Jack in the Box

I've always wondered how cops can be so friendly while they're being complete douchebags. This takes ambivalence to an entirely new, authoritarian level. Fuck your laws, and fuck the fact that you could have easily just passed this off as nothing.

"Six up." Fernweh put the weed back into his tobacco pouch and began rolling a cigarette as the cop rolled up.


"Hey boys. Beautiful day! What are doing?" This cop had obviously smoked a lot of weed himself; or perhaps spent a lot of time around stoners. Or maybe he was just a master of masquerade. He seemed really chill.

"Just rolling a cigarette," Fernweh answered with a grin, holding up his rolling paper full of tobacco.

"Oh yeah? Let me see what else you have in that pouch..."


Really!?

The cop took the pouch and dug around in it until he found Fernweh's weed, which he promptly confiscated.  He could have been even more of a douche bag and given us a ticket, but he let us go with only the knowledge that he was so bored that he'd search random kids tobacco pouches on the off-chance of finding weed. This was his lucky day, I guess.

Granted, we weren't in B.C. anymore. We shouldn't have been rolling a doobie in public - though, rolling a doobie out of a pouch of tobacco, filled with tobacco, didn't look suspicious at all. Whatever.


We jumped on a bus - courtesy of Fernweh`s dad, who`d sent him some cash - and had a quiet, hungover bus ride back to Toronto.

I felt a grim sense of satisfaction to be back home. As we've said before, home is where you can hang your hat. Well, I can hang my hat pretty damn well in Toronto, where drugs are more available than smile and a nod. Hell, I can throw my hat on the ground (if I wore one,) pass out next to it and call that home. It was time to do what we'd wanted to do before we left Guelph - get a shit ton of drugs.

It's funny how life seems to work against my intentions. My plans never work. If I want to ensure that I'll get something done, I have to organize a plan to do the exact opposite and begin to execute that plan. Once I start doing the opposite thing, the thing I no longer wanted to get done, will get done. So, naturally, planning to find Ogre resulted in not being able to find Ogre. We wandered around listlessly without luck until we realized that the only way we could find Ogre would be to plan NOT to find him.

So, we did. This created a perpetual paradox of planning not to plan to see people we planned to see, with the end result being that our plans didn't following through. This was probably for the better - nobody needs that much heroin.

We plopped down in the park and promptly grouped up with someone who changed our lives, though neither of us would realize it until a month later. We found ourselves soon sitting with Fernweh's old friend, Jack. We jammed for a few hours; Fernweh was still shredding his mandolin, and I was working on a new method of playing guitar with old sticks. The jam was strangely awesome; the curious notes that Jack puffed through his harmonica mixed well with me and Fernweh's inability to play together at the same rhythm.

Once we'd set our instruments down, Jack brought us back to "his" bridge. It was a few blocks down from the Spadina bridge where we'd slept prior. Jack said that he'd kicked many-a hobo out from under this bridge and had kept it reserved for himself and those he trusted. Why he let me there, I didn't know - he'd just met me - but he said that any friend of Fernweh was a friend of his.

We set up our Hobo Rollup and lay down, contemplating the nature of competition. We collectively decided that one day, the three of us would travel back from the east coast separately in a race across the country. With extremely good luck, it could  be done in four days. Fernweh would obviously win, since he looks like a sexy asian girl. Me and Jack were at a disadvantage, since he was in his thirties and going bald and grey; and I was black (which, as far as I try and convince myself it isn't, is a huge disadvantage for hitchhiking.)

The prize? Nothing. We're hobos. We're too broke to afford prizes, but you'd win the gratification of flying across a country with nothing but a backpack and a sore thumb faster than anyone else who was doing so at the time.

The idea filled our minds with excitement as we spun a bottle of wine between the three of us. Once the wine was finished, our conversations began to hang low like our eyelids and soon we found ourselves sleeping. This bridge was a lot quieter than Spadina; the rumble of tons of steel rushing by above us was too infrequent to bother us as we slumbered.