sprinkled with lucky stardust

For an entire month I waited in the heat and dry climate at the Crossroads Mission in dead-end town of Yuma mired in continuation of my search. Search. Search for what? A home? A stable life? I should rephrase that and state existence. The small sunburnt burg offered nothing. Through caseworkers and do-gooders. I was offered a tiny apartment in the historic pile of brick called the San Carlos. A 30’s deco joint remodeled into an apartment complex catering to deranged derelicts, cockroaches and onslaught of bedbugs. No. I cannot, will not, go out like that. I know myself, I need some type of diversion – diversions of an explicit nature and this town offered nothing. Everyone was un-attractive and flabbily out of shape. Sweat stained and covered in a fine layer of dust. With the exception of a lucky few.

Anyway, I sat in the shimmering heat of 105 degrees and in lieu of four weeks I thought and plotted all the while passive/aggressivly associating with the burnt biscuits and occasional handsome Lost Angel (wings pruned long ago) who in despairing patience waited for something…anything. Marvin, the lanky Latino of classic Aztec features who would rather sleep in his oil-burning jalopy than lay on a thin mat in the warm nights surrounded by a hundred farting hobos. He would sit long hours in the mildew encased shower room and drone on about his mythical Thai girlfriends. Ernesto, the stout and ruggedly attractive field worker who wholesaled his cock for bus fair to the oil fields of North Dakota. We occasionally jacked off one another under the Ocean-to-Ocean bridge spurting our frustrations into the foul smelling murk of the Colorado. Nick, the mad filmmaker who lived in a surreal dream of the faded Silver Screen obsessed with phantasmic Hollywood nostalgia. Old Gary, the sad sack who constantly hacked up putrid gobs of reminisce concerning past World Wars and passionate hatred for all things American. Most of the others shuffled in a daze about the grimy, foul smelling halls waiting for their probation to end so they could go home or expire all together.

I did chance meet an old black character named Art. Long and lanky with yellowed teeth and scraggly goatee. Soft spoken and of high intellect. Fellow traveler. Been all over the world and then some solely off his meager pension and as I sat wide eyed enchanted with his stories of faraway lands, I arrived to the conclusion: I will spend a year in Tijuana saving what I can as I pen that Burroughs novel, afterwards, I too desire to waywardly journey the world. And why not? I have nothing left. No dreams. No ambitions. I only crave to move, to keep going and experience all this planet has to offer. I want to travel and travel I will without goal or direction.

Want to come along for the ride?