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I might have the year wrong but this story is about the time John Benson took Larry Bus up to Weed for a work party at the Black Butte Center for Railroad Culture. This was my first time visiting it and I wouldn’t have guessed that close to a decade later I would end up living on twenty acres of forest less than an hour away in the Mount Shasta watershed. Hopefully I will go again either tonight or tomorrow and hopefully I’ll be finished with this by the time I get there but the future, much like the bulk of this particular story, is unwritten.

I was poking around on their website earlier today and discovered an MTV documentary around the train riding punk rock subculture from the ‘90s called The Travelers. As far as I know this is the earliest video document of this particular contingent of hobo-dom – it probably even predates the invention of the term “oogle”. At the very least I never heard any of the film’s subjects using the word.

It’s a compelling artifact and I definitely recommend that any readers with even a passing interest in the lifestyle check it out but when I watched it today I was feeling really burnt out on all the Tom Waits music. I listened to him a lot in High School and I still really like his acting work but his music is one of those things that just never hits the same after adolescence – kind of like The Beatles, JD Salinger and Richard Brautigan.

The kids in the movie were wearing a lot of Norwegian Black Metal shirts, Hellhammer and Dimmu Borgir, and I found myself wishing they would put some of that in the background instead. Probably a tall ask for something on a popular cable channel around thirty years ago. This movie would be an earlier example of this but the other thing about Tom Waits music is that it is absolutely inescapable if you are anywhere within the vicinity of the kind of people who like to ride freight trains and go to New Orleans and that sort of thing.

Once I was walking behind two oogles with heavy backpacks on the block of St Claude Avenue that passes in front of popular liquor and chicken store Hank’s while coming down from 2C-B or some other popular Mardi Gras psychedelic. I could overhear their conversation as one turned to the other:

“I heard Tom Waits called Train Doc for a crew change at midnight!”

The second one quickly replied:

“I heard that too!”

It would almost make more sense if my tripping mind had just made this up in the same way that it would fill empty space with intricate geometric patterns that weren’t actually there. It was a perfect storm of all the most generic train rider things imaginable. I’ve already talked about Tom Waits – strictly speaking you aren’t supposed to talk about Train Docs or crew changes on the internet but anybody who’s found their way to reading this probably already knows what those things are.

I’m pretty sure I heard them accurately though. It doesn’t seem to be enough of a story that both of them would have heard it repeated but there it was. It also doesn’t seem like it would be true. Train Doc is getting on in years, if he’s actually still alive, so I’d imagine that Tom Waits would be more considerate concerning him needing his sleep. Somebody at the party in this story told me that he’d kicked them out of the box car they had both been sleeping in for being too loud.

Maybe it was Will, he was often too loud when I’d run into him at various parties and things around the country. He had managed to find one of the few actual taboo behaviors at Taboo’s Summer Wheel party in Maine by setting off firecrackers until Crissy threw water on him. Will bring loud hasn’t been that much of a problem since Will died a night too early to participate in this insane decade we’re not even halfway through yet.

Most of the people from The Travelers are dead as well. They use an expression in the movie, Dead Frogs, to refer to their fallen companions. It feels especially poignant to me as frogs have been my totem for as long as I can remember. I could never bring myself to eat one and the thought of a frog being harmed or killed fills me with acute distress. A couple of years before my father was diagnosed with lung cancer I had a prophetic dream where his health began to rapidly deteriorate as he was turning into a frog.

He eventually died. This is going to be a story about death.

It probably goes back further but I first noticed a trend in the early 2000’s where traveler punk types who were usually vegan, or “freegan” meaning they only ate animal products they hadn’t directly paid for, were getting into eating and skinning roadkill. I think it was the girl I’ve been referring to as Rocky who first introduced me to the idea: speaking in reverent terms about some friends who had processed a fresh deer and eaten its back strap raw.

Making use of serendipitously discovered dead animals always felt especially performative and when I finally did it myself I could see the reason why. Rocky often talked about brain tanning – the practice of using the acids naturally present in a mammal’s brain to cure and preserve its pelt. Supposedly every mammal on earth has just enough brain chemicals to tan its own hide except for the Buffalo which stands out for having too much skin and not enough brain.

It probably doesn’t work for whales either.

Rocky had always talked about hoping to find something to demonstrate her knowledge on while we were traveling together but only ever managed to find a Fox which was both too far gone and too disastrously mangled so she ended up throwing it away. I was visiting my mother in the early part of 2010 when I saw one of her cats playing with a good sized rat and decided to try it for myself.

Despite the expression “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” the process is basically the same for every kind of animal. You want to get your hands on it before rigor mortis has set in and you cut a long incision from the lower lip to the asshole and peel. Most of the time when people talk about this kind of thing they will bring up Native Americans in a way that borders on fetishization.

That isn’t the reason that I used chips of flaked obsidian when I skinned my rat, there just weren’t any knives that were sufficiently sharp at my mother’s house. My father had gotten rid of anything with a decent edge on it when her multiple sclerosis began to manifest in minor kitchen accidents. I had picked up a lot of the volcanic glass at the very first Mojave Rave out at Ryan’s family’s ghost ranch near Coso Junction – I didn’t find any finished points that year but the ground was absolutely covered in the subtractive slivers that archaeologists refer to as lithic scatter.

The cat wasn’t very happy about me taking its plaything away. I started with the rat’s upper lip as if it was the kind of folded paper tab that gives you a head start on opening a band-aid. The face came off fairly easily although I had to work the skin around the eyes a bit to loosen what you call the conjunctiva. With only the head done the rat looked a bit like a heavyset European gangster in a tracksuit – if you’ve ever seen the Pusher trilogy the characters in those films are a good reference point.

After the head the next real challenge are the hands and feet. With something as small as a rat you could probably just pull the limbs off like the sleeves of a shirt, neatly inverting the hand skin, but I chose to score the legs along their inside edges and cut the extremities off like you would with a larger animal like a deer. When I got down to the waist it looked a bit like a worker wearing coveralls on a hot day who’d decided to unzip and tie the sleeves around their midriff. The next step was to stretch the hide out onto something – I used thumb tacks and a record cover from a Rolling Stones album.

I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and cracked the skull open like a walnut with a pair of blunt nosed pliers. I hadn’t seen any live demonstrations or video tutorials but I figured that scooping the brains out with a finger and rubbing it into the wet side of the skin with a little bit of water would do the trick.

After a couple of days it was as stiff as the cardboard it was pinned to and gave off a slight unpleasant smell from the fat that I hadn’t bothered to properly scrape away. The final step is to “work” it – basically crinkle it around until it takes on the softer texture of a textile. This last part seemed to take forever so I got into the habit of bringing it with me to parties my first couple of weeks in Los Angeles.

The amount of attention that carrying around this rat skin and either fidgeting it back and forth or rubbing it against a cement curb attracted was instantly noticeable. Everybody was incredulous, everybody wanted to know how I had possibly caught the rat or worked it into its present form. Conventionally attractive but mainstream girls were seemingly magnetically drawn to me and throwing attention my way on a level that I wasn’t used to.

I could see how people like Rocky or the guy who is about to become the central focus of this story could get addicted to the feeling of blowing minds and being a primitive skills rock star. It wasn’t that way for me – I attempted and failed a skunk and squirrel before losing interest in the process but not in a performative way.

I turned the rat into a kind of envelope by folding it along the middle and stitching up the sides. The lining around its eyes essentially functioned as natural reinforced button holes so I sewed two Mother of Pearl buttons next to the tail and the mask buttoned down like a triangular flap.

The tail hung down from just under the nose. I wish I had a picture of it. It was stolen with my baroque vampire frock coat out of a car during SXSW in 2011 with my first small bismuth crystals and some other woo woo type stuff inside. I imagine suddenly touching the skin of a dead rat came as a bit of a shock to the coat thief. I wanted to make more of them but didn’t find any more fresh rat carcasses.

I thought about trying to break into those boxy plastic traps that cities like Chicago leave in alleys but the locking mechanism seemed like it might be kind of complicated.

Anyway I’m getting side tracked here but the point is that I’m trying to paint a picture of the prevalence of this kind of thing in the traveler punk street kid culture of the mid to late aughts. I want to put the goat guy into a specific context – explain how his misguided plan didn’t just materialize out of thin air.

So let’s talk about the goat guy. It was the work party in 2009 and Zarek’s 33rd birthday and Larry Bus had brought me and a lot of kids from Berkeley squat Hellarity up to the center. Robert Eggplant was there – I hope he’s still out there doing 510-BAD-SMUT but I haven’t seen him in several years and wouldn’t know for sure. I could try calling it but I won’t. You could try.

This guy that nobody seemed to know with a wide brimmed hat and snakeskin belt and large hunting knife and that sort of thing shows up with a goat tied up in the back of his pickup truck. He’s not hard to read – he sees himself as a kind of primitive skills Chad guru and has spent the entirety of his drive to the work party from wherever he came from fantasizing about coming across a fresh roadkill deer and becoming the center of attention when he demonstrates his knowledge of butchering and processing the carcass.

Considering the decision he ended up making he probably would have swerved to hit a live deer if presented the opportunity but when even that didn’t happen he started brainstorming for any possible method of salvaging a specific daydream and notices a goat farm along the highway. Now obviously a frightened living goat that you’ve just bought and dragged away from its familiar surroundings is a very different creature than a deer that’s already been hit by a car and would otherwise go to feeding carrion birds and other scavengers but the goat guy has made himself oblivious to these kinds of distinctions.

None of this is extrapolation – he told me all of these things himself in less self deprecating terms from scanning the highways to buying the goat in a last ditch effort. He didn’t specify whether or not he had informed the goat farm’s proprietor that he was planning on immediate slaughter. This detail probably wouldn’t have been too important – very few goat farms could exist without including meat in their market yields and the lives and deaths of the animals in this mostly cottage industry are light years away from the nightmares of industrial agriculture experienced by the cows, pigs and chickens that stock our nation’s fast food franchises and supermarkets.

This is what I know about the goat: he was full grown and wethered, or castrated, and his main function had been to serve as a social companion to a buck, an unaltered male kept expressly for breeding. His temperament was gentle and sweet, as is usually the case with wethers, and when he began to detect his impending death he cried out in anxiety but never attempted to escape. His only possession was a blue nylon collar without a name tag and I’m not sure if he ever had a name.

I’ve been loosely using the word oogle in this piece as a generic identifier for anyone that is into punk rock and riding trains but the term has a more complicated history. When I did a bit of digging the best looking source said that the word originated in the ‘90s as a derisive label used by more experienced travelers for newcomers to the lifestyle they perceived as coming from more privileged backgrounds. When I first started hearing it in the mid 2000s the meaning had become nearly the opposite.

By that time its general use was on the level of a slur that implied all of the worst negative stereotypes applied to homeless traveler culture: violence, rampant and destructive substance abuse, theft, animal abuse and usually some degree of misogyny, homophobia and sometimes racism. While these things will always be present in poverty and street life to some degree much of the community is committed to inclusivity, safe spaces and harm reduction and the term oogle now seems to have settled as a semi-ironic self applied moniker for anyone involved in riding trains.

The point of this long aside is to ensure readers that the Black Butte Center for Rail Road Culture is absolutely a progressive space where none of the things on the list of negative stereotypes are tolerated. I’ve been to two different work parties fourteen years apart and the vibes were close to identical both times: very low key drinking, collective vegan meals, some music and some work projects. I can’t say there’s never been a fist fight there but I’ve never seen one.

When goat guy showed up and wanted to slaughter the goat in the middle of the party he was quickly told that it wasn’t that kind of party and he’d have to do it somewhere off the property. The whole thing was clearly a bad idea but he was like a kid with two good eyes and a sharp stick: there was no way anybody could tell him anything until he’d already fucked up. Maybe if he had realized the pointlessness of the whole thing the goat could have moved into the center and lived out its years helping reduce ground fuels by grazing.

Maybe that wouldn’t have even been feasible – either way it’s not what happened.

A group of people who decided they wanted to participate followed him over to a meadow on the opposite side of the access road. I think there were about seven or eight folks all together – I remember it being mostly women that decided to go. I was definitely motivated by curiosity but I mostly felt like I wanted to be there for the goat. If there was nothing I could do to prevent its death I wanted to at least ensure it didn’t die alone or uncared for.

It probably sounds a bit hypocritical considering I was about to both actively participate in its slaughter and eat portions of its body but it is how I felt. The goat was tied to a tree with a short piece of rope while goat guy was gathering whoever was going to participate. The goat seemed to pick up on the inevitable sinister energy in the air and began crying out in panic.

“Shut up, we’re gonna kill you!”

A woman I didn’t know who helped us hold the goat down said that and laughed a little bit. It sounds horrible but I think it was her way of expressing the anxiety and nervousness that we all were feeling. I’m not sure about goat guy but I’m pretty sure nobody else present had any experience with taking life on this kind of scale.

I was born on a vegan commune and have spent long sections of my life as either a strict vegetarian or vegan. These days I do eat meat but not very often or very much of it, I should probably be more conscientious about where it comes from. It would be presumptuous to say that having actively participated in the slaughter of a food animal makes any person either a more or less ethical meat eater but I do think that anyone who eats it should be ready to confront the realities of how it is produced and where it comes from.

The goat was almost certainly going to end up being killed so that people could eat its flesh even if goat guy had never made the decision to bring it to this party. Several things did feel “wrong” about the whole scenario: the fact that he had no prior relationship with the animal, that his primary motivation seemed performative and most importantly that the act didn’t feel like it was centered on gratitude and respect.

At the same time there was a barbecue at this party that other kinds of meat were being cooked on. If he had just shown up with a few pounds of goat meat purchased from a farm or market nobody would have thought twice about it. I feel a little bit like I’m talking in circles but what I’m trying to get at is the degree to which the consumption of animal products has become insulated and divorced from the lives of those animals in modern American life.

I’m probably deliberately dragging my feet a bit as well because parts of me continue to recoil from the events I’m about to describe.

We dug a shallow hole to catch the blood in a bowl and laid the goat on its side with its throat positioned over the hole. I held onto one of its short horns, I think they were black and curved backwards, and pulled its head back until the horns made contact with its back and the throat was easily accessible. I tried to communicate calm and reassurance through the other hand resting against its body and helping to keep it still. Goat guy had a sharp knife about seven inches long that he’d been wearing at his waist – he cut through both arteries quickly and cleanly in a single movement.

The blood ran into the bowl and the goat shuddered once or twice and was still. The goat was dead. I don’t know if this was the first time that goat guy had actually killed or slaughtered an animal of this size but when I looked over at him he had tears in his eyes and was starting to cry. I assume that in that moment some form of the various misgivings I have been verbalizing around the overarching circumstances were beginning to dawn on him.

When I think about it now it reminds me of a couple different things. When I was around twelve years old I found a wounded pigeon in my parents’ yard, probably from one of our cats, and me and a friend convinced ourselves that we needed to “put it out of its misery” with a compound bow and blunt tipped arrow. We kept taking turns and missing – neither of us was much of a marksman under normal circumstances and definitely hadn’t aimed at anything living before.

Finally my friend Rick managed to hit it in one of its wings but the force behind the arrow was so weak it only penetrated a small distance and fell back out as the pigeon hopped to the side with a long suffering accusatory expression. He immediately vomited and ran away crying:

“I’m going to hell!”

I went back into the house and didn’t try to shoot the pigeon again. It also makes me think of a line from a song written by Sting, although most will be more familiar with Johnny Cash’s version, called I Hung My Head:

“I felt the power of death over life…”

In that moment goat guy looked ashamed to me but maybe this was normal for him and tears are just part of the process. When I think about it now I don’t necessarily feel ashamed for my role in it but as I type some parts I do want to cry. I didn’t then.

Goat guy recovered quickly and did seem to know what he was doing. After the goat was bled completely he instructed us to help hang it from a tree by its neck. He cut it open and tied off and removed the intestines in the way that ensures there will be no tainting of the meat. I remember looking at the way the goat’s teeth in its upper and lower jaws rested against each other at an unnatural angle now that its muscles were no longer keeping them in place.

My father died from his lung cancer in September of that same year, peacefully at home with the assistance of an attending hospice nurse, and I remember looking at him a few hours later and noticing that his teeth were in an almost identical position. I kept the goat’s collar and wore it from time to time as a way to meditate on how it would feel to know that you were about to be killed in a strange meadow, surrounded by strangers.

We separated out the liver and cut it into small pieces to eat it raw. It tasted a little bit like the white part of a hard boiled egg – I didn’t detect even a hint of the urine like flavor that is present in cooked beef liver. I don’t remember eating any other organs. The lungs and trachea were passed around so everybody could see what it looked like to fill them with air and then watch them shrivel as the air passes out again. It’s nothing like a balloon – it’s hard to describe what it looks like but you’ve probably either seen it or you haven’t.

I remember reading some book in school where a recently slaughtered animal’s bladder is turned into a ball for children to play with – maybe Little House on the Prairie. Either way we didn’t end up doing that. Goat guy showed everybody how to build a traditional temporary smoke house, a triangular lean-to over a fire with the walls covered in thickly leaved or needled boughs from the surrounding trees, and we hung thin slices of meat on the inside.

The idea was to keep piling the same kinds of green fuels onto the coals of the fire so the resulting smoke could cook the meat over many hours. Most of the people who had come over wanted to get back to the party before too long so a lot of meat was getting eaten in a barely cooked state. The Spikula twins were whisking the bowl of blood with a twiggy branch so that it might eventually thicken into a kind of pudding.

I kind of doubt that ever happened or if anyone would have even wanted to eat it if it did.

What I’m getting at is that I couldn’t say definitively whether any part of the goat was wasted or not. Nobody seemed to be trying to stretch or tan the hide but it makes sense that the edible parts would be a higher priority in terms of processing and that would have happened later. I didn’t see goat guy around the party for the rest of the weekend – maybe he camped in the meadow and continued to process the goat or maybe he took off after the assembled group drifted away from him.

Things hadn’t worked out the way he had imagined them, as they rarely do, and hopefully he learned something from the experience.

I did end up making it back out to the center for part of the evening on Saturday. It didn’t occur to me immediately that it had been fourteen years since my last visit until I started asking folks if they had been around for the party where somebody had killed a goat. A lot of fashion trends have stayed mostly the same, muted colors and a preference for durable brands like Carhartt, but I didn’t see the scraps of fur and animal tails that had been trendy toward the end of this millennium’s first decade.

I forgot to walk back over to the meadow and see if any bones were still there. It’s likely they all would have been gathered by this time. Bones, as they are almost always scavenged, are far less polarizing than fur and continue to be a common sight in the cars and homes of anyone who spends long periods of time in nature. A foot’s worth of spine sat on the edge of the stage where the bands were playing but it looked like it came from a deer.

It’s almost certain that Will is not the only person from the 2009 party that is no longer with us. The lifestyle has always been dangerous but in recent years the displacement of heroin by synthetic opiates has made it far more so for those who use hard drugs. I’m fortunate to have gotten away from that when I did. I talked to somebody at the party about an exciting harm reduction project to translate certain freight riding guides into Spanish so that they will be accessible to migrants making the perilous journey from Central America by rail.

The first time I became aware that frogs might be my totem animal was when I went to Mount Palomar in San Diego for sixth grade camp. Boys my age were wantonly plucking them from the pond and torturing and killing them. I had some experience with people being cruel to animals and while it was always disturbing nothing had seemed to provoke such a visceral reaction.

Frogs had fascinated me long before this but I only read the definition of a totem as something it would be unthinkable to eat fairly recently. It seemed to perfectly connect the dots on something I’ve always been aware of to some degree.

Dead Frogs…

I wouldn’t say that I’m comfortable with the people I care about dying but to a certain degree I am at peace with it. Rather than hoping that no one would die at all, which feels unrealistic, I hope that those who do die can experience the same sort of peace – that they can be satisfied with the time and manner in which they pass. I had been talking to Will a couple of years before his overdose when he was using a lot of drugs and feeling suicidal.

I told him that if he wanted to die he should die on a train doing something crazy instead of alone in a room from the same drugs that were killing everybody else. At the time this advice seemed to help him. I don’t know if he would have preferred this to what ended up happening – it certainly would have been a lot more painful and less peaceful.

I was listening to the City of Rails podcast where rail workers talk about finding bodies and seeing people commit suicide by train. I definitely wouldn’t have wanted one of them to be subjected to something like that and I doubt Will would have either. I talked to the friend that found him – she was tortured by it for a long time and probably still is.

LaPorsha gets really emotional when she reads about acquaintances dying from overdoses online or people talk about it in documentaries. I put her through a lot, needing to be narcanned more times than I can count, the last time my hands and feet were starting to twist in weird ways from lack of oxygen so I must have been close. I know this makes it seem like I was suicidal or took life for granted but it never felt that way to me.

I don’t think Will would have wanted things to end the way they did, none of us did.

That’s it…

Part One

Part Two

Once Billy had been taken into custody and the police had left we went back to the RV to get out of town in it before the woman who had just punched him got around to refocusing her rage on us being parked outside her house. The police were trying to convince us to hang around town long enough to testify:

“We’ve been trying to get Billy Scott for a while, he’s a real bad dude”

There was no way that was going to happen. We’d seen enough of Billy’s social standing to not worry too much about anybody retaliating on his behalf but we’d seen enough of Banning in general to want to get out of it as soon as possible. We also didn’t know when he’d be getting back out and our RV stuck out like a sore thumb. The last thing we wanted was to wake up to him knocking on the side door.

We headed west on Ramsey, the main road that passes through town, until we noticed a couple big rigs pulled off to sleep in a big parking lot behind a Mexican grocery store/taqueria. LaPorsha was pretty tired so we got off here in order to sleep a few hours as well. I went into the store for something and somebody thought I looked hungry and bought me a plate of tacos.

I basically always look hungry which is a useful trait to have while homeless. The whole time we lived in the desert anytime we were broke and wanted food I only had to sit outside of an In-N-Out for a few minutes and somebody would approach me and offer to buy me a meal. The fact that it’s a Christian fast food place and I look a lot like popular depictions of Jesus definitely helped. It made me really good at flying a sign as well.

When I brought the tacos back to the RV LaPorsha told me that a car full of young Mexican kids had pulled up close to scope it out and then sped off when they realized somebody was actually inside. They were probably scoping it out for a burglary but they could have been acquaintances of Billy’s as well. Either option was a good reason to keep moving.

Continuing west on Ramsey we crossed the division into Beaumont. Plenty of Beaumont looks as run down and scummy as Banning does but the east side of town is mostly big box stores and cleaned up parking lots. The part of any freeway town that is designed more for through traffic than the residents themselves. We recognized a Food4Less that we‘d pulled off at before on one of our many trips between Los Angeles and either Thousand Palms or Joshua Tree and parked on the side to get groceries.

While we were hanging around this parking lot I’d been keeping my eye on a group of homeless folks across the street who were hanging out in front a doughnut shop that only opened for mornings. When a beat up but classic Cadillac pulled up and they became visibly excited I figured that I would walk over and see if I could finally find the heroin we’d been fiending for.

The reality was a lot more wholesome and innocent. The two older Black guys in the Cadillac had a large metal bowl of some of the shittiest looking weed imaginable sitting between them, it was practically trim, and were doling out little bags of it for two to five dollars. Nobody seemed particularly offended that I was approaching them or asking about harder drugs but none of them knew anything about finding it either.

A young homeless woman who was visibly caked in grime but otherwise healthy looking, even her teeth were near perfect, suggested we hit the gas station for some beers instead:

“You could always do alcohol and if you get something like a Heineken it’s got electrolytes that should help you with the sickness and keep you hydrated!”

I appreciated the idiosyncratic inaccuracies in her advice but it wasn’t particularly helpful. We weren’t really sick but now that I think about it I don’t think I ever drank so much as a single beer the whole time we were in the low desert. The weather didn’t make it seem particularly appealing.

[Author’s Note: I just looked it up and apparently most beers do contain trace amounts of electrolytes but any benefit is counteracted by the alcohol. Apparently non-alcoholic beers with extra electrolytes added are being marketed as workout recovery beverages.]

It was already getting toward evening again and we didn’t see any other RVs or big diesel trucks in the parking lot so we figured they probably kicked overnighters out and we might as well move ourselves before they had a chance to. I don’t think we were actually aware that there was a Walmart around the corner but we might have seen the sign. When we did find it we knew we’d be good for overnight parking at least one night and were both still pretty tired.

This was where where the meth psychosis started to kick in. I’ve mentioned the fact that Billy basically never stopped talking for 24 straight hours but I haven’t actually gone into what that sounded like. His voice was essentially pre-crackhead: if you think of the stereotypical deep, gruff and sardonic crackhead voice as a kind of cheap brandy then Billy’s register could be compared to whatever questionable wine product it was distilled from.

Some of the qualities were certainly there but it hadn’t fully matured or however you want to put it. He had one or two little catchphrases that were actually pretty funny but no matter how hard me and LaPorsha tried we couldn’t quite remember them. Mostly I just remember him never even letting five minutes go by without bothering me for something.

“Ay, Ossian! Lemme get one of them rods!”

“Ay, Ossian! Come do another shot!”

“Ay, Ossian! Go ahead and check that account again, put it on speaker!”

At some point during that first night at Walmart we thought that we were starting to hear that voice again. At first we figured that we were just imagining it or maybe we were mistaking someone else’s voice as we were in a crowded parking lot in what was essentially the other side of the same methed out town. After a certain number of times of thinking we’d heard it we started to fall prey to a specific paranoid delusion.

Our RV had large storage compartments along the bottom that we referred to as belly boats (the name comes from a somewhat twee girl pop band from Santa Cruz). They locked on one side but the doors on the other set had ripped completely off the first time we took it onto a freeway. It was a minor miracle they didn’t cause an accident or catch the attention of CHP when they fell directly into an active traffic lane.

We started to convince ourselves that Billy had somehow made bail, discovered our current location and used the broken belly boats to climb into the RV’s undercarriage and await an opportunity for revenge. I can’t remember which one of us fabricated this idea first but soon enough we were egging each other on – every time one of us thought they heard the voice coming up through the floor we’d ask the other if they heard it and we were both particularly suggestion prone.

I hardly need to go into all the reasons that this particular hypothesis is patently ridiculous but I’ll do it anyway. First off Billy had just gotten his drugs confiscated and lost his proceeds from the checks so he would have had no recourse to bribe a community that essentially hated him to either bail him out or bring him to Beaumont.

On top of that I had already observed him being too lazy to even walk from the center of a block to the stop sign at the corner if the grade was too steep so it was extremely unlikely he’d submit to the discomfort of either squeezing into some tight, hidden space or waiting there for any extended period of time.

If anything he would have showed up loudly banging on our door.

This particular Walmart clearly had issues with campers outstaying their welcome because early the next morning we were approached by parking lot security and informed that we needed to be gone by the afternoon. We saw some truckers taking sleep breaks near the back of a Kohl’s across the street so we figured its lot was probably less monitored. We would end up living back there for at least a month but the manager did start taping warnings to our door and sending police toward the end of it.

This parking lot was essentially empty apart from a truck or two parked a decent distance from us so when we continued to think we heard the voice we were totally convinced it had to be coming from somewhere in the RV. At certain points we even thought we heard multiple voices and started to think that Billy had brought at least one accomplice to hide somewhere in the RV with him.

When it got dark again a couple of crowded cars showed up and began circling the parking lot while blasting music and indistinctly yelling out the windows. In retrospect this was just local teenagers taking advantage of the unmonitored nature of the lot to drink and cut loose but in our paranoia we thought the cars were crowded with Billy’s associates and were taunting us before moving in for whatever revenge our imaginations could conjure.

Eventually the cars moved on but the voices showed no sign of abating. We grabbed whatever makeshift weapons we had lying around and clutched them tightly while shouting to the air to stop fucking with us and bring it on because we were ready for them. It would be embarrassing enough if we spent the remainder of the night like this but we ended up escalating things even further.

We were both convinced that somebody had to be hiding somewhere inside the RV and LaPorsha decided to call the police once again. I’d been trying to use my cell phone to confirm whether or not Billy was still in custody but wasn’t sure about his full legal name. Banning and Beaumont have separate police departments and although the locals had heard a little bit about the prior incident they were unable to tell us about his current status.

They sent over a couple of officers to see what was going on.

When they showed up their general energy was irritated and incredulous but beneath that they were obviously frightened themselves. It wasn’t so much that they thought somebody might be hiding somewhere within the RV as it was the fact that the RV creeped them out in general. They were clearly reluctant to so much as set foot on it. We eventually decided to all search it together.

The indoor lights should have been charged up as we had recently been driving but maybe it hadn’t been for long enough or we were having issues with the cabin batteries – either way it was completely dark in there. When we all made our way to the rearmost bedroom area by flashlight beams I opened the largest closet and thought I saw someone crouched down inside of it with an angry expression on their face. When I yelled out in surprise we all instinctively ran back off the RV.

Once outside the two officers’ fear shifted back to annoyance and they wanted to go back and check. It turned out to be a large jacket on a coat hanger. At that point their suspicions were confirmed that we were simply on drugs and seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. They left in a hurry without any attempt to search us for contraband or check us for outstanding warrants. They seemed a little embarrassed that they had allowed themselves to be infected by our paranoia but also really didn’t like being anywhere near the RV or the people on it.

At first we rationalized that Billy and/or whatever friends of his had been hiding in there had silently slipped out and run away when they heard police arriving but it wasn’t long before the simpler explanation sank in. Neither of us had experienced this level of stimulant induced psychosis before, nor have we since, and even remembering it as exactly that there is no denying how real it all felt as it was happening.

By the time we woke up the next day there was no longer any doubt that we had imagined every part of it. By that point the meth had worn off completely. There was no longer any pretense that we were going through any level of opiate withdrawal but of course we still wanted to find our preferred drugs. We eventually did find it in the area but only once or twice and never anything particularly worthwhile.

I have no idea how long Billy stayed in custody but he never showed up for revenge and after a couple days we barely even thought about him anymore. Out of all the characters from the Banning adventure we only ever ran into the woman with the drastic makeup job. LaPorsha saw her near the Walmart entrance on the first or second day.

“I heard what happened with Billy! He’s crazy, I could never stand that guy!”

Typical tweaker politics – everybody hates everybody else unless it’s directly to their face. There is a much more cogent demonstration of this phenomenon in one of my earlier pieces called “White Tiger’s House”

A few days after we’d moved over to Kohl’s we felt like going to a movie theater. When we looked it up the only nearby option was a cheap little two screen cinema back in Banning. We took a bus over and watched Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – that huge disappointment to fans of The Fifth Element and Chinese investors alike.

It was in a little scrap of downtown Banning that had a sort of “Old Town” feel and was a lot nicer than the methed out blight neighborhoods that had dominated our first 24 hours. Well maintained lawns, brick buildings, bronze historical interest plaques and that sort of thing. The other patrons at the movie were also strikingly upscale in comparison to what we’d seen: older, predominantly white and seemingly well educated. Basically an NPR crowd.

We hadn’t bothered to make sure the bus would actually be running to take us back. It’s probable that we had missed the final trip of the day but after waiting for a couple hours one of the cops from the incident a few days earlier saw us and offered us a ride. He reiterated that they were really hoping we would stick around town long enough to testify at the trial in a couple of months.

The request seems a little odd considering that he knew we lived in an RV, were essentially vagrants and had at least associated with a known drug user. If the goal was to reduce the local population of undesirables they would be essentially gaining two in exchange for a crack at putting one away long term. At the same time we didn’t know what Billy had done or been rumored to do in the past but the general energy toward him suggested it was something somewhat serious.

We were able to confirm that he had been in custody the entire time and there was no chance he had been anywhere near our RV in Beaumont.

The night we called the Beaumont police I got the vibe that there was a bit of bad blood between the departments of the neighboring towns but this confirmed it. When we told the cop where we were parked at he told us that he could only take us as far as the Banning side of the four way intersection by the Food 4 Less. He said the Beaumont police got upset if they saw marked cars from Banning making incursions into their territory.

I was asking LaPorsha why we ended up hanging around Beaumont for as long as we did but neither of us could think of a particular reason. The RV had been struggling with running hot but it wasn’t to the point that we couldn’t have at least moved another town or two over. I guess we just got comfortable: our parking spot was discreet and although there were a few other homeless that hung around the shopping center none of them ever bothered us or tried to break in.

The shopping center gave way to a large field with a long abandoned construction project just at the edge of the Kohl’s lot so it basically felt like being out in the open desert. The hedge on the side of us was home to a colony of rabbits and we could watch the young ones grazing if we were out in the early mornings. A mated pair of barn owls made their home just above the Kohl’s loading docks and most nights we could sit outside and watch them circle over their hunting grounds.

I remember being mystified by their calls at first, thinking that it sounded like hollow metal poles getting clinked together. Once I discovered the source of the sound it became my favorite thing about living there and the first thing I’d say when describing it. I never saw any grackles in our lot, they were only over by the Walmart, and I don’t know if they purposefully avoid owls but they are active at opposite times of day and night.

Now that I think about it the grackles seem to only hang around the Walmart in the closest city to me too. The first time I ever saw grackles and came to know them by their long elegant tails and peculiar calls was in a Walmart parking lot in Texas. I think it’s just a grackle thing – for whatever reason they just really like Walmarts.

Part One

We spent most of the first day in Billy’s small dark garage. He had some kind of stereo in there and must have put on music but I don’t have any memory of what it was. It could have been oldies, old school rap or even death metal. It was difficult to take in any of these kinds of details because for two solid days Billy never stopped talking or pressuring everybody to shoot more meth.

The first two people to show up were this chola girl whose name I forgot and her boyfriend Mouse. Mouse looked like any young Latin gangbanger dude in a uniform that has scarcely changed since the ‘80s: shell toe adidas, wide leg Dickies with a canvas belt, a black short sleeve button up over a ribbed tank top and dark, blocky shades for when he needed to hide how spun he was. He had ear length black hair and a little bit of ink: probably an area code or neighborhood name in tall, thin Old English letters.

Mouse is one of those prototypical street names that you will find at least one of in every town like Spider, Sleepy and Smokey. Much like the dwarves in Disney’s Snow White, vatos get named for some conspicuous mannerism or physical attribute. They would have called him Mouse because he was small and quiet – good at sneaking up on people.

Mouse and his girlfriend showed up with a little bit of meth that Billy pressured them to pull out because his big bag hadn’t showed up yet. This might have even been before he’d asked me if I had a checking account and we’d gotten the two hundred dollars – the early parts of the timeline are kind of blurry. Billy was already aware that we had a couple of bags worth of clean syringes, he called them “rods”, so he was constantly trying to pressure everybody into shooting their drugs.

Mouse’s girlfriend didn’t want him doing it like that:

“Every time he shoots this shit he ends up wanting to fight somebody!”

They wanted to smoke it but didn’t have a pipe. Billy said that there was one somewhere in his garage but somebody had made it themselves and it didn’t really look like one. Mouse started digging around through his stuff:

“Does it look like a rig?”

I can’t imagine how it would be possible to create a working meth pipe from a plastic syringe. Maybe you could clip the barrel off under the needle and use it to lengthen a broken stem if the diameters fit together. I used to cut them off there to create a kind of panpipe/slide whistle hybrid that has a surprisingly nice sound but isn’t the kind of thing you’d want to play in mixed company.

If anybody wants to try it you just clip it off the top and blow over it while moving the plunger up and down to change the pitch. When I first started using IV drugs in Chicago it was part of a performance idea I had called The Turning Blue Man Group. The name is a reference to what happens to your skin color during a heroin overdose and the joke was to do a thing like The Blue Man Group but all the instruments are made of drug paraphernalia. The sound would have been rounded out by spoons and cookers for percussion and some kind of twanging harp made out of rubber tourniquets.

Anyway the thing in Billy’s garage just turned out to be another broken syringe. If there ever had been a hand made meth pipe to begin with it didn’t turn up and Billy was able to pressure Mouse and his girlfriend into injecting. One other friend of Billy’s showed up: a slightly older Black guy who somehow looked clean cut and completely scummy at the same time in a way that is difficult to quantify if you haven’t spent a lot of time around homeless drug addicts.

We had been asking everybody that showed up if they knew how to find heroin but nobody in Billy’s circle seemed to fuck with it or know people that did. We should have taken that as a sign of the way things were going to go but we didn’t have any other leads and needed to hang around until the checks cleared so we could finish splitting the money anyway. We weren’t sick to the point of extreme nausea and vomiting – honestly I don’t think we had much of a physical habit at the time at all. We just wanted to get high.

The only reason that I’m sure the whole thing lasted two days is that I’ve done the found check thing with different people I’ve met a few times and it always takes two business days for the checks to clear. The time we spent in the garage all runs together and it could have just as easily lasted until the first afternoon or all the way to the morning of the second day. I mostly tuned Billy’s voice out after a couple of hours but I do remember him saying one thing that was particularly ridiculous:

“I don’t know guys I think we might be on the wrong drugs and need to go back to crack. I been seeing crackheads driving cars and shit! How long’s it been since any of y’all had a car?”

He was talking to his Banning tweaker friends and not us at this point: we had a functioning RV. After meeting Billy on that first morning he had recommended that we re-park in an overgrown alley behind a vacant business so it would be out of sight of any busybody neighbors that might call the city on it. The RV was big, totally fucked up on one side of the body and very loud when it was starting up or idling so it reliably pulled in negative attention any time it drifted into residential streets.

Eventually we all walked down to the closest Dollar General to get some snacks and beverages and then started hanging out on the RV instead. On the walk over the guy I’d described as clean cut but scummy tried to throw a little shade:

“You ever buy deodorant? The next time you have some money you should buy some. I’m not trying to be rude but you’re smelling musty!”

We’d all been shooting meth in a hot garage all day so nobody was smelling especially good. After a few hours you start sweating the drugs out and giving off a pungent chemical odor. A friend once compared it to furniture polish but was referring more to the flavor after somebody had unexpectedly dissolved some in his soy milk.

After we’d been hanging around the RV for a while Mouse approached me to ask about paying us to move onto it. We weren’t parked anywhere that seemed like it could work out long term and the layout of the RV didn’t lend itself to any form of privacy but the whole thing came off as an unrealistic spun out idea anyway. He was fairly young – maybe his parents had just kicked him out and he’d been floating around different friends houses trying to figure out how to cope with suddenly finding himself homeless.

He also promised that he would find a way to locate heroin or “your kind of dope” as he called it and provide us with it as an additional form of rent but he clearly had no idea how to actually do that. An hour or so before asking me this he had started to look spaced out and paranoid and disappeared for a little while. I’d assumed that he’d gone on a short walk to clear his head.

I walked around to the back of the RV for some reason, maybe to take a piss, and found a big orange folding knife on the ground under the spare tire. My first thought was that it had probably been there long before we’d backed into the parking space and I clipped it onto my belt as a lucky come up. When I came back into the RV Mouse saw the knife and told me that it was his and he’d been looking for it.

I didn’t put it together immediately but this basically meant that when he had disappeared for a while earlier he was probably crouched in the alley behind our RV while nervously clutching his knife. It wasn’t in a spot where it could have fallen off his pants while taking a piss or anything – he would have had to have been directly underneath the window of the RV’s rear bedroom. He seemed pretty bugged out when he’d wandered off but I hadn’t realized how close he’d probably gotten to just randomly stabbing one of us.

Like his girlfriend said he probably shouldn’t have been shooting meth.

While all of this was going on Billy had gotten some other tweaker acquaintance to pick him up and take him to some other random spots around town – ostensibly to find us heroin. Only one of us could go with him for these errands so LaPorsha went while I stayed with the RV and I only have second hand descriptions of these next bits. I’m pretty sure the actual purpose of these trips was for Billy to sell off small amounts of his sandwich bag full of shitty meth.

The driver was a blonde tweaker lady who Billy saw driving past while we were hanging out on the RV and shouted down. She didn’t really want to stop or have anything to do with Billy but he dangled the bag in her face and she agreed to drive him somewhere in exchange for getting her high. As they were driving LaPorsha noticed an obsidian globe in her center console exactly like the one I had gotten her at Teotihuacan.

“Whoa, I’ve got one of those just like that!”

The woman’s body language immediately changed and she started rapidly giving a convoluted explanation of how she had gotten it. Billy mentioned that our RV had just gotten broken into and burglarized. We hadn’t even had enough time to figure out everything that was missing apart from some obvious things like suitcases but the women’s reaction basically confirmed that it must have been ours.

“Well… you can have it.”

LaPorsha told her to just keep it, having already gotten over the fact that everything taken off the RV was already gone. The woman pulled up to her house to quickly grab her meth pipe – it was a stereotypical white trash tweaker/hoarder shack with a bunch of kids running around and junk piled everywhere. Billy made her bring the pipe out to the car because if she’d gone inside to smoke she probably would have just locked the door and waited for him to leave.

LaPorsha had to pee and asked if she could run inside to use the bathroom. The woman feigned embarrassment about how messy the inside of her house was and said she’d be better off looking for a spot outside. In retrospect she was probably nervous that LaPorsha would recognize more things in the house as having been lifted directly from our RV.

LaPorsha went around the side of the house and squatted down to pee when she heard giggling behind her. The kids were all gawking at her from out of the windows. They asked her who she was and she told them that she’d shown up with Billy and their mom or older sister. The kids, all boys between about eight and twelve years old, ran out to the driveway to make fun of Billy.

“You’re an ugly nigger!”

“What? Who taught you guys to say that? You can’t say that! I ought to kick your ass!”

The kids ran away laughing. The way that LaPorsha described it she said that the kids didn’t appear to be racist so much as deliberately trying to piss Billy off because they saw him as clownish and unlikely to retaliate. The kind of grown up that children instinctively identify as beneath respect.

Billy had been asking the driver where he might be able to find some heroin and she suggested he try an older Mexican woman who lived on the more rural edge of town and used to be a major heroin dealer. Her house was on a cul-de-sac with a couple of other farmhouses. The kind of area where the houses are still pretty close together but everybody has a lot of space in the back and usually keep horses or something.

When this lady saw Billy she immediately said that he had to leave and couldn’t be there but he dangled his bag of meth in her face as well. She pulled Billy and LaPorsha into the garage and said they could only stay for a minute. She didn’t have any heroin, she’d stopped selling after a recent arrest, but told LaPorsha she might be able to help her get some later.

She was nervous about her husband discovering that Billy was there. Everyone in the area seemed to have a general distaste for him and didn’t want him around but nobody went into details about what he’d specifically done to earn his reputation. He was a tweaker but so was every other person they came into contact with – if nothing else it seemed like he was the “worst tweaker”.

LaPorsha described this older Mexican woman as kind of “hippyish”but when I pressed her for details it sounded more like she was the kind of older tweaker lady that is into dragon sculptures and fantasy art and owl paintings. My friend in San Diego had a meth dealer that was basically like that too – Celtic knot tapestries and Hildebrandt posters and calendars on the wall. The first time I ever saw Castlevania – Symphony of the Night this San Diego lady was playing it if that gives a better idea of the general aesthetic.

The woman quickly chopped up a line of meth and warned Billy not to sell any to her sons who were all teenagers and promptly showed up and bought dime bags of meth from him. A minute later they were all smoking it in the garage as well – the warning had evidently been an empty one. LaPorsha described them as all fairly generic vato types: shaved heads, wifebeaters and wide leg denim shorts. Billy asked them if they could get any heroin and disappeared with a couple of them for a minute.

While he was gone the lady asked LaPorsha how she knew him and gave her a vague and general warning about being around him. She gave LaPorsha her phone number, hinting that she might be able to set us up with one of her old connects, but it seemed like she was more intending to offer help if she needed to get away from Billy later. After the whole ordeal was over she either lost the phone or thought differently about helping because she never picked up or returned the calls.

Billy came back and claimed that one of the sons had ended up having a dime bag of heroin. When LaPorsha asked to see it he only quickly flashed it for her to see from a distance and insisted on cooking it into a shot for her. I think it was probably just some random substance to darken a shot of meth and trick her into taking it because for whatever reason he was obsessed with constantly getting everyone around him to shoot more meth. She didn’t seem like she’d done any heroin when she came back to the RV.

LaPorsha never learned how to inject anything herself and I only did it for her a small handful of times because her veins were almost impossible to hit. Part of it is that I’m not particularly experienced with finding veins under dark skin but I know that it’s more than that because the phlebotomists seem to struggle any time she needs labs done. They also do with me but I know for a fact that I’ve destroyed mine – she’s taken IV drugs so few times that hers have to be just naturally difficult.

Regardless of this she said that Billy was making a sadistic face while helping her inject the “heroin” and seemed to miss a small part of the shot on purpose. It’s lucky that he didn’t make it particularly strong because her IV meth tolerance would be a lot lower than mine and I only shot the stuff extremely infrequently as it was. The whole situation was reckless on both our parts but we wanted dope and were being stupid.

He started talking to LaPorsha about how much he hated seeing her on heroin and how he wanted to help her get off it and how cool she was and basically trying to make a move on her. The attempt was somewhat laughable because even though we were homeless in an RV his life seemed objectively worse than ours in every meaningful way. After all a few hours earlier he had talked about being envious of crackheads because they could manage to keep a running car.

There is an eternal rivalry where tweakers and junkies have a general contempt for both each other and the preferred drugs of their counterparts. I can confirm this as I love heroin but absolutely despise meth and tweakers. Neither group is above taking the other kind of drugs when offered but the animosity is always there.

The original driver had disappeared the moment Billy stepped into the garage probably figuring that she’d already gotten smoked up and this was her best opportunity to get rid of him. The older Mexican lady drove him and LaPorsha back to the RV because she wanted to get rid of him as well and knew that he’d hang around even if she kicked him out.

I had been expecting them to come back with heroin but once they’d gotten back and I’d had a minute to talk to LaPorsha it started to become evident that his assurances that he could find it for us were pretty much bullshit. We were just killing time until the checks cleared and we could give him the rest of his half and part ways – he was very vocal about not letting us out of his sight until this had happened.

When he’d made a couple more phone calls and offered a convoluted explanation about how he might be able to find us some if we drove over to the east side of Banning we decided to say fuck it and made the drive. I can’t remember if we had to put a little bit of gas in the RV or if there was already enough in the tank to cover the distance. It’s a minor miracle that we didn’t return to find every drop of gas already siphoned out of it but people unfamiliar with the vehicle probably wouldn’t realize that the tank is accessed underneath the fold-down rear license plate.

East Banning seemed like it was the more Mexican side of town – Mouse and his girlfriend ended up hopping out here because it was the neighborhood they either lived in or hung around. I can’t remember when the deodorant guy left but he was already gone by the time we made the drive over. It was dark at this point – we parked outside of a couple of houses and Billy sold off a couple more small bags of meth but nobody actually wanted him or our RV around.

At one point somebody pointed to some street lights at the top of a hill and said that we could probably find some heroin if we walked up to that neighborhood but it was dangerous and they didn’t want to go with us. The explanation wasn’t particularly compelling. A Black woman with an intense amount of foundation got on the RV for a bit and bought a small bag of meth from Billy that she smoked out of a misshapen homemade pipe that may well have been the one he thought was in his garage earlier.

We started to make our way back to the side of town we’d started on. I can’t exactly remember how many times we stopped – it was a lot of just following his directions and suddenly stopping if he recognized a house or somebody walking down the street. He probably had us stop at a couple of houses where either nobody was home or they pretended not to be and waited for him to leave.

At one point he disappeared for a minute and came back with a surprisingly clean and well to do looking white woman. This would have been a perfect opportunity to just drive off but I was determined to honor the terms of our agreement which turned out to be stupid because he turned out not to be. He said that she helped him find a lot of his checks – not exactly scam checks but checks that were diverted from their intended purpose.

He mostly seemed excited to show off to us that he had a white girlfriend and show off to her that he’d gotten somebody with an RV to drive him around but nobody seemed particularly impressed. He asked her if she knew how to find any heroin and she said that there was a nearby house full of college kids that seemed like they might use it and were usually up all night. It was getting toward three in the morning and knocking on the door of a house where nobody actually knew anybody didn’t sound particularly appealing.

After we left her he was out of ideas for people he could bother until it was morning again so we pulled onto a more inconspicuous street somewhere to wait. At this point I wanted to just try to fall asleep for a few hours which is a testament both to how truly shitty his meth was and how dope sick I wasn’t. He kept trying to get me to do another shot with him but I was completely uninterested then tried to get me to just help him hit but I wasn’t about to do that either.

I lost count of how many times he reinjected himself in the duration of time that we were stuck with him but he seemed to do it compulsively at least every couple of hours if not more. His behavior was almost identical to what you would see in somebody in the throes of an IV cocaine binge despite the stark differences in the lifespan and rush of the two drugs.

Eventually I just went to lie down in the back with LaPorsha and tuned him out as he either muttered to himself or kept calling my name and continued to try to hit with his now-bloody shot of methamphetamine in a puddle of his own sweat. The woman with the tragic makeup and janky looking pipe kept pleading with him to stop and told him that she cared about him and didn’t like seeing him like that but he kept at it and eventually either got it or missed it. At some point before sunrise she wandered off the RV as well.

Billy had been badgering me all night to check my bank account every half hour or so despite the common knowledge of any person that has ever waited for a check to clear that the funds are only ever posted at the start of a business day. I’ve been telling myself that this entire encounter lasted at least 48 hours because checks always seem to take two days to clear but me and LaPorsha both remember it as one long day so it must have been closer to 24. It was probably before nine in the morning when we first deposited them but I can’t imagine one or two hours in the morning count as an entire business day.

Looking at all the evidence it seems like they just cleared faster than usual, maybe it’s a smaller town thing.

When nine in the morning came back around we were parked outside what Billy said was his cousin’s house. Just before this he had run onto a porch to talk to someone and come back with what he claimed was less than a point of heroin. Like the earlier situation with LaPorsha he refused to let me closely examine it and insisted on cooking it up himself.

Once again it was almost certainly some random bullshit he found to darken up a shot of meth with. I tasted a tiny drop of the liquid on my tongue and didn’t detect even the faintest hint of the vinegar flavor of black tar heroin. I can’t remember if I shot it anyway or not but if I did there wouldn’t have been too much meth in it. Insane as it was his bag was running low – even though he had only sold out a scattering of nickels and dimes.

He had somehow managed to run through most of a half ounce in a single span of twenty four hours almost entirely from shooting it himself.

Some younger teenagers, a white girl and Asian guy, came sneaking out of the house to see if Billy had any marijuana and could help them buy some alcohol. He gave them a roach he had somewhere and got ready to walk down toward his garage and the Dollar General that served as the neighborhood’s liquor store. The Chase was in the same direction so I came along to settle up and get us away from the bullshit and chaos.

Billy sent the girl, she couldn’t have been older than 14 or so, to keep an eye on me while I handled the ATM stuff. I calculated what his half of the proceeds should come out to then deducted 200 for the funds he’d already received and withdrew the remainder of his cash. I could have easily taken all of it out to more clearly demonstrate the steps and calculations with a tactile visual aid but had a premonition that arriving with extra cash on top of Billy’s portion could prove regrettable.

He was not thrilled when he counted $180 dollars in a folded receipt explaining that $380 remained in the bank in my personal account. This was entirely on the up and up – standard clauses for this kind of arrangement are always a straight 50/50 split. We both got exactly 380 but his came as two payments of 200 and 180 received on two separate mornings.

For whatever reason it was Billy’s devout belief that only a payment of one half of all funds remaining would be satisfactory. Perhaps he was greedy, disappointed in how quickly he had burned through his drug bag or honestly never understood the math. He proposed an entirely untenable solution:

“We gotta just forget that two hundred dollars. That’s yesterday, that’s gone. The money in the account today – we each take half of that!”

I explained that it would be impossible to forget the two hundred dollars considering the entirety of that sum had gone into his pocket and I’d received none of it. If he found the math less confusing I could pull a second 200 for myself from the remainder and then we could evenly split whatever was left. In a manner we were already doing this but a few notes and diagrams could have explained the math more.

Honestly I think he understood the math perfectly and just sort of decided he deserved another two hundred and eighty dollars today and would not budge from that number. He started attempting to throw in other arguments – that he had shared his drugs, taken us around town and tried to find us heroin and all of this goodwill must earn him a higher portion. I explained of course that we never asked for or particularly wanted any of his meth, the rides were in our vehicle and only actually benefited him by allowing him to sell his drugs and of course that “looking” only counts when it ends in actually finding the desired drugs.

He was not to be swayed and his voice took on a darker tone as he warned me that if I didn’t give him his fair half he would have to resort to unpleasantness he would prefer to avoid. I don’t know the history between Billy and the young girl he’d brought back to his garage but the way she started pleading with me to just give him the money so he wouldn’t “do anything bad” seemed to hint at her having viewed or experienced either violence, extortion or other reasons to be afraid of him.

The one thing I can say for sure is that she seemed genuinely scared in these moments. I was not. I think I saw enough rational thought and cost/benefit analysis in his eyes to show me he would stop at intimidation rather than risk the much heavier consequences for possibly harming me physically. I sat calmly, stuck to my guns as it were and refused to attempt a desperate escape of any kind.

He slowly moved his body over me like a slug or starfish and used his superior weight to pin me down and prevent me from fighting back with my limbs. He did have an improvised “shank” in the form of a small screwdriver with a chromed titanium blue finish. It became obvious that he was unprepared to use actual force when this weapon accidentally broke the skin a little bit on my hand and he apologized profusely.

Now that I was immobilized he went to run my pockets and took my ID, Debit card and an expired EBT Card that was actually LaPorsha’s. He handed the debit card to the young girl and instructed her to remove all the money from the account once he had forced me to reveal my PIN number. Whatever else might have been happening it was disturbing enough how quickly he was ready to include a young and clearly frightened child in his violent illegal schemes.

We walked back to the bank and I gave the girl a sequence of three incorrect PIN numbers so that the ATM would freeze the card for too many failed attempts. I made sure to position myself in clear view of both the cameras and bank workers through the windows. When Billy started to rage I said that the girl must have mixed up the PIN numbers in her nervousness and quickly speed walked out of the parking lot.

He tried to follow me but a heavyset Mexican woman came storming up and decked him in the face:

“Oh hell no! I told you to stay the fuck away from my daughter! The police are on the way!”

I took the opportunity to get back up the hill and tell LaPorsha everything that had just happened. She told me that people had been coming to the RV all morning looking for Billy. First it was the Asian kid wondering where Billy and the girl went and dropping off a beer that was supposed to be his.

Next was the woman I’d just seen punching Billy in the face. This was the person Billy had been referring to as his cousin but this seemed unlikely because she was light skinned Mexican and he was Black. She was pissed about the RV and threatened to call the police if it wasn’t moved but when she heard that we’d been with Billy and realized her daughter was gone she went ballistic.

Apparently Billy had been warned multiple times that he wasn’t supposed to be around her at all, much less making her party to scams and extortion. Nobody ever said explicitly that he had a reputation for molesting underage girls but it would fit his character and the general energy that all of the locals seemed to have toward him. His “cousin” went storming down the hill to get her daughter and deal with Billy.

“I’m about to go fuck him up!”

When I told LaPorsha what just happened she said that we also needed to call the police on him. I wouldn’t have thought of it myself but it was absolutely warranted in the situation. The 50/50 split in our arrangement was both standard precedent for that kind of deal and something we’d both agreed to so he had broken “street code” first by demanding more and using violence to try to get it. He was clearly about to get arrested anyway and this was the only way I’d be able to get back the ID and Debit Card he’d just stolen.

I called it in, gave a description and told them I’d last seen him in the Chase parking lot. They told me to head down to meet officers in the lot. By the time we got down there the first set of officers that his “cousin” had called were already on the scene and were watching appreciatively as she continued to kick his ass.

A couple other cars arrived and one of the officers contacted me to give a statement in the back of one of their cars. I left out anything about the drugs or checks – I basically said that we were homeless and passing through town in our RV and he had offered to show us around and introduce us to people. I said a money transfer had hit my account that morning and I’d taken out cash to get enough gas to keep moving in the large RV.

From there my story stuck pretty close to the truth. I told them how he’d threatened and overpowered me, run my pockets and tried to intimidate me into revealing my PIN number including how he had pulled the underage girl into the middle of the whole thing. He still had all of my cards and even the exact same blue screwdriver that he had threatened me with in his pockets. They gave back all of my cards but held onto the $180 in cash as “evidence”.

The officers said that they’d been wanting to get him for a while and repeated the same general thing everybody in town had been saying about Billy being dangerous and best avoided without going into any specifics either. Billy didn’t say anything about the checks, probably figuring he didn’t need to tack on any extra charges for himself or reveal his main source of illegal income, but he did tell the cops we’d been using drugs together.

He probably was stupid enough to leave the rest of his meth in his pocket along with the weapon he’d used to essentially mug me while going to try to pull money out of somebody else’s account. He must have thought that if he was caught with drugs anyway the fact that I had done some would somehow get him in less trouble. I denied using any drugs with him but even if I’d admitted to it nothing would have changed about the fact that he’d just taken all of my personal documents by force and tried to get into my account.

It’s probably better, karma-wise, that I didn’t get the $180 back and only ended up with my half of the money. Billy would have been a lot better off from a legal standpoint if he’d just been satisfied with his agreed to half although he still would have caught some charges for going off with the girl he’d been warned to stay away from.

Neither me or LaPorsha appeared particularly high to the police at this moment in time but the next couple days would show that the meth left in our systems was having drastic effects psychological effects on us. I’ll get into it in the next chapter – this one has dragged on for long enough.

Part Three Here

We left Thousand Palms under cover of night. The 38 foot RV didn’t have too many mechanical problems but it did have a tendency to overheat. I forget their names but a couple of older normie looking tweakers, shorts and polo shirts types, helped us flush the radiator on our way out in case it would help. We pulled into a car wash that was closed for the night – didn’t even have to use a water key they just left spigots out where you could get at them.

The dudes that were helping us used to cook meth and steal diesel from unattended construction equipment but more recently they were getting by on the strength of having the only RV in the Thousand Palms homeless community with a working air conditioner. If anybody found themselves flush with cash buying gas for their AC unit was a lot cheaper and less restrictive than getting a room at the Red Roof Inn which conveniently meant that the RV dudes were getting kick downs of whatever else that cash might go to – invariably meth and booze.

We were probably the only people living out there who didn’t really drink or use meth and we always tried to just park in the shade and suffer through the heat but we ended up donating to the AC unwittingly. We had been away from our RV for a day or so and when we got back they came over with a gas can and apologetically told us they had “borrowed” a couple of gallons because it was a heat “emergency”.

Obviously we weren’t thrilled about our neighbors siphoning our gas behind our backs but considering that they came clean and gave it back we weren’t going to make too big of a deal out of it. They also invited us over to come hang out in the AC. There was always five or six people sitting around in there and the same DVD looping on a little television by the door. It was a fairly contemporary action/crime movie but no matter how hard I try I can’t seem to remember any other details or what it was called.

I didn’t really like hanging out in there but I ended up passing through a few more times – probably killing time with somebody while we waited for heroin. The last time I was on there Phil, one of the older guys who hung around, had just gotten his social security check and was throwing money around like crazy. I don’t know if it was heat, alcohol, meth or a combination of all three but Phil shit his pants while laying in their hallway.

He offered them more money.

I know this style of “pension partying” is fairly standard for older and veteran homeless but this was the only time I’d ever seen it first hand. Phil’s check was somewhere around two thousand dollars – he probably could have found some kind of housing or bought an RV of his own with that much money but instead he spent a couple of days buying gas for an air conditioner, buying everybody booze, drugs and cigarettes and paying apology money for shitting on someone’s floor.

Anyway these two guys were helping us with the radiator on our way out of town. Around the corner from the car wash the RV stalled out and the guys spent a really long time getting it to jump start again. We were parked on the side of some kind of government building that we had gone to before for LaPorsha to apply for some random job. As I searched for a hose to grab some water for the radiator I noticed a very young raptor watching me from the building’s roof – I’m not positive but I think it was a golden eagle.

Phil was one half of the home bum duo Phil and Reno – Reno had a car on one of the side streets that had already stopped running by the time we arrived. It wasn’t even like they hung out with each other that much but they were the two older unattached homeless men who didn’t keep a stable camp so they were thought of as a unit. Or maybe they spent more time together before we showed up – I only know everybody talked about Phil and Reno but I barely saw them together.

When we lived in East Oakland for a while we named the pair of stray dogs on our block after them. I never really thought about the fact that the human Phil and Reno didn’t actually hang out together until just now when I was writing about it. The dogs named Phil and Reno were always together, running up and down the block, until they just disappeared one day. Somebody must have called the dog catcher. They weren’t hurting anybody.

Anyway we had Reno’s heavy duty jumper cables. We had borrowed them from him ages ago when our little black Mercedes 240 diesel was still working. He hadn’t needed them back because his car was essentially a tent and closet but we needed to give them back to him before cutting town. The guys who were helping us with the radiator told us not to worry about it and assured us they would give them back to Reno for us and we should just hop on the freeway while the RV was running.

That’s a mistake I wouldn’t repeat. If you live in a homeless community and borrow something from a peer never trust a third party to give it back for you. It’s entirely possible that Reno did get his jumper cables back because I never saw the air conditioner RV guys again to check either way. I only know he showed up outside our tent one morning and said he didn’t.

This was during a period of time after most of the events that will pop up in the rest of the story when we lived on the side of a Kohl’s in Beaumont but would leave the RV behind and take a regional bus back to Thousand Palms to find heroin. The bus route only ran twice a day in the morning so we would bring our tent with us and sleep in the brush behind the McDonald’s to catch the bus back to Beaumont in the morning.

Reno woke us up at dawn yelling outside our tent. We were the only homeless people in Thousand Palms that weren’t on meth – Reno had probably been pissed about the jumper cables since we left town and then when he heard we were actually back in town he took it as a personal insult. He was implying that he was going to fight me but the main thing was that he needed the issue to be acknowledged and rectified.

We all kept all of our belongings in tents, bushes and cars and constantly left money with each other while waiting for drug dealers: nobody could afford the reputation that somebody took their shit without consequences.

I explained that I thought he had gotten the jumper cables back and gave him twenty dollars to buy another set. I doubt he would have actually gotten another set as even his broken down car wasn’t around anymore at this point but the whole thing was about principle anyway.

Back to rolling out of Thousand Palms at night: We had a minor breakdown a few miles before the dinosaurs at Cabazon that I wrote about in “A Garbage Bag of Desiccated Flesh” then ended up parked in a field next to an Auto-Zone in Beaumont. We had to get something fixed but I can’t even remember what it was – I just have a vague memory of going into that Auto-Zone for something. Maybe I was replacing a hose or clamp from when the driver’s seat got turned into a sauna the night before.

I can’t remember where we were planning on going when we first left Thousand Palms but the next spot we ended up at was the DHS Office in Banning. Our EBT had timed out a month or so previously and we needed to get it turned back on. After a few hours at the office we decided it would be easier to just go handle everything in Los Angeles. It’s possible we needed to replace our IDs too and Los Angeles had some expedited way for homeless people to do that.

The RV might have been up for the trip but we decided to leave it in Banning and take buses instead. We parked it behind a pawn shop in a lot that seemed rundown enough that nobody would tow it while we were gone. Banning didn’t seem to have a proper Greyhound station but they had a line that picked up directly outside of the DHS Office if you bought a ticket online.

It had been a few years since I had made a counterfeit Ameripass and if the service wasn’t retired by 2017 I still wouldn’t have expected it to still work. I mostly decided to make up the confirmation numbers out of necessity. When I looked up transportation options to Los Angeles it was already too late to buy an online ticket but I had bought enough of them to mimic the format that a pair of seats would have come in: two consecutive numbers and some capital letters abbreviating the origin and destination cities.

When the driver looked over the handwritten codes and let us onboard I figured that little had changed from the days when a random ten digit number on a convincing looking facsimile could get you unlimited free travel. That turned out not to be the case. When we got to an actual station somewhere in the San Gabriel Valley everyone who had boarded in Banning was escorted to a ticket counter to check their reservation numbers and ours came up as fake.

I feigned ignorance and said that somebody had bought the tickets for us but we were forced to pay for the distance we had already travelled and didn’t have enough to cover the trip all the way to Los Angeles. Luckily there was a nearby Metrolink train to take us the rest of the way. There had been one or two smaller stops before this station so theoretically a made up reservation number could have worked for shorter distance travel between two towns without actual Greyhound stations but I never tried it again.

It’s actually surprising that they didn’t have a way for the drivers to verify the numbers on their cell phones in 2017.

When we got to Los Angeles we set our tent up under a 405 bridge near the EBT Office at Pico and Sepulveda. Being in town also gave us the opportunity to cop dope that was a lot stronger than what we were getting in Thousand Palms. When we first got out the desert we’d been making trips back and forth to San Diego in the Mercedes 240.

This plug showed up toward the very end of my IV drug using career but was the closest I ever came to a pure product from over the border. It was what you’d call “huff” – a brown powder that only congealed into tar if you got it hot or breathed on it. Even living in Tijuana never led to that kind of quality.

I found a few people on Craigslist to resell to at enough of a markup that five grams would cover a half ounce’s worth. This was the earliest most carefree days at Thousand Palms when our RV was still parked between all the trucks behind the Flying J station and we were only ever moving around in the cool and quiet nights while the close proximity of other vehicles kept the sun off our windows to sleep through the days.

I’d get loaded and buy giant bags of the gummy blue sharks with marshmallow on the bottom – the kind that look like the sparkly layered tooth paste that was marketed to kids in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I had to make sure to finish them all off at night or the heat of the following day would melt the individual pieces into a sticky unappetizing lump. One of the many reasons that I don’t have teeth anymore.

The transmission on the Mercedes gave out and the Flying J station banished all the RVs to the streets and sunlight and the neon nights abruptly gave way to hot and dusty days of moving every week or so before the police could get around to making us. We weren’t quite in a place where the discontinuation of our southern trips led to physical withdrawal symptoms but after a few days the boredom had us looking around for what was available locally.

I asked Phil in the McDonald’s before we really knew him or anybody else yet. This particular McDonald’s really needed to generate positive reviews on that survey thing they put at the bottom of the receipt so they had put the word out among all the homeless that if we gave them top ratings on everything they would give us a a free meal combo instead of the small fries or whatever it usually is. For as long as that lasted the homeless of Thousand Palms practically lived in there.

Actually there had been a sizable homeless camp behind this McDonald’s that got cleared out around the same time that they stopped giving away the free meals for completed surveys. The interior was the oldest of any McDonald’s I’ve been inside of in the last ten years. No hint of the modernized cafe look and the walls were covered in reproductions of Southwestern Native American Art. Pictures of pueblos and groups of men with long braids and sunglasses.

Anyway I’m getting super side tracked. Phil introduced us to a much younger girl called Alexis with a lot of tattoos who lived in a big camp across the street in an unused plot of land you could access from the Denny’s parking lot. She was sleeping with the only dealer for tar in the area: an older Mexican guy who lived in a motor home and had made the bizarre business move of stepping on his stuff so heavily that he could sell five grams for one hundred dollars.

Trying it was underwhelming after the “huff” that I’d been bringing from San Diego but boredom brought me back around and a few months later it was the only thing I’d been doing. There were only a handful of other homeless who did heroin and everybody would always claim they’d found something other than this guy’s shit but it was always this guy’s shit.

Alexis said she knew what he cut it with and that I’d never guess what it was. I’d try listing off common additives like lactose, brown sugar and instant coffee:

“I’d tell you if you guessed it”

Whatever it was it was relatively harmless because I didn’t start getting constant sores and abscesses until I moved to the Bay Area. It didn’t seem to leave behind any weird residue or insoluble fillers but it was definitely frustratingly watered down. We all wished that he would just charge more and cut less but he had his particular way he liked doing things and wasn’t about to change it.

So when we did cop from our old guy, a heavyset Jewish dude in Beverly Hills, it was a lot stronger than what I’d been used to. I overdosed in our tent and we didn’t have any Narcan so an ambulance had to come revive me and I ended up in the Kaiser by Venice and La Cienaga. I pulled my IV out and left AMA, or against medical advice, it all sounds very extreme but at the time I was used to it, it was almost mundane.

The next day we had finished all of our EBT related errands and were ready to head back to Banning. We made our way to the Greyhound to see what our bus options were but tried to find more dope in Skid Row on the way out of town. I talked to another interracial couple and followed the guy to an SRO where he shouted toward an open window for an older dealer named “Shoeshine”. There was a kind of hipster-ish white lady that was copping from him at the same time, like with Amelie bangs, I remember her slyly flashing the small colored balloon she was holding against her palm with her fingertips.

We thought about quickly setting our tent up to have a more discreet place to shoot up but I ended up just propping up a piece of cardboard to block the view and looking for a vein in my foot. When we got to the Greyhound we were approached by a man trying to make money as an unofficial taxi. I told him that we only had forty dollars and needed to get all the way to Banning but to my surprise he said that would be fine.

He was a friendly and talkative older crackhead. He must have already had a decent amount of gas in his tank and just wanted an excuse to get out of town for a few hours. I forget how it came up that we used heroin but he asked us if we needed any more. I told him that we only had the forty for the ride but he said it was fine and took us to some friends of his that lived in one of those big square Coleman tents to buy another bag. We drove around for a little bit so he could get himself some crack and then we hit the freeway.

Out of the money we gave him only ten dollars ended up in the gas tank. It’s amazing how far he took us for how little but we found rides like that all the time that year. A few months earlier we had needed a ride from Thousand Palms to San Bernardino to retrieve the Mercedes after a mishap with a ride-share person and ended up in a fairly similar situation.

It was still pretty early in the morning when we pulled into the parking lot that we’d left the RV in. The owner of the Pawn Shop, an older Chinese man, came and complained about the vehicle and threatened to have it towed when he saw us approaching it. We saw right away that it had been broken into in our absence and a few things were missing. The ignition had been taken apart and it took me a few minutes to put it back together.

There was some kind of problem with the starter batteries that the previous owners had told us to counteract by disconnecting one of the terminals every time we parked. That was probably the only reason we had an RV to come back to at all – the would-be thieves probably assumed the engine and battery was dead when whatever they were doing with the ignition didn’t pan out and never looked under the hood.

We fired it up and pulled into a neighborhood street that looked run down enough that we figured we could park for a minute to collect our thoughts and decide on our next move. We were homeless drug addicts at this point in time and easily recognized by other homeless or near homeless drug addicts. Most of these interactions were positive and mutually beneficial like the ride we had just gotten. People like us sought out the society of other people like us because we could be ourselves without having to hide or be judged for the basic circumstances of our lifestyle.

To outsiders it would probably generally be assumed that the world we lived in was ruthless, cutthroat and unforgiving but that wasn’t usually our experience with it. We were pretty decent at reading people and keeping the ones that felt like the wrong kind of sketchy away but there were occasional little ripoffs or shitty situations. One of these walked down the sidewalk toward our RV, gauged what we were and asked us if we had a clean needle.

Billy was a light skinned Black man a few years younger than me who wore a lot of neon green and tended toward motocross accessories in a style that you’d probably call “urban casual”. His clothes were on the filthy side and had a bit of a Family Dollar look to them, his body odor was particularly foul. He had a broken syringe filled with dirty looking water that was supposed to be a rinse of the meth and whatever else he’d been doing all night. I got a clean syringe and helped him hit his leg with a bandana for a tourniquet.

“That wasn’t shit!”

From the appearance of the liquid and the absence of any notable reaction to a clean intravenous hit it obviously wasn’t. We weren’t interested in meth, or tweakers for that matter, but he assured us repeatedly that he would be able to find heroin for us while pursuing his own drugs.

The thing that caused us to throw in together was the checks. He had gotten his hands on a few checks that were intended as tithes for a small local church and I had a bank account in good standing. The second one of these was a bit of a rarity as most fiends would end up blowing up their accounts with bad checks that bounced or didn’t clear but the initial withdrawal was long spent and could not be paid back to the bank.

For that reason the going rate for this kind of arrangement was 50/50 down the middle. It wasn’t the kind of thing I went out of my way to get into but it came up often enough and I was usually down and none of the checks I deposited ever bit me in the ass. The way it usually went was that you could pull some percentage out immediately and wait a couple days for the rest of it to clear and then settle up.

For Billy’s checks that first amount was two hundred dollars. He held onto it and immediately got somebody to grab him an ounce of low grade meth and continued to assure us that he would be tracking down heroin for us any minute. We had to hang around the next two days so the final money could be properly split, not to mention we were depending on him finding us dope.

He lived in a little garage that connected to his sister or cousin’s house that she ran a daycare out of and was filled with tweaker shit like broken dirt bikes and a few old batteries for scrap or barter. We were told repeatedly to stay out of sight, only in the garage and avoid the daycare house. Things were a little looser because the sister who ran the daycare happened to be the person who drove and got the ounce of meth for him but she didn’t seem to use it – just well connected.

With so much time to kill and everybody else doing it and the constantly repeated lie that it would “take the edge off” of opiate withdrawal I said fuck it and joined in the group activity of injecting Crystal methamphetamine. If anything it adds a jagged and unpleasant edge, things like benzos and sedatives are what takes it off. A small circle of scumbags had assembled for the big bag of drugs.

Eventually I’ll go into who all of these new scumbags were: their names, quirks, fears, tragic flaws, rivalries and any other interesting tidbit. I’m going to end this piece on that first injection. About a year earlier I had kicked what looked like an empty yellow box of American Spirit cigarettes in a Thrift Store parking lot and discovered on foot contact it was heavy with an entire ball of high quality glass.

In the moment I had really been craving cocaine and heroin and convinced myself that if I did a large enough shot of Crystal it would feel something like a coke rush. Obviously this wasn’t the case – it just felt scary. I was scared and agitated and the area around my kidneys felt weird and I couldn’t piss. In some ways it was like tripping on psychedelic drugs but none of the good ways.

I spent the night in the bathtub, constantly adjusting the temperature of the water when I felt either hot or cold, and returned to some semblance of normalcy by morning.

In Banning I insisted on a much smaller amount, something like three points, but still had a lot of nerve wracking window-dressing. It wasn’t just the way things looked, I felt off as well like I was a big raggedy balloon drifting above the ground. I was a little dizzy from sounds and colors and needed to get to one of the big dumpsters in the alley to take a piss.

I had walked within visual range of the daycare kids, not while pissing thankfully but on my way to, and it was a problem. Problems. Over the next couple days we would have our share of problems and when the checks finally cleared even this would bring more problems instead of mutually satisfactory closure under the common terms.

As I pissed in the alley the problems were barely getting started.

Part Two Here

I’ve written a little bit about this house and time period but I wanted to go into it some more and hopefully touch on some anecdotes and details that didn’t make it into those earlier attempts. I talked about our landlord Mark in “What is the meaning of Die Mark?” and how our relationship ended but I didn’t say very much about how it started. Like many people with the tendency to repeat toxic interpersonal patterns of behavior Mark came to the table with significant baggage.

His previous tenant had absconded owing significant back rent but the issues Mark was most vocal about were technically out of his purview. Apparently the man had medical troubles that resulted in what the Old Testament refers to as a “running issue”: infected sores that caused pus to ooze from his face. We never saw a photograph to judge the severity of this ignominy for ourselves but “Pusface” came to cast a shadow over the earliest days of our tenancy like a phantom.

He had departed in a hurry and we’d arrived with next to nothing but between the social dance of competitive disgust responses and genuine fear of contagion we threw away nearly everything that could have been useful. Even things as sterile and unimpeachable as canned vegetables went into the bin with the same generic justification:

“Pusface.”

One thing we didn’t regard as tainted was the micro cassette telephone answering machine. We didn’t immediately have a stereo and never got a television so the discarded recordings offered a precious bit of early entertainment. The two messages bolstered and tempered the myth of “Pusface” adding dimension and backstory to someone who had been a kind of cautionary “negative role model”.

The first one had been left by a young woman with a thick Irish accent who had been entreating John, “Pusface’s” actual name, to be a more active and invested coparent to their young daughter. Her voice was fraught with emotion:

“When you’re with her you need to be there John, and I’m not just talking about being there physically. You need to actually be there!”

I’m probably forgetting some important details but I’m pretty sure she at least alluded to sobriety. At the time me and Francois would repeat small phrases from the message to each other in exaggerated parodies of both her accent and emotional urgency after having played it back at least dozens of times. The melodrama had shaped “Pusface” into an at least interesting, if not sympathetic, figure.

The second message was from a friend and contact in the recording industry. From what I could gather “Pusface” was a session percussionist, the house was in walking distance of Berkeley’s storied Fantasy Studios, and competent enough to be flown over a stretch of ocean. A band in Hawaii was in desperate need of a drummer and the money was good. The friend on the recording most likely had an invested interest in getting John the gig as he was trying hard to be persuasive:

“It’s spring time in Hawaii, it’s spring time in the world man! You just gotta get out here man, you’ll see!”

Together the messages told a compelling story and it wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. Mark didn’t get his rent money, the unnamed Irish woman didn’t get a father to her child but somewhere in Hawaii a music group had rounded out their rhythm section. It’s easy to view “Pusface” as irresponsible and cavalier but I like to imagine his motivations in a slightly more complex way.

Maybe “Pusface” did care about his daughter but was terrified of not being good enough. On one side he was hearing that he needed to do more than be there physically while on the other side he was told that his simple presence would cure all ills. Presented with a classic carrot and stick scenario he ran.

Or maybe he didn’t give a shit about his kid and couldn’t wait to get as far away from her as possible – I certainly wouldn’t know. I do wonder if he would have played on any recordings I would have heard of either in the Bay Area or the mysterious Hawaiian band. I also wonder if his face was even that fucked up looking or if Mark was just bitter and looking to nitpick – that would align with his later behavior.

One unintended consequence of Mark’s complaints is that he showed himself to be a total pushover and both unlikely to retaliate and incapable of doing so if we didn’t pay his desired rent. This was cemented several months later when he gave us written notice of a two hundred dollar rent increase and we flat out refused to pay it but told him we’d go up fifty from what we had been paying. He conceded his power in a near-sniveling tone:

“Well, I’ll take what I can get.”

The second bit of foreshadowing was Mark’s evident comfort in complaining about John’s medical issues in the first place – we were going to learn the extent to which he took an active interest in private and personal aspects of his tenants’ lives. I might have written this little bit up in another piece but it will probably be faster to just type it again instead of double checking to make sure.

Not long after Little Four moved in with us she developed a sensitivity to commercial hair dye. It might have been the curse of “Pusface” but this manifested in pus exuding sores all over her scalp. The problem was fleeting in nature but resulted in a pig shaped pillow from the nearby Ross getting saturated in pus. On the off chance any reader hasn’t had first hand experience with the ill humor it smells absolutely awful – like used band-aids and decay.

She threw the pillow away.

Not long after we heard a knock on the back door. Mark stood outside holding the soiled pillow:

“I don’t understand why you throw valuable things away… I could use this at my house!”

The twin revelations that he thought it was appropriate to both go through our trash and confront us if he disagreed with a particular disposal decision did not move our relations in a positive direction. Our contempt for him blossomed – he was pathetic, disgusting and arbitrarily judgmental. It made for an unappealing cocktail.

Presumably he took home the pus pig pillow.

The neighborhood around Ashby and San Pablo has stayed similar in a lot of ways but much of the “local color” that existed in 1998 has since disappeared. At the time it felt a bit like a ghost town – we weren’t the last occupied house in the area but there were definitely more empty houses than actual neighbors. There was a guy a couple blocks away around the corner who seemed to have some kind of pinball museum in his basement but he didn’t like the look of us and never invited us over to play.

I don’t know for sure if it was Michael Schiess, the curator of Alameda’s Pacific Pinball Museum, but it seems reasonable that it would be. The East Bay may well have more than one pinball historian but my bet would be on it being the same guy. This would have been just under San Pablo on Grayson – I bet somebody will eventually read this that either played or owned a bunch of pinball machines in that spot at the turn of the millennium.

The most welcoming spot was a mid century hot dog and ice cream stand called Twin Castle Express. The building was decorated with a series of paintings of canine monarchs whose nationalities indicated specific selections of toppings. Cartoon dogs seem to have been a popular icon for ‘50s era Bay Area fast food culture – a little further down San Pablo in the Oakland direction somebody had one of those fiberglass Doggie Diner heads.

It might have been outside of a punk warehouse and I heard some kind of story about a rivalry involving serial attempts between two groups of people to steal it from each other. The punk landscape was very much not a place where we fit in so these kinds of stories were always heard at a bit of a remove. I heard about a laundromat nearby where the owners let a group of punks live there in exchange for making sure nobody robbed the change machines. They had a zine with a single syllable name where they interviewed Biz Markie and asked about getting a knuckle ring made of this title but I forget what it was. I went to 924 Gilman a couple times (I might have even worked there once) and heard the story about a dead baby getting discovered in the rafters.

I have no idea if any of these stories are true or not.

I was vegetarian when I first moved up and when Little Four decided to try veganism I adopted it as well for moral support. She gave up on it after a couple of weeks but I stuck with it for the next few years. Luckily the Twin Castle Express offered a tofu sandwich with barbecue sauce and avocado so even in our relative food desert I could always find something to eat. For some reason I vividly remember the tiny sculpture of a toad they kept on top of the cash register – the kind with coins in its mouth and plastic gems for eyes.

A little ways farther down San Pablo there was still an outlet of the Your Black Muslim Bakery chain – a good place to get vegan baked goods and some kind of veggie burger. My eyes always gravitated to the autographed picture of Humpty Hump behind the counter. He had written:

“Hey, I said no cheese on my veggie burger!” on the bottom of the photograph which prompted me and Gabe, Little Four’s temporary punk boyfriend, to speculate as to whether this was evidence for Humpty Hump being a practicing vegan but I’d imagine we were reading too much into it. I’m totally ready to be wrong on that however and wouldn’t be surprised if Humpty Hump was a vegan.

Somebody knows. It would be relatively easy to just Google “Humpty Hump vegan” and if it were true he must have mentioned it in an interview somewhere. I read an interview with him once and don’t remember the question coming up. I’m not going to Google it.

On the opposite side of San Pablo from Twin Castle Express there was this tiny doughnut shop that was really hard to go to because it was only open from about four to seven in the morning. It had the worst doughnuts I’ve ever seen anywhere in my life: small, hard and misshapen. Still, I was obsessed with trying to get them because even on the days when I had morning classes at SFSU it was nearly always closed by the time I got there.

The guy that ran the place had a long flabby stomach than hung over his pants like a pale apron. Apart from the doughnuts he sold hot dogs and lottery tickets. I never actually tried to make sure the doughnuts were vegan but in retrospect they probably weren’t – I would get two blueberry cake ones and a coffee and the whole thing came out to less than two dollars.

I think my fascination was with the fact that the business felt like it shouldn’t logically exist. Not just that it was a relic of the past but that it didn’t seem like it should have existed ever – it was barely open and the product it specialized in was ineptly crafted to an offensive degree and I never saw another human being in there. I kind of wonder if anybody else ever set foot in this Fever Dream of a doughnut shop near Ashby and San Pablo in 1998.

That just reminded me of this little piece of old downtown San Diego called Lee’s Cafe that was kind of close to the first ever Museum of Death location. People smoked cigarettes inside that place and the walls were covered with handwritten signs in English and Chinese and they sold stuff like liver and onions and everything had oddly precise prices like $2.64 or something. It felt like something out of the Gold Rush and I don’t know when it finally disappeared but it probably roughly coincided with the creation of the Gaslamp Quarter.

Going toward Berkeley on San Pablo there was a little storefront called Professor Curtis’s World Famous Cult Videos. It seems like the kind of place we would have been into but we never owned a TV or a VCR when we lived there so we never went into the place. When our last neighbors moved away we snuck into the house under cover of night and found a heavy old CRT TV that we excitedly carried back into our house only to discover it was broken.

I did a little bit of digging into the Professor Curtis guy. It looks like his thing was grind house, martial arts and exploitation movies and he’s also really into conspiracy theories. I met someone a few years later that said he used to hire girls to make some kind of fetish videos but she didn’t go into specifics. He posts movies on the internet now but his shop was the kind of obscure media reliquary that only existed because the internet didn’t.

When I started typing this I thought that it had been in our neighborhood but now that I think about it could have been anywhere around Berkeley: the parking lot where somebody had spray painted this short phrase on a cinder block wall:

“I FUCKING LOVE YOU MAYA”

Whenever we walked past it me and Francois would read the short quote aloud in the Irish accent of the woman from the “Pusface” answering machine tape. I never knew who had painted it or who Maya was but when I mentioned it to one of my Oakland friends a few years later he seemed to. I still don’t know who those people are but it seems entirely possible that I’ve met them at some point in my life.

[Author’s Note: After reading this Francois informed me that he met this Maya on a 2000 trip to Europe. She had red hair.]

With the right perspective every town is a small one.

What’s more interesting to me is the way that some of my friends recognized Professor Curtis or the Maya graffiti when I offhandedly mentioned these things a few years later. We didn’t really know anybody then but I’m interested in the idea that people who read this might have played pinball in a basement or lived in a laundromat or fought over a fiberglass dog’s head. I like thinking about these parallel lives and the fleeting experiences we may have shared in the opposite of intimacy.

I lived other lives in Oakland, with other touchstones and memories, but this was the first one. That first year I spent a lot of time in the SFSU Library media lab either watching The Residents Video Voodoo over and over again or experimenting with the audio listening stations. I forget the specifics of it but the way that the switches that toggled between records, cassettes and CDs were set up it was possible to layer one recording of each medium and listen to them simultaneously.

I was syncing up some Karlheinz Stockhausen and other early experimental and musique concréte stuff when I fell asleep to the soundscape and had a quick vivid dream. I was lying on the little bit of highway in San Diego that connects the Convention Center and the Coronado Bridge and sleeping peacefully. I was gigantic – so big that I roughly filled the patch of road between the two landmarks. I couldn’t have been asleep for more than five minutes but I remember it feeling incredibly luxurious.

Something about the way that I grew up seeing the town through the windows of cars and buses – the sign for the carpet cleaning business that had the two guys on a magic flying carpet and the church and cemetery with a starry blue dome off the 94 that I finally drove to and saw in person but it couldn’t compare to the years of walking through it in imagination while staring out the car window.

I guess what I’m getting at is that the psycho-geographical maps that we project onto cities are constantly changing in nearly the same way that the cities themselves are, like the way a city exists in your head when you can still get lost there and this changes as you learn to reliably orient yourself in any tiny part of it. I’m just wondering about the overlap between my maps and ones that belong to people I’ll never meet. Two completely different cities but bordering on a stretch of road that only exists in a shared anonymous memory…

I was thinking about that thing that cops do where they change their voice a little bit and crack a lame joke to signal to you that they are actually the “cool cop” or “party cop” or whatever. It’s always presented like it’s your lucky day and they’re doing you a huge favor by not levying the maximum fines or charges in any particular situation but it’s more like being forced to “bro down” under duress. Obviously there is nothing particularly “cool” or “party” about using complex bureaucracy and the threat of violence to assert authority, that’s literally the point, but for whatever reason they desperately want to pretend.

A big part of this is that most likely the average cop wasn’t particularly popular or well liked among their peers during the formative High School years but now they can force nearly anyone to at least pretend to like them and laugh at their jokes for a few moments at a time. It’s also possible that they had hoped police work would be more centered on stopping violent criminals and actually protecting the public so they genuinely hate responding to noise complaints, busting people for drugs and alcohol and that sort of thing.

Whatever the case there is a very specific tone of voice when they want to transition to this specific form of role play – this is another one of the situations where I wish that there was some way for me to add audio clips (there probably actually is) but I’m sure everybody reading knows exactly what I’m talking about. Nobody in their right mind would completely snub the cop in this situation, unless they were already under arrest or in as much trouble as possible, so few people have seen the kind of wounded wrath elicited by this kind of denial.

The one time I did it was a complete miscommunication and accident for reasons I’m about to describe:

In the Summer of 2010 the Generation/Bleak End tour was passing through New York City and nobody in that town ever seems to be ready to call it a night and go to sleep. We’d already played a great show at our friend Stewart’s loft and now we were following a crowd of party people to try to sneak into some bigger thing at a Brooklyn space called Zebulon or something. The weather was nice, the street was fairly crowded and I got caught up with an open can of Budweiser in my hand.

My reflexes were pretty good and the moment the cop approached I dropped the can onto the ground and managed to kick it so that it disappeared into a raised storm drain about twenty feet away on the corner. I don’t know if there is a special name for what I’m talking about but I mean like where the little brother gets his arm ripped off at the beginning of It. I was pretty jazzed, I’d never been particularly good at goal kicks when I played a lot of pick up Soccer so I was impressed with myself for getting it on the first try and figured that I was off the hook for sure.

I just realized that although I’ve mentioned these games in passing I’ve never actually gone into them in much detail so I’ll write a little bit about them here. Me and Francois first started going to these games when we moved back to San Diego from the Bay Area in 1999 but they may have been going on for some time before that. I think they were on Saturdays and everybody met up in one of the grassy areas of the Banker’s Hill side of Balboa Park and they were organized by Rafter Roberts.

Rafter is probably best known for setting up Singing Serpent Studios and playing in Bunky but he was also helping a lot of different people with recording and production in the late nineties. I probably first met him because he was my helping my friend Steve Lawrence with some production stuff for his band Gamelonian LX Cruise Ship. Steve was a little bit older and an oil painter. His personality and reference heavy colorful canvasses made him popular with the kids in the scene.

He hadn’t worked a job or secured housing for himself for several years but a chain of people took care of him as he continued to constantly paint in garages and living rooms. His paintings almost never sold but around this time he got a set of trading cards printed under the name The Supernatural Peep Show and tried to sell them at Comic Con. Steve had the common character armor techniques of constant sarcasm and giving everybody nicknames but he was hugely influential to me as a budding aesthete and we spent a lot of time talking about art and comics and flipping through his record collection.

He was also the first person I ever became aware was using heroin and other intravenous hard drugs, that I knew personally anyway, but it would be a couple of years before I would think about doing this myself.

Anyway him and the rest of GLXCS moved up to Los Angeles to try to make it as a band and it didn’t work out and his friends got burnt out on constantly supporting him and he became homeless. I used to run into him now and again around Hollywood but it’s been over twenty years since I’ve heard of anybody seeing him and I wonder if he’s still alive. I’ll occasionally try googling his name and the scraps of painting titles I can remember but nothing ever comes up and in a way I find it almost comforting that he belonged so purely and completely to this past sense of underground that there aren’t even traces of him on the internet.

I’m really rambling on this one – back to Rafter and the soccer games.

Rafter had screen printed a bunch of t-shirts to distinguish between the two teams: red for The Venomous Spyders and purple for The Semi-Violent Unicorns. I can’t remember anybody consistently being on one team or the other but it generally worked out that people who felt like playing more seriously were on the Spyders and people who felt like just having fun and goofing off were Unicorns and the Spyders always won. I don’t want to overstate this – everybody was serious and everybody was just having fun and the games were generally close instead of a one sided slaughter but this was still the basic pattern.

In 1999 these soccer games were a who’s who of the San Diego underground music scene or at least the slightly older Casbah crowd. I never saw anybody from The Locust or the younger hardcore/Spock-rock crew but people from Three Mile Pilot and Soul Junk and that kind of thing always played. This might have changed – I was only in town for part of the Summer of 1999 and I don’t know when the games ended or even if they still occasionally take place.

I usually played defense and wasn’t much for taking goal kicks although I might have tried and even gotten a couple. I was almost always a Semi-Violent Unicorn. There was a guy from Belgium on our team named Tomas who as a European was both very good at the game and took it quite seriously but chose the Unicorns out of what was most likely an inherent love of underdogs. He always called me his “tall defender” but with his accent it sounded like “my tall defend-air!”. I played defense because I had a lot of energy at that age and loved running.

I’ve mentioned this already but when me and Francois decided to drive back to Chicago because our friend Brandi needed room mates again we asked around the games if anybody would want to come and help drive and we got Andy Robillard who had been the drummer of GoGoGo Airheart to come with us. Actually Andy had just been replaced in the band in the worst way imaginable. After some obvious tensions with other members he was at one of their shows when he heard a band start and realized it was GoGoGo.

Apparently they had found a replacement just hanging out at the show and decided to go on with this new unrehearsed drummer without saying a word about it or even warning him. He just left the show and went home – I think it was the homecoming show of a long tour. I’ve met other drummers since then, especially in more successful bands, who have spoken of the threat of replacement feeling ever present like the Sword of Damocles.

I read up on GoGoGo Airheart for this piece and found out that they reformed with Robillard back on drums after a hiatus and went on to what was their most successful and well received period. Andy was quoted from an interview about why they finally ended things – they hadn’t been making enough money for the time and energy they put into it especially with everybody getting older and having more responsibilities. It sounded like things had ended in a much better place than they had the first time around at least.

So New York, 2010 : I just kicked my beer away into the sewer destroying any evidence that I had been drinking alcohol in public. The cop still came over and asked me what kind of beer I drank and I said that I didn’t drink beer. This is where things took an unexpected turn. The cop was from the West Indies and had a fairly heavy accent so I didn’t immediately realize that he had clicked over to the more familiar “cool cop” inflection. His feelings were hurt:

“I try to be a nice guy and ask you what kind of beer you drink but you want to be the tough guy and say you don’t drink beer!”

The whole thing was basically a language barrier. We were both speaking English but different kinds of English that made it almost impossible to transmit certain subtleties. There was a bit of a friendly wink in me saying that I didn’t drink beer at all considering he had just seen me but he took it as hard rejection. He probably wanted me to say something like “Budweiser, the best!” so we could pretend that we were just a couple guys talking about our favorite beers instead of being in a situation where he could use his discretion to decide whether or not he was going to make my life shittier and more complicated.

Anyway he wrote me a ticket and I didn’t do anything about it and I don’t know if I still have a ticket in New York City or not. I think this was a one time thing – if I ever end up in another situation where a cop with a heavy West Indian accent suddenly switches to the “cool cop” voice I will know what it sounds like and hopefully respond in a way that is satisfactory so I can get into the minimum amount of trouble.

Chicago in 1999: me and Francois were hanging out and going out to a lot of shows and parties and met a bunch of kids that lived in a house on the corner of Belden. It’s crazy to contrast this time to the stories I’ve written from less than a year earlier when we lived in Berkeley and were absolutely insane and terrible at making friends. We had both started drinking which didn’t hurt of course but I do think there’s more to it as a lot of the kids at the Belden house didn’t even drink.

Now that I think about it it’s probably a couple of things: first off The Fireside Bowl was right in the neighborhood and a really inviting space to hang out and meet people at this time. We’d been to a show or two at 924 Gilman when we lived in the Bay but never really felt like we fit in with the whole membership card thing and the singular focus on a specific political kind of punk and hardcore. The Fireside was fostering something more eclectic that more closely aligned with our tastes.

The other thing, of course, was San Diego. Even though we hadn’t been connected to the scene that everybody was obsessed with we were from the same city and this was enough to make us stick out and make people want to know us. In a larger way this was California in general – the myth of California as a kind of “alternative paradise” was alive and well in the Midwestern imagination of 1999 and we were bonafide Californians.

Actually to be super accurate I’d already met a few of the Belden kids when they took a road trip to California around 1998 or early 99. I forget who all was there but definitely at least Aaron Hahn, Meg and Janice. We started talking because me and Hahn both thought we’d recognized each other and had met before. (We hadn’t.) I was with my friend Dave Malone, aka Blinky, and he must have had a thing for one of the girls because he started boasting about how he knew the guys in The Locust and could introduce them.

I just got a flash of memory from writing this down. It must have been Janice because he was trying to write down his address to give her if she wanted to meet up in San Diego. We were at an Amoeba in store performance I can’t recall the band of in Hollywood or San Francisco maybe. Janice squinted to try to read the paper:

“Does that say Broad Curvy?”

Dave had been living on Broadway, probably toward Golden Hills, but was too drunk to write legibly. When me and Francois moved out to Chicago Janice most likely recognized me the first time we went to a Fireside show. We all lived really close to each other too and got into the habit of hanging out in a breakfast diner on North Milwaukee called The Cozy Corner or as we all called it “The Cozy C”.

Fireside shows usually ended well before midnight but the Cozy C was only open mornings so instead we’d go to an IHOP on Fullerton to have something to do. In San Diego the Denny’s on Pacific Highway had been the go-to hangout after a show or party had caused a group of kids to miss the last bus back to parents’ houses and the suburbs. In Chicago the buses ran all night and everybody lived close by but we were still drawn to an almost identical activity. A big part was that coffee remained the beverage of choice long after most of the crew had started drinking.

There were usually enough of us to fill two tables but coffee was the main thing that anybody ordered and some people didn’t even order that. Very rarely somebody might order an actual meal but the more commonplace thing was sides of hash browns or seasoned red potatoes that I called Red Medicine after the Fugazi album. The big thing I remember is trying each one of the flavored syrups mixed into endless coffee refills – they were all pretty nasty but I got into the habit of using the hazelnut one.

Considering all this and the fact that we stayed for hours and never tipped particularly well we were pretty much a server’s nightmare. As we popped back up night after night they probably argued amongst themselves as to who would get stuck with our table until they figured out a more permanent solution. One night we sat down and waited but after over an hour nobody had so much as greeted or even acknowledged us, much less tried to take our order, so we got the message and never returned.

Anyway I brought up the IHOP on Fullerton because there were a few kids who lived in an apartment more or less directly across the street from it. I forget who all else lived there except for this guy named Jason who we nicknamed 1776 because his hairstyle looked like George Washington on the one dollar bill. I was never over there much but I did go the night they had a party and the cops came out to break it up.

Their coffee table had a bong on it. This was far from a common sight in 1999 Chicago and most of our smaller clique hadn’t even started smoking marijuana yet. The moment the cops came in their eyes landed on the bong and there was some palpable tension in the air as to what they were going to do about it. Thankfully, somebody switched over to the “cool cop” voice:

“Does that bong have vodka in it?”

1776 nervously replied:

“I wish dog, I wish!”

It was a nonsensical answer to a nonsensical question but it served the purpose of protecting that particular cop’s fragile ego and they left with only a warning. I can’t think of a single good reason to fill a bong with vodka or wish that a bong had vodka in it but it makes sense that a cop who’s never smoked marijuana before might think that’s a thing. That entire “I wish dog, I wish” quote became the new nickname that we used to refer to 1776 as.

For whatever reason me and Dave really liked making fun of this guy – not publicly or in front of other people but just to each other. It’s not like we were particularly cooler than him or anything. We weren’t cool, he wasn’t cool and the cop wasn’t cool.

It was 1999 and nobody was cool.