KING OF THE HOBOS
I was getting kicked out again. We were getting kicked out again, all of us. It wasn’t my fault.
I had had a candid discussion with one of the roommates and as it turned out he hadn’t been paying the electric bill.
Water was in my name and I had been paying it every month. It was a fiasco as nobody had any money because nobody was working anymore. The government had told us to stop paying bills. I would have done the same but something was fishy about it.
The other roommate then confided in me after I pressed him that he wasn’t paying the garbage.
“They’re not going to take the cans away,” he said with a cunning twinkle in his eye. “The age of the landlord is over. We’re not serfs and his property rights are an outdated concept from the 18th century.”
My eyes glazed over and I just kind of spaced out when he started talking about fiat currency and how money didn’t mean anything.
I went out into the garage, sat down on the couch. Lit a cigarette. Thought for a minute.
I had to be honest with the landlord. He was my friend and if the pandemic ever ended we were going to be fucked with thousands of dollars worth of utility bills.
The landlord didn’t take it well. The next day we all had eviction notices.
I scrambled to find a new place to live and to make sure I hadn’t done any damage to the room. The only thing in disrepair was a window screen so I drove to the hardware store down the street.
There is an island on the corner of Sebastopol and Stony Point where a homeless guy holds a sign and begs for money. After they ripped me off for a screen I drove immediately back to the local grocery store and bought the most perfect rotisserie chicken, drove back and almost got hit by a car giving this guy his dinner.
The car missed me by inches. That’s when I started believing in God again.
I started handing out five dollar bills to the homeless. Since the war started there’s more and more of them in Santa Rosa each month, each year. I had a little extra cash in the bank and I started thinking that if I paid it forward, like that Kevin Spacey movie, that good things would start happening to me.
I found a place to stay, and being a little low on cash because of my charity, I discovered something that changed my life forever.
New Amsterdam vodka.
https://www.newamsterdamvodka.com/
They have a slogan that goes, “Distinctive enough to mix in any cocktail, smooth enough to drink straight.”
And that slogan is the absolute truth. All the homeless people started asking me if the shit was any good and I explained it’s the best vodka on the market. You get no hangover, you just feel great the next day. It makes you want to go for a run, climb a mountain, get a gym membership, learn the acoustic guitar. You’ll never drink Grey Goose again.
Pretty soon things started to click for me and I wrote and recorded an album with some help from a talented guy who believed in me. The landlord and I started getting more shows with the band we play in and I started to do better at work. I moved again into a really nice neighborhood, and I’ve never had that experience before.
An ex-girlfriend contacted me and turns out she wasn’t doing so well. They put her on lithium and some other terrible shit. She couldn’t stay out of the nuthouse. No wonder she said our relationship was completely my fault.
I started to realize that the world is nuts. The people are nuts, the politicians are nuts, television is nuts. The Internet is nuts. Sports, popular culture, crypto currency. NFT’s. It’s all crazy and everybody has lost their fucking minds.
And I’m crazy too. But if there’s one thing I know it’s that one decision to buy that homeless guy a rotisserie chicken has made me a king. I am the King.
I am the King of the Hobos.
