Hobo
By Tony Nesca
()
About this ebook
About the Book
Hobo is the sixth novel of underground writer Tony Nesca, a rambunctious, rebellious drunk-happy love story about a struggling writer who moonlights as a Night Watchman at a college located right in the middle of the ghetto. His wife is also a writer and together they publish their books and live a dual life of family and home with late night bohemian living, the whole time surrounded by an array of street-people, broke artists, and other fringe-dwellers. Sexually frank and charged with humour and desperation, Hobo is a unique work, a gritty celebration of life, love and individuality, written in Nesca’s classic free-flow-lyric, with words, ideas and sentences that go on for pages, alive and beautiful and unapologetic.
About the Author
Tony Nesca was born in Torino, Italy in 1965 and moved to Canada at the age of three. He was raised in Winnipeg but relocated back to Italy several times until finally settling in Winnipeg in 1980. He taught himself how to play guitar and formed an original rock band playing the local bars for several years. At the age of twenty-seven he traded his guitar for a Commodore 64 and started writing seriously. He has published six chapbooks of stories and poems (which he used to sell straight out of his knapsack at local dives and bookstores), six novels, four books of poetry, one short story collection, and has been an active contributor to the underground lit scene for fifteen years, being published in innumerable magazines both online and in print. He currently resides in Winnipeg.
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Hobo - Tony Nesca
Hobo
Tony Nesca
Ukiyoto Publishing
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can the QR Code and let the Author see your View]
All global publishing rights are held by
Ukiyoto Publishing
First Published in 2011
Reprint in 2019
Content Copyright © Tony Nesca
Reserved rights by Screamin’ Skull Press
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All characters in this book are purely fictional
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut
- Ernest Hemingway
If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms -
- Henry Miller
Never have I met that glorious heavenly hobo-type that Kerouac so proudly and beautifully describes in his books, never once…I’ve also never hitchhiked or hopped boxcars or drove day-glo hippie buses cross-country, always thought the whole damn thing was ridiculous and contrived preferring to live my life as it comes without forcing the issue and playing the bloody hero, but listen man, I’ve certainly experienced the local streets and the piss-stained marching gutters, the furious back-alley street talkers, the welfare line-ups under the blue moon and starry sunshine, the seedy caretakers hovering in the heroin shadows, oh yeah I’ve met some interesting street-types, no doubt - there was that guy I shared a bottle with in Winnipeg’s Central Park had lung cancer sad and noble and still far from that final hurrah, another type played guitar on Portage Avenue sold grass and always took off West just before that beautiful terrible long winter thick knotted dreads rotten teeth always smiling man, and another one with long thinning hair scammed welfare and travelled the country east to west and back again, then there was that Native artist back alley brawler but with gentle soul who hung himself in a cheap dirty room at The Windsor Hotel but before that had sold his beautiful paintings around Cumberland and Hargrave and Qu’Appelle Street, those dark long summer nights drinking that lousy cheap-ass beer sold in two litre pop bottles talking shit about whatever popped into our heads, politics, philosophy, movies, love, sex and death and art and television and music – but for the most part they were scammers liars and cheats and knew just exactly what to say to you, exactly how to groove with that necessary long cool bullshit...
I worked the midnight shift at a college located right next door to the ghetto and open to the general public and when I unlocked the doors in the morning all the flophouse rejects and curb-side residents sauntered in shaking their weary asses grooving with the free warmth and dimly lit hallways…interesting time to be sure, I was 42 years old and I had just gotten married after a lifetime of carousing bar-crawling midnight-writing marijuana-thinking and even though the carousing had stopped (monogamy had always worked best for me), everything else was still in place – I was regularly hungover and stoned while working and lived on the fringe of society happily and mightily writing and putting out books read by only a handful of people scattered across the globe enjoying some respect in that indie writing world, a respect that I believed was well deserved and far far too small and unknown, yet I persisted man, I persisted beyond most people, hell, most writers I’ve ever met quit after their second or third rejection letter but here I was 16 years and 12 books later still going strong and unknown and smiling in the face of the loaded gun with that perennial loud sound distorted sound of an electric guitar in my ears…
So the hobos would come in and I got to know them by name and they dug me for the simple reason that I gave them the time of day and would listen earnestly and genuinely to their fucked-up and for the most part made-up stories, Steve had a British accent and his front teeth were missing and he spoke with intelligence and some pride and I didn’t quite know what to make of him, I had the internet in the security office and I played music all night long and Steve came into my life on a cold cold January morning as I was listening to Bessie Smith (now I challenge you to show me a twenty-something who knows who Bessie Smith is) and this guy walked right up to the security office,
Wow man, is that Bessie Smith?
Thick British accent,
Yeah…how did you know?
…Always liked this kind of music, is this that compilation that just went on sale?
‘I don’t know, it’s streaming from the internet, how goes it anyway?"
Great man, just got off work…I work at the Shilow Mission House on Main Street, midnight shift…on my way home, you know…
Alright buddy, what other kind of music do you like?
I collect LP’s man, got a huge collection, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Charlie Parker…got some vintage Pink Floyd with Syd Barret too, ‘Saucerful of Secrets’, that type of stuff…
That was their first record, wasn’t it?
Yeah, I think so…I was living in England in the late sixties, look at this…
He pulled out some concert flyers, old and gray and crumpled, one said ‘Cream live at the Central Polytechnic London 1966’, another said ‘Ten Years After at Windsor Jazz Festival’, hmmmm, interesting, very interesting,
Cool stuff man, I’ve always dug ‘Ten Years After’…what part of England are you from pal?
He ran a hand through his short messy grey hair then stroked his beard,
Northampton
He said smiling large and wide and genuine,
Oh, that’s where one of my favourite writers lives
Who’s that?
Alan Moore
Oh yeah, the graphic novelist, he wrote ‘Watchmen’, didn’t he? Some say he’s one of the most interesting people on the planet
I’m not gonna shit ya, I’m impressed that you would know him
Cheers man…I’m Steve
Ziggy…take it easy
I turned away for a second and turned back thinking he was gone only to meet Steve’s fist gently, just very gently, placed on my cheek, then he started laughing and he limped away all smiles and good energy, it was 6:30 A.M. and the college was still rather empty except for the few employees that worked in the cafeteria, I had the music set on random under the rock and blues
topic and Soul Kitchen
from The Doors came on, I sat back and watched nothing and listened to the tunes and felt my marijuana high fading in the distance and the young college girls started coming in and the guys as well and they all looked so damn bland typical and energy-deficient somehow, but the chicks had nice legs, no doubt about that, so it was alright man, the bums also started coming in some looking wasted and hopeless, others looking like the game had just begun and they were somehow enjoying the whole dance, what a damn strange sight to see these well-scrubbed college kids sitting just a few tables down from a tattered bum sipping on coffee half-asleep dusty and terrific and bluesy and moonlight howling… One of the students came up to me, young 20 year old studying to be a journalist barely 5 feet tall small and thin coffee-coloured complexion all young sexual energy cocky cigarette dangling from pouty lips rock and roll bravado untouched pure white/heat, and she had claimed to be a great music aficionado, definitely knew some stuff but not nearly as much as she thought, always talked to me in the early mornings before class,