Hoboing Through Indiana-American Yarnprose1

I slept last night underneath a bridge in the country, trying to run away from my misgivings and misfortunes I’d uncovered since coming to this shabby town and this cruddy old state. The worst of it was, I had to face up to it, to who I was, what I had done and the one I had hurt.

I thought about her intensely. The one person who I’d met and fell head-over-heels in love with. Shoot! I didn’t mean it. I thought she said it was okay. Apparently it wasn’t and it caused a lot of bad blood between us.

I wanted to run. Run real bad. I started out as a hero in this state and I ended up as a goat. I never started to drink until this past evening. That cheap strawberry wine tasted so good, much like that cheap strawberry wine I discovered back in my college days, always laughing heartily every time I had hit my head on the door, leading inside my dorm room.

Over and over again, perhaps at least 1,000 times, the scene played over in my mind like a needle stuck in a grooved record. I kept seeing her face. And of course, she continually blamed herself, even though the responsibility was ours together.

Earlier in the day, we went for a walk in the park, the same place the coppers found that floating corpse in the river and with the silly photograph blaring loudly on the front of the local morning daily. She reassured me that she would get the problem taken care of, but refused to let me tag along, because she didn’t want me to see that “other” side of her personality, the often sullen and spooky shadow of her interior.

I never did forget the jumbled words she spat at me over and over again in monotone, “You hurt me. What can I say? I’m pissed!”

I saw my own reflection in the moonlight along the riverbed. My clothes slightly soiled and my backpack was full of written memories from the writings I conceived earlier in the year. I saw the gleam of the Soo Line railroad engine flash its warning light and blasted its horn loudly and proudly, as if to acknowledge my presence. I started to run, managing to catch one of the rungs of a graffitied boxcar, flinging myself inside the cold, empty crawlspace on wheels.

“Dear diary,” I wrote, “Boy did I mess up shit this time. Not only did I give the gift of life to the person I really love, but at the wrong time and the wrong place and what do I end up doing? I run away! I’ve never done that before. Do you think anyone will understand my actions?” I pondered my thoughts for a moment or two and continued writing. “Me, the one who preached righteously about morals and then I screwed up royally.”

Somewhere in the back of my head, I heard Joni Mitchell singing 1970s songs. I drifted in and out of sleep, to earlier moments of happiness and other creature comforts. The open boxcar screeched and scratched endlessly against the rustic sky, which by this time, had turned to hangman black. I tumbled about, as I felt the entire train shake and clatter further and further away from that horrid little midwestern town.

Where was I to go? What was I to do? Would I be welcomed into a strange town again like I was the last time? I was scared. Truly and honestly scared. Just like the place I had lived before. I felt like a refugee. A godforsaken hobo of a man, stuck with all of his priceless belongings that didn’t amount to much if that crucial moment came crashing down unexpectedly, so I took a few swigs of the sweet wine and eased up a bit.

I was far enough away from everybody now. Far enough, where I could sing, laugh and cry all in one fell swoop. Quakers. Weirdoes. UUs. Evil people. One-Horse Towns. Hog Farms. Holsteins. The Ku Klux Klan. College Students. Snobs. Ministers. Churchgoers. Mennonites. One-Eyed Cats. Movers and Shakers. Songs and bands I’d never heard of. New poems I had written all rolled up into one solid ball of messy entanglements that I had yet to classify or put my fingers on.

Why had I befriended these freaks? These people? Written about them or become influenced by them? And sometimes, sometimes I actually became them for short fleeting moments! How strange!

It felt lonely and downright depressing to hit rock bottom and to then have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. That truly was the scary part. A part of the reality check that I more or less had to face up to. In other words, the eventual look of the picture frame that for some reason, I had continually put off until I had painted myself into a corner and could barely move, let alone breathe.

But in a way, I liked that. My whole time in this state had been an adventure and in the end, it didn’t amount to squat. Not all the tears, the threats nor the weather could change my mind, except of course, for the people whom I befriended along the way.

I knew in the long run, I was right. Did it matter anymore? Yes! Only to those who cared enough to call me friend. Did my nine months here serve a purpose for me, I thought, lying back on the floor on the cold boxcar.

Indiana, the state where the buffalo and cattle once roamed endlessly. Where slaves had a place to hide. And where Abraham Lincoln was considered a traitor by people whose minds had all the energetic mentality of a worm being swallowed by a carp. Indiana. The state where I once came as an alien. Lived like a gypsy. Fled in terror like a refugee with no homeland.

“Yes,” I thought to myself, as I drifted off into a deepening slumber, “It’s time to go home.”