I love movies & docs that are portraits of wasted youth, NOT like Dazed and Confused, more like My Own Private Idaho, movies that tend to have a homeless element, a shambolic feel, trailer parks, motels, the desert, fringe politics, a general plotlessness, and a bunch of kids who can't articulate themselves. Drama stuff like American Honey, KIDS, Gummo, Honey Bear (altho I can understand why you would boycott that one given Shia Labeouf's horrible behavior), The Coriolis Effect or Nomadland. Documentary-wise: Catching Out (or ANY documentary about homeless train jumpers), Last Free Place in America, Carts of Darkness, etc.
If you like any of that stuff there is a movie I just LOVE from 2011 on YouTube (w/ Spanish subtitles) and it WON'T be up there for long. It's called Dragonslayer and it's about a bunch of disaffected youth skateboarding in the swimming pools of California's abandoned exurbs. If you like skateboarding you'll probably love the main subject, Josh, or “Skreech.” His skating style is really sloppy but fascinating to watch. "Random chaos" as someone in the film puts it. I thought the film was great when I first saw it with 10 or 12 other people in the theatre in 2011. I watched it again in 2015 & felt the same. Maybe I'll feel different now, here in 2022.
I always find myself wondering where the kids in these films ended up (tho I feel like I know the answer, I hope it's not dead or on drugs or alive but leading lives of quiet desperation.) ANYWAY I HIGHLY recommend this documentary. Fair warning: it's about nothing:
I understand that my own journey days can be reduced to a few cliches. Thousands of young people before me have read Jack Kerouac, got the itch to see the West, and hit the road with a blank notebook. Sitting on my guitar case on a highway shoulder in Nipigon writing bad poetry.
I understand that this a particularly privileged way to experience your country, because it is a deliberate shedding of comforts. I did not have a tent but I could have afforded one before I hit the road. I just chose not to buy one. Choosing not to have something is not the same as not being able to have that same thing. Passing up is not the same as being passed over. So there’s the usual white guilt associated with my memories of the trip, and I made the usual idiotic mistakes on the road in assuming say, me and a 40-year old hobo who has been riding the rails for two years are on the same transformative journey. The romance of the road had been sucked out of that man’s movements years before I caught up with him. And so my questions about how it “felt” to have celebrated ten straight birthdays under the open sky, exposed to the elements, were eager and ignorant, but he didn’t exactly tell me to fuck off. It was more like, he was dumbfounded that anyone, especially a “good looking young kid” like me, would choose to live on the road, even for a summer. He hadn’t read Kerouac, didn’t give a fuck about Walt Whitman, didn’t give a fuck about a sense of “belonging” to some wider tradition. His life had been completely atomized and sliced into a single day. What was he going to do that day. How was he going to get the fuck out of Wawa? I caught us a ride. He only had 50 cents, how the fuck was he gonna eat? I bought him breakfast.
Took me til Manitoba to understand that I was taking advantage of him just like he was taking advantage of me. I was bothering him. I kept pestering him about his “story.”
“There ain’t no ‘story’ to tell,” he kept spitting.
“Yes.”
“It was child support broke me. Hell, I’d gladly pay it if it meant I could see my daughter but I couldn’t get no custody, not even on weekends. But the judge ruled that 80% of my income went to support. This was…81? 82? Just as things were gettin’ all computerized in this fuckin’ country. It got so I couldn’t just fuck off to the next town and get a job there, cuz they’d ask for my SIN, put it in the computer, and by the end of my first week workin’ I’d practically end up owing money. Wasn’t worth it. I couldn’t even stay on Skid Row, is how little money I had. I tried to keep up. For two, three years, working a second job, but my past…I got 3 or 4 DUIs, buncha drug charges as well, plus loitering and vagrant charges in every fucking province in the dominion. I’d never get to see her. I’d never to get to see her at all. And it wasn’t about the money. I didn’t feel like the money was goin’ to Tammy anyhow…”
“Tammy?”
“That’s my daughter’s name,” he rolled up his sleeve just then and showed me a tattoo. It was her name, unadorned, on his bicep. Just TAMMY. Nothing else.
“So I started bouncing around. I rode the rails, which you could still do in the ‘80s, can’t do it now. Every yard is enormous these days, with razor wire just like a prison, and the bulls bring dogs to sniff you out and then they beat you, and then they make you march out of the yard under your own power, even if they broke your leg beating you, and they drive behind you the whole way, goin’ 20 miles an hour, makin’ sure you leave the yard, an’ then as soon as I was outta the yard the guy in the CN truck guns his motor and almost flattens me, and there’s a buncha guys’ in there and they’re all laughing at me…”
“Jesus.”
“So kid, I know what you’re saying, to some degree. I’ve had some good experiences. I’ve also had bad experiences. And a lot of times an experience is good then bad, d’you know what I mean?”
“No.”
“I’ll tell you, since you wanna know. Back in…87? 88? I still had teeth, I looked okay. I met this woman. She was hitchhiking. So we decided to hitch together. She had money on ‘er and she had drugs. But we couldn’t get a ride. So we walked out to this water tower…”
He trailed off. I think I filled his pause in with the requisite images and assumptions. They got high together. Probably had unprotected sex. Or maybe not because “next thing I know I wake up and she’s standing over me with some other dude and they’re using my head for a football. They tried to kill me.”
“Where was this?”
“Just outside Medicine Hat. We’d walked clear through town that day, from the west side to the east. Was her man followin’ me that whole time?” He looked at me as if I held the answer. I was two or three years old when this attack took place.
“I’d told her I had nothin’. She knew I had nothin. I mean no money. So what they did, they did for kicks.”
I wanted to say literally….kicks, but he wouldn’t have laughed. And it wasn’t something I wanted to make light of. It had taken me all day to crack the man’s tough outer shell. Now that he was talking, I let him talk. As if some secret of the road would be handed down to me. As if he’d pull from his rags some unknown Road Atlas that only hitchhikers know about, and it shows a network of unknown roads that only we can walk down. Places only we can sleep. A world for us. Because this man had none of his papers. Had no birth certificate, no license, no SIN card. He sneered when I told him I’d recently lost my license in a DUI. He snickered when I told him I’d parked my van and run from the cops. They caught me. No shit they caught you.
“Don’t worry, you’re still in the system. You’re still a citizen. Me? I’ve been out the system so long I’m a ghost now. I’m a ghost. A stranger to my own country. When they arrest me, they don’t believe me when I give them my name. Cuz I’m not in the system.”
I thought maybe he knew of a place he belonged. Like that hobo camp I’d passed in Portage La Prairie just as a golden afternoon turned into lilac evening. He’d be welcome there. I was sure of it. A place where campfires roared and men tied six packs to their belt loops, so nobody would steal it, and women sat around and told jokes and refused to play house. There were no traditional gender roles in the hobo camp, and they were all happier for it. Any man who demanded his woman make him food was liable to get a smack. Any man who called a woman “his” was liable to get a smack. The women I met who’d been on the road attributed their survival to hyper-alertness.
“You can’t trust anybody, especially the nice ones,” one of them glared at me. I was on my way to the West Coast and I wanted people to drink with. I’d been carded at the liquor store and the first homeless guy I gave $20 snuck out the back door. I found him later at the hobo camp where we both pretended it never happened. He needed it more than I did. Finally I found a woman who had a decrepit wallet with a non-expired license in it.
“Oh, they card all of us. It’s a way of making sure we don’t get too rowdy.”
I didn’t understand what that meant on my way out, but the reticent hobo explained it inadvertently. None of them had their papers. This dehumanized them more than it freed them. They weren’t in the system. Unrecognized by their own land. Ghosts of the great highway.
That’s my favourite Sun Kil Moon record. I particularly love the song I posted up top. It’s called “Carry Me Ohio.” A few years after my hitchhiking summer my band made a record (and a song) called “Carry Me Ontario” cuz we were cheeky, derivative fucks.
I was looking for a rite of passage. Not something I could slip through easily, but a kind of gauntlet of experience. I wanted to get drunk more than anything else, but I also wanted to meet people. I wanted to have my breath taken away by impossibly cold glacier rivers, and I did. I wanted to see the country, and I did. I wanted to become something else, but I didn’t. I stayed me. Whatever test I’d given myself, I knew in my heart I hadn’t passed it. I may have moved around a lot, but I stayed the same. In Vancouver I squatted in an abandoned office on Hastings for 3 weeks with a drunken former drywall worker named Phil. He had 15 years on me, but we both had guitars. Every day we’d get up in the morning and go busking until we had enough money for 12 beers each (we drank Pacific pilsner). My bank account was at $0.45. I’d never gone beneath $0 before, so I did not know that overdraft existed. One day we made no money and just for the hell of it, I walked over to a TD machine and punched my number in and asked for $20. The $20 came and we cheered, and we bought beer. We bought beer the next day too. Turned out I could go all the way to $-500, which I promptly did. See, Phil had a bunch of songs. Hobo strums. Songs about the railroad. Songs about the highway. The first song he’d ever played me, as I sat outside a hostel, dejected. (The Cambie) They wouldn’t let me in because I didn’t have sufficient identification. I’d lost my license and nothing else I had could prove to them that I wasn’t from Vancouver. (I had my old University of Guelph I.D. – I’d attended U of G from early Sept to Hallowe’en 2005 but dropped out because I’d just lost my high school sweetheart…she’d dumped me rather enthusiastically for “the experience” of being in college, and how could I blame her, being hungry for experience myself? Anyway the Cambie wouldn’t let me in. So I was sitting outside on my guitar case, dejected, when a friendly-looking guy came over to me, smiling. He asked to play my guitar. At first I was kinda standoffish to him cuz I was dejected, but then he took my guitar and began to sing:
Livin on the road my friend
Is gonna keep you fresh and clean
And now you wear your skin like iron
And your breath as hard as kerosene
Weren't your mama’s only boy?
But her favorite one it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye
And sank into your dreams
I’d never heard the song before. “Pancho & Lefty” by Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard. But fuck that version. The rendition Phil played & sang for me that afternoon on that Vancouver sidewalk was one of the most moving performances I’ve ever seen in my life.
Over those 3 weeks I learned that Phil’s dream was to record his songs & call the resulting album Guitar Town. I had a friend in Victoria who had a friend who had an 8-track recorder. And I had $300. So off we went, me & Phil & a friend of his who could play anything (guitar, piano, drums) called Conrad. We stayed at my friend’s house after enduring a very cold night in her backyard (the suburbs of Victoria are freezing at night, even in summer…it’s the cold wind coming off the Pacific. It froze us to our bones. My friend was out drinking but got home around 8AM and let us all in. We fell asleep on her floor. That same week we borrowed my friend’s friend’s 8-track and made a lo-fi album on cassette, featuring Phil’s songs. We named ourselves The Solomons (it was either that or The Sharp Screwdrivers…that woman I’d met in the Portage La Prairie hobo camp carried with her a screwdriver that she’d taken to a belt sander until the tip was sharper than a bone tomahawk.
“Any cop who finds a knife on a homeless person will arrest that homeless person. A citizen can just say ‘it’s for my apple!’ even if they don’t have an apple on them, but a cop won’t listen to that from a homeless traveler, even if she’s got a bag fulla apples. So I sharpened this screwdriver. Anybody fucks with me, it goes in them.”
“Have you ever used it?”
She shook her head. “Nah. I’ve only had it 2 days. The time will come though. The time will come.”
Yep. The romance of the road had really been bled out for these ghosts of the great highway. Maybe that’s why I loved Phil so much. He’d been on the street so long but he’d retained a child-like enthusiasm. It made me love him. So I spent the last of my money on beer and recording. The recording we made, Guitar Town, is here:
That’s Phil in the middle in the photo. The first song me & Phil wrote together about an alcoholic named Ben who we met on the streets of Vancouver. He kept saying he was going to check himself into rehab but first he had to meet a girl. He’d dreamt about it over & over. He was going to meet a girl & she was going to change the world. So he wouldn’t check himself into rehab til he found her. Benjamin. Bless his heart. Another ghost of the great highway.