Hobos in Space

Two west side hobos talking in a vacuum, thinking they're funny.

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

The Birth of Tiresias

“You got your mother in a whirl, cause she’s not sure you’re a boy or a girl.”

Sing it once more with feeling, Ma. Thanks. She sang this to me as a child, when she thought I was too young to know what she was talking about. But little does she know that my memories extend beyond my existence as a discrete human being, that I know hymnals in two languages plus the entire Thank You for the Music and Tommy soundtracks and all of Jim Croce from days in utero.

I, Tiresias, the blind prophet, was born on the coldest day of the coldest month. I attended an elementary school whose south windows faced a cow pasture. Somehow, a lifelong love and yearning for Art and Beauty were instilled in me during my time here. I painted, drew, cut out paper furniture for my shoebox dollhouse and got written up for my efforts by my third-grade teacher, who didn’t like boys, who didn’t like girls, who especially didn’t like me, as I defied, for those early years in our little burg, all conventional notions of masculinity or femininity.

I played the recorder and sang soprano like an angel in the fifth grade chorus. I was also made hall patrol and wore plaid pants and platform slides and a peach Members Only jacket and polished rock bead necklaces.

In the seventh grade, I predicted that Gerald Akata would beat out Susie Keener for first cello. Everyone said I was jealous of Susie and had a crush on Gerald and why don’t you just shut up already, no one asked you, fifth chair second violinist. Then Gerald became first chair and people stopped talking to me.

In Jazzercise class in the Magnolia Parlor during college, I said The Spice Girls were a one-summer one-note one-wagon sensation and they would disband after Spice World. The instructor glared at me, turned up “If You Wanna Be My Lover,” made me grapevine until I was debilitated by shin splints, and told me I was no longer welcome in her class.

In my first post-college job, I said to my co-worker, “It’s not turkey season yet.” He went anyway and was issued a citation by the Department of Natural Resources and they revoked all future hunting permits. Love bloomed and left so soon. Then it really was turkey season, so off I went with my turkey call and rifle. He never spoke to me again.

In graduate school, upon being asked if a potential hire was a good fit for the program, I said, “I’m not so sure about this guy. Why didn’t you bring in another candidate if you’re asking our opinion?” I was never invited again to issue my opinions and the program director blacklisted me from all program announcements, especially ones that announced job openings and AWP postings. The new hire came to our school the following semester, got into a fist fight over cocktails at a dean’s function, had an affair with the program director’s wife, who was going to leave him anyway, as he was on the Pulitzer Prize train to nowhere and he was only holding back her acting career, the same program director who told me that I was only a “temporary member” of this fine esteemed institution so why don’t you just shut the fuck up already, hack writer. Undeterred, I put him in my romance novel as the villain and killed him off on page 157. My travels took me away, and I was five states over when I was finally in a position to say “I told you so.”

I enjoy eating, drinking, reading (often frequent Penn Books and The Book Corner), and listening to music. The number of times in a row I can listen to “See the Sky About to Rain” (so far) is nine, which just might put me on the list as a hard-core Neil Young fan. And only nine because I had to leave to meet Cassandra for coffee.

I, Tiresias, went through many of the hoops of higher education and did time in many professions and received countless numerous accolades before settling into my current profession. I was a good employee, a hard worker, on time, courteous, never spilled coffee on my keyboard or put up incendiary political material in my cubicles. I was a model employee, and I made many friends. However, no one wants advice or to hear “I told you so” when one’s job is to answer phones or copy-edit trade magazine articles or wait tables, especially when the couple who ordered the scampi after I told them what I recommended (and it wasn’t the shrimp scampi) comes back in after a night on the toilet and accuses me of food poisoning, to which I answer, “Tweren’t me, lady, I told you scampi wasn’t a good choice,” and then I get fired anyway, even though it’s not my fault their ass exploded. As a consultant to people from all walks of life, I issue statements whenever and wherever I please and sometimes get paid for my efforts. I believe I can make a difference, and I endeavor to do so every day. I spend most of my time in Penn Station, where I frequent many of the fine eating establishments and shops.

The Biography of Cass

I, Cassandra, prefer to be called Cass, a name not bestowed upon me by Apollo, who is both the spring and bane of my existence as disbelieved prophetess. Rather it is a name I have chosen for myself and as such, holds little chance of being believed or invoked. I am the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of a place kind of like Troy.

I am not the most beautiful of Priam’s wild brood, because as my frustrated brother whined [in a litany of other perfectly packaged characterizations] one day, “Cass is the smart one.” I wanted to be the “good-looking one.” Or I, had it not been for my two left feet, would have gladly been the “athletic one.” But I was the “smart one,” which doomed me to eyeglasses so thick they could stop stray bullets and a paperback on my person at all times. To quote a nimble and self-absorbed 1990s ice princess of bludgeoned fame, I wondered, “Why me?” Why do I, Cass, have to be the smart one?

Word to the wise: don’t brush off a prospective suitor with Apollo-like powers, particularly when you’re just the “smart one,” and neither the “good-looking” nor the “athletic” one and therefore not really worthy of his affections in the first place, nor capable of using your athleticism to kick him in the balls and run. He’ll never get over it. Like many disgruntled Greek gods before him, he will mark you as his once-traversed territory, and that marking will smell a bit like urine and may take the form of a curse. And you, you will find yourself in the fine company of my Greek namesake and me, fated to foresee coming events, never to be believed.

My Greek name, in all its fullness and glory, means “one who entangles men.” And perhaps that’s where Cassandra’s and Cass’s paths diverge in the wood of disbelieved prophetesses. Cassandra’s life is chock full of men who loved, exploited, possessed, and sought to possess her. To which I say: not this Cass, not this road; because I can assure you that I, Cass, took the road less traveled—by normal heterosexual male suitors, that is.

Despite the fact that I predicted she would be crowned Goddess of Wisdom at Homecoming, Athena never picked me to occupy a coveted corner of her temple, nor to wear the Carolina Herrera-designed robes a priestess of Athena must be entitled/encouraged to don when spewing wisdom. But like fair Cassandra, I, too draw attention from the likes of Ajax the Lesser, or the Little (depending upon your degree of orthodoxy in translation). I, Cass, am doomed to brush elbows with little men; seriously, my elbows brush the tops of their heads. These Ajaxes the Littles see my 5’9ness as the perfect genetic donor, or in plain, non-prophet speak, as their shot at medium sized children.

And many years before the fall of Troy, I, Cass, a wiry Olive Oyl-like figure, leaned my bony elbows across a chain link fence and muttered “No, no they won’t make it to the Majors.” To which my companions guffawed, rolled the waistband of their pleated uniform skirts again and giggled louder at the boys throwing a baseball on the other side of the fence. “And if they do, which they won’t, do you really think they’ll be faithful to you?” They stared harder at me and tied the ends of their Oxford shirts tighter across their busts. And Shelly said, “Why do you always have to be such a know-it-all pain-in-the-ass?” as she hiked her skirt up and hopped the fence to retrieve Pete’s ball. She smiled at him, he grinned and then took the rest of us in with a swooping leer before spewing tobacco at her feet. “See Cass, it is true love,” the others clicked, before they too bounded over the fence to collect other stray balls. A year later, I was spending my free time with the mock trial team, and Shelly was pregnant with Pete’s twins. Pete hadn’t made it to the majors, but he was still swinging for Mister Tony’s Restaurant Monday nights and riding a lawnmower around the diamonds the rest of the week. The others, who still believed it was true love, simultaneously blamed me, as if my stray words crept up Shelly’s skirt, impregnated her, and landed Pete with Mister Tony instead of Mr. Steinbrenner. Not sure if Shelly, Pete, and the twins are still together. I hope they are, but if I was a disbelieved betting prophetess asked to comment on the matter, I’d guess….

And my teenage prophetic powers weren’t limited to the sunshine task of predicting doomed relationships. Like my Trojan predecessor, I foresaw the collapse of the place of my birth, perhaps without the same epic inducing ripple effect as the fall of Troy. So yes, I, Cass, predicted that the gigantic wooden horse that appeared at the city’s gates was full (not of blood-thirsty Romans bent on rape and pillaging) of kick-back hungry politicians and their cronies who bled my birth city of its youth, businesses, and fortune. Unlike Cassandra, my prophecies did not land me in a maximum-security tower without a key, but rather on the road in search of a job in neither a restaurant nor a beauty parlor. And I thundered my way down the Garden State Parkway for a brief respite in the Boss’s state. But visions and a modest salary propelled me across the Hudson and onto the most expensive island in all of Greece, ahem, (because even prophetesses need to clear their throats at times) America.

On this island there is an axis, and at this axis there is a station, and this station pours forth commuters onto the anger-management or nervous-breakdown-inducing (depending upon one’s predisposition) streets of Midtown. In this station, there are tunnels and merchants peddling their price-inflated wares, and in these tunnels, I stumbled upon the blind prophet Tiresias fresh off the midnight train from Georgia. And this brings me to the present, or as much of a present as any prophetess is entitled.

Hobos Inc.: Vision Statement

We are a limited liability corporation offering no tangible product or service with the ultimate goal of selling said company for an inordinate amount of money (that’s a lot in panhandler dollars). The good fortune of Pip stumbling upon an irate escaped convict to smooth our way toward the gates of Marc Jacobs is always a possibility, but at the moment we prefer to work on our visitor stats before resorting to a benefactor.

We at Hobos Inc. strive to maintain the best customer service relationship possible; if you send us an email, we will reply. We may not give the answer you are looking for, but we can assure you it will be as we say. Clairvoyance and soothsaying cannot be tailored to every customer’s wishes. We prefer not to say we told you so.

We said this enough during the Peloponnesian war and the dot.com bubble; we said this about the Ugg shitstorm (woe to all those with fur-trimmed accessories writhing in their closets) and last summer’s boho bender. Despite the fact that we are hobos in space, we cannot exist solely in a vacuum, so we recognize that you are our stakeholders. Thus we appreciate your input and your expressions of support; we are available to receive them at our global headquarters, located in Penn Station.

Manifesto

In Jerome Stern’s Making Shapely Fiction, he offers the would-be writer a few cautionary tales to consider before crafting the great American novel. One of his cautionary tales is an entry he calls “The hobos-in-space story”:

“Here a small number of characters, perhaps only two, isolated from ordinary society, talk a lot about life while not doing very much. They tend to comment about civilization, philosophize about meanings, and squabble a bit among themselves. One of them says, ‘It’s cold.’ Another answers, ‘It’s always been cold.’

“Perhaps this is all Samuel Beckett’s fault. But it’s really not fair to blame him. It is fair to blame those who don’t realize that giving portentous dialogue to philosophizing outcasts (in a world gone mad) is self-indulgent, sentimental, and heavy-handed. The stylized setting makes all actions seem weightily symbolic, and the characters generally seem to stand for some major idea about the nature of man. Stories of this sort tend to end with either a bang (punching, knifing, hitting with a plank) or a whimper (staring into embers, staring into an empty pot, staring into nothing).”

We realized that many of our existing manuscripts, living and breathing in our closets and not going anywhere anytime soon, seem to bear a striking resemblance to what Stern characterizes as a fiction faux pas. We also realize that we bear a striking resemblance to hobos. Talking. In a vacuum.

Why Hobos?
Because Tiresias looks back on her five months of homelessness with fondness; because she was again cast out into the streets after her first apartment was destroyed in a neighboring apartment fire. It was the last time she would ever venture out into the boroughs.

Because Cass was a squatter living in NJ and when she did lay down roots in this fair city, it was in the Kremlin of W Czech Republic prior to reunification, prior to toilet seats, locks on windows, shower fixtures, closet rods, heat/hot water, & functioning kitchen appliances.

Because sometimes living in NYC forces one to do things typically reserved for street people, such as: stuffing a wad of Starbucks napkins in a coat pocket to use later as toilet paper, cleaning rags, or tissues; extending the five-second rule for dropped food to thirty seconds; wandering the streets, laptop in hand, looking to park at the foot of a building with wireless access; attending seminars and lunchtime talks for the free food, coffee, and dessert; conserving everything from yarn to Ziploc bags to newspapers; washing clothes in bathroom sinks (both public & private) when there aren’t enough quarters or hours to do laundry.

Because we fall asleep in the park, during corporate meetings, on the train during which we awake to find ourselves fifty blocks east of our desired destination.

Because as hobos, we often sport a uniform: loose-fitting linen skirts & tunics, wifebeaters, sometimes comfortable/sometimes designer shoes that hearken back to days long since past, to our more lucrative days as graduate students.

Because we are always in search of benefactors.

Why Space?
Because hobos are inherently transient, and as former inhabitants of Amherst, Atlanta, Bloomington, Buffalo, Latrobe, Lawrenceville, Lilburn, Marietta, New Providence, and Poughkeepsie, so are we.

Because only the highly skilled and intelligent explore space.

Because space is waste management’s promised land.

Because space offers us a bird’s eye view of all things.

Because you can do things in space that you can’t do on earth, such as: dance on the ceiling, eat reconstituted foods, and wear Balenciaga-esque white uniforms.

Because space obliterates all normal rules, such as theme, grammar, organization, transitions.

Because we have no intention of producing any sort of coherent or focused writing.

Why Write?
Because we’ve tried and failed at:
painting, sculpting, wire & plastic mobiles
piano
singing
composing showtunes/sonatas/symphonies/simple chord progressions
remixing songs like “All Along the Watch Tower” and “Immigrant Song”
violin: chamber, orchestral, solo; classical guitar; country fiddling, jazz improvisation
poetry recitation
mime, juggling, trapeze, unicycling
candle-making
skyscraper window-washing
anything and everything involving the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of numbers
Olympic sports, including but not limited to ice dancing, bobsledding, javelin throwing, and curling