PicoBlog

*Hey everyone: This is a published autobiographical short story which occured in 2009 during my wild off-the-grid hitchhiking days in my twenties. It is gritty, real, raw, and definitely NOT politically correct. One note: Keep in mind that this is a very honest piece of writing. When the narrator judges the “fat” woman…keep in mind how much more severely he later judges himself. Yes: it’s rude and unkind to judge someone by their weight. Life can be crude, judgmental and unkind sometimes, especially when you’re a lost, wayward alcoholic semi-vagrant on the road in your twenties and you’re half drunk 24/7. In my opinion writing (literature, if I dare) is about reflecting ourselves back to ourselves, not about creating an ideological safe space. Anyway. Enjoy.

It was the summer of 2009. I’d been hitchhiking for about three months. I’d met Matt in New York City, at the cheap hostel on West 125th Street, Spanish Harlem. He’d come from Austria, had traveled around Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and then flown to San Francisco, first time in the USA, bought an old used motorcycle, buzzed it across the country to New York. I’d dropped out of college again—San Francisco State—and had driven with a friend across the nation to her father’s farm in Rhode Island. After a week I’d thumbed out to Boston and then finally to New York. Matt and I met that first night, when he’d walked out to the porch of the hostel and, with his nasally Austrian accent, arms wide in a V-shape, announced, “I’m going drinking: Who’s coming with me?”

A month later, here we were, in a little river rafting town in northern Maine called The Forks. We were only about two hours south of the Canadian border, Quebec to be precise. Actually, if you want the whole truth—and I know you do, you greedy Reader—we’d already tried to walk across the border and go into Quebec. The original plan—mine for months before meeting Matt—had been to walk across the line and then thumb west along the southern border of Canada all the way back to B.C. and then head south once more into the United States, through the Pacific Northwest, through Washington and Oregon and into my sacred and lovely California. My home. Where I was born and raised. My lover, my best friend, my worst enemy.

But, alas, that plan fell through. They didn’t like the look of me: Haggard, tattooed, scraggly beard, unwashed, pack on my back, walking across the border, of all things. Not driving but walking. Clearly, I was up to no good, they decided. But the worst offense, in their Canadian eyes, was my DUI from seven years ago. Back then, when I’d been 19, I’d passed out at the wheel and had plowed into a tree. I walked away unhurt, but I landed in Ventura County Jail outside of LA and got my first (and only) DUI. They said I had to wait a decade after getting a DUI to enter Canada. That would put me at 29. I was 26. Tough luck. They liked Matt and allowed him in—after all, he was European—but he said No, he’d stay with me. Good guy Matt was. Precious new friend.

So anyway, all of this is to explain why we’d turned around at the border and had thumbed along the same old twisty highway and had ended up going in reverse direction and had finally landed in The Forks.

The Forks was right along the Kennebec River, which wound through half of Maine. The old highway—U.S. 201—ran along the western edge of the town. The town sat right where the two rivers—Dead River and Kennebec—forked, combined, morphing from the two branches of a slingshot into one river: Kennebec. There was mostly green, stinky forest everywhere and you could hear the lazy push of the river and you could smell the wet earth, the minnow stink, and you could hear and feel the rumble of the plowing eighteen-wheelers bashing back and forth on the highway.

There was a local company—big cabin structure—which offered a massive green lawn for campers. We walked in, signed up and set out our tents. Immediately we met some river guides, young men and a few women in their early twenties, slightly younger than us, who were from all over the country—Iowa and Tennessee and Arkansas—who started talking to us, asking us questions: Who were we?; what were we doing here?; did we want to come drink with them later tonight?

We answered their questions and said that, yes, we would like to come and drink with them. One of them, Jed, a young man with broad shoulders and a drum-tight stomach who wore green flip-flops and a red T-shirt that said, “RIVER GUIDE 4 LIFE” told us to come to his cabin up the hill at 7 PM, and to bring beer. He said there was a liquor store, Andy’s Liquor, down the road a ways. We nodded, smiled, shook a few of their hands, and said thanks.

Matt and I sat around on the green sloping hill, watching the lazy river pulling brown veiny leaves and sticks down with the current, and we closed our eyes against the sun and we sighed and smiled and didn’t say a word. It was one of those moments. We were young, travelling around on our own, thumbing rides, free. We didn’t have jobs or girlfriends or responsibilities. We had nothing holding us down. We could do whatever we wanted. Matt had left a fiance and a good engineering job back in Austria. He’d taken all his savings out and decided to travel the world. He’d suddenly realized, according to him, that getting married and being stuck with a serious, well-paid job at 26 was not his ideal. He still had life to live.

Me, too. I’d left the Bay Area, San Francisco. Sure, I had a girl. She was trouble. A girl I’d met at a bar. And then of course there was Rachel, the one I’d travelled Europe with, fallen madly, deeply in love with, moved to San Francisco from San Diego with, had my heart broken by. But she’s another story for another time. Right now I was on my own, alone and powerfully free. That word—freedom—floated around my lips like honey.

I woke up. I’d fallen asleep in the hot bright sun. I saw that Matt was still asleep, lightly snoring. The sun was low and sharp, arrowing shafts peeping through the willow tree leaves along the river. The sound of the river reminded me of a thousand backpacking trips I’d taken, starting with the first one ever, with my father, when I was eight or nine years old, in the back country where I grew up outside of LA. This feeling blew some sad lonely grumbling into my heart and I almost felt the desire to cry. No. Correction. I did feel the urge to weep. Why did this happen? It came sometimes at the most random and chaotic and unhelpful of times.

Less than an hour later we arrived at the cabin with a 12-pack of PBR cans. There were several people lazily sitting on the porch, one on a swing, drinking brew, mostly also PBR, which they’d picked up from the same place. There surely was only that one spot in town to buy beer.

As we rose up the creaking wooden steps to the porch, nodding to people, Jed walked through the open door.

“Hey guys,” he said jovially. “Ah. You brought beer.”

We walked inside and he directed us to the kitchen. People were everywhere, sipping from red plastic cups and from cans of beer, yammering, yelling, laughing. It all sounded like garbled language. You couldn’t really tell what anyone actually said. It just sounded like “blah blah blah.”
 
We set the beers in the fridge. There was a lot of beer already in there. I snagged two of them before closing the white fridge door, that thrumming sound, and then the suction pulled the door closed. I handed Matt one and popped mine open. We grinned at each other like thieves, which we were, of a sort, and then we glugged. First beers of the night.

“Well gentlemen,” Jed said beside us. “Have fun. Enjoy.” He walked off. We laughed, me and Matt, at the fact that Jed hadn’t engaged us in conversation, how he’d simply directed us to the fridge and then left.  

The rest of the evening isn’t much to talk about. It was boring. The usual: Meeting random people; the occasional cute flirty girl; drinking many brews; the night growing later. The cabin was small and claustrophobic. People stepped out to the porch where you could hear the cars swishing back and forth on Highway 201. There was a silver guard railing along the road; I watched it once in a car’s yellow projecting headlight beam.

Things got interesting around 2 AM. Two things happened. The first was the fat woman with the Marilyn Monroe tattoo. The second was the LSD.

She was short and dark-haired (she had lovely, long, curly dark hair, down past her shoulders) and had these short pudgy legs and thick monster thighs and this fat torso with a wiggly pouch of a belly and a wide, wobbly chest. Her black T-shirt of thin cotton stretched like a vast desert across her body, trying to contain it.  

There were half a dozen men surrounding her, in the corner of the living room, near a burgundy leather couch, which piqued my curiosity. What was it about this woman that had intrigued them? Why weren’t these skinny, tall, good-looking men ignoring her, the fat, unattractive elephant? But then, as I stepped closer, I realized the problem. She wasn’t bad looking. In the face I mean. Her face possessed the plain beauty of a former movie star, a sexy young starlet. But it was round and too big, oversized, due to her weight. Were these men sucking down alcohol as rapidly as they could, hoping to then convince themselves, in a drunken stupor, that it was alright to give the elephant a go?

I stood next to the half circle of men, elbowing my way in. Two men on either side took sips of PBR and stepped aside for me to enter. Some circus show this was. I took a hefty chug of my beer and realized it was nearly finished. I was good and buzzed by this point. Close to drunk. Very close.

The woman was tugging her thin black T-shirt up. Why I didn’t know. She pulled it up about a quarter of the way and I glanced up at the mens’ eyes and saw a mix of pure disgust and total glee. A thunderous crack of shame rushed through me. Here we were, quietly mocking this poor girl. And why? Because she was overweight, not the picture our debilitating, conventional society paints for our women to be? Wasn’t that wrong? Hell, I knew what it felt like to be mocked, to be made fun of, to be taunted. To be loathed, to be hated, to be scorned. All my life practically.

She pulled the shirt up even higher and I saw the beginnings of an ink-colored tattoo on her left side. It was on her torso, sort of midway between her back and flabby, hanging stomach, which hung like a failure, like some dark talisman. And yet. And yet, I felt slightly turned on, slightly horny. Back then I slept with all kinds of women. Skinny blondes I’d met at bars. Cocaine-drenched beach bunnies. Whacked-out drunk chicks. And yes, fat girls, sometimes, when I was loaded enough. Right now I wasn’t loaded enough. But I was getting there. But would one of these men get their first?

She lifted the shirt entirely. It was a tattoo of Marilyn Monroe, that famous photograph of her on the streets of New York, her dress blowing up around her from the grate below. Marilyn blushed, her palm at her mouth, her sexy pose, big-breasted, blond, sharp-featured, everything opposite of this woman here, in real life. The bearer of the tattoo. You could see the wide, scar-like stretch marks along her torso, even along the tattoo itself, the skin having stretched and stretched to accommodate the expansion, like the Bering Strait from Russia to Alaska, which the Asians had once taken, slowly, to get to North America by. The Great Diaspora.

Right as I was working up the courage to speak to her, Jed called from out of nowhere, saying, “Hey Frankie,” and one of the men turned his head, slugged his brew, and trudged off. His buddy followed him and soon a new song started on the stereo—Break on Through by The Doors—and the other men turned and walked off, too. It was like magic. Suddenly it was just me and her, as if God had planned it that way. I couldn’t believe it. My luck. I blushed. Coughed. Cleared my throat. Considered walking away I was so embarrassed now. But no! I couldn’t walk away. Not now. Not with this turn of events.

“I’m James,” I said.  

She smiled at me, sticking a yellow straw from a cocktail glass I hadn’t known she’d had into the corner of her mouth and sucking. “Julianne.”

“I like your tattoo,” I said.

She sucked on the yellow straw again, even though there was clearly nothing left in the drink, only wet ice cubes, half dissolved. Her eyes narrowed flirtily. “I see you have several of your own.”

I looked down at my arms, as if noticing the faded ink for the first time. I smiled. Nodded. Blushed once more. I said nothing.

She shook her head to the right, quickly, snapping some dark hair out of her eyes with a palm. “Listen. Come over tomorrow night. Cabin #4, by the restaurant. Yellow door. Late. Around midnight.”

She wrote something down on a piece of paper—I have no idea where the paper or pencil came from—and handed it to me. It said, “Julianne” and had her phone number. I folded it and stuffed it into my back pocket.

“Don’t forget, lover-boy,” she said, and then walked right past me.

(TO READ THE REST OF THE SORY FOR FREE CLICK HERE TO THE PUBLISHED VERSION)

ncG1vNJzZmilmZi1orHLpqahql6owqO%2F05qapGaTpLpwvI6mmKuhnK67brnOp6monV2brrV5xqKppatdmbKiwMdmnaudlZm8rg%3D%3D