The life of a hobo is not the life any sane man would ever desire to lead. To say it's a hard life is putting it mildly. To compound the problem of traveling by bindlestiff from county to county, hopping rides on the occasional canonball across these great States of America, I am no ordinary hobo. No, sir. Your average hobo only has to worry about where his next meal is coming from or where he might pick up some extra scratch shoveling sidewalks for rich folk.
No, unlike your common roustabout, I have a unique problem for I am a time traveler. Years ago, in my youth (it must have been about 1962 if I recollect right), I found my way to the Badlands of South Dakota by boarding a cow crate from Louisiana. The ride had been a rough one. It'd been at least a week, though I confess I don't quite recall how long exactly, I was deep into my third or fourth bottle of Jack whisky and hadn't had a bit of Mulligan since New Orleans with barely a thought buzzing in my head, when the train made an unscheduled stop near the Badlands to clear some goats from the tracks. My hemorrhoids had been flaring up as usual, and when the train made its stop, I took the opportunity to light a fire on a hillside.
Now maybe it had been the whisky or the pain in my rear, but either way, three good squeezes of the old sphincter, and I passed out, right there, next to the train. My pants around my ankles. My bindlestiff still sitting on the train car. My last bottle of Jack drying up beside it. And since I'd been a stowaway on the cow crate, no one knew for the wiser that this old bum had chucked a dummy in the middle of nowhere.
It must have been six, maybe seven, hours later I woke up, because by then it was dark outside, and the cow crate was long gone. Now normally, when old Beasley finds himself in a situation like this, I'd be swearing up and down and about ready to blow a gasket right out my backside. But the dry air and the heat had given me a god awful thirst. I could barely squeak a sound. I was miles away from civilization. And I was convinced I was going to die. And dammit all to Hell if my bottle of Jack was still sitting on a cow crate somewhere a hundred miles away by then.
I did what I could to pull my pants up right around my ankles. It was god awful hard work to do, on account of the throbbing in my head from the thirst. It was then there was a sudden, terrible light in the sky. Brighter than the sun. Brighter than a hundred suns. I shielded my eyes and choked down a sob. I managed to peek a look through two of my fingers, when I saw it:
A god damn unidentified flying object, that looks like a banjo hovering some two hundred feet in the air. It was covered in dazzling lights that burned the eyes right out of the back of my skull, so I looked away. I wanted to run, but there was no where to go. My heart was pounding right out of my chest. I thought I was going to have another attack like I did back in Dallas of 1957. Instead though, I felt myself lift right off the ground, like I was a hummingbird.
That's when I blacked out again.
I'll continue next time with the rest of my story on how I became the world's first time traveling hobo.
