Nignorant

"You guys got didgeridoos? I gotta get the FUCK outta here!"

Grizzly threw his hands in the air and fled the scene with an aura of such prejudiced fear that I had to re-evaluate my entire view of the trainhopping community. Grizzly, and the rest of his friends (some of whom I'd partied with last year in Montreal) were the epitome of traincore. 

Traincore (adj.) /treɪn kɔː/
Niggas who adhere strictly to the following three rules.

1. Your must ink yourself out of society by tattooing your face. This separates you and your crew from any association with the bluecollar grind.
2. You must respect and accept the Traincore Prejudice. Yuppies are unacceptable, "business-suits" are unacceptable, hippies are unacceptable (and didgeridoos, portrayed as "hippie-sticks" are even more unacceptable.) Any clique besides punks and traincore kids are to be disregarded. Any travelers who don't hop trains are also unacceptable.
3. You must hang out with your traincore crew, talking about traincore things, having stupid traincore fights amongst each other.

Anyway, as Grizzly's six-foot-five, massively disproportionate 300 pound body lumbered away in fear of being seen associating with hippies, we frowned as a thick cloud reared its fluffy face and began trudging across the sky towards our sitting spot. Not wanting our backpacks to become moist, soggy piles of must, we soon found ourselves heading towards the nearest shelter - an elementary school where last year, a group of me and my friends had been kicked (and kicked out) by a power-tripping Toronto cop. 

We joined a group of two young negroes. Before I continue writing, I'll care to inform those who are uninformed about the current use of the word nigger in frequent youth standing. 

Nigger originated as a derogatory term that slavers would call their slaves in an effort to undermine their dignity. This would label them not as humans, but as animals. After the slave trade came mostly to an end, the black street culture adopted the word, altering it slightly to become the word nigga. This greatly reduced the impact that the word nigger had and its use declined. In more recent terms, the term nigger has been readopted by most western cultures to reference anyone - black, white, or yellow - who conforms to a certain set of immoral tendencies: disrespect, thievery, belligerence, etc.

That being said, there had been a lot of debate over the "niggers" that we'd seen at the drop in center the week prior. Since the folks that had been called niggers were, indeed, black, the word took on an entirely new level of intesntiy. It was hard to come to a general understanding that they were termed that not because of their skin, but because of their stupidity, their aggression and their inability to be civil.

Anyway, as I whipped out my leatherbound journal, the two boys' eyes widened and I shared some stories that I'd written down about the road. We struck up conversation about travel, and these conversations quickly twisted themselves into freestyles.  These freestyles echoed in the doorway as we rapped about positivity and maintaining good mindsets. I liked these dudes.

Tragically, Toronto has a terrible predisposition in regards to black people. Stereotypes are often there for a reason - and the kids at the drop in center proved that. Though these kids we were with now were indeed confined to the streets, they weren't disrespectful. They were polite, happy, and willing to share their wisdom. Kids like these (and myself, I like to think) are the ones who can change a person's racist viewpoint. Hopefully, we'd have a chance to share these views ourselves.

As the case of beer emptied, so did our drawers of inspiration. The freestyles fell short, and the group came to disperse. Once me and Fernweh had time to ourselves, we laid back and let our new knowledge of prejudice settle into our brains. Fuck a label, man. We're all just people.
 

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.

Ham Slappin' Separation

Scrib howled with gut busting laughter before hanging up the phone and doubling over, clenching his fuzzy stomach. I worried his spleen would pop from over-exertion.

The night before, me and him had been fucking around on Facebook together. We'd been telling each of our contacts to SLAP THE HAM!!!, which had become quite the running joke with us (and was to become even more dangerous and hilarious in the future.) For anyone living under a rock, "slapping the ham" is a term for female masturbation.

We had, indeed, told all of our contacts to slap the ham. Including Scrib's ex-girlfriend's mom.

She'd promptly googled SLAP THE HAM and discovered what it meant. She'd presumably nearly fainted from offense before she vaulted towards the phone called the cops on Scrib for a number of reasons, including sexual assault.  She'd then called Scrib's grandma, who'd waited until the next day to call Scrib and inform him about what a crazy bitch his ex's mom was.

We all had some hearty chuckles and enjoyed the brief uplifted atmosphere before the mood went stagnant. We reluctantly resumed our prior mindsets - irritation, anger, condescension. Lately, our buttons had been getting pushed uncontrollably. Simple sentences would set a spark of livid hatred that would twist itself into an idiotic accusation. We'd spent too much time together - we were now each firmly convinced that ourselves, as individuals, were the only ones able to form a rational view of how our group should behave. In short, we were getting sick of each other.

We came to talk as our relationships about husbands.

"Guys? Maybe it's time we spent some time apart. We know we love each other, but this is stupid."

This is a tricky thing to say to anyone - be it a partner, a best friend or a travel buddy. Considering we were most of these, the conversation was tricky. We'd been together for over 30 days without separation, and we were getting damn close to our destination on the east coast. How could we separate?

The conversation dwindled down as we analyzed our surroundings and we came to realize that we were getting antzy for another reason: we'd been stuck in the same place for too long. We'd been at Snooze's house for 4 days. When you're chock full of wanderlust, 4 days is a long time to stay in a city - let alone a single house. Vagrants don't get stuck in the same spot.

This gave us a perfect opportunity to separate. Scrib had decided to stay with Snooze for the duration of her house-sitting gig, spending some time around Guelph with her. Me and Fern could now make our own way back to Toronto. Elated from the prospect of our separations, the three husbands and Snooze embraced before me and Fernweh hit the road for an hour long walk back to the train station.

Baby Shower

The sun poked its head through the living room window and asked if we were hungover. We weren't, so the sun went back outside and decided to bother someone who was.

We woke ourselves up and pretended that we'd forgotten the arguments of the night before. Sure, the feelings lingered, but we put them behind us. There was no point in holding onto sour memories and pushing blame on one another - especially not this early in the A.M. Today was going to be a good day.

Today, Scrib and Fernweh were going to become parents. They were getting rats! Fernweh had had a rat on our traveling expedition the year prior; Zukuma had been his name. In a tragic turn of events, Zukuma had decided he didn't like the vagrant's lifestyle and decided to disappear into the wilderness one rainy night by Burnaby Lake. Now, it was time for Rat II.

On the way to the pet store, we ran into a group of hippie-assed mothafuckas. We got to talking and discovered that they, too, were from Vancouver Island. We conversed in compraison of Guelph to the Island - the were quite similar. Guelph was a small city with a small-town feel, similar to Nanaimo where we were from. That was probably the reason that the two groups had felt so comfortable there - the vastness of such a small population spread out over such a large area.

We parted ways, hit the rat store, and got a couple cute rodents. They were housed in a nice leather cage - bred to be roommates, whether they liked it or not - and placed on the table at Snooze's. We then proceeded to do what we'd came to do the night before - get absolutely shit-dick wasted.

The next thing I remember was coming to during the middle of the 5th episode of Star Wars. Apparently, during the midst of me tearing all my clothes off and gallivanting around the house with my pecker flapping in the wind, we'd started a Star Wars movie marathon. Awesome! Now that the entire group was conscious, we put the movie on hiatus, smoked a doobie and returned to the couch to be vegetables for a few more hours.

Reunion (7)

We were here! Guelph!

Cool?

I hadn't expected much, and we hadn't received much. We'd made our way onto a bus full of small-town kids, and the mixture on their faces was a mixture of awe and apprehension. Apparently they'd never seen traveling hobos; we were still a breed of homeless fairies that existed only in their imaginations and in ancient doctrines from the early half of the century. They weren't prepared for these dirty back-road, province-hopping rejects.

They warned us about the local gang. We laughed. The gang called themselves the Rats. Really? Any gang that called themselves the Rats clearly didn't understand a thing about terminology - that, or they just wanted to get their ass handed to them.

We ran into a few of these Rats as we got off the bus: saggy-pantsed, backwards hat-wearing Gangsters from Guelph. They stared us down until Fernweh shouted at one of him to pull up his pants and get a belt; the kid's tough-standing posture instantly melted into insecurity. He lifted up his shirt to reveal his belt and muttered something about the fact that he was wearing one. We shrugged the kids off with our laughter and went to go find Snooze.

We promptly forgot our task as a liquor store crested on the horizon and we started to beeline towards it; fortunately Snooze intercepted our path. Her obsession with Scrib had not abated. I'm not opposed to love, lust, even infatuation (though the latter can be dangerous) but when emotions come to such a degree that they  interfere with your relationships amongst friends, I start to get worried. Me and Fernweh stepped back - we knew that in a few minutes, she'd hopefully be able to tear her gaze from Scrib and pass a few words our way. We had our own conversation about similar topics in the meantime.

Still missing some...

An eon passed. Finally, Snooze turned and gave me and Fernweh a much less lustful greeting and led us back towards her house. Along the way, the group made a pact: tonight, we would black out. Tonight, we would get so sloppily slizzered that the very Earth itself would tilt 45 degrees to the side. Tonight, friends, would be a night to forget. There was not to be one wayward memory that weaseled its way into the back of our minds. We stopped at the liquor store and dropped the last of our 70 bucks on the cheapest, strongest beer we could find.

At Snooze's, we felt out of place. The house, her father's, was quite classy: middle class excellence that was pretty much as regal a place as a hobo could be without getting ushered out. Our comfortable mood began to subside in unison with the beers that we drank; our relaxed demeanor melted into varying scopes of immaturity. Me and Fernweh resumed our childish ways - name-calling, in-depth conversations about ass, etc. Scrib had become verbally aggressive; his words took on an intimidating factor and to interrupt him would be an instant confrontation. "Why is it that your speech is more important than mine?"

Naturally, there ensued a whole bunch of stupid arguments; a clash between three faulted points of view. We decided to call it quits - we'd only drank a few beers, and realized where the night would go if we kept it up. Fernweh and I traipsed to the living room, where we took all the blankets and pillows off of the couches and set them on the hardwood floor before we realized that we could have just slept on the couches. Our hobo instincts in full effect, we curled up in our Hobo Rollup and fell fast asleep.

Reasons not to take trains with hobos

Alright, now we were Guelph bound. It was time for us to feel some reprieve from the wretched walls of Toronto.

Sam had taken us out for some decidedly unimpressive "suicide hot" wings after we'd gotten ourselves kicked out of Dickhead's bar. The restaurant we ended up in promised us painfully spicy hot sauce, but after downing 20 wings, me, Fernweh and Scrib had barely broken a sweat. We'd been traveling across the country in search of true spice, and were still yet to find any (though this was bound to change in the next week.)

We walked to the train station with Sam afterwards, bid her a goodbye filled with warm embraces, and then proceeded to make our first mistake of the day: we paid for our Go! train tickets. Only once we were on the train did we realize how easy it would have been to just hop on.

Fortunately, after we'd made out way to the second deck of the Go! train, we recounted our money and realized that we'd vastly overestimated our ability to do math. We still had enough change left over to cover another set of train tickets back... which meant: beer. Now we were over-excited to get to Guelph.

We sat on the train, being our usual belligerently, assly selves. As we were proceeding to fill the air with banter and general ignorance, one of us pondered aloud, "how is it that so many people like us? We suck!"

"Who the fuck knows. Maybe people our overwhelmed by the contrast and the stark difference between our stupidity and our intelligence."

We debated the topic of our undeserved popularity for a while until the guy sitting behind Scrib turned around. He caught my eye, then reached into his bag and pulled out a mickey of vodka. He handed it to Scrib.

After we picked our jaws up off the floor, we thanked him profusely. Was our belligerence really enough reason for people to be so generous? Either way, we drank the mickey right there and proceeded to crank the volume up a few decibels. After chatting up a gorgeous muslim lady sitting across the aisleway, (and after having a few shots) we felt fully confident that our obnoxious demeanor was charming everyone on the train, so we kept it up.

Near the end the train ride, we went downstairs to have a smoke. We wrenched the automatic sliding door open and surreptitiously looked past the "NO SMOKING" sign. Instead we focused on the blur of a treescape that rushed past outside while we lit one up.

A few drags later, a red light blinked on and the train started to slow down, so we jammed the doors shut and bolted back to our seats. Moments after this, Blazer showed up.

We'd met Blazer earlier - he was the train's conductor. He'd disapproved of our playing didgeridoo earlier, and he'd told us not to play any music on the train. This time, when he found us, we were picking some single notes on the guitar out of sedentary boredom to pass time until the train started again. Despite not playing loud enough for the single passenger left on the train to hear, and despite the fact that, earlier, she'd told us she liked our music, Blazer freaked out.

"I told you guys. NO MUSIC!" We stayed silent, impressed at his determination to stay true to his asinine rules. "You guys weren't smoking any cigarettes?"

"No, sir." This wasn't a lie. We'd each taken a drag of a cigarette. Nobody had smoked a whole cigarette at all.

Blazer's warning was useless anyway. By the time we would have finished smoking a cigarette, we would have arrived in Guelph. Once we'd arrived and stepped off the train, we had a moment of train-hopping nostalgia... our cart had been on the end of the train, and the gate towards town was near the front. We hopped onto a pipe that was hanging off the train over the tracks. Holding on for dear amusement, we let the train bring us across the yard towards the gate.

Finally, we left the yard. Welcome to Guelph, boys.

Do you shave your head to look like a dick?

We had to pull fourty bucks out of our asses for our train tickets to Guelph, and so far, our luck hadn't been great.

We'd only just sat down, but apparently we'd picked the wrong piece of sidewalk to rendezvous at. As soon as we'd sat, we were bombarded by a homebum and his less-homeless looking friend.

He spat bearded complaints about how he'd been using this spot to panhandle for the last 6 years.

That wasn't our problem -  if you've been sitting on the same piece of sidewalk for 6 years, you should probably move somewhere - either a different sidewalk for a change of scenery, or a different walk of life to gain some different hopes.

Regardless, we left so our ears could find some reprieve from his haggard, scratchy excuse of a voice.

By the time we'd crossed the sidewalk, he'd already left. Fuck it. We went back and sat down, on the very same square that he'd just given us a lecture on being useless. This turned out to be the best decision of our day.

Once we returned, we held out our sign which attracted the right kind of people. One of the first donors we met was a young girl, our age, named Sam.

She bounded over to us and struck up a smiley conversation, with some smiley hand movements, before handing us a smiley 20 bucks.

I felt like I'd seen her before.

She kept talking to us and after a while, offered to take us out for lunch. Hungry as we were, we politely declined. Hadn't she already given us 20 bucks? That was more than enough.

She insisted, though, and helped us up from our seats on the concrete and walked us back towards Queen.

This girl was great. She was bubbly, she smiled a lot, and she was very... weird.

Not weird in a bad way, but weird like we were - open-minded and not afraid of the twisted and foul inner-workings of a broken psyche.

She was a computer programmer, so she had a ton of time to spend by herself, contemplating the awkward algorithms of a nerd's mind. Because of this, we had some great (albeit very odd) conversations.

Still, she reminded me of someone.

The four of us strolled down the road, the three boys collectively infatuated with this high-spirited angel. Together, the lot of us strolled down Queen, trying to figure out which restaurant to go to.

We left the choice up to her, since it was her money.

She decided against that - she was feeding us, so we should pick. We unanimously agreed to go to the first bar that we found, which happened to be only a few feet down the road.

In the double-doors we went, looking back at the reflections our filthy faces and our sparkling mentalities. We were turned around soon after, our elation twisted into outrage.

A tall, bald man who could only be described as a fuckface was waiting for us when we stepped inside, his arms crossed and his posture confrontational. He looked us over.

"Nope."

We paused and waited for him to finish. He didn't.

"What?"

"You've got to go." He spoke to us as if we were trying to sell his customers barrels of earthworms and maggots.

"Why?"

He first looked at Scrib. "Well, you need a shower," he said, apparently trying to single Scrib out (like most authority figures seemed to do), "and I can already tell that my customers don't like you."

Doubtful. There were very few people that we can't manage to put a smile on.

"Do you shave your head to look like a dick?" Scrib asked, "because you're doing a pretty good job."

We laughed, left, and spent a good minute emptying the phlegmy contents of our lungs onto the door before we left to find another restaurant.

It was then that I realized why Sam seemed so familiar. She had the exact same smile as my ex-girlfriend.

Weird...

I looked at her with a different eye from then on - not suspicious, though if anything, my gaze probably making it more obvious that I really liked her. Shit.

Infatuation is such a stupid thing... it's one of the only feelings that can make you disregard your plans, your morals, and your life for a few hours or a few days worth of satisfaction.

Infatuation; the Feel that allows you to find perfection in the apple of your eye for the simplest things.

She plays with her necklace the same was as you do? Oh my god, we're meant to be together. She has a tattoo on her arm too? We're soul mates. 

Ridiculous.

Damn. Either way, getting kicked out of the bar by that douchebag had brightened our days. It had given us something to stand up for - it had almost entitled us to a sense of purpose.

Sure, maybe we weren't university grads, but at least we were able to piss off pretentious fucks just by being alive.

Thanks, man!