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Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend

Brandon Knight

    The sign said, “On the Road, Out of Food.” It was Jake’s suggestion that a sign should be simple. He claimed he had been using the same one for the past five years. Make the message short, to the point, and legible. Don’t invoke pity. Forget their pity and pretend that they’re jealous. So I trembled across the intersection under the overpass and gritted my teeth. “Smile, look like you happy out there man,” he told me. The façade of happiness wasn’t quite possible at first, but with my nerves shot, with my pride wounded, I stood on the corner of Mopac and 2222.
    I was fucked. North Austin overpass, pitiful bedroll sprawled twenty feet from the train tracks, delirium tremens and nothing left to drink. Not even the ass end of a forty. I had already managed those with conviction. I had run out of the little cash I had made from a job I worked the week prior. I despised the manager and residents of the hundredth halfway home I was living in, so I chose the bridge instead. Actually I despised everyone, all I wanted was solitude and perpetual inebriation. I had no idea how to be homeless but disregarded that fact until the money ran out.
    Suffering from severe social anxiety for as long as I can remember, I naturally distrusted and automatically abhorred anyone I met until they proved me wrong. On principle, asking for spare change or flying a sign were out of the question. I was too proud and too hateful to ask for help. Or maybe I was too afraid. Two days without a drink, I was hallucinating under a bridge and became convinced that the visions were real. Violent tremors and an impending sense of doom had taken hold and all I needed was a goddamned beer to stop the torture. I prayed to no one or nothing in particular for a fatal seizure, which given my medical history was certainly within the realm of possibility. So I had some hope. But I would be damned before I asked a stranger for money, help, anything. The initial goal was complete self-reliance, a hermetic lifestyle with as little interaction with humankind as possible. This goal ultimately proved to be quite naïve as it quickly became clear that my alcoholism demanded action, some way to survive that involved other people. Then came Alien Jake.
    Delirium tremens were a familiar enemy. While in their throes, there are of course the tremors or “the shakes,” these are the most tolerable of the symptoms and require no explanation. There is then a hypersensitivity that takes over me: a falling leaf grazing my shoulder induces a brief panic attack. A constant dread is felt throughout my entire body. I feel dread in my bones. I feel my bones, each one. My mind, my thoughts, my body, everything turns putrid. It makes me wretch. I vomit constantly, all bile and blood. My cynicism is intensified and I cannot help but seethe hatred for the human race, hatred for myself. Then come the hallucinations, like clockwork, day two. I revert to a primordial state, a shaking mess on the ground, hallucinating image after image, acts of perversion I was unaware I was capable of creating. And they come fast. During detox, my mind moves more swiftly and creatively than I believed possible. The images it creates, unfortunately, are fucking disgusting. One after another, a split-second each, these images play out. For whatever reason I see them on early twentieth century film stock. I see close-ups of sebaceous cysts being gnawed upon by unnatural insects, lapping up the pus. Oily serpents inserted into my only friend’s vagina, she is bound and gagged by a band of nefarious, salivating men and she is gasping for air. My mother, gang raped as my father’s eyes are pried open by device and his four laughing brothers, forcing him to watch, masturbate each other. These visions will go in and out for days on end and they become increasingly real and increasingly personal. When they cease, a woman’s voice will begin to whisper in my ear. She always starts softly, I can barely hear her, soon though, she is screaming and cackling at the top of her lungs, raving of my hideous transgressions, some true, some false. Then they all become true and I long for the days of the California hospitals and their comely nurses easing me through hell.
    If I am detoxing in a hospital, these episodes are typically mitigated with a variety of wonderful medications. On the west coast it’s Klonopin, on the east, Phenobarbital, and back home in Texas, it’s both, and they might throw in some Librium for good measure. On my own however, I experience all of these symptoms at full force for a full five days. Heroin withdrawal was a five-day flu, fucking amateur hour, alcohol withdrawal is a waking nightmare that never really leaves you. It changes you on a fundamental level. It leaves you cold, unfeeling, unsympathetic. Anhedonia is common. I try to care, I want to care, but I know that I don’t. So it becomes a battle. I could go one day without a drink and while harrowing in its own way, as long as I didn’t go two days, I could keep the DT’s at bay. But why even go one day without drinking if I could avoid it? Why suffer because of my own stupid pride? I would soon learn not to want for anything. If I didn’t want to go through the DT’s anymore, if I didn’t want to go one more day without a drink, I didn’t have to. Homeless alcoholics are not rare. Obviously there is a method to staying drunk without a traditional income. That method essentially amounted to eliminating a certain part of my ego, or hell, all of my ego, and realizing the truth about who I was, or rather, who I could be. I would redefine my pride. As it turns out, considering the benefits, it wasn’t really all that hard.
    Alien Jake. He was a seasoned train hopper. He travelled with two guitars (which I eventually taught him to play), a hundred pound pack and a mutt named Maggie. His pack was glorious. He had all the necessities: tent, tarp, bag. He also carried electronics: a phone, a tablet, a radio, portable chargers. Jake packed flip-flops so he didn’t have to put his boots on when he had to piss in the middle of the night. He was fancy for a hobo. To this day I’ve not met a traveler with as much gear as Jake. He was about forty and had been hopping trains since his teens. He certainly looked homeless but he wasn’t filthy. Jake was black, kept a short beard and neatly dreadlocked hair at shoulder length. He named himself Alien Jake as a play on the old tradition of hobos adopting monikers based on where they came from, like “Cincinnati Slim” or “Pittsburgh Pete”. He was alien, claimed no home, wasn’t from anywhere. Jake never got into the specifics of why he was on the road but I would later wonder why anyone wouldn’t be.
    I was lying in my pile, waiting for the end when he appeared. He recognized the state I was in and offered to share his beers with me, Steel Reserves, twenty-four ounce cans. That was my drink, and he had plenty of them. He could tell that I didn’t know shit, that I was in pain and that I was pathetic. He cracked the first one open for me. It was a beautiful sound.
    “What’s goin’ on with you man? You lookin’ like you ‘bout to die.”
    “I was,” I managed.
    He handed me the can and I downed the twenty-four ounces of eight-percent swill in two determined pulls of the neck.
    “Goddamn! How thirsty were you?”
    Feeling slightly better, “Not thirsty, just sober.”
    He pulled up a milk crate, sat down and like a prince passed me my second beer. Again, I put it down aggressively. Maggie sniffed around my pile and coughed.
    “How long you been out here man?”
    I began to emerge but still shook.
    “Not sure, maybe a week.”
    He found this funny and laughed, “What, and you already stuck to the ground in the middle of the day?”
    “I ran out of booze.”
    Jake laughed. “Go get you some more! Everything you need is out on that corner.”
    I thought about that corner. I thought about those cars and worse, the people driving them. I thought about fear. I thought about pride. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but near the end of my third beer, which when dealing with Steelies amounts to about ten, I was roused. Being beaten down by the DT’s then finally being drunk feels better than getting out of jail. Jake told me something at the exact moment I needed to hear it, a rule for survival. Fuck your pride, fuck your fear and get your ass on the corner for two hours a day. You will never be broke. You will never be hungry. Delirium tremens will no longer be a threat. Stand out there two hours at a time, split it up, whatever you need to do, but two hours.
    I was on the verge of tears for the first twenty minutes. No kick-downs. Beat down but desperate enough, I pretended to smile, began to walk up and down the row of cars. I was going to drink tonight. Then, like running into an old friend, I saw a hand wave towards the end of the row. Too sore to run, I hobbled down to a pickup truck and a man handed me a bill, my first kick-down. I pocketed it without looking.
    “Get out of the sun, go get something to eat brother!”
    “Thank you sir, I will!”
    Something stirred in my tiny heart. I was surprised at the lack of shame I felt accepting his offering. There was no condescension in his action. Here was a man helping another man. I didn’t feel ashamed about the other offerings I received in that first hour, or in the hundreds of hours I would end up putting in. I never felt ashamed when I bought my pack, my bag, my knife, my guitar. I never felt ashamed of the couches, beds, and floors I would sleep on in cities all over the country. Everything I needed on two hours a day.
     Fifty dollars later I walked into the corner store and proudly stocked up on beer that I brought back to share with Jake. It felt good to pay him back. I would be able to buy a beer in the morning so I slept easy, and this would continue to be the case for years.

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