Two Way Thumb - Real Life Hitch Hiking Stories of my dangerous and misspent youth, Part One

The year was 1992.

I remember that because Nirvana's "Nevermind" had been released the year before. We were all living in a sort of "communal" flop house on west Bannock street in Boise Idaho at the time. It was a modest one bedroom house with a full basement. I think at the time there were about nine of us all living there to some degree.

Some of us had semi-regular jobs. I was a window washer at the time, but it was a bit of a throwaway job for me. I could certainly take it or leave it. I owned a 1974 Ford Econoline van I had bought from a local produce delivery company who had retired it as a wholeslae delivery fleet vehicle. I paid $400 for it and it served me well for many years. We had traveled all the way to Mountain View California for the first Lollapalooza in it the year before. The side of the van was emblazoned with a smeary, abstract but very colorful painting done with acrylics squeezed directly out of the aluminum tubes, using our fingers as a brush. Just beneath the mural, I had stenciled an identifying nickname for our small group of roustabout buskers and street punk freaks, it read "GODS DOGS." One of my first bands where I was the primary songwriter was at first named "Gods Hounds" as an evolution of the term. This name eventually morphed into "Godzoundz," transformed via repeated mispronunciation and a general unwillingness to settle on a moniker which cast us as some sort of "pets" of a cruel and diminishing deity.

I had parked the van outside the alley behind the Bannock house, and I used it as a bedroom and personal space when I needed to escape or get a little privacy from the sheer loony bin which the inside of the house had become. Some nights were definitely worse (better) than others, but weekends were always a party. And when I say party, I don't mean some sort of civilized affair, where people played organized games or watched sports on tv with bowls of snacks on a glass top coffee table. No, I mean party as in, there will certainly be nudity at some point, though it was mostly male nudity. There was LSD or Psilocybin mushrooms involved in many cases, and if that was not available, it was anything we could get our hands on. Lots and lots of cheap shitty canned beer was drunk by all, that was a given. There would be a jam session downstairs before it was all over, and if we were lucky that night, none of the neighbors would call the cops.

There was one of these parties going on that night, and my friend Joe with the pointy beard and crazy eyes would not get out of the bathroom.

Some girl was complaining to her boyfriend about it, and I felt a confrontation brewing. Joe had little restraint when it came to obliging the call of other's normalcy. He was a little crazy, like for real. But he was a brilliant wordsmith, and one of the most astoundingly creative artists I had ever met, making us fast friends and constant collaborators.

I heard this girl complaining to her boyfriend that "some weirdo would not leave the bathroom and she had to go pee real bad." I saw her boyfriend's face crinkle up into an expression of disgust and I knew what was coming, having seen it before. I beat him to the bathroom before he could get through the crowd, and I quickly closed and locked the door with Joe and myself inside.

"Joe, some dude is outside and his girlfriend needs to use the toilet. I need you to get out of the bathroom and let her do it. You can come right back in after that, but the dude looks pissed and I don't feel like breaking up any fights tonight."

Joe had that blank stare I had learned to recognize when he was "checked out" and not willing to respond to reason. In his left hand, he held a can of cheap shitty beer with the tab pulled off. His right hand was neurotically twisting the point of his beard. He let go of it just long enough to gesture toward the toilet, then he reached around me and jiggled the handle a few times, making a hollow rattling sound inside the empty porcelain tank.

I looked down at the toilet, the water was circling around and around, a mass of toilet paper clumped on top. A few cigarette butts clung to the mass like crash victims on a lifeboat adrift in a swirling and slightly yellowed sea.

"It won't go down," he said plaintively.

"Dude, you gotta stop jiggling the handle and let the tank fill up. You keep letting more and more water out and it doesn't have enough velocity to flush."

"No no," he said. "It's plugged."

The bathroom was right off the kitchen. We did not have a plunger so I tried to be resourceful. I opened the door long enough to slip out and grab a long bread knife from the drawer next to the fridge. I closed the door to the bathroom again, locking it so nobody would burst in but before I could investigate, the girl's angry boyfriend was pounding on the door.

"My girlfriend really needs to use the bathroom, can you guys get out for a minute please?" He was trying to remain calm and polite.

I opened the door a crack and told him it was plugged, but I was investigating and would be out in a minute. I shut the door and locked it again before any more discussion could take place.

Joe was still jiggling the handle, giving it a wiggle then looking at me like he knew he was annoying me, but delighted in it. I pushed his hand away and jammed the long knife into the toilet drain. I felt some resistance there, and as I pulled the knife out I felt something following it. It was a large red squishy tomato.

Almost immediately the toilet water started to recede down the drain but it still seemed to be plugged, so I stuck the knife back in there and pulled out a second tomato. With one tomato in my hand, the other still stuck to the end of the knife, I held it up in Joe's face. I could tell he was trying not to crack a smile.

"What the fuck, Joe?"

Joe stood there silently staring, twisting the point of his beard.

I managed to get him out of the bathroom so the girl could go pee, but it seemed she had already left the party.

James was standing in the kitchen and saw me emerging from the bathroom with a tomato skewered on the tip of the long bread knife and instantly burst out in maniacal laughter.

"I fixed the toilet," I said, laughing as I thrust the knife into the air and shouted "tomato!!!"

Later that night as the party was winding down, Joe, James and myself were in the kitchen talking.

James' dad lived in Tuscon and we were discussing going down there for a surprise visit. At first, we spoke as though we were going to get in James's car and leave that night, but we were all pretty drunk, so we somehow managed to agree to wait until the next day. Then, if we still felt like going we agreed we would scrape together whatever gas money we could get and we would go.

The next day came and I woke up in the basement of my mom's house, not entirely sure how I ended up there. I called James on the phone while I lit a bent cigarette, and we agreed he would need a couple hours to sell the battery out of his jeep for a little cash and then he'd come and pick Joe and I up, and we would then head out to Tucson to pay his pops a truly unforgettable surprise visit.