TIME FOLLOWS ME

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO SEATTLE AND THE MIDWEST GIRL

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

SEATTLE AND THE MIDWEST GIRL

I planned to head up to Seattle and from there, take the ferry from Port Angeles to Victoria, Vancouver Island and I'd be back in Canada. My money was holding up well. I think that maybe I'd spent half of it, maybe $75 or $100 dollars.

Cat made up some excuse that he had to go to Seattle, which was about fifty miles further north so he and Karen drove me. They were really cool. On the road you make friends fast and they can be as solid as anything you might have had in the past. I was amazed at how giving people were. I thought of my time with the Moonies and especially Mary Beth and Bob too sometimes. "Always leave the place better than when you got there," was a mantra that I had learned. I always tried to follow this motto and it seemed like a good way to live.

Cat and Karen let me off near the ferry docks. We wished each other, "Fare thee well, may the wind always be at your back". Never got the last names of these folks. It's funny how last names don't mean a hill of beans. I don't think I mentioned my last name Eastmure all summer. I was just Pete the hitchhiker traveler.

On the street I was startled by how busy it was. There were businessmen and women walking with exaggerated purpose weaving between the tourists and other lost souls. I watched a man with a dirty pack going from garbage can to garbage can picking out food that had been thrown away and stuffing it into his mouth. I hadn't seen this before and was shocked that this was how he had to survive. Some college students watched him and started to laugh at him and call out to him. "Look at that dirty bum, what a Looosssseeerrr."

I gave them my coldest stare and walked after the man and gave him my money for the day $4 dollars. I was so angry. He took it without saying a word and moved on. I felt like this was the best thing I could do that day. It took the sting out of the taunts they had handed him, so the scene receded in my mind rather quickly.

I met a bunch of street kids who were hanging out. They asked me for cigarettes so I rolled them a few. We talked and I asked what they were doing. They were a bit vague and seemed to exist only for getting between one drug connection and the next. But, they also seemed sweet. They were pretty scrawny, all the young girls and guys, just kids really.

I asked where they stayed at night? They had found an old abandoned warehouse where they crashed after a day of hanging on the street. They invited me to stay there. There were a few mattresses on the floor. Some kids seemed to be couples or best friends and snuggled under the blankets together. I spread my sleeping bag near a corner and listened to the street noises die down as traffic slowed and the city sunk into a somatic dream. Morning broke like a ruptured pipe, all cold and damp. Through dust and grimy windowpanes the rusty yellow glow that was the sun crept along the old wooden industrial floor. There were stirrings.

Kids got up and left, one or two at a time. I went out the back window the way I came in, lowered myself, and my pack into skid alley. Around the front of the building, a group of kids congregated and smoked the first cigarette of the day. Talked to a brown haired girl from the Midwest with sad eyes and a defiant stance.

"What you doin' today, eh?"

"Just hanging around. I got to meet someone at noon, it's an appointment."

"Oh, want to get some coffee?"

"Naw, I already got one."

Then she drifted off and started talking to this other really young skinny kid who talked really fast and seemed excited all the time. He reminded me of a kid I used to know in the pool hall back home. The kid was Johnny Palmer, with his aura of unbridled naivety, all over again, this frenetic energy and bravado. One time in grade seven, Johnny answered back to one of the teachers a big oaf called Mr. Daunders, and Daunders said to him, "What did you say? What did you say to me? Are you trying to be smart?"

He suddenly lifted Johnny clean off the floor, all seventy-five pounds of him, if he was soaking wet, and pinned him against the wall three feet off the ground. He gripped his neck with his both hands and Johnny's feet dangled beneath him like a marionette. Johnny was crying out for dear life, "No Sir, No Sir! Mr. Daunders, I wasn't being smart."

All of us were stunned into silence. We had never seen Old Man Daunders lose it so quickly. He had a wicked temper and a shorter fuse. He used to yell a lot but he hadn't done this before. I thought someone should report this to the Principal but I didn't do anything. I didn't want to be singled out next. And later, Palmster was smiling so he was all right. He talked a mile a minute same as ever.

I squatted on the street in a pose that Wayne always struck from his time in Vietnam. I found it comfortable squatting down with my back against the wall watching the world roll by. At 'round noon, a car pulled up to the corner and the Midwest Girl hopped in. Her head went down fast, disappearing below the rear window down onto the businessman's lap. That was the last I ever saw her.

Some guys would cruise by on the sidewalk in stripped shirts and talk to the young street boys. After some minor haggling, they would go off together around the corner. When I saw the kid again, he was as jumpy as usual but he had some cash on him. He went and bought a coke and a bag of chips, and a coke for his young female friend. I could see where this was all headed and I hated the business people who preyed on these young kids. Later, quite a few years later, looking back at this scene in my mind, I wrote this song called, "New Mexico."

"Don't look at me until I can look you in the eye

If you do, you'll see me four thousand miles away

Somewhere riding out under an arch of trees

On a street in a small town in New Mexico

Close to the Mexican, U.S.A. border

And I don't ever want you to see that.

~

In Seattle, Washington the street pulses and throbs

With raw bleeding sexuality and anger

As the hookers and the pimps ride through the city's twilight

In borrowed cars and thirty-second dreams.

~

The young girl prostitutes go down on

Withered old men in business suits

With death in their eyes

And a suitcase full of dead-end lines.

~

The young boy prostitutes say they do it for fun

But they lie

Their rangy bodies seem to disappear

In all directions even as you speak

The tight seams of their jeans and dreams

Reveal the bones that cannot support the weight

The frame needed to take them where they're going.

~

Needles and grass, cocaine and ass

Can make the difference between doing

Hard time and just hard times

~

So don't look at me because I can't look you in the eye

And if you do, you won't really see me

'Cause I'm not really here

I'm riding out under an arch of trees

On a street in a small town in New Mexico,

Close to the Mexican U.S.A. border

With lots of space all around me."