by Tween Hobo
Well. Two can play at this game.
Hello, Mr. Scarecrow. Ready to pose for a bunch of pictures where it looks like you and I are having the time of our lives? Cool, I thought you’d be down. Okay—let’s do one where we’re high-fiving. And one where we’re both wearing ironic T-shirts and pointing to ourselves like, Whaaaaa?! And then let’s take one where we’re not smiling, but looking pensively out of the frame, as the sunlight hits us and it’s like the viewer is getting one little glimpse of the crazy-deep adventure that is our lives.
What’s this? A comment from Stumptown Jim? “Cool pic. Miss u.” Oh, I bet you do. And I bet you’re just frantically googling this scarecrow right now, like, who is this guy? Do I know him? Should I? And meanwhile, I’m not responding to your comment—I’m just posting a status update: Laughing so hard it hurts.
Who’s got FOMO now, you ruthless bastards.
Tween Hobo @TweenHobo
5/9
He’s Just Not That Pinto Bean
Tween Hobo @TweenHobo
5/10
Is America READY for this dandelion chain???
Tween Hobo @TweenHobo
5/11
Lord, I got the password-protected wireless-network blues . . .
Tween Hobo @TweenHobo
5/12
I got Catfished today. Big fella. Whiskers.
Tween Hobo @TweenHobo
5/13
Just helped Toothpick Frank set up his Pinterest account; his main interests are whores and carousing.
Tween Hobo @TweenHobo
5/14
If I ever find a phantom tollbooth, I’m stealing all the phantom change.
Tween Hobo @TweenHobo
5/15
This Farmers’ Almanac is useless, it doesn’t even explain how to unlock bonus crops.
Tween Hobo @TweenHobo
5/16
Justin Bieber’s tweets are so random, and handsome, and brave.
Tween Hobo @TweenHobo
5/17
Balloons on a mailbox mean some little kid is about to experience a bona fide Tween Hobo cake heist.
Tween Hobo @TweenHobo
5/18
No one ever lies on their deathbed and says, “I wish I hadn’t collected so many dreamcatchers.”
Tween Hobo @TweenHobo
5/19
My Traveling Pants are starting to smell weird.
Tween Hobo
5/20
I feel sorry for them hobos who never knew a mother’s love—cuz my mom once signed me up for a make-your-own-plate class.
Cool Things about My Brother, Wherever I May Find Him
He is almost seventeen.
He got his driver’s license, and then he got it revoked.
He wears headphones 99 percent of the time.
He’s good at every video game ever invented.
He writes on his bedroom ceiling in permanent marker.
He has a poster on his wall of a kitten in midair with flames shooting out of its butt that says, “I Must Go—My Planet Needs Me.”
He’s the one who came up with naming our wireless network Bill Wi the Science Fi.
He wears stupid T-shirts on purpose.
He is mean to me in front of his new friends.
He secretly loves me.
Vaudeville killed the pantomime star.
May 21
* * *
Boise, Idaho
Something you might not know about me is that I can really sing. I know it sounds conceited, and I wouldn’t even mention it except that I am truly, like, wildly good at singing. The only thing I’m better at than singing is stuffing grapes into my cheeks and then smashing my fists against the bulges so I get fifty squirts of grape juice shooting through my teeth at once. When I sing, the joy and light that goes flooding out of me is so intense I’m like, um, how come bluebirds aren’t doing my hair right now? Not only do I sing, I also rap. For instance:
It’s the remix to ignition
Tween Hobo edition
I got a nut allergy
Just ask my pediatrician
My talent is a gift that I thank myself for every day.
Out on the road, there ain’t much in the way of entertainment. (Even my YouTube playlists have gone stale.) So we do a lot of gathering and banjo-picking and open-air crunking. Stumptown Jim’s got his old guitar, Hot Johnny Two-Cakes has his harmonica (which he often just kind of kisses, to show off his lips), and I’ve got what Shakira would refer to as “the Voice.” We do old hillbilly classics, traveling songs, spirituals—and I try to put a new-style spin on the old gems:
St. Peter, don’t you call me cuz I can’t go
I owe my soul to Forever 21.
Or:
Come gather, Beliebers, wherever you roam
Oh, his voice, it is a-changin’ . . .
And, of course, that old chestnut “I Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s FarmVille No More.” (Maggie, if you’re reading this, STOP SENDING ME FARMVILLE REQUESTS!!!!)
I also try to teach the guys some of the latest hits, putting them in words they’ll understand:
Hopped off the train in Idaho with a dream and my cardigan
Noddin’ my head like “yeah”
Playin’ my spoons like “whoa”
And:
Hey! I just met you
And this is crazy!
But here’s a tin can
So call me, maybe!
We have a real good time. Or at least—we used to. Until this week. When everything went wrong.
The trouble began on Monday morning, in a vacant lot near the Boise Amtrak station. Stumptown Jim was tearing off strips of newspaper to start a trash-can fire. I was standing behind him on an upside-down plastic milk crate, trying to fishtail-braid his hair, when suddenly, an advertisement in the newspaper caught my eye: “Is YOUR CHILD a STAR???” Then, below that: “Could YOUR CHILD make a MUSIC VIDEO that would get ONE MILLION HITS???”. And then there was this grainy, newspapery photo collage of a proud white mother, a bulky computer, a cartoon keyboard, and a chubby, curly-haired, blond girl in a leotard flanked by three other children of assorted nonwhite races with her hands on her hips like, I did it.
Eagerly I scanned these images and synthesized their meaning. “Stumptown Jim!” I cried. “There’s some kind of off-brand Ark Music Factory–type joint in this town, making professional- quality digital videos for underage amateurs! I could be the next Rebecca Black! And all we have to do is raise”—I grabbed the paper and checked the fine print—“dang. Two thousand bucks?!!” I clutched the paper to my chest and wailed a timeless lament: “This suuuuuuuuuucccckkkkkksssss!!!!!!!!!”
Well, if there’s one thing Stumptown Jim’s good at, it’s being hopeless, so we got right down to it. He busted out his old guitar and strummed and stared off into the great unforgiving yonder, while I wept and wiped my eyes and wept again. As the trash-can fire crackled, I sang low, sad songs—songs like I am a tween / Of constant sorrow. I sang, and Jim played, and the fire smoked, and there we were—at rock bottom.
But you know me—I’m irrepressible. Plus, YOLO, etc. So I didn’t stay down for long. I popped right back up like a bath toy, and I go, Jim! Wait a darn sec. I don’t need these fancy producers. It’s the twenty-first century and we’re in the United States of America!!!! I have GarageBand, iMovie, YouTube, two thumbs, a magical singing voice—and a buttload of moxie. I am my own producer!!! Jim, don’tcha see? I can do it myself! I can go it alone! I CAN BECOME . . . A MEME.
By this point I was twerking so hard that all the trash cans in the area were vibrating and my loose tooth fell out. Jim’s eyes were full of prairie. But I think he caught my drift. So we packed up our spoons and went to shoot a “Call Me Maybe” parody video in a graveyard.
* * *
The next day was Tuesday. Happens to be a lucky day for me, because it’s the only day of the week when the day-of-the-week underpants I was wearing when I left home are factually correct. Jim and I put the
finishing touches on our video (couple hyperlinks; a black screen at the end with a note in some supersquiggly font [which Jim called cursive, which, huh?!—never heard of it] that said, In Memoriam: Floyd Caboose [he died while making the video, RIP]). I uploaded it to my YouTube channel and we crossed all our remaining fingers.
As we waited for the views and likes to start racking up, Jim and I split a can of beans and I hummed some Rebecca Black, as if to mystically summon the powers of the internet. Yesterday was Thursday . . . eats beans . . . Today it is Friday . . . licks spoon . . . We, we, we, so excited . . . more beans . . .
Nothing. Not a single view (aside from the lousy three that Jim and I had given ourselves). I refreshed and refreshed and refreshed. It was hopeless! No one was watching our video. We were broke and lonely and unfamous. All we had was each other, which, barf. And somehow, Jim didn’t even care. He kept saying all this junk about how to him, making the video in the graveyard was an experience, and it was the experience that mattered, in the end. I was like, Jim, don’t you realize that nothing matters unless other people like it?!?! I started to think maybe I had picked the wrong hobo to help me go viral.
Just then, Tin Cap Earl wandered over to us. He was wearing a neon-yellow mesh tank top and singing Lady Gaga. “I’m beautiful in my way, ’cause God makes no mistakes, I’m on the TRAIN TRACKS BABY, I was born this way!” Something told me Tin Cap Earl could help.
Sure enough, he had lots of advice: “You gotta sex it up. What gets hits on the internet? Animals. Korean songs. And sexy stuff. Put yourself in one, ideally two, of those categories. You’ll blow up like the World Trade.”
Jim goes, “Too soon.”
Tin Cap Earl, fresh as ever, goes, “Too spoon.” And played the spoons for a second, banging them sassily against his hip.
Meanwhile I had already taken his words to heart. I yanked my ponytail way over to the side, threw on my heart-shaped sunglasses, tied my T-shirt up so my whole midriff was exposed, and wiped glittery lotion all over my stomach. I looked almost illegally hot. I was like, let’s go, Jim, let’s reshoot the thing.
But Jim wouldn’t hear of it. He went off on a classic Stumptown Jim–style rant. He goes, “I hate a song that makes you think that you’re not any good. I hate a song that makes you think you’re just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you’re too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood!” And he lifts his guitar way up in the air and goes, “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS!!”*
But I only heard that part from a distance, cuz me and Tin Cap were already halfway down the road, planning out our first shot: me in a bikini, standing over the camera sucking a Blow Pop.
By Wednesday, the new video was up on YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. The comments were rolling in. Unfortunately, they were not quite what I’d expected. Most of them seemed to be written by members of the Taliban? Or maybe some of the mean girls at my school? They said things like “U r so lame it makes me want to kill myself” or, coming from a different perspective, “U suck so bad please kill yourself.” By the time I’d scrolled through a hundred of these, I was pretty much a cutter. Tin Cap Earl kept saying, “It’s avant-garde, they just don’t get it, it’s way over their heads,” but that was not comforting to me. I wanted my Voice to Touch the People. I wanted to Heal What Was Broken in This Land. I wanted my Video to Get One Million Hits. I didn’t want to be humiliated.
* * *
Yesterday was Thursday. Today it is Friday. Friday. Everybody’s looking forward to the weekend. Weekend.
* * *
Around the campfire tonight, Jim took out his old guitar and started to strum. “Why don’t you sing something for us,” he asked me. But I just hung my head and sighed. My singing days are behind me now, I said. The people have spoken and what they said was, I suck. I’ll never be famous now, I said. I’ll never go viral.
Jim looked at me funny. “Well, now, you didn’t come all this way just to get famous, did you? I thought you had something more important on your mind. Something to do with searching out the truth. Something to do with locating your brother.”
I stared into the fire. For some reason, it floated back into my mind, that phrase my brother wrote on his bedroom ceiling. “Life is pointless.” Was he right? All I knew was I missed him now more than ever.
“Yeah,” I said gloomily. “But it’s hopeless. I’ll never track him down. All I know is that he went to something called ‘rehab’ somewhere in California. That’s not much info to go on. No, let’s face it, Jim. I’ll probably never see my brother, Evan, again.”
To my surprise, Hot Johnny Two-Cakes suddenly perked up and addressed me directly for the first time in recorded history: “What’s this? You got a brother named Evan who went to rehab?”
Startled by his interest, and eager to seem like I wasn’t internally pulling off a 540 McTwist on my emotional skateboard because he’d spoken to me, I responded curtly, “What’s it to you?”
“I think I know that kid,” Hot Johnny replied, cool as a jumbo freezie.
“What do you mean, you know him? Where do you know him from?”
“Met him on Second Life,” said Hot Johnny, matter-of-fact.
While my mind reeled, Stumptown Jim asked for clarification. “Second Life? Jumping Jehoshaphat. What in the name of holy creation is that?”
Toothpick Frank jumped in. “You never heard’a Second Life?” he jeered. “You been out on the rails too long, buddy. You need to check in with civilization again.” (A little aggressive for a dude who just the other day found out about Pinterest, I thought, but whatever.)
“It’s an online virtual world,” said Hot Johnny, yawning. “Been around since the early oughts. Used to be kind of fun, now it sucks. But this band I like did a virtual record-signing at this virtual music store. And that kid Evan was there. I remember him, cuz his avatar was the Kool-Aid Man. He kept, like, busting through walls and whatever. It was pretty tight.”
I was in total shock. First of all, this was the most words I had ever heard Hot Johnny say, at least all at once. And second, I knew he was right. My brother loves the Kool-Aid Man. He has him on a T-shirt and everything. Plus, he’s always online playing weird games and hanging around digital e-commerce locations like that. It had to be him.
Hot Johnny kept on, “Yeah, Evan. Kid was a trip. Told me all about how his parents were sending him to this treatment place, spending all kinds of cash, telling him that he had to clean up his act. He used to laugh about it. Said he was getting an all-expenses-paid vacation.”
Now I was getting superexcited. “That sounds just like him!” I clapped. “That’s my brother! Oh, Hot Johnny Two-Cakes, you magnificent hipster! Tell me—do you know where he is?!?!”
“I’m not a hipster,” said Hot Johnny, and I could feel him growing cold toward me again. Tin Cap Earl snorted rather obviously at this. Hot Johnny, ignoring him, went on, “And, no, I don’t know the name of the place.” Hot Johnny yawned again. “But he said he was going to LA.”
“Los Angeles!” I cried. “City of Angels! Okay! Well, that makes things easy, doesn’t it?! There can’t be too many of these ‘rehabs’ in LA!”
Hot Johnny seemed to have drifted off into sleep. But Tin Cap Earl and Stumptown Jim were joyful. “See now!” said Jim. “Just when you think things are hopeless, you catch a lucky break. We’ll be in Los Angeles before too long. And we’ll track your brother down when we get there.”
“Oh, HECK YES, we will!” I cheered.
“Now then,” said Jim. And the firelight danced. “Now you got to sing. But you got to do it for the right reasons. For joy. Not for a spectacle. You sing for the song itself, because that song just needs to be sung. And it’s burstin’ out of you. And because no matter how rough or low-down you feel, singin’
will lift you up again. Now come on. Let’s sing something.”
I took a deep breath. I felt my veins growing warmer. Jim strummed his guitar. And I opened my mouth and sang!
“And I was like, baby, baby, baby, ooh! Like, baby, baby, baby, oh! Thought you’d always be mine, mine . . .”
On the second chorus, the rest of the guys joined in. Well, except for Toothpick Frank. He just laughed a nasty laugh. Or possibly it was a cough. He’s sick as a dog and so are Salt Chunk Annie and Blind Hank and Whiskey Bob. Looks like this ague’s gone viral :(
LA OR BUST!!!!!!!!!!
Tween Hobo
5/22
If I had a hammer / I’d put stickers on it.
* * *
* According to Google, someone named Woody Guthrie really said all that, and Stumptown Jim was biting his style.
Falcon
I will now present my research on an important subject: the subject of Me getting a Pet Falcon.
This research has been extensive. My Gmail threads are all like Re: Re: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: FALCON.
Question: If I have ADD, then how am I so focused on getting a pet falcon?
Second question: What should I name my pet falcon? I’m thinking either Oberon or Jazzy.
Fact: Having a pet falcon can be dangerous, because suddenly you don’t care about anything besides the falcon.
Okay—not saying I’ll give up falconry if the answer’s no, but do they have fingerless gauntlets?
Falcon biz got old. Guess I’ll strap this tiny hood to a cornhusk doll, shove her in the cockpit of an old model plane, and call it a day.
Tween Hobo