Hobo's I have loved, v.1

It was hot, too hot for sleeping and too early to be awake. I rolled over. My girlfriend was still sleeping beside me, and Bro had abandoned us for the shade in his crate under the bed. I pulled aside the burlap curtain, hoping to let in a breeze. Instead I found a man holding his hands up to the hand prints on the bus, his face just inches from mine.

“Hey,” he laughed. “Your bus is sooo cool. This is the ultimate hippie bus, man, I fuckin love it and I was just thinking to myself there’d gotta be some fuckin awesome people that live in this thing.”

I blinked. He didn’t have any shoes and I wondered how his feet weren’t burning.

“Hey do you think I could come in and hang out with y’all?”

I blinked again. “Um, I’m kind of sleeping. Maybe in a little while?”

“Oh, sure,” he disappeared.

An hour later we were awake, the dogs were walked and fed, and we’d re-examined the brakes (which had caught on fire – and yes that’s an exaggeration, but so what?). Arizona truckstops are really awful places to be stuck. Oddly, I’ve been stuck at a few of them. The air brakes, which were piggybacked on hydraulic brakes, seemed to be stuck on. Not that we really knew what we were doing. A stray truck driver tried to convince us to just disconnect the air brakes, but despite our innocence we were both pretty sure that was a bad idea. So we called a tow truck.

Soon our shoeless friend was back. He did have one shoe, which he carried in his backpack in case he were ever to come upon another shoe. His backpack was otherwise full of sunglasses, which he had been stealing from truckstops and department stores all over the country as he hitchiked his way from Georgia to LA, where he planned to sell the sunglasses on the beach. He even demonstrated his sunglass stealing technique for us.

He was impressed by our copius, over loaded bookshelves. “What are you reading now?” he asked.

My girlfriend shrugged. She wasn’t really reading anything.

I held out The Secret Life of Plants, which is a really good amazing book that everyone should read and maybe I’ll write a review of it soon.

He got excited. “I love plants! Oh my god, you like plants too?! Dude, the other day I was at this truck stop in Texas and I was sitting under this, like, bush, and I was meditating on the meaning of life, yanno? Anyways, suddenly I was looking at the plant and I realized we’re ALL ONE!”

I nodded. My inner hustler approved of his use of plants to develop rapport, and the we’re all one stuff brought back good memories.

“The plants, the trees, me, you, the whole planet, we’re all, like, different parts of a whole! It’s so rad,” he continued. “And you know it’s because God gave his only son for us.”

WHAT?!? I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or not, but I just smiled a little and asked, “really?”

Apparently our shoeless shoplifting hippie friend was a Jesus Freak. He even had a small ministry, collecting Bibles and God Pamphlets from the many Christians who picked him up hitchiking, and redistributing them to his fellow hobos. But he wasn’t one to force it on people, he told us, so if we didn’t want to hear it he’d stop right now.

“Yeah, we don’t really want to hear it,” I told him.

“That’s cool, I totally respect that.”

Then he noticed my dulcimer and we talked music for a while. I played my song (the one and only song I’ve ever written). It turned out that he wrote songs too. Cool, sing one for us, I told him.

He pulled a notebook out of his backpack, all shy. “Are you sure? I’m not very good.”

“Of course!” I said.

“Okay, well, I write rap music…”

How strange. But that’s cool too.

He opened his notebook and started rapping, “I was sittin on a mountain, and God is good, the air’s so clean, cause he gave his son…”

Wow. I didn’t know what to say when he was done, so I offered him food. It turned out he didn’t have any food in his backpack, so that worked out.