Rough Living

by Vago Damitio

  She loved to dance and she asked me if I wanted to explore the train with her. Her name was Brook and she was fabulous. She asked me to buy her a beer.

  We went to the dining car where I bought a whiskey, and she quickly poured half into her Gatorade bottle. She did it without my permission. I swear! The attendant left for a minute and she was stealing things from the cupboards. “It’s not what you take, it’s how you do it.” We made out in the bathroom and then, luckily, we were in Seattle. Where we were both going. Where her parents were waiting for her.

  She said “ You’re totally older than me, I mean I’m only sixteen, but we should get together and do something. I think you’re a lot of fun.”

  “Here’s my number,” she told me as she handed me a piece of paper. “If my Dad answers tell him that you’re my English teacher. Oh look, there he is!” She waved at a rich looking couple standing outside King Street Station. Holy shit. I needed to get out of here. How many laws had I just broken?

  I was happy to get on the bus and get out of there. I got on and a bitter old woman tore into me for the holes in the knees of my jeans.

  “What possible excuse can you have for being such a loser at your age?” the baggy old gal carped at me.

  “At least I don’t pay two dollars extra for a carton of milk I can get by walking a couple of blocks cause some dot com company will deliver it if I order it online!” I said, completely confusing her and the issue. It made sense to me.

  She looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was as I continued to look out the window at the snow covered Seattle landscape.

  It’s not so terrible being houseless.

  The Dogcatcher Cometh

  I never bothered paying the $50 to license my dog with the city of Seattle. I wasn’t the best dog owner. I would make sure she had food and take her for walks but she got left alone a lot. She had all of her shots. She was spayed. She minded well and didn’t run away. Besides, she had a tag with her name and my phone number on it in case. So why should I pay $50 to register her? I only had $30 anyway.

  Shakra was a little blue heeler and I was in the habit of taking her to a little park near my house in Green Lake, a district of Seattle, in the mornings and evenings and playing Frisbee. She was a great Frisbee dog and it was fun for me to have people stand around and oooh and ahhh when she’d leap in the air. One morning, I woke up a little later than usual and we started down the street. I rarely used a leash as she was highly trained and would heel on command.

  Something felt funny as we approached the park. It was too late by the time I noticed the dogcatcher. He called me over and I nonchalantly told Shakra to heel so that he would see it was no big deal I was breaking Seattle’s leash law.

  “Where’s your leash?” he asked me in a belligerent tone.

  I held up the Frisbee smiling. “She’s never more than a foot away from this,” I told him. I tossed it so he could see how good a dog she was.

  “Is that dog licensed?” he asked, again belligerent.

  “Of course she is,” I lied. “See, I have doggie bags too!” I’d brought a pocket full of plastic grocery bags to pick up her shit.

  “I’m going to have to write you a ticket for not having her on the leash,” he told me with a smile on his face. “And if she’s not wearing a license, I’ll need to take her in until you can come with the proof of it.”

  “Oh, give me a break…are you serious? You’re going to expose my dog to all those diseases and write me a ticket? Come on, have a heart.”

  “Are you trying to interfere with a Seattle Law Enforcement Officer’s duties? Should I call the police?” He loved the fact that he was an officer of the Law.

  “Yeah, you better call em you fat old fuck ‘cause there’s no way YOU are gonna catch either me or my dog. Get over yourself TJ Hooker.” I couldn’t believe it as the words came out of my mouth. This guy would probably kill my dog now. We had to run.

  I bolted into the woods and through the park. I saw him driving his truck around and intentionally ran the opposite direction from the safety of my house. Shakra was beside me, loving this new game. We jumped over hedges, cut through alleyways, and still the dogcatcher’s truck was behind us. He knew these streets all right.

  I saw two garbage trucks blocking both lanes of the road ahead. Here was my chance. The drivers were having a little joke. I ran between them and cut left once I was out of sight of the dogcatcher. A short run up a hill and through a rhododendron put me back in my yard in Greenlake. It was a fun morning and a fun run. Thank you Mr. Dog Catcher.

  Farters and Axe Murderers on Greyhound

  I’ve heard they’ve gotten better but here was what a bus ride on a Greyhound looked like in 1998.

  The bus ride was fairly uneventful. The first person to sit next to me was a sweet looking old woman who got on the bus in Centralia, Washington. I made room for her and she pulled out a little crochet pillow and quickly fell asleep. It was about 10 PM. I was reading and watching the lights go by. Happy to be on the road to somewhere.

  First she began to snore. I pulled out my walkman and put in a mix tape the girl I was madly in love with had made for me. That’s when I noticed the smell. It smelled like a dirty old turd on that bus. I took off the headphones right after ‘The Revolution will Not be Televised.”

  She was farting. About every two seconds that old broad would let one rip. Pfthhhhwwwwrrrp! The smell was horrible. I looked around hoping that there was another seat open. No way. I was stuck. A guy across the aisle looked at me with sympathy and shared suffering.

  It was a moral dilemma. Should I wake her up and ask her to please stop farting? Was that rude? Was it more rude than her farting? I looked at her sweet old snoring face and shook her awake.

  “Ma’am? Ma’am?” I shook her harder. Another fart came out. She opened her old blue eyes.

  “Is everything alright? Oh, goodness, was I snoring honey? “ She asked…

  I couldn’t do it. “No, I just need to get by you so that I can use the restroom.” She kept farting all the way to Roseburg. Everyone on the bus seemed relieved when she left.

  My next seat companion told me he had just been released from prison. I asked what his crime was.

  “I killed fourteen people with an axe,” he said and then laughed, “but the doctor says I’m getting better.“ Was he joking? “Hey have you seen my medication?” Yeah, he was joking. I hoped. Prison humor. Ha ha.

  He pulled a bottle of rum and a coke out of his bag and asked me if I wanted some. I handed him my half empty coke and he filled it with rum. I gave him a few of the morphine tablets I had in my pocket figuring it wouldn’t hurt to have him mellow. Just in case.

  It was a pretty typical Greyhound experience. Nobody slept on my shoulder though. One of my good buddies had once sat next to a pretty girl on a Greyhound and then fucked her in the bathroom of the bus. Things like that never happened to me.

  We arrived in Sacramento at about three o’clock in the afternoon. My buddy the axe-murderer and I grabbed a beer in the dingy bar next to the bus station. He gave me his number and told me if I needed work to call him. I hadn’t told him I was catching a train at nine that evening back to where I had come from.

  You gotta love travel just for travel’s sake. Sometimes I wonder what’s wrong with me.

  Airport Crime

  I had to pick George Hush up from the airport at 11:58.I took a shower and got dressed. I wore a black suit so I would look corporate but ruined the effect by wearing my old hat. I looked like a petty thief or a conman. I set out to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

  When I got to the airport I checked out the baggage claim area then took a walk up to the lost and found. I wanted a black parka. I told the lady that I had left my coat in the Delta section a couple of days before and described the coat I wanted. She went back and looked. “All I found is this black fleece,” she said.

  “That’s the one!” I lied and then joked about being forgetful while putting on
my new coat.

  George got off the plane. He was one of the few people who weren’t already talking on their cell phones. Most of them seemed to be attempting to find the perfect pose for a sophisticated television commercial. Trying to impress the crowd with their importance. George looked like a mobster in his shiny black leather coat. We shook hands.

  “Hey, I met these kind folks on the plane and they’re going to Anchorage and have a long layover can we take em to a mall or something?”

  “Yeah, no problem. You got bags?”

  He introduced me to his new friends. They lived deep in the interior of Alaska. We all went to baggage claim where George got his bag and I got a suitably corporate bag of my own. The girl freaked out when she noticed.

  “My god, you’re stealing someone’s bag. Put it back”

  “What? We just met, what are you implying?” Yeah. I was stealing a bag. It was a stupid thing to do, but I wanted to see if I could. I should have listened to her.

  “Put it back.” She whispered.

  “I can’t believe you’d even imply that” I said. “Are we ready?” I pulled out the handle and wheeled my bag behind me.

  George walked next to me.

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Yeah, pretty crazy” I said.

  “You,” he laughed, “You’re crazy.”

  Once we got in the car, the girl was the first one to unzip the bag. Her boyfriend let out a yell.

  “All right! You got a video camera.”

  They inventoried everything out loud. Lots of tooth whitening products, skin products, a few porn mags, and the video camera. The girl started feeling guilty and started to make light like we could go back and get lots of stuff and take it to the pawnshop. She gave me a karmic warning with a story about how she stole and it came back to her. I laughed and told her that I fully expected to lose all of my possessions. I never planned to keep anything for very long anyway.

  We dropped them off at a mall so they could see a movie and then George and I went to breakfast. We sat at a table where the sun was keeping us warm. The waiter kept asking us if we wanted him to close the blind, we kept saying no, and finally he closed it halfway and said “otherwise its in my face:” I wouldn’t mention it, but it’s a great example of how people often pretend they are concerned about you, but they are actually trying to accomplish their own ends and make you feel obligated at the same time. He could have just said “Do you mind if I close the blind?” Instead, it was that whole charade.

  It was near Halloween and George needed to go to the fabric store to get material for his costume. He was going to be Mr. Hanky, the Christmas Poo, a giant turd that spreads Christmas cheer. George even had fart spray. Leave it to George to spray fart spray in his own bedroom. About 10:00 PM the whole gang showed up. Tom, the spaceman, Mike, the leprechaun, Evelyn the peacock, Andie as old topless Bo-Peep, George as Mr. Hanky, and me as a Zombie Detective.

  I was out of money and wanted to avoid going to a bar, after all there were free drinks waiting at the party, but the girls were insistent on stopping by Le Chat Noir for a couple of drinks. My friends don’t live like millionaires, but they like to live it up by going to their favorite semi-fancy bar once in a while. It was always the same and always a little bit of a shame on my empty wallet and on George’s this time. George covered my three whiskeys. I loved that place. Random, the bartender, always treated us like we were important, even if we were just a bunch of bums.

  “Hey, guess what?” Little Joe came up and put his arms around George and me. “ I finally told my family I’m gay…by e-mail. I sent it to my mom and she forwarded it to my dad and brother.” The girls had to keep telling him to leave us straight boys alone.

  We all got in cars and set off for the party where we parked on the street and smoked cocaine. Suddenly things were kicking up.

  We drank and smoked out in a hot tub at a house Little Joe had been watching. The owners of the house were away on vacation. A very drunken hot tub party that was hell on those of us wearing makeup. We made use of their gourmet kitchen, their hot tub, their wine cellar, and their liquor cabinet.

  I tried to let the social lubricant work its magic. It just didn’t happen. I kept drinking the huge drinks. A little later I looked up from my stupor and a cop walked in. He was looking around with a flashlight. I was beyond remembering I was at a costume party. I saw a cop drinking and dancing with pretty girls and then suddenly pulling his gun out. The horror of a drunken cop waving his gun around freaked me out. I felt the cold steel of the 45 on my forehead, my temple, and under my jaw. I’d had lots of bad experiences with guns, this just sort of brought everything together. Then I threw up and walked back to George’s.

  I asked Little Joe the next week if he got in any trouble over it.

  “Nah, it turns out they came back two days late and the owners brother had a party after I vacated… he got the heat… how do you like that?” We both laughed.

  China Luck

  I called my brother about a week into 2001.He was disappointed that I was living in my car.

  “It may seem cute at 29, “ he said, “But it won’t be so cute when you’re 50.” I thought about Aquillo… no he wasn’t cute, but he was definitely better than some lonely and jaded stockbroker living in a mansion. At least to me.

  “I just don’t like the culture we have here.” I told him.

  He thought for a minute and then said, “You should go to Asia. It would do you good to see how other people live.”

  I agreed with him, it would be good for me to go to Asia. I’d always had a fantasy to climb Mt. Taishan, a holy Taoist mountain in China. Sure, Asia would be great. Neither of us bothered thinking about how a homeless, unemployed guy manages to travel halfway around the world.

  He said it and I agreed with the result being a decision on my part to go to China. If I saved my unemployment checks, I figured I could be in Beijing in early March. I wasn’t doing a real good job of saving so far, but I figured once I had my traffic fines paid off, it would be easy.

  As I drove to Bellingham the moon was rising over a mountain and being reflected onto a lake. It was a huge oblong yellow disk like a Chinese painting of Tao. I knew it was a good omen and knew I would stop at the casino and win enough to pay off all my fines and give me a head start on the travel money.

  "Ah ha! That’s how I’ll get to China.” I inherited an addiction to slot machines from my grandfather. It’s easy to rationalize a reason to gamble. I thought about the foolishness of spending half my $38, but I figured I would only spend $18 on the dollar slots and then I would leave.

  I was doing okay, up to $39 from my starting $18 and then I started losing. I stopped at $23 and figured I should walk out a winner. There was something about the slot machine that told me to get another $18 and go for it. I lost for three pulls in a row, then hit the double diamond gold and won $800! Grandpa spent a lot of time in Asia too and I figured he was helping me out.

  The first thing I did was to pay off the remainder of my fines. Next I bought breakfast and a Lonely Planet guidebook to China, and started to visit travel agents. It looked like I would need about $1500 total to make the trip work.

  I drove down to the beach and got a little fire going and one of Jesus’s reformed heroin addicts came and filled up all the quiet with so much Jesus mumbo jumbo. It seems like Jesus saves a lot of addicts by replacing heroin with himself.

  I’d rather see a Jesus freak than a heroin addict any day of the week.

  I could hardly believe all my fines were paid off and I still had money towards my ticket. I left the beach with the intention of going to the casino again, telling myself, “I’m gonna win a $1000 this time.” I prepared myself mentally on the ride down. I knew I would win. I played another $20 in the same dollar slot and about 15 minutes into it, I hit the $1000 jackpot. The luck of Jesus must have rubbed off that junkie and on to me. Really, I hit it. It felt so surreal…I knew it was because I’d decided to go to China. I got
back to Seattle and called a discount travel agency. Crazy. I had enough to get my ticket the next day and put away $500 towards the trip. I bought a 6-month round trip open ended ticket to Beijing and a cassette and textbook to help me learn Mandarin Chinese.

  I went to the library and used the internet to apply for jobs teaching English in China. I found four and applied to them all. Wednesday I had a response from the New Bridge Language School in Beijing. I was hired. I studied up on China and felt completely whacked on the side of the head. Was this really happening?

  Books were beginning to pile in every corner of the bus. I knew that I was leaving for China in three weeks, but five or ten dollars for books seemed much cheaper than thirty or forty dollars in a bar or casino. I had woke up that morning with nearly a ¼” of ice on top of the blankets I’d put over my sleeping bag. The coldest morning of the 2001 so far. Jammed into my shoulder blades was a book I’d picked up the day before Yankee Hobo in the Orient.

  Something intrigued me about John Patric, the author of the book. I thought he might even be the elusive J.R. Bob Dobbs who founded the farcical Church of the SubGenius. I needed to take my bus to my mothers house in Redding and figured I would drive through Florence, Oregon where Patric had made his home. The combination of the cold and the book prodded me into action.

  I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get my visa in time to go to China. Weird ideas of having brownish babies and starting my own race of bums, tramps, and hobos had been going through my head for days.

  Why not? I had to think of the fact that I might fuck up in China and get executed…so what…?

  In my mind, I was a super hero waiting for the right moment to spring upon the unsuspecting world. I was stressed out like a crackhead in a squad car and I had virtually no time to look for Bob Dobbs and Frying Pan Creek. I quested after a warm dry place to keep my books.