. Blood was trickling down it. Shattering the windshield left him wounded. Jay didn’t care. He was alive. And he came up to the car. With tire iron in hand. Blood pouring down his arm. He got up onto the hood of the car and he screamed “Yeah, motherfucker! You want to fuck with me! This is what you get!”

The three of us said nothing. The light turned green, then red, then green again but we didn’t move. How could we? We were entranced. This guy. This guy. This guy. We watched as the blood trickled down his arm, to his wrist, and off of the dull black tire iron. We watched it, and we all said to ourselves the same thing:

This is the newest member to our crew.

Minneapolis, MN

The unit PA from my last two jobs is from Minneapolis. He arrived with this arrogant notion that he would be an executive producer in a matter of days. This unit PA was a big fish in a little pond, and now he was a small fish again. Nevertheless, he waddled with the best of us, and in the end found some sobriety in his motives. I was leaving Iowa City, on my way to I-90 West, when I decided to head north for another hour to see where this kid came from. It was like heading to the hometown of one of your heroes, trying to find the sediment that made him into the man that he became. My thoughts were the opposite. I wanted to see where Minneapolis had done wrong with this fellow. And why did I have the burden of teaching him the notion of being humble. In the end, Minneapolis seemed all new. Like every indignant piece of brick fell the wayward for a last chance grasp at progress. I hated it. And I drove fast. But some pics were snapped, and here they are.

DOWN HOME IN THE VALLEY OF THE BEAST

I still have the trip to speak of. Still have the flat tire that occurred in South Dakota to speak of. Still have everything that came between me leaving New York City and arriving in Seattle to talk about. To whom? I don't know. But many spend many hours talking to some Jew Therapist for the same amount of satisfaction I get from typing. What is the driving thought that gets us through? I don't know anymore. But I know my stories click. And I know that I find some type of solace in telling them. So here we are. I live on a boat. Looked at every writers cliche before I found the ultimate. At first I was going to rent a house on the lake. Too obvious. Then I was going to rent a cabin in the woods. Been there, done that. So I found a boat. A big boat. Well at least big enough to me. And I sit at this table, with a table lamp supplying me with illumination, and I think about all of the stories that I have, And I think that I don't want to stop. And I think I can go on forever telling these here stories. And I keep finding more. And that is the magic of it. And that is the saving grace that keeps me grounded. Let's keep going. Lets see where we get.

ON THE ROAD

Heading toward Minneapolis, MN

Why I have no photos of Iowa City, IA

I spent the night in Iowa City, IA with a good friend who had lived in Brooklyn, but decided to give the quiet life in his hometown a try. The city is a college town. Very quaint. It's population is made up of a wet-behind-the-ear students who are all extremely attractive and full of zero life experiences. After arriving in town, I stopped off in this tiny bar in the middle of city center. The bartender was dressed in classic hipster garb, extremely self-assured, and arrogant as one can be. The patrons were no different. One day, I told myself, these people will be living in Williamsburg, and that is where they will make the transition into a complete fucking asshole.

It was raining heavily in Iowa City. Bad enough that taking the camera out didn't seem like a great idea. So I leave you with nothing but a couple of words rushed together with very little thought.

We went out that night to a 'townie bar.' It didn't seem like the place where the college kids go to tie one off. After a slew of drinks, the two of us headed home. I slept in a guest room in the basement. In the middle of the night, I drunkenly exited the bed and headed out in search of a bathroom. In old age, the bladder can no longer hold out till morning. The basement was pitch black. The door to the upstairs could not be found. Nor could the stairs. A decision, based on science, was made. If I pee'd on the concrete floor, it should evaporate before anyone wakes up in the morning. So that is what I did. I pulled my cock out and poured  what felt like two gallons of piss onto the cold hard floor. It was a horrible thing to do, but I didn't feel that way at the time. Only later, when I woke up the next morning and headed back out into the main area of the basement did I realize my error: they had a pet rabbit in a cage. He was a big sonofabitch... and he was soaking wet. So was all of the contents inside of his cage. My eyes widened. The realization rushed to me like the tidal wave of piss that washed over this poor bastard in the darkness of the night.

I loaded up my car. Said goodbye to the family. Thanked them for their hospitality, and was back on the road. Minneapolis would be next.

ON THE ROAD

Heading toward Iowa City, IA

And we are back...

It is would great pleasure that I welcome you back to the blog that no one reads. Perhaps I can change that by actually updating it from time to time with photos and stories of my journey so far. Last we left off, I was racing back from Indianapolis, IN with very little money left in my pocket (I made it home with exactly $17 on hand). In the in-between, I worked, saved up, and now am back on the road. Hope their will be stories to tell. Stay tuned.