BRIAN GAUCI

Songwriter, guitarist

TALES FROM THE ROAD

THE HOBOS AND THE LIMES


In the summer of 1969 I spent my summer holidays hitchhiking from Toronto to Vancouver. This was my second summer in a row making this journey and by the time I got to Ontario on my way back I was quite road hardened. I had a hard time getting out of Kenora the year before, I was worried about being stuck and had thoughts about jumping a freight train. As I was walking across the bridge into town my hat flew off into the river. I decided to try to retrieve it and ran to a house by the river begging to borrow a boat. The lady reluctantly said go ahead after I badgered her for a while only to find a huge cabin cruiser with no keys. I ran back to the house and asked for the keys but alas, she didn’t have them. I found an oar in the boat and paddled out into the current only to find it very strong and my hat nowhere in sight. So I paddled as fast as I could and by the time I caught up to my hat I was racing downstream at a fair clip. Trying to slow down was useless but I managed to use the oar as a rudder and spin the boat around so I was going downstream backwards. With all the strength I had I started paddling against the current and managed to stop and make a bit of headway. In what seemed like all day but was in reality only a couple of hours I managed to wrestle the boat back to the dock. I went to the house and told the lady I brought her boat back and she said it wasn’t her boat and wished me well.

I tossed my guitar over my shoulder, put my hat on my head and went walking into town fondling the quarter in my pocket. It was all the money I had and I was very hungry after my ordeal. I passed by a fruit market with a sign in the window “SALE----12 LIMES FOR 25 CENTS” As I walked on I thought “boy that’s a good deal”. I went back, slapped my last quarter on the counter and said ”12 limes, please”. The man in the store asked me if I wanted a few more, I said “why not?” and noticed he had limes everywhere, his store was full of them. So off I went with a huge bag full of limes (about twenty, I think) and went to check out the road out of town. There was a lot of hitchhikers, maybe about a hundred, so I went to the freight yards. I stood on a bridge overlooking the station and some kids came by eating apples. I asked them if they had any more and they said no but there was an apple tree up the hill. As I stood in front of a house about three quarters of the way up the hill trying to remember if I’d ever seen any apple trees in Northern Ontario a man came out looking me over and asked what I was doing there. I told him some kids told me there was an apple tree around here, he laughed and invited me in for a sandwich. He was there with his ten-year-old son and they were happy to let me eat them out of house and home as long as I kept telling them about my hitchhiking adventures.
When I started asking about the trains the boy said he’d go watch for a train heading east.

About half an hour later he came running back and said one just pulled in. I thanked them, gave them each a lime and bid my farewell before boogieing down to the tracks with my bag of limes, my guitar and my backpack. I noticed an open door in a boxcar four or five cars back from the last engine, in fact the door looked bent. I had heard stories about sticking something in the doorway of a boxcar in case the door slammed shut and for this reason I was hoping to jump on the third engine. The boxcar was easier to get to and after I jumped in I came face to face with two hobos. One asked me if I had anything to drink. I said no and the other one asked me if I had anything to eat whereupon I presented my bag of limes. They snarled at me but I managed to get out of them that the door was stuck. Soon the train was moving and I was getting closer to home, I was hoping to make it to Thunder Bay and start hitchhiking again. One of the hobos asked me about my bag of lemons and I tossed them both a lime. They munched into those limes and ate the whole thing, peel and all. Then they asked for another one. I was happy to oblige and it wasn’t long before I tossed them the whole bag. They ate them all, there was no traces of anything lime after they were done, I’m surprised they didn’t eat the bag.

It was nighttime when the train stopped in Dryden. We were stopped for a long time. When we looked out the door and saw the train pulling off in the distance, we realized we’d been shunted of onto a siding. One of the hobos said “we left our luggage on the last car” and they ran off into the night. I wandered over to the highway to see if I could thumb a ride.

ALMOST SHOT BY THE DEPUTY

While hitchhiking from Vancouver to Toronto I was walking through a small town near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border when I saw two scruffy looking figures sitting by the road huddled under blankets. They looked like hitchhikers who’d been stranded for days. As I passed them one asked me for a cigarette in French while the other one took a straw out of a popcan, put it in his mouth and snapped his finger at the end of it

As I said I didn’t smoke, I saw someone running towards us out of a building beyond, I noticed that it was the local copshop. It was a small thin man with big thick glasses wearing a brown uniform, his hat was just a little too big, in fact it was---the local deputy doing his best Barney Fife impression, waving his gun in the air and yelling at us drop our stuff and put our hands up.

We were busted for the criminal act of smoking marijuana and hauled off to the local hoosgow, hands held high. Then he went back for our gear, including my guitar. As he went through our stuff, he kept muttering “I know it’s here somewhere”. Then we were interrogated, he got nowhere with the French guys so he started picking on me. My attempts to tell him that if I were a big time drug smuggler I wouldn’t be hitchhiking across Canada fell on deaf ears, however his cracks about searching my rectum didn’t.

It was hard to keep from laughing as he yelled at me from every direction, unfortunately I told him that I was already a week late for grade 12 and he threatened to get me for truancy too. In what seemed like the nick of time, Sheriff Taylor showed up wondering what was going on, a little milder mannered; he again got nowhere with the French guys. Our chat was a little calmer than my previous chat with his deputy, he listened to my story and said he thought a guitar would be a good place to hide dope, you could drill holes and fill them in. I asked him how much he thought a guitar like mine could hold and he laughed and told me to get out of town. I said that that’s all I was trying to do in the first place.

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