# Old Stories - #19



## The Cack (Dec 21, 2011)

*Travelogue #28*
*Will They Still Love You Now That They Know?
*Gustav Mahler entitled one of his symphonies with the sub-text "The World Has Abandoned Me". When you're looking outside of a Lowe's Home Improvement Center, wondering if the night crew looks in the shed's they use to advertise their easy-to-build shelters, maybe the world has abandoned _you_. The passing headlamps of the cars in the night are like one-thousand spotlights with you as the actor. Where does our protagonist lay his sorry head? Even the story of the Nativity had an end, and so, too, you must find a place for your weary eyes.

But where? To knock on a residential door is too risky. The clampdown could be called, and then its handcuffs and delays. To be robbed of the feeling of motion is deadly. Where are you going when the cell clamps shut and your cell mates begin to bicker about the merits of _American Idol_?

Uhaul moving vans are along the main drag, by the police station and other public works. Do I? Does the warning years ago yield reward? 

Warning? Yes, a bald man in one of Portland, OR's Uhaul stations once cautioned me to close and lock the rear door of a Uhaul, "to prevent homeless people from breaking in. They'll steal the mats and everything, and guess who'll have to pay for it?" Its that sort of rhetoric that inspires my survival instinct. 

A Corona 24 oz'er would suffice to put my body to sleep between the cardboard blankets and inadequate sleeping bag. The world has abandoned me to the point that it repulses me to think of any adequate masturbation fantasies peppered with flashes of sexual memory. "Sure, her tits are wonderful, and I remember the way she dragged them across my chest, but then she turned out to be a moron, and I have no tolerance for stupidity. Let's think of Heather... but then again, Heather was schizophrenic. Tom, you have sex with schizophrenic girls? What kind of cretin are you? Well, I guess you didn't fully understand she was schizo until we were in the hotel... that'll do, I suppose. Think of Heather's odes that never added up... Think of something depressing. Think of Mahler."

Masturbating in the back of a Uhaul in Melbourne, FL. The world has truly abandoned me. _Why am I doing this?_ It is Sunday night, and a chubby girl says over my shoulder when I pass, "wow, he's kind of cute for a homeless guy," to which her friends correct her. At least, that's what you hoped you heard. The Corona's kicking in, the post-self-coital shivers have elapsed into a milky relaxtion. The metal floor of the Uhaul is uncomfortable, but you have survived. The Rifleman's Creed escapes you, but the mind draws correlations to alleviate boredom:

"This is my life. There are many others like it, but this one is mine. Without my life, I am useless. With me, my life is useless..."

You smile with the good side of your face against the steel floor. There's a crack to let air in. Every ten minutes or so, you change sides to ease your thighs from your body's pressure. "Please, God," you think for a moment, then atheism kindly corrects you:

"There's no God. You've been abandoned by the world as you have in the past."

The sunlight bursts through the slit you've left for breathing air, the fresh Florida morning air of sixty-degree Fahrenheit winter. It feels real, yesterday's toss-turn becomes today's malaise to tonight's finger-snap sleep. How long did I sleep? My friend tries to convince me you can live off of 2 hours sleep. Not live, but thrive.

God help me if they have security cameras. Or, please allow the Patriarch of Probabilities to shine in my favor. I wake up, leave the cardboard as a reminder, the smeared semen as some Freudian aspect I'm not entirely sure pans out but looks great on paper (or, yellow Wendy's napkin), and try not to concentrate on poverty. 

I walk along I-95, trying to imagine what it must have been like to grow up if my mother had bought a _Skip-It _when I was a child. The cloud cover mocks me and I know if I can sell that iPhone I found on someone's driveway, there'll be a leg up the ladder.


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