Brain dead in Tucson

The trip from San Diego to Tucson was punishing.
Somewhere along the way the speed limit turned to 75 mph and most traffic was now doing upwards of 80. My little bike could just handle it, but getting out from underfoot of vehicles jockeying for position was unnerving.
I've had the bike up to 100 mph, but that was for kicks on an open road in the sunshine.
Between California and Arizona people drove differently, as if accidents didn't matter. Like they were bored. Bored at high speed.
By the time I closed in on Tucson it was getting dark. Traffic was heavy.
The semi trailers weren't focused either. Drifting all over. Were they racing each other? A few times I dropped the bike from sixth gear into fifth to power out of an ugly tangle, a lovers spat between amorous truck drivers. But the bike was no jack rabbit going from 85 to 90 and the tiny shoulder on my right didn't look like a safe place to go in a jam, more like a place to be smashed up against a concrete barrier.
I dodged and weaved, exposed. I was out gunned and nervous, by people driving fast and carefree.
Though I wouldn't admit it at the time, it might have been safer on a bigger bike.
By the time I pulled off the interstate into a gas station in Tucson I was exhausted the way a hunted animal must get exhausted.
I was brain dead, thirsty for a drink to celebrate my survival, and though I hadn't planned on it, ready to pay for another night in a hostel.
I fueled up and went inside to pay. Walking up to the doors, a very tall, very well groomed man in a tidy brown leather jacket with long straight brown hair asked me if I had any change. He was standing in front of a pop machine. I assumed he wanted change: quarters for a dollar or something. He didn't look like any bum I had ever seen. I told him I didn't have any and entered the Circle K.
You've got to love those American gas station convenience stores. Each is it's own empire of vice. Tobacco, fireworks, pornography, junk food, gasoline and liquor. Chinese trinkets with American flags on 'em. This one had the typical wall of coolers, filled with cases and cases of terrible American beer.
I paid for gas and asked the cashier if he knew of a hostel close by.
He didn't know what a hostel was.
I asked if there was a YMCA and he didn't know that either.
“What about a cheap hotel?” I pleaded.
I got a blank look in return and he offered me a phonebook.
There was nothing under “Cheap place to stay.”
Life before smartphones. It was a riot.
I needed someone who knew the local scene. I needed to talk to someone a little closer to the edge the cashier to find out where I could get a room that wouldn't break me or a good place to camp.
I walked back to the beer display and pondered my situation. The beer was here, but where to drink it? It would be nice to camp tonight, drink a little and then sleep the sleep of angels.
It came to me in a flash. The guy I had passed on the way might know.
I walked back outside.
“Were you asking for money to buy alcohol?” I asked, awkwardly.
This huge white guy, I'm guessing 6 foot 4, turned red and sheepishly bowed his head as if he were about to be judged and found guilty.
"Yes,” he said.
“Great,” I said. “Where do you live?”
“Nowhere.”
'Great!' I exclaimed. 'Where are you camped?
He hesitated. 
“Like where are you staying?” I asked again.
I don't believe he hesitated because he couldn't understand my Canadian dialect. I believe he was wondering about the wisdom of telling a greasy guy who just rolled in on a motorcycle where he lived.
 “Behind this place,” he said.
"Perfect. Would I be able to camp with you?”
He hesitated again.
What I would later come to know about down and out folks, is that just because they've come onto hard luck doesn't mean they aren't fussy. This guy more than most really didn't like sharing his space.
I told him my situation, my lack of funds and showed him my bike and my camping gear.
"You're from Canada then?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Looking back, I might have been a little more circumspect and a little less cheap. At the very least this guy was a candidate a mental health case. A gigantic, well dress homeless guy.
We came to an arrangement. I'd buy beer, he'd show me a place to camp. I bought a 15 pack of Budweiser and walked beyond the parking lot of the Circle K.
On the upside, it was close, but he was apologetic about how dirty it was. He had just made camp there recently and hadn't had a chance to clean it up, he explained.
His camping spot was quite literally between some low bushes. It was dark and I couldn't see a thing.
He found me some spare cardboard and I laid out my sleeping bag 10 feet from his. Setting up the tent seemed impertinent.
Typically this would have been the time to light a small fire, but my new friend new better than to try. We each cracked a beer.
After two beers I was ready for sleep, but my new friend had some things he needed to get off his chest.
That's how I got to meet Samuel James Hazard.

As far as you can go on land

This is the story of how I got to Tucson, Arizona and what happened there.

When I was 21 I wanted to explore the world. Not the whole world, just as far as I could go on land.  I decided to go to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. I was frustrated with University and the  idea that everyone around me seemed to be giving all their attention to surviving, little to learning, and nothing to living. So I left school, saved money, bought a motorcycle and went.

I travelled alone. My purpose was to find the meaning of life. I didn't bring a map.

I can't start from the beginning, too much happened, so I will begin in Mulegé, Baja California Sur, Mexico.

Davide, my flamenco guitar instructor, suggested when I should leave. “Wednesday night,” he said mysteriously, after practice.  “...is a good night to travel.”

He talked like a sage at times. So I just let it sit. But a few days later when I was pushing my bike out to the highway in the moonlight the sense in his words came to me.  It was moonlight. You could see like it was day time. And the roads were eerily empty, the weekend traffic hadn't started yet.

It was not uncommon to see vehicles racing down the road without headlights on the Baja Coast. In fact I had done a 17 hour grocery run in a van without the benefit of headlights just a few weeks before. A full moon aided travellers.

I couldn't say if Davide knew I had plans to leave yet or if he was talking about his own plans to leave.

At any rate I needed to leave Mulegé, and while I was sorry about leaving without saying goodbye, I needed to get out of there.

In a perfect world I would have just went south and took a ferry from Cabo San Lucas to the mainland, but I desperately need a clutch cable, and there wasn't a shop in Mexico that carried the piece I needed.

It's a little more than 600 miles from Mulegé to San Diego. I left Wednesday night and arrived in San Diego midday Friday.

So this was an unwanted and expensive detour. But by this time my approach was admittedly non-linear, a week at a monastery, driving a piece of the Baja 1000 race course, a month feeding donkeys and cooking the books at a Mexican resort. My goal was still Argentina, but the important thing was to experience things, to meet people. To live.

Without a clutch, driving a motorcycle is tricky. It is jerky, graceless, and dangerous. My bike was heavy with gear and that made starting out without the aid of a hill awkward. There are lots of pieces of a motorcycle that aren't completely necessary to its operation, but a clutch isn't one of them. In spite of this I'd travelled about a thousand miles without the benefit of a clutch, but not having a clutch was getting in the way of my idea of being a smooth operator. Both literally and figuratively.

In San Diego I drove straight to the dealership. Lo and behold, as if they had been expecting a visitation from a time traveller from 1978, the year my motorcycle  rolled off the assembly line, they had the part in stock and on hand. The parts guy offered to book a time to have it installed, but it was an operation I was waiting to perform. To have it installed at this point would have been sacrilege.

To say that I was attached to the bike would have been an understatement. Fear, love, hate. It was all there. It wasn't a pet object to me. It was a crazy lover that I knew was trying to kill me. It was the one I'd trust taking a hair pin turn laid down flat like it was resting on the pavement, only it was moving so fast that there were only inches to spare across two lanes of traffic shoulder to shoulder. Sometimes I'd notice sparks flying from the footpegs as they grazed the ground.

To American onlookers it was a silly looking affair, so much gear stacked on top of a tiny, donkey-shaped Japanese machine. Few people would consider taking such a huge trip on a motorcycle so small and under powered. But to me the bike was beautiful in the way a pocketknife is beautiful. Simple, spare, all utility.  Despite it's simplicity, this bike threatened my life daily.

With a tiny toolkit pieced together from pawnshops and second hand stores I could pretty much tear down the entire bike. In the parking lot, I went over the same motions I had made two months before, but this time, replacing the cable assembly with the right one. With the new clutch cable, it was like a new bike.



A trip to the city meant a stay in a hostel, and the cost was unnerving. I was beginning to worry about my ability to complete the trip with the funds I had left. $25 USD for a bunk. It was robbery. And what did I get? A night with a bunch of starry-eyed travellers pretending to have real life experiences with other starry eyed travellers. I didn't have the time or patience to connect with these fakes.

Out there on the street, that was real. If I had had more time I would have found a place to camp in some abandoned building or vacant lot. I would have met the people of the street and warmed my hands around a fire burning in a barrel. That's what I told myself, though I had never done any of those things.

In the morning I was glad to leave. I brought my gear out to the bike and loaded up. I was putting on my helmet when someone from behind me asked me about my license plate.

"You've got roses on your license plate? What's that about?"

I turned around to see a 30 something man with a beard.

“I'm from Alberta,” I explained. “It's a province in Canada. We've all got roses on our licence plate there.”

“Oh yeah," he said. "Where you headed to?"

“Mexico.”

He was instantly alarmed.

“Damn, son, it's dangerous down there.”

I asked him if he had ever been 'down there.'

“No,” he replied, as if it were proof backing up his story. “That's how bad it is.”

Beside being security guard at a mall, his job appeared to be convincing random travellers not to go to Mexico. He asked me if I'd have a coffee with him.

He was a caricature of an American and I liked him for it. His name was Reginald.

It was amazing, this guy's perception of Mexico; it wasn't 5 km from where we stood, but he thought it was some kind hell on earth. Anarchy and death. Random acts of violence.

Over coffee he continued to preach about the dangers of Mexico. He also offered me a place to stay and a reference for a security job in San Diego. Not a bad opportunity by my metric: a random job in a city I knew nothing about. But it didn't feel right, a little too milk toast. Too safe. I had idled for more than a month in Mulege, and I just wanted to get moving. America was an uninteresting and expensive detour, Mexico was interesting and inexpensive.

Reginald saw I was still set on Mexico and changed his tactics.

He started talking about Tucson. If I was headed East to the Gulf Coast, why wouldn't I head through the states on those fast American highways?  Wouldn't that actually save me time overall?

It made sense. If I made my own food and camped illegally it would be fast and pretty cheap, maybe cheaper.

And there was that name, Tucson.

It was like a poem.

“Oh,” he expounded, “It's a beautiful little college town, mild climate, friendly people. Beautiful college girls.”

Images of college girls sunbathing played in my mind.

I told him it was too expensive state side, and that his fears of Mexico were unfounded. We finished our coffees and I thanked him.

He waved goodbye as I eased the bike into first gear. The newly repaired clutch made starting out effortless.

Two intersections later I pulled up at a light and a beautiful woman crossed the street a few feet from my bike. I got her attention and asked,  “If I was going to go to Tuscon which way would I go?"

"Turn left and watch for a sign," she said.

"What will the sign say?" I asked.

"Tuscon," she smiled, and continued walking.

Reginald would never know it, but his magic had worked. And in Tucson things would go in a completely new direction.

Corin's call

Corin called a few days ago. He wanted to know a few more details about the trip. As it turns out, a second hand account of it inspired one of his songs that will be released soon. It was twenty years ago this month, and because I am endowed with both a sense of nostalgia and time to reflect, I am going to give an account of that journey.

This is my version of the events that led me into what Corin calls the Hobo Jungle.

Lost and Found

One night on a beer run next door a beautiful young women approached me and asked me if I wanted to buy some handcrafted jewelery. I was stunned. I said yes, oddly.
Really I just wanted to spend a little time with her.
She showed me a bunch of items I could buy for my girlfriend. They really didn't appeal. Do you have anything fit for a guy?
She pulled out a bead necklace with mushroom penants hanging off. The necklace was nice, but the mushrooms made it look really odd.
How much I asked?
You make an offer.
$10 I said. she blanched. Her boyfriend popped out of the shadows and said the materials to make it were 10 bucks.
I apologized,  offered $15 and they took it.
It was bad before, but having in my possession it was truly ugly thing, likely crafted after a hallucinatory mushroom session. The mushroom penants were gigantic and childish looking.
Do you want me to put it on you?
Yep, I said. That had been the point.
She tied it on. Later on I came to appreciate it. It really completed my hobo look.
We got to talking. They had run off together and were camped up on A mountain.
(*What were their names? Did I write about it anywhere?)

It was a sketchy situation they admitted. Things could get pretty wild out there, but they could be together, and that was important.
I told them about my situation and asked them to come visit sometime and hang out around the fire.
It was odd that I was so drawn to this young woman when she was so clearly taken. Her boyfriend was right there.
They asked about my bike.
Want to see my Harley Davidson? he pulled out his bicycle from beside the building. "It's Hardley a  Davidson," he said more clearly.

 and want to spend a little time with the girl, stunning beauty at Winks. She was selling necklaces she made
Lost and Found
Lost's special craft was writing signs for people. He  had decent penmanship, but more than that, he had a terrific sense of humour. Perfect for sign writing.

When they had fires at their camp the police were called out. Some nasty neighbour just didn't want homeless people keeping warm.

Who are they, where were they from. What would happen to them.
They did show up after all. It was the festive season, and although it was a bruising season for people on the street, the evening was filled with cheer, Tusconians had been generous to the panhandlers and there was beer and everclear too.
Lost asked if anyone else knew the lyrics to the Lion King songs. We all knew of the movie, but no one knew the songs.
That was okay, Lost knew all of the songs by heart. Also all of the dialog. He had been on acid watching the film and was able to commit the whole thing to memory.
too bad really, he had a thin wavering singing voice.
He was inspired by Jim Carey, who himslef had been a street person and now was worth a tonne of money.
Found getting pregnant. Her brother.
Lost said the doctor said he could have children.
Interestingly, it seemed to be everybody's business that she was pregnant and that she get off the street, get back to her parents, go to a shelter. this odd collection of hustling addicts who wouldn't so much as share their real names suddenly wanted to advise this girl. It seemed like a heart warming activity to partake in, but I just didn't believe in it.

Souring the Highschool sweetheart

I probably should leave the part about my relationship with women upto your imagination, because it would make for a much better story.

I was ashamed not to have broken up with my highschool sweetheart before leaving. It was completely disingenious. If I had met some adventurous, like minded woman, I believe I would have jumped ship. But there was something else holding me back from dumping her. I think it was kind of like a life line. I knew I was going to get into all sorts of shit, and I wanted to have a plan to have something to come back to. Even though I had a deep suspicion it was a fraud.
Pamela said stupid things that made me cringe. "I want a house that doesn't have stairs," she said. As if I should go and get her a stairless house, or care about some house sometime in the future.  "I won't be able to do any vacuuming because of my back, you'll have to do it."
At that time in my life I was condemned or, perhaps blessed, to live in the moment. Gathering the resources to plan the bike trip was for a few months was about as much as I could muster.
Clearly this woman was trying to push me away whether she knew it or not.
She also notice that I didn't introduce her to other girls as my girlfriend. That's kind of a telltale sign.

The trip was about me exploring the meaning of life, not a search for love or sex, and I'm glad it didn't become that. At the same time almost all my interactions with women were rife with sexual tension. I was essentially the same repressed sex mad teenager I had been a few years prior, and despite being on an awesome motorcycle road trip with black leather jacket and amazing stories, I quite successfully managed to chase off any would be pursuers just by being myself.

Magic tricks at the peep show

One day Samuel said something completely unexpected. 'Searchez la femme.'
Double surprise.
Samuel knew French cliche.
Samuel had a sex drive.
It was disturbing, I couldn't see how this situation was going to end, but I knew it would be more weird that I had signed up for.
A mesquite marinated man picking up a woman. What woman, where? What would her story have been. My legendary empathy forsook me and I almost wretched. What femme would he find? One requiring payment, but who would be willing to accommodate a broke dude?
After watching me recoil in horror, Samuel announced the plan. We would hike across the tracks into some god forsake industrial neighbourhood to a neon coloured sex shop: to see a peep show.
I didn't want to go.
Sam wanted me to, which was weird. It wasn't weird gay, but plenty weird.
I think part of it was not wanting to be judged. On the exterior it seemed like a pretty sleazeball thing to do, to go to a disgusting booth in the back of a sex shop to pay quarters, no shit, quarters to watch women strip and dance about. That's about how I felt about it. That was a sleazeball thing to do.
I told him I'd walk with him there. He gave an ambiguous gesture that I took for submission.
Crossing the railway tracks it occurred to me that it might not be safe to just hang out in front of sex shop in the middle of Tuscon's industrial complex. I already had people try and pick me up, and it wasn't while I was hanging out under a streetlight in a charmless neighbourhood.
 On arrival I decided to go into the sex shop. Whatever, it didn't mean anything. I went inside.
Wall to wall penises everywhere. All sizes.Given the situation it was exactly what I didn't want to see. I moved about, even weirder shit.
I'm not against sex toys, knock yourself out. But there are times when it is really awkward to be reminded of your sexuality.
A mustachioed cashier glared at me.  
Samuel put some change in my hand and pointed to a velvet curtain.
I took a deep breath, steeled myself and walked back.
It was dark, but I could see a row of red doors along a narrow hall. Definitely some fire code violations. All the doors appeared to be shut, but the place seemed empty. I walked further along and pulled on one. It was open and thank Christ, unoccupied.
It was very dark. I could barely see anything, but the thoughtful managers at Deep Throat Exotics had been thoughtful enough to ensure that the place to put the quarters was lit.
Well what the fuck.
I put in a quarter.
The slits opened and I gazed through.
The first thing I noticed was the eyes behind the slits.
There may have been as many as 20 cubicles such as mine surrounding the edges. It was totally creepy. Creepy Sci-Fi. Welcome to the hall of the half humans. It was as though we come to watch some satanic ritual.
I saw a naked woman leave the room. She vanished behind a curtain, and then an attractive young woman walked on to stage scantily clad. Likely a university student. She was beautiful. And she started pulling off of her clothes. It was an immediate turn on. Praise God: the man in the cloud who set the wheels of evolution turning, had done a very good job wiring my sex drive, because despite the disgusting cheapness of the whole sleazy affair, I suddenly wanted more than anything in the world to see this woman take off her clothes.
It was sexy for about 5 seconds. Her clothes hit the ground and things got weird. Hardcore.
Clearly the clientele that this was established for needed to see much much more than I would ever want to see.

I was an inexperienced child, around me were porn addicts.
My quarters were gone.
I left, now willing to mill about the penises and the glaring cashier.
They seemed less offensive now.

6 Southern fire

The fuel for our little campfire was altogether different from Canada.
It was hard, misshapen stuff. Hard to get, hard to light, once lit would last all night.

We didn't have an axe or saw, so to make the fire meant breaking up big pieces of dry and dead wood into smaller pieces and hauling them back to camp.

Samuel and his giant frame snapped these dried up logs like twigs. I tried to do the same, but I was struggling. A six inch diameter log was getting the better of me.

Samual took note.  'Andru,' he said. 'you have to believe it is going to break.'

The other great thing about that southern wood was how it smelled when it burned. It was like burning incense.

But there are lots of ways to be on the outside.

(*Might be cleverer to save this for another chapter)
But when it was time to leave the fire and interact with the people of Tuscon, the fire smell gave us away.
It was like an olfactory business card.
"andru McCracken, esquire, homeless, lifting your possessions and peeing in your streets is my business"
Wafting across the air currents, people knew who we were, what we stood for and what we were trying to do.
From 2 yards away you could smell we were homeless, even though we had good access to bathrooms at the nearby gas stations.
We were homeless bums, certainly alcoholics if not heroin addicts, probably capable of violence, who cared for nothing but a drink or getting high,  and our mission was to rip them off.
It's hard for me not to be slightly sympathetic to Tusconians. Tuscon is a magnet for homeless people because the climate is so mild.

There were throngs of us, always getting into trouble, slowing traffic, ripping people off, getting high. Always tugging at someone's heart strings for a quarter and always ready to let them down.
(*Careful with this)

Dress like you are homeless sometime. Get real dirty and smelly and then go out into public and just feel the loathing. It's incredible.It is amazing to be on the outside.

4 A vacancy

We slept another night in the bushes, and when we woke up the next morning Wolfman was gone and the tree was ours.

It was what an middle class home buyer would you would call a fixer upper. The place itself was amazing. An old tree. A very big tree. And for all the drunken booze hounds and drug addicts that had made camp underneath it's generous limbs, they hadn't damaged a thing.

(* Senators office was just down the street)

In the open clearing underneath the limbs was a fire ring.

In short this campsite was probably one of the most rustic and charming places in to lay one's head in all of downtown Tuscon.

But having been the favored camping spot of hobos just off the highway or the rail, it was a complete fucking mess. Samuel would see to that. He was nearer to obsessive compulsive than neat freak.We went to work.

There were beer bottles every where. Hundreds of them. I asked Sam if we could return them for a deposit, but Arizona in its deep commitment to being a backwards state didn't have a refund system.

I stacked about 300 into a wall that I thought might keep out the wind and look pretty when the light shone through it in the morning. It didn't keep out the wind and it didn't look pretty, but it did get the bottles out of our way and did much to improve the appearance of the place.

Sam went to work too. He wasn't worried about beer bottles.  There were needles and worse, and he took care of it.

"Even cats, bury their waste," he complained,  "What kind of person doesn't bury their shit?"

I agreed, though until then I was more of a flusher than a buryer.
 Our little campsite had quickly gone from looking like a junky's shack to a national park.

It was beautiful.

The previous campers had browned the trunk with their fire, so Sam and I hauled a big piece of concrete to set against the tree trunk and reflect heat back at us.

We tidied up the fire ring, took half scorched plastic out of the ashes and gather some wood for a fire.

It was good.

I bought a case of beer and we enjoyed the afternoon.

It was getting colder and a fire would be essential to warm up in the mornings.

My sleeping bag was a joke.
(*Write a 

The nice thing about that fire was how it would always be glowing in the morning.  That gnarly old wood scavenged around the lot burned long. And in the morning the embers were still glowing and putting out a little heat. It was nice not to have to light the fire from scratch.

There is this idea that sleeping by a fire can keep you warm at night. But unless you are bodily a part of the fire, it really doesn't do a bit of good.

I like drinking with friends. Sam was a friend now.

I like drinking. I like drinking with friends. Drinking around the fire with Sam behind a god forsaken gas station in a great wasteland of an american city was, in a strange way, kind of like being home.

There was a Conan O'Doyle book with no covers, puffed up to look as thick as War and Peace because it had been left out in the damp, so we talked about books and words.

Samuel just did not understand the word motivation. He was really concerned about it. It doesn't make any sense, he cried drunkenly.

I agreed with him, though in my heart, I thought it was a stupid idea.
 It should be motorvation..



Life in our little area was nice.

5 Guitar

So I was going to stay until Christmas... I would need a guitar.
I found a great big pawn shop filled with broken dreams. Over in the instrument section I gazed upon the fields of guitars representing unrelenting addiction, untold musical failures or disappointed parents.Sweetness itself.
In a row of what might generously be called starter guitars, I noticed three or four of the same style. They all came from Paracho, Michoacan
There was definitly a bit of a glut on the market here.
 I looked them over, searching for the ugliest one that could hold a tune.
I found one that was a complete mess, had a crack in the sound board at the back. Maybe it had served as weapon, or swung at someones head? Played loud it gave a slightly distorted sound, the sound board clattering in a strange way. It was light as a feather and made in a Mexican state reknowned for guitars, and didn't look as if it would be a threat to be stolen.
I picked up the best version of the same model.
Would you take $75 for this guitar. The guy looked at me.
The place is filled with them man, don't you want to get rid of them?
Sure he said.
Then I picked up the next nicest one. Would you take $50 for this one?
The guy looked alarmed, but my calculus made sense.
"Nobody gets a guitar for $50"
It remains true. It doesn't matter that it probably scored a junkie $10 at a maximum, what mattered was the pawn shop's reputation for being hard asses.
I brought out the big ammunition.
"It's Christmas, man," I said.
He, unbelievably, nodded and started moving towards the front.
I took a deep breath and went to an unspeakable place.
I help up that damaged but sweet sounding piece of crap that would come to be my traveling companion.
"$25," I said.
He glared. Nostrils flared.
"You can get this piece of junk out of your store," I said, "It's stinking it up."
He looked at the mangled mess.
"Fine."
I paid and left quickly, but could not resist chirping on the way out, "Merry Christmas."

I hustled through the street with my beat up guitar and no case.
Cross an intersection a young guy spotted my guitar and asked me where I was from. Canada. Cool man, want to jam some time?
A high schooler, confident and outgoing, looking to connect with new people and grow his circle. A rare connection. It made me feel human.
Trying not to look or sound desperate, I said yes.
But the reality was, I was desperate.
Desperate for a little middle class convention. Desperate to be inside a home with walls and doors and running water. It made me think about going over to my bandmate's houses after school. I would have loved to come over.
He asked for my phone number. Umm...
He asked where he could get in touch. I revealed a little too much about my situation.
 The wind probably shifted and he got a whiff of mesquite.
And as quickly as it had been given the invitation was silently retracted.
I continued on my way.
Halfway home it started to rain lightly, and when it picked up I dashed under a bakery's awning.
I was just standing there waiting for the rain to stop when a woman came out of the shop, got my attention.
Let me get something to put that guitar in.
That's fine I said.
no really she said.
She grabbed a really big clear bag and brought it out to me.
I thanked her excessively in my Canadian way, but it seemed like her good deed was more about the guitar than me. But it was still a nice gesture.
Together we put the guitar in the bag, and I made my way back to camp.
The rain didn't last, but the weather was certainly getting colder.
I showed Sam my guitar.
(*Hung it from a tree)

2 Brain dead in Tuscon

Harley, the Canadian biker who lambasted me months before about overdoing it on the bike was absolutely right. Six hours can be too long.
Approaching Tuscon the speed limit turned to 70 mph and most traffic was doing 80. My little bike could just handle it, but getting out from underfoot meant the bike took some serious punishment. I dropped into fifth to gain power, but at 90 it felt like things were going to fly apart. It was getting dark, and traffic was getting heavier.
For this one stretch, I definitely would have felt safer on a bigger bike, but I would never admit that to anyone.
  I was dodging and weaving and exposed and couldn't find a safe place to go my own pace. Each time a semi trailers would pass me, it jostled me around the road.
By the time I pulled into a conveince store just off the interstate I was tired, Brain dead and thirsty for drink.

Walking up to the store, a tall well groomed man of about 30 or 35 asked me if I had any change. He was standing in front of a pop machine, so I just assumed he wanted change, quarters for a dollar or something, I told him I didn't have any and walked past in the store.
You've got to love those American convenience stores. This one had a wall made out of coolers, filled with cases and cases of terrible fucking beer. How do alcoholics get gas in the states?
It was handy, in a couple ways. Gas stations were open late, beer was always on hand, and it helped complete my stereotype of Americans, overweight junk food eating, hummer driving, fireworks buying alcoholics who bought piss beer in increments of 24.
 I asked the gas station attendant if he knew of a hostel close by. He didn't know what a hostel was. I asked if there was a YMCA. He didn't know that either.
What about a cheap hotel? A blank look.
Why would this guy, likely living with his parents, know about cheap accommodation. I needed to talk to someone closer to the edge.
I pondered and looked at the beer display, it would be nice to camp tonight, buy some beer and sleep the sleep of angels.
It came to me in a flash. The well groomed man outside wasn't looking to exchange bills for coins. He was panhandling.
I walked back outside.
Were you asking for money to buy alcohol?
This huge white guy, I'm guessing 6 foot 4, turned red and sheepishly bowed his head.
"Yes,' he said.
'Great,' I said. 'Where do you live?'
'Nowhere.'
Great I said. 'Where are you camped?
He hesitated. 
'Like where are you staying?' .
 'Behind this place.'
"Perfect.Would I be able to camp with you?
'Ummm....'
What I would later come to know about  down and out folks, is that just because they've come onto hard luck doesn't mean they aren't fussy. This guy more than most.
He really didn't like sharing spaces.
"You want beer right?"
"yeah,".
I told him my situation, my lack of funds and showed him my bike and my camping gear.
"I'll pay.
 He was clearly suspicious of me. Looking back, I might have been a little more circumspect and a little less cheap. He might have had some mental health issues. A gigantic, well dress homeless guy with a dire thirst.
He agreed to my terms. We got a 15 pack of Budweiser and he showed me where he was camped.The great part was that it was close. But it was truly disgusting. he had just made camp there recently and hadn't had a chance to clean up.
He found me some spare cardboard and I laid out my sleeping bag 10 feet from his. Setting up the tent seemed impertinent.
Though clearly not a talker. This guy wanted to. Damn did he talk.
That's how I got to meet Samuel James Hazard.

Meta hobo

Thinking about these things sometimes now makes me sad.
Not sure what the sadness is about really. I am sad to iknow about that.