Mikey Gluesniff: I Had A Dream

 

I was in the dream.

(an excerpt of the journal of Mikey Gluesniff, a hobo who came by his name honestly...)

March 7th, 1937

I had the dream again. Shorter than usual, and deeply unsatisfying. My after-supper glue smelled delicious, but then I got lost. I tried walking. Still lost. My trousers felt heavy, like they were wet, so I knew the old penny farthing was not going to be an option for getting to my brother's wedding in time. That was a shame, because who doesn't love a giant wheel and a tiny second wheel? There were no trains. Anywhere. Trains did not exist. I asked. Everyone looked at me with pity, and shrugged and shook their heads. Except this one old man; he laughed and laughed and repeated "train" over and over, like it was the punchline of his new favorite joke. It started to rain.

When the snow stopped, I left the printing press showroom (no idea how I got there) and went across the street to Pittsburgh, for one of their famous crusts with the bread cut off. They were all out. That girl was there, like she always is - ten years old and dressed for school, lecturing passersby about their oral hygiene and bookkeeping. I could do without the bookkeeping talk, you know? Anyway, I turned around and was a child again, myself. I was sketching my latest yacht design, and when I finished and held it at arm's length, it was a naked lady, and the cops came and took it away. I got dizzy, so I closed my eyes for a minute.

My head hurt. Not like a headache. More like someone was scratching my scalp with nails. I fell down some stairs and went to a humdinger of a party in an abandoned warehouse, thrown by a man nobody knows. There was dancing. Ol' Barb Stab-You-Quick was there, but for some reason everyone kept calling her Jane. Someone offered me a smoke and said they knew what trains were. Thank goodness, I said. But I blinked and the fool turned into that goat, again.

Always the goat. 

The goat says I need to lay off the glue.

Plausible Zane Scarrey vs. Starbucks

Most of the so-called "deliberate hoboes" - those who left the regular world behind and hit the rails by choice - did not set forth without a head full of dreams.  Some dreamed of lives unfettered, walking and riding free from one interesting place to another and sleeping under a blanket of Arizona stars along the Union Pacific.  Others envisaged wandering for a while, seeing America, getting it all out of their system, and eventually finding a place to settle down and restart their lives.  A few dreamed of being discovered by a big-time Hollywood talent scout in search of a scruffy, disheveled man to play the heavy in the next Bogart flick.  [Note:  This only happened four times.]

One deliberate hobo, however, took a more modest approach to his dreaming.  They called him Plausible Zane Scarrey, because he kept his dreams plausible, and his name was Zane Scarrey.

He had fled the violence and futility of the Wisconsin Milk Strike in November 1933, and his only expectation for the future was to find a version of the Great Depression in which people were not shooting strangers over busted headlights and picket signs.  He made his way to the Illinois Central, then to the Santa Fe, and finally to the fabled rails of the Union Pacific in California.  He picked oranges and strawberries for pennies a week, and raisins for slightly less, and rarely stopped moving and/or working.

When he allowed himself the indulgence, he imagined that one day, he might get hired on full-time by one of the farmers he served.  That never happened.

He pictured a world in which his black hobo friends could illegally ride in the same unlocked rail car with his white hobo friends.  That happened, but not until the mid-fifties, a half-decade after Zane's death at the hands of mindless Indianapolis cops who had mistaken him for the Beech Grove Groper at the 1951 Indiana State Fair.

Once, when he was three sheets to the wind on hobo wine and grilled baked lint fritters, he imagined that he could land a job with the railroad.  He always got along with the train crews, and the yards cops (and their dogs) seemed to adore him.  Unfortunately, he was a cow-teat-puller by trade, so this never happened.

As his hobo years rolled on, he developed a skill with pot-brewed hobo coffee.  He dared, from time to time, to see a future world in which he started a humble coffee shop on a corner in downtown Fresno, and worked hard and made really good coffee and expanded to two locations, then three, then a hundred, then a thousand, until eventually his coffee shops sold indy music and sub-par sandwiches on every street corner in the USA (in some cases, on more than one corner of a given intersection, and in a few special spots, more than one in a given coffee shop).  

This happened, but Plausible Zane Scarrey didn't live to see it, and received no credit for the idea, because he hadn't deemed it plausible, and never told anyone he had thought of it.

He kept it plausible.  Imagine that.

This post prompted by the words ENVISAGE and IMAGINE, from the good folks at Studio 30 Plus.



 
 

A Slacker* Looks At 40 (From 45) -- The Warranty Expires

It's hard for me to look back at turning forty without seeing a dead, muddy Bart Simpson, crumpled face-down next to the railroad tracks.  Oh wait - that was me, only I wasn't quite dead, and I was on the floor of our foyer.  My 40th birthday was still several months away, but I was quickly learning that my warranty had expired at 39 1/2.


Leaving out the medical details because they are tedious and boring (except to my doctors - they think I'm NEAT!), I was very sick, and the long process of trying to figure out what was wrong with me had just begun.  I was home, loaded with radioactive iodine and awaiting part two of some scan thingy.  I stood for a minute, then sat on the floor, then sprawled out on my back, breathing laboriously and scaring the hell out of poor [Maris].  Feigning confidence as best I could, I assured her that we would find out what was amiss, treat it, and get on with our awesome life together until we were so old as to be considered cute.  Inside, however, I felt as though I might not see age forty, a mere six months away.

What do you do when you think you might be facing death, and for real, this time?  I don't know about you, but I watch a mandatory internal slide show of bits of my life.  It was much shorter than I'd expected, but whatever.  It was out of my control, so with [Maris] holding my hand and worrying herself almost to the point of injury, I watched as the images scrolled past like a bad PowerPoint presentation.


Dangling happily from the rusty old ladder on the American Shoal Lighthouse, a few miles off Sugarloaf Key on our honeymoon.  (Photo by [Maris])  It seemed like only yesterday.



Back, back, back we go - to 1977.  One of those images I can see perfectly without the aid of the photograph.  Yes, that's a Fonzie t-shirt I'm wearing.  And yes, I look a little less than thrilled.  Photographers who read this will understand.  A stranger had my camera.  Rest assured, though - that was a great day.  When I got sick in 2006, my father had been gone for just over a year.  I remember thinking that my dad would have liked my boss.  On one of my really bad days, this guy came over to my cubical, looking very concerned, and quietly and very sincerely told me not to die at work because he didn't want to have to "deal with" me.

 
BOOM.  It's 2004, and [Maris] and I are adventuring in Maine, shooting every lighthouse and weird sign that moves, and many of the ones that don't - including the Old Cape Elizabeth Light.  That was only two years ago, I thought.  I took a few deep breaths.  I determined that I would live to again scamper along the coast with my beloved, searching for the perfect photograph.


I got worse, then better, then much worse.  One morning - and I know I make a lot of stuff up, but I'm not making this up - I had an extremely vivid dream of dying.  One of my weird symptoms was extreme joint pain, and my hands would sometimes clench up so badly that just washing them was difficult.  In my dream, I was in my parents' bathroom, struggling to wash my hands.  A voice from within told me to give up and turn off the water, and that it was okay.  I had a feeling that turning off the water would be THE END, but as quickly as I filled with dread, I was emptied of it.  It was okay - profoundly sad, but okay.  I was going to miss [Maris], but as the water stopped and my life went silent and black, I thought Well, at least my hands won't hurt anymore.

 

They don't.  I lived.  I turned forty.  I live.  I complain a lot, but I live.

 

* I'm not really a slacker.  Mostly, I just like the title.