May 18, 2002

• Bear in mind, this is but part of a single chapter of my memoirs.  It happened not long after I had gotten out on parole,  then violated that parole and went on the lam.  The chapter-head spoonerism gets explained in the latter, still-unwritten, portion of this chapter.

  
  

  A Loaf of Lettuce and a Head of Bread– Dec., 1971

  
  

  As a child, I talked silently in my head to God, asking all the questions my parents couldn’t answer for me. It had been years since the day I’d stopped talking to God, since I’d grown angry at him–that misguided excursion into evangelical thought. I’d been fasting and had little in the way of fluids in the boxcars and railroad yards from Indio to San Antonio. We’d turned our pockets out, Rocky and Robbie and I and the half dozen or so hoboes, pooled our money and sent Robbie across with the buck and change to a mom and pop store near a siding in West Texas, but the train had pulled out before he got back with the candy bars.

  
  

  Rocky and I and our new-found hobo friend/guide split from the others. The three of us stood beside the tracks where trains slowed on entering the yards, yelling Robbie’s name as the cars clattered past.

  
  

  We’d not been there very long, just the second train through, when Robbie walked up behind us with candy bars. Ecstatic reunion, frenzied noshing, and then the hobo showed us where to quickly and stealthily get a drink of clean water. Next, he led us away to a more protected spot where we could wash hands and faces in a puddle near a leaky pipe. The guys’ faces looked somewhat better, I thought, there in the dark, but as the dawn came shortly after that, I could see what I’d been feeling since the rinse. We had just smeared the dirt.

  
  

  There I was, sleepless for days, homeless, hungry, penniless, and wanted by the law. I’d been warily ducking and dodging through the darkness, through row upon row of freight cars, some of them in motion. The hobo’s anxiety infected us as he quietly warned us to move cautiously and avoid detection by the bulls. I was scared. I was filthy from graphite particles picked up in a boxcar. The hoboes had said it was machine lubricant that sifted out of shipping crates. It itched everywhere.

  
  

  Our guiding hobo stopped. When we all caught up to him, he explained that ahead was the track on which the train to Houston was just beginning to roll. Houston was where we’d get off and hitchhike to Galveston where we all hoped to find work on the shrimpers. We just had to stand by, he said, and watch for an open boxcar. We didn’t want to have to ride on an open flat or gondola, or huddled among the cars on an auto transport. As the sun rose over the string of rail cars and warmed our dirty faces, we looked at each other…and dissolved in laughter at the collection of smudges, streaks and runnels. And I realized then I was happier at that moment than I’d ever been before.

  
  

  As soon as that thought crossed my mind, something else came to me, in that soundless, wordless “voice of God” I’d conversed with as a child. I knew then that I needed none of the material provisions for security that I’d hungered and worked and schemed for until then. I had freedom and I had friends, and precious little more than the dirty clothes I wore. And I was happy!

  
  

  My life has had its share of small epiphanies, everyday “Aha!” moments of inspiration or realization that everyone has. But when I heard that resonant voice deep in my soul there in the freight yard, it changed everything for me.

  
  

  The Universe supports me. God told me so! The gist of the message was that as long as I am true to myself and my buds, the things I need for my survival will be there for me. The rest of it:  the bells and whistles, comforts and luxuries, might be harder to come by, but the basic package was a given. I started living that truth that day and it wasn’t until years later that I learned this path was well known to many others and had a name: Living in the Flow.

  
  

  Furtive before, scared and manipulative, neither trusting nor trustworthy, I now grew a fast set of ethics and started saying straight out what I think and what I need. I would no longer make promises I couldn’t keep and if I’d make a promise, I’d keep it. I’d never again steal from a friend or an associate who trusted me. I’d share what I had with those who had less. I’d rip off only those big corporations with shrinkage insurance. No more shoplifting in any old mom’n’pop or pilfering pills from the friends’ medicine cabinets.  I was on my way to some self-esteem.

  
  

  
  

  Ok, it needs some work–needs finishing for one thing.  It is a story I’ve told at least a hundred times.  I’ve written it in more than a few letters, but ’til now I hadn’t published it. 

  • 5:25 pm
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