A Hobo Thought I Was Homeless. Turns Out, He Wasn't Wrong.

Guess it takes one to know one.

A few years ago, I was mistaken for a hobo. Well, that’s not quite true. I was offered a ride as I was sitting on the side of the road, but my would-be benefactor was not, in fact, mistaken. Let me explain.

My Dad is convinced that I am manic-depressive, a diagnosis he has doubled-down on several times. I’m not defensive about this, nor do I write him off. I’m aware that he doesn’t have the credentials to hand out mental health diagnoses and probably shouldn’t be doing so. Still, as his son, I know he speaks with a legitimate authority on such matters, and, as his son, I can’t help but notice our likeness.

Dad vacillates between seasons where he can’t get off the couch and seasons where he thinks he could be the next Mr. Olympia. I vacillate between seasons where I can’t get off the couch and seasons where I believe I could be the next Bob Dylan. They call the former seasons “depressive” and the latter “manic.” In neither season do you see things very clearly.

According to my Dad’s analysis, I was at the tail end of a manic-episode-summer on the day that someone thought I was a homeless hobo. 

In May, I had been set-up on a FaceTime-facilitated blind date with a girl from Minnesota, and we proceeded to spend the summer traveling the globe together. We attended a wedding in New York City, and then, on a whim, she invited me to crash her sister’s destination wedding in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Oddly enough, we didn’t elope while we were there. Before the Virgin Islands girl managed to break up with me in late August, I had quit my job, grown a mustache, moved back home, spent two weeks in Scotland (with Virgin Islands girl), and made the decision to relocate to New York City.

The Virgin Islands. It can’t be denied. The summer started well.

Somewhere between my decision to relocate to New York City (a story that deserves its own post) and breaking up with Virgin Islands girl (I’ll refrain) I found myself sitting on a concrete wall under the blaring sun in Nashville, TN. It’s hard to know the exact impression I must have left. Something like a European caricature of an American, if that caricature had abruptly, and rather unsuccessfully, adopted the persona of a folk singer: weathered T-shirt sagging around a pair of ragged jeans, white socks thrust into leather boots, and baseball cap perched atop a mound of unconditioned hair. A backpack sitting nearby, and a sweat stain the shape of a backpack where it had been. I might as well have been shelling sunflower seeds into a bottle. I think I was.

I thought I was a real dirtbag, a real Bohemian, a real Lower-East-Side diamond-in-the-rough. You would have thought that these Nashvillians, with their demonstrated ability to distinguish between vagabond and musical virtuoso, would have given me a little more attention. Unfortunately—as I intuited from several prolonged stares of disgust—my unseasonable, unreasonable apparel gave more “mistake” than “mystique.”

In reality, I was a guy who looked about as well as he was doing. I didn’t have a home, though my parents–God bless them–were housing my stuff. I had no car, because I was under the impression that I would soon be gracing sidewalks and stages in Brooklyn. And I didn’t have any sanity, because, well, ask Dad–he knows.

Cigar on the sands of St. Andrews. But notice the subtle deadness in the eyes.

So I’m sitting there and up drives this rusty compact pickup with a tarp held down by bungee cords covering the bed. I remember thinking to myself that there probably was a mattress back there. The truck passed slowly and, after a hundred yards or so, made an awkward three-point turn, and came back. I’m just sitting there, watching all this go down and making music with my spitoon.

At first, when he rolled down his window, I thought he was just trying to get some air, given the noticeable haziness of the cab. Once the clouds dissipated, I quickly located the familiar accoutrements of a bachelor-adored pickup: 32-ounce plastic cups piled up on the passenger seat, a few pairs of safety glasses on the dash, along with some napkins and a wadded T-shirt used to clean a dipstick.

The driver, leathery and middle-aged, leans over the center console and looks up at me: “Hey man!” he begins, with the nasally edge of a native Tennessean. “Hey there! Where you need to go?”

It took me a moment. “Sorry?” I said, squinting as if to see his question a little better.

“I said where you headed! Hop in, bud.” He leans across the cab even further and starts opening the door from the inside.

I was way more taken aback than I should have been. Here I had sized up this guy as more of the “live-in-your-car” and “ask-people-for-money” type, and now he’s asking if I want a ride. And not just asking, but clearly offering with the generosity and pity of a person who is himself acquainted with roadsides and the insides of random strangers' cars. This is a guy who knows one when he sees one because he’s been one.

I think it was the sheer generosity and heartful candor of the offer that kind of pissed me off.

“Uh, no. I’m good. I’m actually just waiting for a friend.”

Now it was his turn to be taken aback, and once embarrassment set in, moderately annoyed. In any case, he sort of sped away, at least to the extent to which you can in a 1990 Tacoma. I decided to shove off, too.

Yes, that is Bob Dylan’s house. But notice the subtle deadness in the eyes.

Jesus once told a parable which goes something like this: Once there were two men in a church, a Pharisee and a tax collector. When he looked at the tax collector, the holy Pharisee thanked God that he wasn’t a sinner. But when the criminal talked to God, he just asked for mercy.

Imagine if the tax collector had mistaken the Pharisee for a homeless man and offered him a ride, and you will understand why I was a little pissed off.

Who wants to learn that he’s a sinner from a sinner? Who wants to hear that he’s a hobo from a hobo?

But the hobo knows one when he sees one.

Random picture from my manic-summer camera roll. An appropriate way to end.