Chapter 4: A Night (and day and night and day…) on the town

January 5-8

The next few days blended together. Our first afternoon in town, we basically just walked around trying to figure things out. That night we went to a basketball game at the college. Hey, what else did we have to do? After that, I spent my mornings and afternoons calling apartments and getting job applications. Hunter got all enrolled in school and stuff. We talked to a couple of people at the institute building, trying to get some connections. Even so, there was a LOT of time to kill, and there’s only so much time we wanted to spend in the Baby Truck. So we spent a couple hours at Walmart… not to buy anything of course (you need money for that), but we did sit on one of their benches…so that was fun.

ow, thanks to Mroth and Froth we didn’t spend every night in the Baby. I count that as one of the many blessings of life really. There was one night in particular that we spent in the Baby Truck though which motivated us more than ever to find a place, any place, to live. I don’t remember what time-filling activity we did that day. Maybe it was walking around the town, or signing up for classes. Either way, our day was over by about 7 or 8 p.m. With that being the case we drove around to the back of the institute building, or home as we’d come to call it, and settled in for the night. To give ourselves a bit of extra room (hardly any, but hey in the Baby you don’t turn down any kind of extra space) and make things a little more bearable, I decided that we should put the cooler and other such things, the basketball and the jug of oil, outside for the night. Leaning our seats back was still out of the question, but at least then our vision was not impeded by a mound of pillows and other objects that we couldn’t cajole into fitting in the back. Now, I know I’ve talked some about our laughter which was generally tinged with craziness. At this point, we were on the verge of full-blown insanity. The laughter came more frequently, but we hardly knew what we were laughing about. For too long, sleep evaded us. We therefore tried to get as tired as possible, so that our bodies would be forced to ignore the discomfort that was laying siege to them. To start off, we decided that a trip to the

nearest gas station was in order (there was no bathroom in the Baby…). Instead of piling our belongings back into the Baby, we decided it would be more…practical? to hide them behind a bush near the institute building. Upon entering the gas station we looked over at a group of kids chillin’ in the bed of their truck. As we left, I whispered to Schunt, “I was just thinking about how dumb it is for kids to be hanging out at a gas station at like 10 p.m., don’t they have anything better to do?” Then I thought of what I myself was doing, and decided I had no room to judge.  In fact, once we got back to the Baby there was no room to do much of anything…  A few hours later after watching corner gas, playing hanging with friends, more maniacal laughter, and other modes of keeping ourselves entertained fatigue was beginning to catch up with us. Though not uninterrupted throughout the night, sleep did come. In the morning, a line from a Maroon 5 song came to my mind “I am in misery”…  

I think it was later that day that we discovered that Burger King had free wi-fi. HALLELUJAH! That became our new hangout. So long Walmart! Still, though BK is not an upscale restaurant (by any stretch…it’s hardly low scale) it was a little bit embarrassing to be seen there… or anywhere in public for that matter. Even with the hotel showers, we were grimy. We both had the unkempt look of the homeless. Unable to reach our clothes (even in the ones in the cab of the truck), we had been wearing the same outfits for days. It felt as if our clothes were beginning to corrode our skin. We needed to find a place to call home… besides a parking lot. Later in the Baby while I was munching on some uncooked ramen noodles, I heard a squeal of joy. Hunter had hit a little gold mine. He’d found his deodorant AND a pack of pop-tarts. It was a sign. Good things were about to start happening.