((The Omaha Gambit) (November 1967))
“Come on,” Jerry Hino said, it was morning and we needed to get an apartment, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground, it was November 1967 and this was my second big trip. The anxiety and dilemma of the night we drove through Milwaukee had passed, we had driven from Minnesota, to Milwaukee, to Madison, Wisconsin, and here we were in Omaha, Nebraska. In Milwaukee we almost got shot. Anyway, we had left Milwaukee for Omaha.
I was a little disappointed in the city; It didn’t look like much, I spotted Dodge Street right away, and we wandered around looking for an apartment. Jerry was running from his girlfriend Nancy from him, and I was on an adventure of my own, my second to be exact.
I took in the jumble of crude buildings, duplexes, and corner grocery stores scattered around what I called upper Dodge Street, and a branch, here and there (Dodge was the main branch of the tree).
On my Seattle adventure, I ended up with Jeff’s wife coming over, and here again I have a friend who had left a lovesick woman, for affairs, and hoped she wouldn’t appear on the scene, and until now. right. Anyway, we found a Rathole of an apartment just off Dodge Street, and the duplex was right next to each other, so our neighbors were closer than rice white. I didn’t really have a ‘B’ plan here if things didn’t work out, I just hoped they would between me and Jerry, and apparently they did. He, like me, liked us to drink, and maybe he was a little overweight, since he was about my height, five feet, eight inches wide and two hundred and forty pounds, I was kidding, he was very overweight.
The duplex was gray, and I guess it was built in the 80’s, and it was like I said, 1967, I mean, 1880. We paid two weeks rent, that was all we could afford at the time, it cost us $65 dollars, and that was highway robbery if you ask me, i mean it was raw and skimpy lodging. Surely he was not unknown to me at the time, during those years anyway.
Jerry seemed to speak for both of us, and with him being the eldest I didn’t take that as an insult, he often listened intently during those drinking days, we had our stories to tell, and we told them, and laughed half the night. We must have gotten drunk every night we were in Omaha. And in between I looked for work, Jerry didn’t, he slept all day while I looked; I think that was one of the reasons he and Nancy had a fight; He could be wrong. Anyway, I went to the Omaha State Employment Office and they asked me where I had come from and why I was there trying to take jobs from the good people of Omaha who needed more work than I did. he replied that, “I didn’t realize he was treading on forbidden ground,” he didn’t like my comments and he told me to go back the way I came from and stop taking jobs from other good people. I know what I wanted to say, but I just shook my head and left the vulture with his cornfield.
I found a job across the bridge in Iowa, felt like good people there, working for Howard Johnson, as a dishwasher. It paid well, the work wasn’t hard, and I got a big discount on food, and they usually gave me an extra portion, and I brought it to Jerry, I think they thought I’d be late. late-night dinner, but dinner for me was beer, not food.
Well a few weeks went by and Jerry sent a letter to his mom, telling her how he was doing, he wasn’t sure why he did it at first, I mean, I never did, I didn’t feel the need to, we had just been through a few weeks, not months or years. Anyway, our address was in it, this now took the secrecy out of where we were, and of course Nancy got hold of the address, unsurprisingly. It was inevitable now, she would one day appear at our doors, but of course I didn’t know all this at the time. But it wasn’t long, and yes, she was there one night when I got back from work, and again I was taken aback, but not as baffled as when Jeff’s wife showed up out of nowhere wanting to come with us. to Seattle. I thought at the time: what is wrong with these guys? Don’t they have any problem staying away from their goats, the ones they’re running from, the ones they can’t live with or deal with? I had old girlfriends, too, and I was glad to get away from them, and the further the better, and the longer the better. In fact, I never went back to one I left, or anyone who left me, so once the bond is broken, it’s broken, as my mother said: get off the bus and find another one.
Maybe I was his shadow for the next two weeks; I think we spent anywhere from a month to six weeks in that Rathole. I went alone, visited the museum, which had a lot of Indian artifacts, and we all got drunk at night, as always.
But to make this story more interesting and to flesh out the plot a bit, but not much, because it’s really the end of the story, we just went back to Minnesota, I lived with them for six weeks, they asked me to leave afterward. that, since they had kids, and I was sleeping on the couch, and you know, that gets old. Anyway, I remember the Jewish Store, down the block in our Omaha neighborhood. I spent a while down there, talking to the old redheaded Jew. Gold teeth, not bad for a fifty year old, she had very nice curves and I, of course, matured at nineteen. Her place was also a Rathole, but I guess she went with the neighborhood. The store had high ceilings, you could see the wooden beams, and the place was damp, messy, and everything looked old, rusty cans. Maybe she was a drug dealer and this was the front of her, but he couldn’t have imagined it at the time. I liked him, and he let me come and go and not buy anything, and hang around.
5-17-2008