George in Normal entries

Forty years ago to the minute, give or take somewhere between a few minutes and a few weeks, I was in the Cheyanne Wyoming greyhound station. Sometimes when you’re hitch-hiking you need, or are forced, to take the dog. This wasn’t one of those times. Sometimes when you are desperate to get ripped off on a drug buy or just mugged in an unknown city, the bus station is like a one stop fuck-you store. This wasn’t one of those times either. What I was doing there was singular, it wasn’t any kind of one of those any times.

I met this kid (ok, kid in my mind, he might have had a year or two on me), George, a German kid on a travel visa. George talked a lot about being a bad-ass and selling shit in the grey and black markets on both sides of the wall. Yes, the wall was still up forty years ago no matter how many months you give or take. He talked about it so much it was hard to believe.

The reason I thought of George today and the reason I pinpoint the greyhound station in Cheyanne, that’s where George told me I was too polite. He had this theory that rude people get more respect. Today I think I talked to four people and said please, thank you and fine how’re you at least twenty five times (except the last bit, I only said that once per person).

I didn’t take it personally. A day or so later we were in Reno visiting his uncle. He wasn’t just a dick, well, he was just a dick, a very rich dick, with all the seventies accruements down to the golden coke spoon around his neck. Ok, he wasn’t just a dick, he also had a very different tale about George. I guess George was troubling his bourgeois parents in Cologne (I can’t find my umlaut or I’d spell it auf deutsch, Koln with an umlaut) a far piece from East Berlin with his wild trip to the untamed states. He did give us a few drinks and a meal but he spent the whole time telling George what a fuck up he was. Even when he was belittling me it had to do with George’s taste in traveling companions. Apparently I was some kind of hippie-junkie-serial murderer (well, it was trendy at the time, all the kids were doing it) and if George wasn’t such a sheltered little bitch he would have realized that, according to the uncle.

George stole some little chatzie thing and spent the next few hours talking about how his uncle was just a dick. I might have said something like “I’m sorry” or “sure you’re right”. Something polite, I’m sure.

The last time I saw George was in San Francisco, again, a greyhound station, he had a monthly pass. He was chatting up this eighteen year old single mom on the run from Georgia. She left the kid with us when she went to the bathroom. George congratulated himself on “pulling” such a prize and told me if he got married he could stay in the States. I shook his hand, he pulled me in for a hug and we wished each other good luck. I pretty much walked out of the city and about twelve hours later I was in LA at my brothers house. I think he was living in Van Nuys then, but it could have been Pasadena. Shit, forty years ago? Might have been the law house, USC, bordering on South Central.
Yeah, so, thanks for listening. Christ there are a lot of holes in that story. Maybe I’ll tell a fuller version one day.