This Dirt Bag Life

By Sam Bove

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

OCTOBER 18, 2008

I had it all figured out: two bicycles, three thousand miles, two thousand dollars, sixty days, forty hits of acid, a couple ounces marijuana, and then Mexico… We had almost enough of everything to get there.

I crushed my cigarette into the asphalt and looked out over the vacant lot. It was one of those cold, bright fall mornings when the sun goes bouncing off the dead grass and fills your head with glare. Nick and I didn’t have the slightest idea how to get out of Richmond. In the fast days pre-departure I’d been much too concerned with stockpiling drugs and making elated phone calls and testing the drugs and making goodbyes with girlfriends to worry about something as easy and simple as a book of maps. Our adventure was getting off to a marvelously appropriate start.

“No sense asking anyone around here,” I said. It seemed a sound observation. We had just stepped off a greyhound bus.

“You don’t know that.” Nick spoke at the ground.

He was still trying to get his bicycle whole. There was a set of wrenches scattered under his crouching body along with a pair of pliers and a few other tools that he couldn’t seem to make head or tail of. I watched him getting into a quiet frenzy but I was tired from the greyhound, feeling much too conceited to care.

“Fuck!” said Nick.

“…Fuck,” I replied.

“Oh, Fuck you!”

“For fucks sake,” I mused. “What is it?”

“My axle’s gone. I can’t ride without a front axle and if I don’t have one we’re fucked.” Nick liked to speak in italics when he thought he was right. “It disappeared,” he said curtly.

He got up and crossed his arms and sighed. His eyes arched, overwhelmed. The rest of his face was hidden under an electrified black beard but I knew Nick well enough to tell you it beheld an expression of genuine anguish, even doom. I sat there in the dirt watching him, followed his gaze to a ransacked mountain bike chained by the highway. It had a front axle on it.

“This is such a bad way to start,” said Nick, his teeth rearing out in a bright grimace. I assured him it was abandoned. He said something about Karma. I assured him his karma would be fine. Hell, it didn’t make any difference; Nick had the worst luck of anyone I’d ever known.

Nick tapped the rusty axle through his wheel and clamped it down and squatted with me against the chain-link fence for another cigarette. The last thing either of us wanted to do was get going.

We managed to spend a couple more hours making adjustments and repacking our panniers with the tools, clothes, cooking pots and whatever other trinkets we had brought along for our new life on two wheels. Whatever didn’t fit in the bags we rolled into bundles and strangled on top of the pannier racks with old bungee cords. The end result looked much less athletic or ambitious than simply tattered, raw, and homeless.

Looking over our bicycles I had one of those amusing “this is it” realizations, which is to say that we had struck out into the world with little education, no skills, minimal money, already riddled with bad habits; that before me stood the very fabric of our livelihood and already it appeared ready for condemnation. It felt like a big lecherous voice booming down from the heavens saying, “alright you little shit, you asked for it, and this is what you get — embrace it!” Nick and I were really, really free.

It’s nothing romantic. I wasn’t lost or trying to “find myself” or taking a gap year or anything queer or adolescent like that. It’s just that I was eighteen and free from school and I’d resolved not to deprive myself of anything; self-discipline, regimented life, higher education, the prerequisite carvings that bring about social fluency in a young man, it could all go to the dogs. My life mission was to satisfy desire. To be the pariah, to lay down on the big wet paint palette of the world and roll and smear and fall into feeding. To eat and be eaten by the world — that was being alive. To accept any lesser existence, and as a young man, was nothing but patient and despicable dying. Just what I did to fulfill this need hardly mattered. So long as it made people gape or shake or prophesize failure it would do, and cycling to Mexico with my half-mad drinking buddy at the beginning of winter fit the bill. The fact that Nick liked it was proof enough.

OCTOBER 2, 2008.

VERMONT

Nick was a hard guy to get a hold of. He lived far out of town in a cabin with his old man and when he wasn’t on the road filching magnums of cheap red wine he was usually reposing on a rock in the woods somewhere, an unchallenged mystic, drinking and brooding indulgently about the wicked world he hardly knew. I had been down on the south coast that summer and around August I began harassing him, leaving erratic voicemails on the house phone about imminent departure and all the glory that awaited us and if you could just get a damned bicycle and some money together we cannot fail, Nick, and quickly, there is no time! I never heard much back. He was a classic hater of phones.

I came back to Vermont in October and called immediately. Finally, he answered.

“I’m coming over!” I said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

I thumbed a few rides and walked the rest of the way in good time. The sun was just out after a morning of autumn rain, the road a cold mash of red leaves and mud. I could hear the stray notes of Nick’s harmonica coming through the trees as I walked up the driveway almost laughing, watching him in my minds eye, sitting in the wet grass, plugging his bearded face with his ubiquitous bottle, hunching over the tiny musical tool cringing and heaving his reams of life into the ten little slots like some tortured mute-savant calling up the world the only way he knew how. Nick could really play the harp.

He was one of those useless people so possessed by that thing larger than passion that never finds a home but is simply dumped, as out of a pressure valve, into whatever medium is closest at hand. He was of the ilk who, when sent to chop wood, pick up the axe and fall it with bloody howling and such disregard for personal injury that is agonizing to witness. It was easy for anyone to call him an antique by first impression, an extreme condition of the “old soul,” but I never really bought that.

In response to my often hedonistic ideologies he would scoff in disgust and false anger, “you have no respect,” He would say. “A hundred years ago you were a man by sixteen! By our age we’d have a trade and three children, for Christ’s sake!” but Nick had no trade, and women had proved too stressful for him. He didn’t do much of anything and while he may have belonged to a gone era by reason of his impracticality and general ignorance of era’s bygone, his soul, his gruesome, flippant, muzzled soul was of an intricacy that could only be indulged by the freedom and idleness allowed by modern life.

He couldn’t hear me over the noise he was making. I snuck across the wet grass and shouted at him.

“Jesus! You know you can kill people like that?” he smirked, discarded his Harmonica and flicked a rolling paper from the pack in his breast pocket. He mashed a wad of tobacco into it and went about making his cigarette with the utmost anxiety, as though I had caught him in the midst of it.

“What’s wrong old man? Don’t tell me you’re dry.”

“Dry? No, hmm, nah…what do you think this is? Acht, hell! Sammy boy!” He came up still clutching the unfinished cigarette and gave me a slapping hug. I spotted the bottle sitting on the patio behind him and sat in a rotten Adirondack chair and grabbed it by the neck and filled my mouth. Old Crow; the world drowned out for a moment while I got it down.

“Take it easy! That’s all I’ve got,” Nick wailed in. “And no more Jekyll and Hyde bullshit ‘ey?”

I kept my eyes on him and took another slug. I felt like cutting to the chase.

“Are you coming?”

“What do you mean am I coming, hey,” Nick lunged at me from the comfort of his chair. “March up here and guzzle my booze, you’re a real asshole you know that?”

“You’ve told me,” I said. This was simply a new variation of an old game between Nick and I. “I was just wondering if we were cycling to Mexico is all,” I took another gulp.

“Christ!” Nick screamed. “That’s all you get. You want to see my bike? I got a bike.”

“You bought one?”

“Yes I bought one. I should have stolen it for all it cost me. Hey, give me my whiskey.”

I got this feeling of joy like after you murder someone, when you wake up and realize it was just a wild dream.

“So we’re going,” I said, laughing.

“But I don’t believe a word of your shit about making it there in three months,” Nick pointed his big dirty finger at me and buried it in a cloud of smoke. “I mean if you actually look at a map…”

“Man!” I put my hand up. “It’s a simple equation, if we do fifty miles every day we get there in two months. I really don’t see how it’ll take longer than three.”

“You didn’t see me trying to ride it up this hill then,” Nick waved his cigarette at me. “My lungs are shot.”

“You’re twenty years old!” I said. “And it’s going to be flat the whole way. We’ll go between the Appalachians and the coast and then cut west once we hit Florida. That way there aren’t any hills until Mexico and by then we’ll be raw as wolves. ”

Nick drank a mouthful that made him bare his teeth. “I’m not giving it up Sam I think you’re out of your mind. But I’m all the way in, I mean… whatever happens out there’ll be better than this,” he said, sighing at the dripping autumn forest like it was a wasteland. “And maybe we will get there.”

I didn’t care what he said so long as he was on board. The whiskey was already working, laying over my mind like a clean, warm, joyous towel.

“To Mexico!” I said.

“To Mexico,” Nick complied, and we shook hands on that time-old pact, the mother and murderer of umpteen thousands of adventures by confused white people since the very advent of the Americas. Just like that, it was on.

It was as though life had begun all over again. We sat there well into the evening drinking the whiskey and then some 151 Nick’s old man kept under the sink. Even Nick became optimistic and we made countless toasts to Mexico that kept on long after the frost came down and stiffened the grass. The road would be flat, money would come, and Mexico receive us like ambassador kings. The plan became my identity. The future was a big vacant world and we were its gods.

It was mid-October by the time we were ready to go. The leaves were down and a snowstorm due to hit New England that very week. After many bitter debates we made what I can confidently call the Last Good Decision: we packed our bicycles into boxes, raised our parting middle fingers, and boarded a greyhound bus to Virginia.

OCTOBER 18th,

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA.

Nick straddled his bicycle but it was so back heavy that before he could even take a seat it reared up like a stallion, the frame delivering him a violent smack in the balls that sent him gargling to the earth like a shot cat. Unlike poor Nick, I had panniers forward and back to balance out the load, but this gave the front wheel a lot of leverage, which in the midst of my laughter caused it to swing over, trap my leg in a jackknife and drag me to the ground a few feet away from where Nick was laying.

There wasn’t much to do but live with it. Everything we had was either old, heavy, or cheap, and there was nowhere else for it to go but on our bicycles. For the rest of the trip, wherever we made our stops Nick’s bicycle would repose on its hindquarters, a sitting horse, while mine went twisting to the earth to lie like a withered rheumatic hand. Fine. After a few more tries we learned that most of the trouble happened when we weren’t in motion, and after a few wobbling loops around the lot we took our two-man circus out onto the highway in search of a map.

It took something like four hours to escape the city. I’m sure most others could have done it in two. We experienced vast confusions and even vaster cigarette breaks, received bad directions in the wrong directions and pursued them in blind trust to a chorus of “fuck you’s” and “get off the road!’s” from the frightened motorists who, as we swerved helter-skelter with our awkward loads, found themselves within inches of committing manslaughter. When we finally found the old two-lane highway that ran into the wooded suburbs and the country we were jangled and half-frozen with cold and began searching immediately for a quiet place to “bag it.”

The woods of Virginia were hunched and gnarled and full of old washing machines. Like the woods behind a trailer park or an old saw mill I knew by instinct never to walk in them without shoes. We turned down the first overgrown dirt track and walked our bikes until we were out of sight of the road. It was still early afternoon but we were both spent and full of that raw foolish feeling you get the first day of any adventure and we didn’t say much, just laid our bicycles into the grass and tip-toed into the fantasy.

Growing up north of the Mason-Dixon line, one of the first stereotypes you learn about Southern people is that they hate people with long hair, which we had plenty of, and that they harbor a special relish for the shooting of trespassers. From the get-go we moved like hunted men. Paranoia is a magical affliction. Born from a single thought it will help itself to the fridge of your faculties until it is fat and dark and solemn as a cow. Nick and I shared this cow. It caused us to cringe and freeze with every snap and wiggle of the wood, haggling about the freshness of age-old litter and empty shotgun shells and all the different ways we might get busted. This was to be our afternoon routine for the next months and every time we grew too confident we were swiftly routed out like the runaway slaves that we were.

We crept along until the road brought us to an abandoned singlewide trailer with a giant dog by the front door. Maggots were liquefying the dog. The south was full of apocalyptic scenes. We ran back to our bicycles and settled nearby amid the bushes and thorns.

There is a lot to do after a days ride. The tent has to be set up, bags put inside, firewood gathered, the cook stove assembled and dinner made before sunset. Fortunately, Nick and I were shitheads.

“Let’s get stoned,” I offered. Nick readily agreed. We rarely differed on such matters. He pulled out the still-leaden drug bag and rolled a king-sized joint that left us completely helpless. Stoned into mumbles we watched the long brassy beams of sunlight lope down through the treetops and back up to the sky with the languid musical movement of a tune composed by an elephant an obo, and there we were — Sam and Nick — after all the toasts and boasts and visions of grandeur, lying like regular homeless in the sickly old woods of Richmond’s back yard. Surveying my surroundings and my hairy mumbling friend I couldn’t help but wonder at the anomaly of our situation. If this day was our foundation, what on earth would our house look like? How many stories could it possibly wheedle into the air before it fell down?

The sun made a muddy orange smear in the sky and vanished as we scrambled to erect the ancient six-man tent I had brought along for the excursion. The tent lived in a soccer bag now but it had spent most of its life lying unsheathed in an attic.

“Look at this fucking thing” Nick whimpered, rifling through the folds of fabric with big, tragic hands.

“I thought we should have a little space.”

“It’s fulla holes you idiot.”

“Where?”

“We’re camping in a fucking mouse nest. Look — do you see this?” Nick held up a sample of the limp, mildewed cloth and then another and another. They all seemed to have the same jagged hole in them.

“See? Full-of-holes, see?” he kept on. I couldn’t care about holes like Nick could. We had walls and a roof and I liked the size of it too but I had to listen to the racket about holes for the remainder of the trip. In rain, in cold, in mosquito’s — fulla holes! It wasn’t a bad tent. We tossed all our bags inside it and got a fire kindled just as the evening died.

Our first night was a poor one. We incapacitated ourselves many more times, played harmonica by the fire, whined for booze, ran out of water, cooked an inedible “curry” in the near freezing cold and then, in a fit of paranoia brought on by a chorus of screaming bloodhounds and gun fire and other southern oddities, pissed all over the fire and leapt into our sleeping bags to shiver and cough until dawn. Nighttime was never quiet in the south. Someone was always out shooting things and there were always the hounds baying their orchestras of blood lust and canine panic. In time we got to appreciate them like the stars we could not see.

1.)

The next day was bright and warm and the riding came easily. The road took us into a vast flat country of cotton and soy fields that stretched for miles at a time and we were soon pedaling shirtless without hands, just Nick and I and the endless blacktop to the horizon. We went for a few hours passing nothing but the occasional farmhouse until we came to a country store at a windswept crossroads with a roof that sagged like the back of a mule and clapboards stained orange from flying dust. The place looked very abandoned but in my Yank mind the whole south looked abandoned anyways and I was right. I propped my bicycle against a lone oak tree and walked in to the clamor of it “settling,” while Nick dismounted nearby with a skillful hop, followed by the “sitting horse” phenomenon that I have mentioned, his front wheel spinning at the sky.

It was made clear by the wallpaper and cheap chandelier overhead that we had entered a dead mans living room. There were a couple sparse shelves parked in the middle of the space and a table in the corner with a big red glass carboy on it beside a household fridge. That was all. To stay within our ten dollar-per-day budgets we’d resolved to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day for the entire trip but there wasn’t any peanut butter or bread to be found in the place. Of course there was grape jelly but there is always grape jelly. The last living American will find and eat grape jelly long after everything else is gone. Nick and I hadn’t eaten yet. I wandered over to the carboy. There was a little index card taped to the side. It was red with dribbled dye. This is what it said:

Lips

Hocks

knuckles

$1

Swine! I will hear no more griping about the white man’s wasteful massacre of buffalo. Look forward goddammit; the south has redeemed all that. We may not drink from pig bladders or eat pig testicles and pig bones are useless and full of holes like the tent, but the rest of the animal that isn’t made into steaks is resourcefully separated and thrown to pickle in carboys of lucid Maraschino-red brine throughout the southern land. These brazen acts of courage were as ubiquitous and conveniently placed as coffee, bobbing in wait for any kinky southern motorist-on-the-go in yen of some good protein.

I feared we were destined to lunch on cigarettes but the place had saltines, and Slim Jims, and we bought a few dirty yams to eat for dinner from a basket by the door. The woman behind the register needn’t be explained too much. She was putrid, incredibly old, sitting on a mound of stuffing that in better days had been called a chaise lounge. Her head had bristles in it. She looked like a giant pig foot.

Days passed easily, vast soybean fields narrowed into more verdant rolling countryside, and the rhythm of the bike trip took hold. The weather was warm and clear and ominous as Indian summer can be when you know that any day now you will wake up to find it over. We took the days as they came.

Sunday morning found me guarding our bicycles outside a hardware store in another one-horse Virginia town. Our brief woodland existence had already begun working on me to the effect that I could lean against the brick wall and watch people park their cars and walk their wives and waddle about and remain quite entertained, mystified by what was already beginning to seem like a parallel universe called Other Peoples Life. It was a feeling of conceit and awe that was matched perfectly by the conceited and awful regards of the people who passed me by.

They seemed especially disgruntled today. The town was in a religious fervor and the amount of fat people stuffed into arcane finery gave Main Street the appearance of a funeral procession at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Nick came wheeling out the hardware store thrusting a new machete through the air. He wore black jeans that were already shiny from filth and a threadbare GG Allen t-shirt and he launched immediately into a wild skit about “guttin’ squirrels” with our new tool as his only prop. And I’m standing there bare-backing in a day-glow fishing vest beside Sitting Horse and Rheumatic Hand laughing over the racket of the church bells. People took time to stop and stare. Back in Vermont we were branded dirt bags fair enough, but in the eyes of old Virginia we were regular “crazies.” People were offended by our presence.

Four nights on the straight and narrow were enough; Nick and I were jonesing for a little excitement, perhaps a foray with the heavier items in the drug bag, but most of all we wanted to drink. A strong tail wind sailed us out of town. We stopped at another dilapidated country store a couple miles down the road and bought more yams. They were cheap and enormous and we had taken to chopping them into cubes with onions and garlic and butter, wrapping everything in tinfoil and tossing the bundles on the fire. But that was for later. Nick unloaded an armful of forty ounce Colt 45’s on the counter and the cashier sold them to us without a hitch. We were never sober at night again.

We set off sniffing for a place to camp until we found a meadow, glowing green in the sun beyond the roadside pines. We heaved our bicycles through the undergrowth and emerged in a grassy clearing that was sheltered from the wind and the sun was beating down and we dropped our bicycles and splayed our tired bodies in the grass. The earth was hot and soft and damp in the sun and I closed my eyes a moment and smelled the tingling hot grass. But there were these huge bottles of malt liquor behind my eyelids. They were sweating and trapped in my bedroll. I stopped smelling grass and ran off to save them.

Nick was already after it. He laid on his elbow nearby suckling away, his eyes rolling and fluttering like a big hairy infant on the tit. He sighed a great sigh.

“It’s in my blood,” he proclaimed. “I am an alcoholic. Do you know how good this feels? Do you know? Its like love, man,” he said, his face a carcass of smiling tooth and bone. I tipped my bottle up and kept it coming until the screaming feeling came in my throat, lowered, then did it again. I’d never enjoyed drinking so much as after a days ride, and I’d always loved to drink.

The beer was still very cold. “Lets drop Acid,” I said.