Hobo Lifestyles #8

What I did with my Winter Vacation

by Tyler Carey

The hiatus is over. We're all back from the brink of exhaustion with a few more beers under belts, and few new stories for the telling. All of the hoboes hope that you had a great holiday season. Well, except for the Unknown Hobo - he's been a little incommunicado lately. Hopefully inspiration has struck him as well as all of you during these holiday weeks...

This holiday season found me spending more time with family, perhaps by extension that through my girlfriend I had more family to celebrate with, this year. Around the tri-state area I drove, shaking hands and kissing babies. I felt like I was running for office, like our good friend Mark Hugo. All of the visitations were good ones - especially the stop by the Newark apartment of an 89-year old near-relation who stuffed me with shrimp cocktail, and offered me Ballantine's whisky at eleven in the morning. What a gal.

Depression-era relatives with a penchant for mischief are the best. It's at this time of year that I think a lot about my passed-on aunt Alice, a tough-as-nails Scots-woman who would have been ninety-one this past Halloween. Alice's lust for life was unbelievable. She lived close to the vest for seventy years, but then spent her old-lady nest egg in grand style, spending her last years doing the Lindy Hop on board the QE2, as it circumnavigated the globe. She danced her way around to Hawaii one year, and decided to say "Mahalo," to us all. I pictured her in a sick bed, having one last mai-tai while a steel guitarist plucked "Aloha-hoi" for her Tibetan Book of the Dead-type voyage home.

Alice used to love making a raspberry trifle for my family during the holidays. It's my most distinct memory of her, which is odd because there was enough rum in it to prep you for an appendectomy. My drief-out grandfather loved it most of all because eating it was his one chance a year to get his bag on. Perhaps the two or three servings I had every Christmas were what put me on my road to ruin...

This year's Christmas memory came from a party I went to with a cousin of mine. Her name's Wendy and she's a semester away from graduating with a philosophy degree from the New School. One of her literature profs was throwing an epiphany party in his Tenth St. brownstone.

"An Epiphany party?" I asked Wendy.

"He's a Jesus freak," Wendy explained. "There'll be priests and professionals and students there. They'll hive wine and crackers and probably sing some Christmas carols."

"There will be booze there?" I asked skeptically.

"There will be wine," Wendy reiterated.

"That'll do."

The apartment was filled with framed, illuminated manuscripts and people who believed themselves to be illuminated. Wendy and I were the youngest people there by about seventy years. Professor Halvorson, a giant Swede of a man, introduced himself to me. "Welcome to my Epiphany party, Tyler!" he said grandly. "I'm Gary Halvorson."

"Great to meet you, Gary," I said as I shook his hand. Upon uttering his first name, Gary's hand became limp and sticky.

"Oh," he said. His grip loosened entirely. "You can refer to me as Professor Halvorson… Well, let me introduce you." Gary turned to the room full of intellectual-types and said, "Allow me to introduce to you all Wendy Bergman and her fiancée Tyler Carey." Everyone smiled and waved all at once, like the Stepford wives.

"What the fuck?" I asked Wendy.

"He must have me confused with one of his other students," Wendy hissed through smiling teeth. "Just go with it," she whispered.

"Go with it? I'm your cousin! I only came for the wine!"

"You had a crush on me once," Wendy teased. A guest walked up to her and congratulated her.

"We were seven!" I whispered. Some woman I'd never met before gave me a kiss on the cheek and assured me that Wendy was a great girl and that I was very lucky. "I know!" I said, feigning appreciation. "I feel like I know her like family."

Eventually the congratulations (including one request for a list of places where we are registered) faded. I snuck to the kitchen to fix myself a drink, and found Professor Halvorson (or "Gary" to his closest friends) on sentry duty.

"You are old enough to drink, aren't you, son?" he asked.

"Sure thing," I said.

"You got ID to prove that?" he asked.

I was startled. "You do realize," I said, "That I'm marrying one of your grad students."

Professor Halvorson sighed. "ID?" he asked again. I held back my complaints and opened my wallet to show my driver's license. "You're not driving home tonight, are you, son?" he asked.

"No, sir," I said.

"That's a man!" he said. "What'll you drink? This here's whiskey. It has a smoky flavor..."

What an asshole, I thought. "I'll have a Wild Turkey with a beer-back," I said.

Professor Halvorson balked. "I'm only going to give you one drink at a time, son. Y'know, I developed a drinking problem when I was your age, so..."

"Fine," I said. "Just give me the Turkey."

Very slowly, Gary filled a shot glass, and then dumped the shot into a small plastic cup. "Here you go," he said. I downed the shot in one gulp and said, "Great! Now can I have another shot, but this time with the beer and without the guilt trip?" Professor Halvorson stormed out of the kitchen, leaving me to kill my liver in peace. Sadly, I didn't drink enough to prepare me for what followed.

When I returned to Gary's living room, a gigantic priest was staggering about, holding a six-string guitar in one hand and a martini glass the size of a baby's head in the other. "Who wants to hear some Beatles tunes in Latin?" he barked. The only Latin I know, I picked up from the Electric Prunes' Mass in F Minor. I was raised Presbyterian in a Jewish town on Long Island. You do the math. Thankfully, it was just a drunken joke. The priest launched into a slow version of Neil Diamond's "Shiloh", instead.

There wasn't enough Wild Turkey in the world to help me deal with that image, just then. I had an opportunity to revisit the bar at the end of the song, though, when the priest said, "Hey, buddy, mind giving an old man a refill?" I found his martini glass thrust into my hand, and Wendy and I dashed into the kitchen as he began singing "They Call the Wind Mariah."

"I was expecting a few verses of 'Silent Night' and maybe a round of 'Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore', not this weirdness," I said to Wendy, as I lightly shook some Bombay Sapphire gin and some vermouth in a cocktail shaker.

"You're not having a good time?" asked Wendy.

"Are you kidding? I just showed up to this party to have some wine, and all of a sudden I'm engaged to my cousin, I'm being cut off on booze by a giant professor with a stick up his ass, and a martini-swilling priest is singing AM radio hits. How can I be having a good time?"

"Oh come on," Wendy said, "At the very least, I figured this would all be grist for the mill for that website of yours."

"You mean you think I'd write a story for The Great Hoboes of New York based on some personal experiences? You think I'd trivialize my private life in my twice monthly column?"

Wendy nodded. "Yeah."

"I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you, Wendy. Don't worry about it, cuz. I'd never write about any of our adventures." Unless of course it was pure gold.

Tyler M. Carey
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, The Great Hoboes of New York
January, 2003