The Put Out

by Cheese Burger

Part One: Hubris.

Wind gusts at 70 mph in my hair as a mirror flies by my face. That chicken fucker just tried to kill me. Chicken fuckers are happy to drive a hippie over in Delta if they’re pissed off about their shit job in the morning, whereas at night, they just want a Banquet and choke the Colonel’s chicken. 

Living reduced to survival isn’t real life. 

I was cowboy camping in Rattlesnake Gulch, full moon silhouetted off the canyon walls, dehydrated urine breaks, hoping I wasn’t having heat stroke. My hitch-hiking skills flaccid, three years of domicile living made me soft and stupid. Perhaps a narcissistic pride. I tried to walk out of Delta. 

“Notice, ‘correctional facility’, do not pick up hitchhikers”. Twas Fuckersville. 

It’s time to go back for the Bustang at Fort Uncompahgre. Twenty-five miles walking in less than twenty-four hours with a mid-eighties ski pack blows. 

Hitchhiking is easier when you’re young, or when it’s not Burger-land’s apocalypse, or you’re not in a fetid alley of methed out nazi’s. 

I arrived in Delta the day before via All Points Transit. The Methodists in Montrose have curtailed services, but a free ticket to Delta is available. The houseless live in the grass, dispersed camping, survivalism away from the police. 

No home quickly becomes no city. 

Arriving in G.J, a Yosemite Sam character barks an indiscernible noise at me. “My name is Bob,” more likely “Get a job.” I looked pretty clean-cut but having a sleeping bag and water jug made Bob’s eyes pop out of their sockets and explode.

Part Two: Ate.

Low on sleep and money I found “Homeward Bound.” 

I love the mid-90s talking dog and cat film, and I remembered that in San Francisco, there was a similarly named free bus ticket. 

This was different. Two case managers swamped in 100-degree-ecocide sweltered bodies. “A month,” the smarmy front desk kid I was trading passive aggressive barbs with said. 

I asked for the lowdown from an employee who looked like what you’d expect to be running an Arby’s east of Denver. “Sure, I’ll see you in twenty minutes”. Stonewalled. 

Ken Kesey memories hit, and I see nurse Ratchet. The inmates ran the detention center. Under Ratchet’s workhouse model, free homeless labor “volunteered” for benefits, privileges, and the provisioning of good behavior which gets you out early. 

A panopticon running on renewable homeless power, spritzed with a Stanford prison experiment lemon zest. A Marquis de Sade play of asylum seekers re-enacting the assassination of Marat. References fail; everything is becoming a concentration camp. 

You’ll get air conditioning, but you have to register with the Kapos. Sadistic delight accompanied any infraction. 

“You’re a dirty dog, and we’re going to put you out”. Out to pasture. Out to the curb. Say yes to chores, because there’s no no. Let the pigs eat you alive. Full frontal lobotomy. Holy Buddha Cannabis is still a drug. Swiss army knife with beloved tweezers a weapon. I hid everything nearby. 

The waiting room was a tented enclosure where I noticed several Montrosians. An elder who would read and sleep on his favorite sun chair in the public library, now sat with glassy eyed catatonia.

Part Three: Nemesis.

Ratchet wanted a McMurphy game. Ears assailed by pedestrian pep talk; I walk around as names are called. Having just completed intake, I wasn’t on the list. Ratchet asked eventually, so I spelled it out. I saw Ratchet fucking it up, and I wanted the bastard to know I saw it. 

After shower and religious T.V snack time, they assign mats. Before mat time was called, I had tried to fix the sheets that were on the mat with my name. Ratchet and Co gave me the smallest, which was next to multiple unused full-sizers. After seeing me trying to fix it before fixing time, I heard a simulated laugh, “You have to wait for mat time before you put your sheets on the mat.” 

Serialized false consciousness. 

I re-emphasized that I was staying one night and would be gone tomorrow. I think that only further angered them. 

Immediate survival affected a given apathy. Defeat. Conformity. Behavioralist conditioning. Generalized narcissism. Trapped in DisneyLand. Chain smoking poor killers, Soda pop mega gulps, white boxes, slop with extra slop, spectator alienated in cell phone images, sweaty tattoos, coughing death lungs, garbage bag suitcase, farts, psychotic mumbles, crotch smell, hostility, condescension, adaptive cynicism. 

Business as usual. The put out. 

God bless Ronald Reagan, and the new meat bag assembly line reincarnation.

I’m privileged, but it’s going fast. Everything is for sale, it all must go. The copper wire is being ripped out and sold for baby buster biocide bombs. 

I left the next morning. 

Three years ago, my lady friend picked me up at this greyhound station. Fortuitous timing, as I waited for my bus to Denver at this same stop, serendipity called and we made up. 

If love has any existence beyond capital today, it’s the real movement of abolishing this current order. 

I day-drank at a local bar, watching a “homeward bound” advert on the T.V. The commercial ends with a forlorn paternalist walking to kitsch violin music, and the words “I don’t believe in throw-away people”. 

Survival is getting old. Does it age faster than our superfluousness? 

We have to wage our lives on our terms lest the system consume us. Today’s spectacle of oblivion makes this obvious. 

Wherever the will to destroy capitalism is strongest–is home–everything else is fast becoming a desert.

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