The Bottle Pops (2)

We found ourselves at the top of a staircase on a mezzanine outside someone's second story apartment building. Surely nobody would be home.

Once Upon a Friendship

Just as we thought that, the door opened and a woman poked her head out.

"What are you doing here?"

We stated the obvious by looking at our bottle of whiskey. "Uhhhmm.. can we drink
here?"

She considered for a moment. "Yeah, sure. If you're quiet."

We weren't. The tables turned quickly. Such began Scrib's second act of severance towards our relationships.

Initially, we were gleeful and excited that this random woman had actually let us drink on her property. Our excitement was evident in our elated conversations, though, the conversations soon came to dwindle.Words were replaced by aggressive stumbles and aimless punches that flew through the air. There was no intention to this aggression - Scrib was simply acting as an icon of his current emotions. Fernweh joined in - he likes to hone his fighting skills - and I sat in the back with Snooze because I was too lazy and drunk to practice.

As Fernweh stepped into the circumference of Scrib's area-of-flail, the scene changed. His words - obnoxious, two dozen decibels too high if only to defile the kindness of the lady who's property we were on (she was surely now too scared to kick us off the property) [run on sentences are cool] - were senseless, violent and cacophonous. Finally, after a dozen minutes of rambling, he resorted into one of the most paleolithic methods of communication: violence.

With a glorious (albeit terrifying) shout, Scrib twisted his face into a contorted, screwed up mask of hatred. His eyes lost any sense of luster as he bellowed, "ALL I FEEL IS ANGER!!!"

He spun with the entirety of his 180 pounds of wait and clocked Fernweh in the face. Fernweh hit the ground and stood back up.

"What the fuck, man?" He stepped back. We'd never seen such mindless fury before; at least, not within one who we held in such high regard. It was scary to see someone you loved treat you with such disrespect.

"YOU ARE AFRAID!!" Scrib stepped forward towards Fernweh, who was leaned up against the fence that separated us from a story-and-a-half-fall. Every follicle that resided on Scrib's flesh flourished with fury as he backhanded Fernweh in the face again. Considering neither Fernweh or I had expected this, we weren't nearly prepared to jump into a state of hatred half as complete as Scrib's. We decided we were just going to leave - there's no point in beating the shit out of your friends. At least we were rational enough to realize that. The liquor was gone, anyways.

Your portfolio presents nothing but provocation.

Your potential's being taken apart, piece by piece;

being picked at by narcissistic fingernails;

a story narrated by pain itself. 

The first part of our walk sucked. Fernweh had been provoked, though at the time, he hadn't want to act on his anger. Now that me and him were alone, I had nothing to listen to but his furious rantings the surreal sound of Scrib's hand as it smashed against Fernweh's face. Fortunately, not far into our journey, we ran into a group of kids smoking a doobie. We struck up a conversation and ended up being passed a few tokes.

This happened no fewer than 5 times on our walk back to the bridge, and by the time we were there, we were so ripped that the night's aggression had diffused itself into a chink-eyed state of relaxation.

We set up our beds and laid down, trying not to let the distant memories penetrate our present mindstates. The night found us quickly.

Squids

It had been over a year since I'd awoken under this bridge. This time, instead of being cuddled up with a fine lass, I found myself cuddled up with my two homies and one of their girlfriend.

This was much more awesome.

We scrubbed the sleep from our eyes and decided it was best to go squeegee. We had been awake for five minutes already and had discovered no effective way to get beer, so we figured we'd hit the street corners and wash some windows.

Toronto's well known for its massively popular and massively efficient streets where gangs of squeegee kids take to the road and clean the fuck out of anyone's car that happens to be driving by.

Fortunately, while packing our bags, we found three beers leftover from the night before. We took them to a corner on Queen and sipped our sunrise beers while we orchestrated the soft slip and slide of our squeegees.

There's a ton of controversy about squeegeeing. Some drivers may consider squeegee kids respectful, in a sense, because they work for their money as opposed to panhandling. Other drivers consider squeegee kids (hereon referred to as squids) rude and invasive. These drivers aren't asking for their windows to be washed. Maybe their window was already clean?

Yeah, my fly's open. I give this many fucks:

We figured people shouldn't get so damn offended.

I understand if you don't want your car touched by a stranger, but I'm not touching your car. My squeegee is. The same damn squeegee that you probably use to wash your own window.

You don't have to be scared, either. Nobody's going to beat your windshield in for not paying us. We're used to not getting paid. If you do have a donation, though, we won't say no.

Everyone's gotta eat. And drink. Drink, mostly.

We washed away for about an hour before the cops rolled up as per usual. A fairly normal conversation ensued.

"Do you know this is illegal?"

"Ye."

"So, you can't do this anymore."

"Of course not."

The cop whipped out his ticket book and asked for my name.

I told him my name was Jamal Kingston and he left me a ticket inscribed with that identity. Sweet! This would make things easier. If you tell a cop that you haven't got any ID, you can use an old ticket instead.

Once you gain a repertoire of squeegeeing tickets, cops won't even question you. Hell, some businesses accept tickets as ID. Thus began my new life as Jamal Kingston.

In a normal situation, with normal cops, the encounter ends here, but as I bent over to pick up my squeegee, a gargantuan uniformed douchebag stomped his oppressive, steel-toed boot down onto my squeegee.

"Where'd you get this, kid?" Supposedly he wasn't an idiot. Supposedly he knew all the squids in Toronto steal their squeegees from the gas station down the road.

"I bought it. I brought it from B.C."

"It's a Mallory." (Mallory's a brand of squeegee.) "I can prove you're lying."

I hesitated, expecting to be ushered down to the gas station in a pair of cuffs.

"Whatever. Keep your squeegee. I know you're just going to steal another one." He left it on the ground, got into his cruiser and left.

Sweet. Now that the four of us were still here, we weren't apprehended, and we had money in our pockets, we decided it was time to go to the liquor store. We were gonna pick up a bottle of whiskey to truly celebrate our arrival in Toronto.

This was a bad idea. It's sad to say that getting ticketed was the happiest moment of our day, but it definitely was. Soon after we'd picked up the bottle, we stepped into some dark times.

Fire in the Hole

We didn't beat the storm.

Sprinting through the torrential downpour, we finally found some shelter.

We dove out from the maelstrom of ice-cold needles and sprawled ourselves onto a concrete slab next to a hotel's entrance way. There was already a wise couple here, apparently as disgruntled by mother nature as we were.

We struck up an awkward conversation for a few moments before we realized how bad we were at pretending to be normal and seceded from the group to find ourselves our own spot to be incoherent and stupid.

The storm cleared out pretty quickly. We'd passed much of the time discussing the possibility of sharing lucid dreams and joining each other in our subconscious minds while we slept. It had been done before - there was no reason we couldn't do it.

The last drops fell from the firmament and we held this thought in our minds as we hoisted our bags on and headed towards the bridge. 

It was only a ten minute walk to the Spadina bridge. This was the bridge of all bridges. Hobo central, Canada. It looked like things had changed a lot since last year though.

Last year, the bridge had been occupied by only the most revered of hobos. There had been six fairly large cubbies situated right underneath the main section of the bridge, elevated between the road itself and the ground by about five feet.

These had essentially been "rented" out to different hobos on a first-come, first-serve basis. It had been truly reasonable - shit never got stolen, people tended to get along, and those who didn't, didn't talk to each other.

I'd stayed in one such cubbie with a friend of mine, P-Dawg Williams. Her concrete cubby had been big enough to fit a single mattress, a couple loads of laundry, three people and enough room to hang her pictures on the wall. Homely.

Despite that, nobody was sleeping in the cubbies anymore. They'd relocated themselves onto a massive stack of pallets on the ground next to the cubbies, that must have been 20 feet by 20 feet across and was standing at least a foot off the ground.

There were a good dozen hobos sitting, lying, standing, drinking and smoking on top of this beastly structure, and they informed us that nobody was sleeping in the cubbies because someone had been going around torching them.

What the fuck? There's a hobo arsonist on the loose?

We didn't want to risk getting torched, and we were way too tired to deal with meeting a handful of hobos at this hour, so we trucked 'er down a bit farther past their camp and found some cardboard. We kicked a bunch of dirty needles out of the way before setting our tarp down and our cardboard on top of it to lay down for the night.

Well, it was nice to be back in Toronto. Now it was time to have some lucid dreams.

Relapsed

Well, it was done. We'd all relapsed.

It wasn't as great as we'd expected.

I, myself, was having a pretty good time. The world had become ethereal, as it usually does when one is ripped on strong opiates. A whole new spectrum of vibrant colours revealed themselves to me (well - not new colours, per se, but colours I hadn't seen in a few months.)

Each person who sauntered past me would radiate with a sense of potential friendship, leading me to offer everyone my heartfelt greetings. Life had become worth living again!

Scrib, on the other hand, had receded so far into the interior monologues of his mind that it was impossible to get a word out of him. Questions would pass right through his brain as it twisted and turned, contemplating the sadistic inner workings of reality. There was a lot going on in there.

Fernweh, while not quite as reclusive as Scrib, had succumbed to one of the most prominent adverse effects of heroin - the Bothers.

Everything was bothering him - each sentence I spoke irked him, each misplaced shrub in the grass enraged him, the sound of the footsteps of passers-by infuriated him.

Thus, each word that he spoke was confrontational - whether it be to contradict what I'd just said, or to hate on something, or to talk down on someone. The Bothers always make for some truly lame social situations, where beneficial conversation is replaced by a competition between two egos.

People using heroin often find themselves vehemently arguing with each other, too busy thinking about how awesome they feel to realize they're both defending the same topic.

Snooze was extremely dissatisfied with our choice of relapse. We chose not to care - we sure as hell hadn't pushed the drugs on her, and it's not like we'd turned into psychopathic demons who weren't fun to be around.

Sure, Fernweh was grumpy, and Scrib was lazy and quiet, but that wasn't really much different than usual. Besides, I was having a great time with Snooze.

After I flailed around in the park for another half hour, our hobo bones began to creak. This is a telltale sign that something was coming... something... big. Something... wet...

We looked upwards and saw an army of storm clouds marching across the firmament. We hopped up, grabbed our bags and dashed towards the clouds and our destination: the Spadina bridge, where I'd slept last year on my journey through Toronto.

We'd beat the storm.

We had to!

Relapse (1)

Alright, well, a few things had happened since we'd landed in Toronto.

First, we realized how infinitely glad we were to be at least a few miles away from Habeeb's ignorance. The instant his car had pulled out of the parking lot he'd left us in, we muttered a few insincere thanks before hootin' and hollerin' as he crept out of the parking lot at his usual speed of 2 clicks an hour.

The second thing that happened was that I saw my old heroin dealer. Fuck. His stocky, pale, ogrish form ripped up to us on his skateboard before we'd even had a chance to find the person we were looking for in Toronto.

Ogre is actually a really cool guy. Despite this, I hadn't been making a point of seeing him while I was here. Last year, traveling with a group of traincore oogles had gotten me into some extra sticky situations with heroin. Needless to say, I wasn't too eager to reinstate an addiction like that.

Pft. Who was I kidding?

 I opened the filing cabinet that categorized my life;

sidling through the different years that each folder held.

I pulled out my past memories

and sent them through a shredder;

I found my failed dreams,

stapled them together,

and mailed them back to who I used to be.

Once I'd cleared out the empty folders,

I found myself at rock bottom again.

The three of us handed him over a wad of cash and waited for him to return. (I know that the number one rule on the streets is not to give money to dealers and let them run off, but I'd known Ogre for some good time and knew he was a solid guy. Aside from the first impression that any dope dealer gives off, he's an intensely spiritual, verbally talented sympathizer. He just happens to make his profit off of other people's lives.)

Didgeridouchebags

Anyway, we clunked down on the sidewalk and jammed out on our didgeridoos while we waited for Ogre and Snooze to show up.

Ah - Snooze. Last time I'd seen Snooze had been back in B.C.

Me and some of my old friends had introduced Snooze to Scrib and she'd fallen head over feels into a boiling vat of infatuation. Seriously - I'd never seen anyone fall so severely in love, so quickly. Despite our constantly hanging out together, she isolated herself from our group so she could ogle Scrib. Our words were lost on her; her words ceased to exist - her entire existence was revolving around putting Scrib under the scrutiny of a glossy-eyed stare.

Anyway, I'd hoped that her relentless lust (relentlust?) would diminish at least a bit between then and now, but it hadn't. She'd spent the first week apart sending me text messages demanding to know about Scrib's safety, and when it got so severe that I had no choice but to ignore them, she began calling me with the sound of tears in her voice demanding to know if Scrib had died.

Yeah. One of those relationships! Anyway, things hadn't changed. She offered Fernweh and I a quick hug before she threw her arms and her eyes onto Scrib and refused to let go of him until Ogre returned with our drugs. Right - the drugs. We had some explaining to do with Snooze...

Freedom from Habeebdom

Almost... there...

Almost...

There...

Habeeb's presence had become a suffocating grip that threatened to ensnare each one of us. Not only that, but we were getting irritated at ourselves for getting so irritated with Habeeb.

Fernweh, having dealt with Habeeb's unreasonable demands as much as we had

("you can't wave to strangers on the road!" 

"why not? they waved to us... this is a perfectly rational and friendly greeting, man."

"no! you can not do that!"

"fuck you..." )  

had just spilled a glass of water on himself, and finally flipped. He'd spent the next 3 hours muttering profane curses and death threats to the back of Habeeb's seat. Scrib's knees were driving him into a state of wretched agony, and his grunts and grimaces were sucking the sympathy out of each of our sickened souls.

The excited demeanor with which we'd left Vancouver was quickly dwindling.

Finally, after one of the worst six hours in recorded rideshare history (that anyone lived to speak of), the highway began to twist itself into a network of spiraling highways, an endless current of on-ramps and offramps.

We were coming into the city, at last, and we'd be freed from Habeeb's grumbling presence and our own cynicism that he'd unearthed from within. We'd be freed from a mire of fetid foot-stench. We'd be freed from these daggers that so diligently stabbed at our thighs.

We'd be free!

sometimes, life's like a fable;

each frown gives way to a smile;

upside down lips melt into the brightness of day

and every grin

brings off the burden of sin.

Super-Habeeb: Volume II

7 AM rolled around and we packed up our shit and went to meet Habeeb at the McDonald's where we'd promised. The next two hours passed in a stagnant swash of ambivalence.

7:30 - Habeeb hadn't shown up. This was to be expected - at the speed that he drives, I wouldn't expect him to be any less than an hour late.

8:00 - One hour late. We didn't actually expect him to take this long, but we weren't surprised.

8:30 - What the fuck, man. We were starting to weigh the pros and the cons of the potential situation. If he didn't show up, we'd have to hitchhike from Kenora to Toronto throughout the forlorn highways of Ontario. On the bright side - no more Habeeb!

We were considering calling someone to report his license plate number and have him tracked down, since he still had some of our stuff in his car. Between 8:30 and 9 he finally showed up. He bought us each an Egg McMuffin, presumably as an apology gift for leaving us sitting in McDonalds for 2 hours waiting for him.

Once we'd crammed back into his car, bent at unsightly angles and crushed by unnecessary amounts of our own gear, we witnessed another episode of Habeeb Driving. I swear, he was trying to follow his GPS out of the damn parking lot, because he ended up doing a bunch of half-circles around other people's parked vehicles at a max speed of 5kmph. I vowed never to let him park his car again before he let us out in Toronto.

We'd only driven for about half an hour before we saw the all-too-familiar red and blue flashing lights shining throughout the car's interior. Beebs pulled over and rolled down the windshield.

"Your insurance is expired, sir."

Idiot! You don't take a bunch of kids on a rideshare without letting them know that your insurance is expired. Granted, maybe we should have checked, but paying $180 for a ride generally guarantees the assumption that it will at least be legal. 

We were convinced at this point that Beebs was going to have his car impounded and that either the 4 of us would have to hitchhike out of here, or that Beebs would get a ride to the impound lot and the 3 husbands would be stuck hitching. It was bound to be an excellent couple days, foodless and drinkless as we were, cast under the vicious beat of the sun.

Nonetheless, after the cop made a blatant point of assuming Scrib was a criminal by singling him out and asking for his ID, we were set free.

At least he took us to see this.

 

Later on, when the sun had begun to set, we were pulled over again. Apparently Beeb's headlight was blown out. Fuck, man. We pulled over in the next city to rest until the sun came up, so as not to get busted again.

Beebs passed out pretty quickly once we'd found our parking spot. Understandable, since he didn't have pounds of baggage crammed onto his lap. It took Scrib and Fernweh a while longer, and I wasn't even able to fall asleep - though I was able to bare witness to Beebs being an idiot, even after we'd all relaxed.

During Fernweh's slumber, he moved his cramped knee and bumped it into the guitar. The slight jarring of the strings awoke Habeeb and sent him straight into an outrage.

"DO you not SEE that I am SLEEPING?" he hissed; the car turned from a calm, collected, and uncomfortable stupor into a spit-filled growl-haunted chamber, if only for a moment.

I considered stabbing Beebs and taking his car, but decided against it because I don't have a driver's license. Whatever. One more day, stuck in this car, and we'd be there...