Up on The Range

Up on The Range is where we everything
Remember when the County Fair was in Hibbing?
Six of us went, the girls on our laps
T.J. Swan and Schnapps for them, we had Southern Comfort, Jack and Jim.
A little Columbian with some of the worst homegrown for backup
More friends met us there in Bubba Pender’s pick-up
We had mini-donuts and elephant ears and we made bad decisions behind the carnival trailers
Those two broke up and that one threw up and it went bad from there

Up on The Range is where we everything
Grandpas, Dads and Uncles working swings at the mine
We had our first time and did our first crime
Got our first cars and lied our way into that one bar
Some of us graduated, some dropped out, some died

Some grew roots, some of us couldn’t be held down
We moved or stayed, found our tribes and lived our lives

But we all have it in us, with us, in our being

Up on The Range is where we everything

The Last Time I Saw Scarface Billy

I saw Billy at the Bus Stop on Nicolette and Franklin. I hadn’t seen him in eight years, but Scarface Billy looked 20 years older. He was on crutches dragging a bum leg in a brace. His face had been always been a cross-hatch of scars, but it looked worse. One eye was milky, blind, and that side of his face was drooping. His once jet-black thick hair had more salt than pepper and it struck me that I never knew how old Billy was…55? Maybe, but he looked 65. He didn’t have many teeth left, but the old tramp had fire blazing from his eyes and muscles still rippled in his forearms. He looked like what he was – an old wolf that, if pushed, would just kill you because he was too old to last in a fight.
I was embarrassed for him to see me in the condition that I was in; I had just come from my twice monthly hair-cut, I had a well-cut Brooks Brother’s suit flipped over the shoulder of my white light-weight Perry Ellis shirt. I was wearing pleated pants and expensive shoes. Hell, even my socks were expensive. He saw me.
“Hey, Soldier!? Is that you, man?”
“Hey, Billy. Yeah man, it’s me.”
“You look like a mark. Spare any change, mister?”
“Fuck you, old man.”
We stood there grinning at each other for a long ten seconds and then he said,
“Buy me a drink and give me a tailor-made smoke, ‘Citizen.’ “
We made our way to The Speakeasy – where all of the two-in-the-afternoon drinkers were pros. All of the men had decades old tattoos and some of the women had all of their teeth. It was where guys like us felt at home…when we were with guys like us. I was 29 years old, a kid in that bar, but I had lived ten men’s lives.
Billy asked about my clothes and I told him that I was married, separated, had a son and a different life than I once did. I was an account executive for print advertising for a publication that had a circulation of 100,000. I bullshitted my way into a job that had a company car and two-hour client lunches on the expense account, but I blew into town in a stolen car, had a warrant out for my arrest, and my life was coming apart.

“Who do you think you’re bullshitting, Soldier? Guys like us, we’ll never be Citizens.”

He called me Soldier because that was my street name when I met him. I was an 18 year-old street punk looking to get schooled in the art of hopping a freight train from Minneapolis to Eugene, Oregon. I rode the rails for the first time with Scarface Billy, Limpin’ Ed, Curly and Jim Forney. There was a girl in that mix too. I brought her along, but she disappeared with Curly when we hit Spookaloo. Billy took me under his wing and taught me how to roll my own cigarettes, make coffee over a fire in a soup can using a tied off clean-sock-pouch. He showed me how to get fifty cents on the dollar for food stamps, how to dive the best fast food dumpsters, and how to drink White Port, Wild Irish Rose and Thunderbird wine. I discovered Mad Dog 20/20 on my own.
Billy and the other guys knew where all the Salvation Armies, Rescue Missions, soup lines and food banks were in every town that we stopped in along the way. It was their way of life and I was being shown the ropes. I hung with Billy for a couple weeks, saw him open up the forearm of a big Ute with a broken Wild Irish Rose bottle. He was a wolf back then and I hadn’t seen him in the 8 years since.
An hour of drinking draft beer and Bacardi shots and I had stripped down to my wife-beater and threw my Perry Ellis shirt in the trash. We got shitty drunk, played shitty pool. Billy hobbled around the table on crutches, banging peoples shins and pissing off the room. It ain’t easy to get kicked out of the Speakeasy, but we did find ourselves out on the sidewalk in the hot sun of the late afternoon.
I got Billy back to the physical rehab place where he was sleeping, which was supposed to be a sober environment. I left him leaning on a buzzer and telling me not to forget that I would never be a Citizen.

 

 

Throwing Rice

Troy didn’t like to be rushed. Didn’t like that the paparazzi was all over the place on this one. But he was a free-lancer, so it came with the territory. He prefered close-up work, but his employer wanted a distance shot at a celebrity wedding. So he waited from his balcony.

He’d been enjoying the purrs and moans of a raven-haired, well endowed beauty when the call came in to his Manhattan apartment. They needed the shoot done today. In Malibu. He had three hours to catch a flight, the ticket would be waiting for him. Everything he needed would be waiting for him at the Hilton, across the street from the church where the wedding was taking place.

When he arrived and checked-in, the hotel manager welcomed him to California, and handed him the promised equipment bag. When Troy got to his room, jet lagged and grumpy, he checked to make sure the bag contained the right lens for the job, and took everything to the balcony, found a cushioned wicker chair, and started assembling the tripod. Nothing to do but wait now, and watch below as hundreds of guests crowded around the church, cameras flashing all around them. It was two in the afternoon and Troy coudn’t help but wonder why people were using flashes at all. Amatures.
Looking through his lense, setting the focus on the doors of the chapel, he grumbled inwardly again at the distance.
The groom was the celebrity, the bride was a studio executive who had finally netted her meal ticket. Troy had a chance to catch up on the event from a blurb in a newspaper on the flight over. He didn’t watch T.V., and had never heard of the actor getting married. He was thinking that the bride’s name rang a bell, something from his past, when the doors of the church opened.
It was Mandy on the groom’s arm. Troy had heard she’d been married, and had taken a new last name years ago after she had left him. Mandy was his Red Cross nurse in Kosovo when he’d been shot in the leg doing merc work. They had a two week affair, but in the end she left him saying they had no future because of the way he lived. Troy had never heard from her again.
Setting his cross-hairs on the grooms head, he squeezed off the shot. Blood and gore covered Mandy’s beautifull white dress as she screamed and collapsed unconscious on the church steps.
Packing his equipment, Troy wondered why she was wearing white. Wasn’t there some rule about wearing white if you had been married before?

 

 

Under the Overpass

Under the Overpass

While hitchhiking in the 80’s I covered 43 states. I was almost always solo, but I was also part of a tribe of travelers who were usually well met as we crossed each-others paths the along the Interstate Highways across the country. Along these roads are thousands of over pass bridges, and the ones closest to Truck Stops and towns were where those of my tribe would shelter from a storm and spend our nights.

After I carefully trudged up the 75% cement grade that ended on a three-foot wide flat ledge that spanned the width of the bridge, there would be a four-foot heavily shaded clearance under most of them, so I would crouch to unload my gear onto the cold cement. Sometimes, if I was lucky, there would be a cardboard mat left by the last traveler or a couple local teenagers using the spot to get high or make-out, but other times I would have to go out on a mission seeking a cardboard box from behind a local business.

Usually, I spent my time alone in those spots, but at times someone else would be up there, or just their gear. If there was another traveler (or sometimes a pair of them), I would smoke what I had with them and offer what I was drinking, or vise-versa. Most times we didn’t have a damn thing. We would camp on opposite ends of the ledge that spanned the width of the bridge.

There was always graffiti to be read along one of the concrete rafters set about ten feet apart spanning the width of the overpass. Names and dates of the last ones to pass through, messages to others about the local police or other dangers up above in the area and messages to each-other about when they were here or when they expected to arrive at a destination to meet up. Poetry, some long and some short, and “underpass essays” were common too. The words could rattle you or soothe you. Often there were canned goods that others chose to leave behind. A little weed or tobacco may be found in a baggie under a rock.

The sleep on concrete, even with cardboard and a blanket or sleeping bag was always rough, but it’s the life we chose.

Confession

“Yeah, you read my sign right, I’ll listen to your confession for a dollar, but just one. Man, really, I’ll listen to you if you just keep dropping ten dollar bills every few minutes. This is my corner, this is my gig. No one else does what I do.”
“Okay,” She said, ” I just left a man tied to a tree. I tried to beat him to death, but I’ve broken both of my hands on his face and he was still breathing when I left him. I kinda ran out of hate, too. It felt good.”

Day One

DAY ONE
I wasn’t new to cities, I had learned how to survive in a couple of them, but Manhattan in 1982 would take everything I had learned from a year and a half of traveling and living on the street, chew it up, mix it with some depravation, cum and blood, spit it back at me then lick it’s lips and sneer. New York City was a dragon.
I was nineteen years old, grooming Standard Bred Harness Racing horses along the east coast, in Florida at first, then up to North Carolina and finally to the Meadowlands in New Jersey. I quit the day I arrived because, from the Parking lot looking across the river, I saw the New York City skyline that stretched as far as I could see from north to south. I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t even unpack my Korean War ruck sack that I had been traveling with for about a year and a half. I just left.
I found my way to the Lincoln Expressway and started hitchhiking to The City. A passing Yellow Cab pulled over and when I ran up to the passenger side door he shook his head and pointed to the back. I had never been in a cab, but I knew it cost money. I had about seventy dollars on me and I knew it wouldn’t go far.
“Man, you can’t hitch on this road. These Jersey cops don’t play nice. Got any money?”
“About thirty dollars.”
“Oh, man. Do you know anyone in the City?”
“I don’t know anyone here. I just want to see Manhattan. Central Square I think.”
He just looked at me then. He seemed stunned.
“Nah. A kid like you, with practically no money, you gotta go to the Port Authority and find a locker for your shit, then you won’t look like some Midwest new fish.”
“I’m from Minnesota.”
“Jesus. Keep your money, kid, you’re gonna need it. I’m headed to the garage anyway. Out of service. I’ll take you to the Port Authority. Once you stow your gear and go out to the street, don’t look up. All the tourists and new-fish runaways walk around looking up at the big buildings.”
“I’m no runaway, I’m 19.”
“Yeah whatever, kid.”

I put my pack in a locker at the Port Authority, stepped into a Deli that was accessible from inside the station that had a bank of plate-glass windows facing 8th avenue. I got my first bagel and “just a regular coffee.” Turns out some animals have been fucking coffee up for so long that they consider a coffee with cream and sugar not only something that you could put in your mouth but “regular”. They don’t unfuck your order, so I just watched it go cold and untouched, which is the only proper response, and ate my bagel.
I spent the rest of the day finding landmarks that I’d seen from movies – Penn Station, Grand Central, Times Square, Park Ave., Fifth Avenue, and 42nd Street – where in every other doorway was hooker, dealer, cop. The cops didn’t see larceny and sex, they only saw violence- muggers and purse snatchers.
I made my way back to the Port Authority, which is a transportation hub for buses and subways and started thinking about which seat near the departure doors looked the most comfortable spot to nap later. I still hadn’t made it to Central Park and Rockefeller Center yet and was thinking about that, just relaxing from walking around. I had been there for about 10 minutes, sipping a coffee and leaning against a pole, when a young preppie kid stopped and answered a ringing phone from a long bank of payphones about 20 feet from me. He talked, listened and then turned and looked directly at me and motioned for me to come to him. I shook my head and he said,
“It’s for you.”
“Nope can’t be, nobody in this city knows me.”
“It’s a woman, she says she wants to talk to the good-looking boy behind me, that’s you, man.”
I stepped up, took the phone form him, told him thanks as he walked away and then said hello to a stranger.
“Hi there cutie, do you want to party?” She sounded older, sexy, and had a heavy New York accent. I looked around at all the other pay phones, trying to figure how she could see me.
“Yeah, I always wanna party.”
“Oh yay, well listen darling, I saw you there but I had to rush away, but my brother is still there. Do you see him waving by that door on your right?”
I saw him and told her so. He was tall and wore a tight white t-shirt over a lean muscled rock- hard torso. He looked like he threw engine blocks across the yard for fun. He had mean lifeless dark eyes, an olive complexion, and jet- black hair greased up into a James Dean look complete with a pack of smokes rolled up in his shirt sleeve. He saw me nod at him with my chin, stopped waving and stuck his thumbs in his belt loops, waiting.
“I’ll see you soon darling, go by Jimmy’s place and pick up some booze and then he’ll bring you here.” Her voice was dripping with promise.
I followed Jimmy out and he pointed to a crappy cream-colored rust-bucket Volvo and I got in. He reached back over the seat, grabbed a cold beer from a cooler and handed it to me, but stayed stone cold quiet during a quick 15 block drive. He was big in that seat. I started to feel a cold dark thing gnawing at my subconscious, but I followed him up the stairs to the top of the three-story brownstone.
A black and white Quasar was on in the large studio apartment, but the sound was turned down and hard punk rock played low from a stereo under the television. Jimmy motioned for me to sit down, handed me another beer and a blue pill.
“Eat that. My Sis wants you to be on the same level as she is when you get to her.”
I ate it, drank beer and watched as Jimmy started cleaning trash up around the room. Ten minutes later M.A.S.H. was on the T.V. and the Psychedelic Furs were screaming out of the stereo and I couldn’t move. I was completely awake, but I didn’t have any motor control. I couldn’t reach up to scratch my itchy nose. I started slipping off the couch and I couldn’t stop myself. I passed out for a moment and woke up to Jimmy pulling me up to my knees, forcing my mouth open with his fingers, and sticking his cock in my mouth.
“ If you bite down, I will snap your fuckin’ neck.”
He used my mouth until I passed out again. I woke up in agony. Jimmy had me on all fours and was assaulting me with no mercy It was agony, I could feel tissue ripping but my arms and legs were useless. He was holding me under my chest because my arms wouldn’t support me. I passed out again and woke up in the passenger seat of his car. He had carried me down three flights of stairs.
We pulled up to an apartment building on Christopher Street and I was just getting control of my limbs again, but I was shaky as a lamb. He came around, pulled me out of the car and walked me over to a stoop and sat me down and that caused me so much pain that I almost passed out again. Jimmy just walked away then and drove off. The demon was gone.

Day Two…

Eddy Cook

Carny Rap

When you’re born into the life it’s like being raised by wolves. Growing up a carny kid prepares you for no part of the real world. Not one thing about it is common. Some families in the business go back generations, to the turn of the 20th Century, and have generations of traditions unique to show-people. Other show families came along in the last couple decades or even as recently as the last season. It gets in your blood. Not everyone is wired for the life, but there are those that were raised as citizens that found “the life”.
When I was a kid, my parents would take us off the lot to shop for clothing or whatever and usually I thought of those trips as trips into the real world and that when we returned it was to the midway- wherever it was that week. As I got older, I considered the show as the real world. It was where all my family, both immediate and Show Family- which were truly family, and lifelong friends were. Fuck the rest of the world. If they wanted my time, they would have to come to my world.
We come from generations of tradition and myths, lies and manipulations, and a sense of family that many of the carnies never experienced when they lived back in Bum-Fuck Minnesota or wherever they’re from. It’s a self – contained off the grid nomadic community that is unrivaled in today’s age. Street gangs and bikers are probably the closest in the dynamics of infrastructure within the group.
We bang the occasional town-mark, but more often each other, and try not to fuck a concessionaire’s wife or daughter, but a show-owner’s women are fair game.

The green help don’t know about the old days and ways. When a carny yelled “Hey Rube!” it meant he was in trouble. You stopped what you’re doing and come running and bring a hammer or a joint brace with a hinge on the end because shit is getting real on the Midway. Everyone knew they better be in some deep shit that involved blood and some town marks before they yelled those two words.
Ours is one of the last to have a Freak Show – Snake Girl, Two Headed Woman (slept with her. Boy howdy), Wolf Boy, Sword Swallower. The canvas was painted by one of the last few carnival artists in the world, trained by a master.

The show started with just a Ferris Wheel on one end, a Jenny on the other, and a rotating kiddy airplane ride in the middle. Jonny G had an Italian and Polish sausage grab joint, Big Connie spun floss out of a tornado of a joint. Billy had a Duck Pond, and Dirty Darrel had a Shoot out the Star.
The game joints are where the money is. There was a certain knot that you had to learn to stake a joint down. There are a lot of aluminum framed joints around now days, but back in the day they were all panted and carefully pin-stripped wood and canvas stick joints held together with hinges on two-by-fours, and Kotter keys, we call them R keys. You’ll see show folks wearing them as earrings, necklaces, and on their key chains. The rides were held together with them too. It’s a symbol.

 

Snap Shot – Minneapolis Back in the Day

Prince aand Husker Du and later – Tina and the B-Side rumbling through the coolest venues and Kid Johnny Lang playing everywhere. But it was more than that. Deeper. The music came from the vibe. The vibe came from the streets; the tribe of street people, the tourist restaurants, the drugs, high end clothing and shoe stores, gay bars, local bars, and seedy bars like The Speakeasy, adult book stores with 24 hour video arcades – the hunting ground for the chicken hawks. The labor pools and Catholic charities drop-in centers, Rifle Sport Pool Hall where the hustlers hustled the hustlers, and Tourist Education establishments like Moby Dicks where, in the back at the pool tables, some of the best acting, finessing and double-talking sharp shooters will rob you in a few games of straight-eight call your shot. Money was laying around, you just had to pick it up

Alley Cat

There is a barely real Bohemian coffee house called The Alley Cat Café. It’s not part of the world, it’s just in it. When you go inside you know it immediately. The whole joint is done in sepia. From the moment that you walk up the stairs that lead from the alley and pull open the door, everything you see is cool and it appears that every cool thing you see has been there for years, as though nothing is new, but it’s not true. I’ve seen the ebb and flow of art, décor and architectural design over the course of fourteen years, and even though the management has changed a time or two, the character in the visuals stays deep and vibey.
I go there for the coffee and the slightly vibrating barely contained pulse that draws me back. The U-shaped counter is wrapped in copper sheeting that has been beaten and burnished to perfection over the years. Every acoustic ceiling tile is an original work of art, in mediums ranging from oil paint to Sharpie, and each one was done by a patron. The music playing reflects the tastes of two twenty-something java sorcerers working a shift, and it moves from Coltrane to Kraftwerk and Avenge Sevenfold to Etta James, Trance, Jam-grass and everything between the cracks.
The cadre of Baristas is well curated and vetted in the refining fire of the most successful coffee house in Fort Collins, Colorado. Their educations range from BA, MFA, Master’s to ‘I just dropped out of high school and lived on the streets until The Alley Cat took a chance on me’. Some were born abroad and some here. Big, little, Rasta, Bald Girl, Man-bun, Yoga pants, ripped jean, cargo shorts, performers, writers, engineers. The Baristas are a tribe unto themselves.
The taco joint downstairs doubles as an over-night bakery for ‘The Cat’,which is open twenty four hours a day, and the duties in the past year have been split between three bakers, all of whom take great care and add their individual character to every sinfully decadent bite that we wait to experience. If you’re fortunate enough to be there at 4 or 5 a.m. when the fresh hot trays come up from that amazing cave, the sensory overload is enough to kill you.
I can sit at a table and stare off into space, slack-jawed and unaware of my appearance, and at any given time there will be half a dozen others doing the same thing. To the one’s who don’t know me, I’m “Older dude with the cool hat”. I’m in my mid 50’s, and there are a few of us around that age range that are regulars, but for nine months of the year, most of the customers are chai-drinking college kids with fire in their bellies and in their eyes. And about them I have to say; they give me hope for the future.

The Alley Cat – If you haven’t, you should and if you don’t get it, it’s okay, you never will.

Writer Spotlight

I’ve only spotlighted one other writer – Craig Johnson- on this sight before, and that was some years ago. Today it’s a writer that I’ve known for a few years named Ray Harvey. I’ve read Ray in small bites before, but this piece drew my envy and admiration. I’ll let it speak for itself. So damn good.

View at Medium.com

Another Day in the Life

Another Day in the Life

 

Hypothermia, hunger, addiction, dehydration.
Nicotine, caffeine, ephedrine.
Revulsion, degradation, medication, hallucination, humiliation, resignation.
Freight train, roll yer own, box car, don’t want to die alone.
Street light, street fight, stolen car, fugitive.
Food shelf, soup line, tramp stamps, dumpster dive.
Chased down, locked up, broke down, humbled.

Day two

Hypothermia, street fight, chased down…