Noah Cicero - The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. I

But would talk about how people can lift themselves up by their bootstraps all night.

I would argue with the fucker all night.

I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.

But random people would say they thought I was right.

There was a guy named Michael who was African-American and very pissed all the time.

He was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met.

He made me look stupid constantly. Everything I told him, he would tell me I was wrong.

As the years passed I would find he was right, and not because I was looking for the answers he gave me.

But because after I figured it out I would think, “Holy shit, Michael told me that at the Grand Canyon two years ago!”

I wish I could find Michael to tell him what I learned and to learn more from him but he’s gone.

They are all gone and if there are any left they will be gone one day too.

Tom was also there.

We were all sitting there having a nice Fourth of July talk and then a middle-aged broken-looking Indian comes in and sits down on one of the couches, drinking a tall boy and carrying three more with him.

He had on a ball cap with one feather in it.

Bob the fat guy asked the Indian how he got the feather.

The Indian looked at us and said, “In Vietnam.”

The darkness is coming, I thought.

The Indian with the feather began his monologue on the Fourth of July.

The monologue was scatterbrained.

The man obviously had been drinking heavily for over thirty years and had what is called Mush Brain. Which is common among older people who have spent their lives drinking and doing drugs and have been through too many absurd and terrifying experiences.

It is when a normal person can barely communicate with the outside any longer. They have an inability to form paragraphs and sentences to convey complete thoughts. You can tell when speaking to them that they know what they are talking about and they know what you’re talking about. But they have killed too many brain cells and just can’t do it anymore.

The Indian with the feather basically told us.

He went to Vietnam on the Fourth of July back in ’68.

That he thought it was bullshit that he had to go because the Vietnamese weren’t doing shit to him but he was drafted and didn’t want to go to prison.

He was there on the front lines because he said if you were a minority that is where you immediately went.

He snuck away from the American side and found a small village and found some Vietnamese people to live with.

Waited till after the war was done to go back to America.

While speaking he kept telling us he saw babies burned alive.

“I saw babies burned alive!

“I saw babies burned alive!

“I saw babies burned alive!

“I saw babies burned alive!”

How he saw useless death all the time.

Everyone in the room barely said anything during his monologue.

There was no need to interrupt him.

We wanted to hear what he had to say and we didn’t want him to get off track.

He didn’t say it like it would change our lives either.

He said it like it had changed his life.

He didn’t really care who he told or who was listening.

He just knew it had to be said.

I would not doubt that he told that monologue to a different group of people every Fourth of July and that he will tell it till he dies.

After I got fired from the Grand Canyon I moved to San Diego.

It was one of the biggest culture shocks of my life.

The first week there I’m sure I just walked around and stared at everything like I’d entered an alternate reality.

Everything in San Diego in 2000 after the great bull market of the nineties looked shiny, glossy, and new.

The streets were perfectly paved and clean.

Not a cigarette butt to be found on a sidewalk.

All the buildings were less than ten years old and if they were older they were remodeled to look like new.

When you walked down the street, people didn’t give you the “I’ll cut your fucking balls off” look that is common in Youngstown.

Youngstown was a third world country compared to the neon newness of San Diego.

When we first got to San Diego, we sometimes went to the beach and sat on the wall separating the beach from the boardwalk.

Watched people ride by on bikes or just jogging.

We would sit there for hours, staring at the people going by, talking shit about them as they passed.

Most of them except the Mexicans seemed very concerned with how they looked.

They wanted pretty faces, strong muscles, and basically to look cool and sexy.

Tom and I looked homeless, which we were. We’d been sleeping in gas station parking lots in my ’89 Caprice Classic.

There were a lot of homeless people at the beach.

Most of them were your stereotypical homeless.

Shaggy beards.

Ripped t-shirts.

Dirty hair.

Most of them delivered papers and did construction under the table for forty dollars a day.

Some would wonder why they didn’t save up and buy nice clothes to get a job.

The truth is, forty dollars a day didn’t buy shit in San Diego in 2000 and probably buys even less now.

The money went to eating a cheeseburger at Jack in the Box and the rest went to booze.

I remember one homeless man who collected cans on the beach.

When you were on a San Diego beach, you would just throw your beer and soda cans on the beach so the homeless wouldn’t have to sift through the garbage to get them.

I remember an old, almost dead Chinese man who was wearing the traditional blue Mao Communist outfit.

He had built a yoke out of a plastic pipe and attached two huge garbage bags to the ends.

He carried it down the beach with no emotion at all.

I doubt he had time for emotions.

He would put his yoke down and pick up some cans and put them into one of the bags.

Then pick up the yoke again and walk down the beach.

I sat and watched that.

It was real and could not be denied.

I was in downtown San Diego one day in 2000.

I was hungry and looking for cheap food.

I stumbled upon this Chinese food cafeteria that served a Styrofoam bowl of one food item for ninety-nine cents.

I went in.

It looked like it had booths from a closed down fast-food restaurant.

It was bare.

Not even one of those pictures of Hong Kong on the wall.

Walked up to the counter and picked out three items for three dollars.

Then sat down and ate.

There were a lot of homeless there.

There were perhaps more homeless in downtown San Diego than on the beaches.

The homeless all had cuts and bruises.

Most of them were crazy or had chosen, through the sick and brutal contingency of experience, that it was better to be drunk, on crack, to drop out.

That to face the rigid routine and institutions of work, family, romance, and upholding false notions was too much for them to bear.

That to be drunk or on drugs, and without those institutions, existence was better and easier to face.

I always gave the homeless a dollar or two and bought them cheeseburgers.

I didn’t give them money and food because I thought it was my duty or some form of charity.

But because I understood. I had traveled two-thousand five-hundred miles to San Diego to escape my life.

I knew what drove people to escape, the causes that make it very possible for a person to just say, “Go fuck yourself, world. What good have you done for me anyway!”

It wasn’t charity.

It was solidarity.

A oneness in the understanding that the shit of life never ends, and that we are all victims of a mass hysteria of stupidity.