I am sure that Gothboy will tell me that he enjoyed his evening with Jace (the kid from Omaha who showed him the music that he loves). That it was a lot of fun. And that he met some mellow people at the all night diner.
The next morning he heads out to where he had left Winking Joe and Satchmo. And he is eager to tell them about his night on the town with Jace.
I mentioned before that Gothboy has a good ear and a keen eye, and I can't verify this until he calls me next. But there is a tension between Winking Joe and Satchmo; or a distraction that they are into that doesn't involve Gothboy. He notices this and he grows wary of being here. They are up to something that he doesn't understand. Gothboy knows when it is time to distance himself. So he packs up his stuff, says goodbye, and heads out to the highway and sticks out his thumb.
Winking Joe and Satchmo say goodbye in return, but they dont seem to be all that sad to see Gothboy go. What are they up to?
Satchmo, and that of course is not his real name, is a rather large man. He sits at the undersized desk in the Motel 6, looming over it like a parent might look like visiting a first grader's classroom desk. He has the heat in the room turned on high-it is still cold in Omaha- and the window wide open. This is supposed to be a non-smoking room but everyone who stays at a Motel 6, anywhere in the country, smokes. That is just the way it works at a Motel 6. $48 dollars a night.
Satchmo takes the last cigarette from one pack and crumples up the packaging. The trashcan is next to the end table by the bed. He tosses it. It misses by a foot. He lights up and fetches a new pack from his pocket.
He opens up his notebook. He puts on his glasses. He reviews the pages and pages of notes he has made. Hand-written notes, not something he or anyone else did using Microsoft Word. Hand-written, in a tight script.
Satchmo, as you might have deduced. is a black guy. And he is quite a large black guy. He has spent a lot of time working as a private investigator, travelling around the country chasing down dead-beat dads or whatever. He never really liked it, but it put food on the table for Mimi and the kids. And before he knew it, thirty years had gone by.
He actually went to Penn State for a couple of years. He had a fantasy about being a member of the football team, but that never happened. He did get to scrimmage with the team his first year when they were in training, but he could never run too fast.
His interest in college was chemistry. He had done well in science in high school and when he got to Penn State that was definitely the direction he was headed in. But then he met Mimi, and fell in love, and he perhaps got distracted. They married, probably too young, and had their first child. He has no regrets about that, of course. He and Mimi are still together. And the kids are fine. But college? Well, he dropped out. And that resulted in his being eligible to go to Vietnam, which he did, and he never talks about.
So fast-foward thirty or thirty-five or is it forty years later. He is sitting at a tiny desk in Omaha. Motel 6. Reading his notes.
Some guy named Joel Kriegler or something lived here in Omaha. He kept detailed records of the flights into and out of the air base near Omaha. He had files and files full of photos of the contrails those planes left behind. They were mysterious, perhaps sinister. contrails. And then Joel moved away suddenly and died shortly later.
Satchmo was hired by someone, he won't say whom, but I assume it is someone in Joel's family, to look into this. Looking for what, I don't know.
Aha, I've been meaning to read this thread, Johnboy. And I will..
I hope you do find the time to read through it, jo. It, like your thread on architecture, has very few participants. But that doesn't really matter, does it? I hope that, when you settle into your new home, you will resume that thread.
Some of this thread is autobiographical, from when I was a young man drifting around the country. Most is total fiction. The guy upon whom Gothboy is based is a friend of mine. He recently asked for a print-out of the stories (this thread is only one of several). Sure, I said, not realizing that 8 or 9 pages on A2K works out to about 40 pages of story.
Wow, that's a lot.
Always enjoy your musings, rjb, for both content and style...
Just a quick note regarding Gothboy. He called me a couple of days ago. He was somewhere out west. I mentioned that I was going to be in Chicago around May 8th for the A2K thing. "I'll meet you in Chicago," he said. Wouldn't that be cool?
Totally!
Hope he makes it to the Duke of Perth. I think he'd like that more than, say, the Art Institute.
I haven't written about Gothboy for many, many months. In fact, I had kind of forgotten about him for awhile.
This weekend I am taking care of the neighbors' dog while they had to make a trip out of town on short notice.
The dog makes no demands, just as Gothboy never does.
This evening, I was watching the dog. I had fed him and taken him for a long walk. We were back in the house. His bed is laid out in the room across from this one. Before he lay down, he did three or four circles around the bedding area. I am told that is an instinctive thing amongst some animals to mat down the grass where they will be sleeping. I don't know if that is true but, if so, he tramped down some invisible grass.
About two miles to the east of me is a set of railway tracks. They run from the South, carryng freight from Charleston, New Orleans or wherever, to the North. Lots of trains a day. Usually I never hear them. Too far away.
But this evening, just as the dog was completing its ritual before sleep, I could clearly hear the train horn announcing its approach to each grade crossing.
The dog's ears perked up and kind of a shiver went through me. I thought of Gothboy and how many freight trains he had ridden and how many safe places he had found to sleep.
Wow. Gothboy called me this evening.
Just discovered this story and I'm enjoying it immensely, rjb. Maybe it's because I feel like I could be Gothboy's mom. I'm glad you've heard from him. Is he okay? What has he been up to?
Thank you Tai Chi for your interest in Gothboy. He has been around on this thread since Feb 2004. But you can find him earlier on other threads going back to early 2003 perhaps.
Gothboy is kind of a scrawny kid. He has piercings in his ears and his nose and his upper lip. But Gothboy can and has, if pushed, beat the crap out of anyone who attacks him.
Yes, Gothboy did call me. He is fine. He is in Idaho this Thanksgiving evening. It is snowing a bit and Gothboy is warm and dry.
So Gothboy called me today. He has called me once in a while in the past few months, but this is the first call I wanted to tell yall about
He is in Arkansas right now. He was in California but is drifting east.
We started talking about Kurt Vonnegut, who died today at the age of 84 or so. Vonnegut died. So it goes.
Vonnegut was almost four times the age of Gothboy. And his stories came out of WW2, long before Gothboy, or perhaps even Gothboy's parents, were born. But Vonnegut's writing resonatated with Gothboy. The absurdity of war. The mindless cost of sending young men off to die battling other young men. But so it goes.
Gothboy doesn't really know who Robert F (Bobby) Kennedy was. Supposedly Vonnegut wrote this: Bobby Kennedy got killed a couple of days ago. So it goes.
Gothboy was at a gas station in Arkansas. Convenience store/gas station. He was just hanging out before hitting the interstate. An "elderly" gentleman (I didn't ask how elderly for fear of being called elderly) pulled in and attempted to get gas. But he had problems with the pump.
Gothboy, noticing this, walked over and solved the problem and got the car gassed up. And this elderly Arkansas gentleman and Gothboy, with his tattoos and piercings, got along fine. No animosity. So it goes.
The gentleman told Gothboy that he was going to be heading down the road for about 70 miles in the direction Gothboy was headed. And Gothboy was welcome to ride along. Gothboy got in.
But, the gentleman said, he would have to stop at a nursing home for a ten minute visit with a friend of a friend. Ten minutes, max, and Gothboy could stay in the car, and then they would drive on.
So they got to the nursing home and Gothboy told me he had never seen a nursing home before. So he went in.
Gothboy, with his long hair, tattoos and multiple piercings in his ears, lips and eyebrows, walking down this corridor lined with old folks, people who had we assume, amazing lives but now sort of empty shells. They were hoping that he might be coming to visit them. But he wasn't.
So it goes.
Thanks again for posting about Gothboy. I'm not sure why I find him such an interesting person, except that I have sons of my own (young men now, though neither are goths). The youngest is heading off on his own travels soon, to learn about the world and himself. I hope the folks he meets are for the most part generous and non-judgemental.
