So I have this fear of hobos. Some years ago I took it upon myself to head downtown at a totally unreasonable hour in the morning in the hopes of being first in line to get tickets to a concert that was in a town that’s about 160 miles away. It didn’t occur to me there wasn’t going to be a line, but that’s beside the point.

I arrived about 3 hours before the record store opened and, true enough, there was no line. Nothing at all downtown was really open at all at this point, being sometime after 6 am, so I went to the mall because, even if the stores were closed, the doors were open and I had to shit. Shitting in a mall is better than shitting on the street, by and large.

I chose the handicapped stall, not because I am a differently abled fellow but because I like to luxuriate in all that space. And as I was doing so, at what was now about 6:30 am, I heard the door to the washroom open.

At first I assumed my friend Wizo came into the bathroom. I was downtown with Wizo. He’s a gas. But as I sat in my luxurious stall working out some issue I spied through the crack in the door that Wizo had not entered. A shambolic, scruffy figure stood before the sinks and began to undress himself while muttering and occasionally clearing his throat in a thick and wet sounding fashion. Indeed, there was a hobo out there. Not just a hobo, a hobo who was slowly and methodically disrobing.

My first instinct was that somehow this transient had been stalking me through the downtown, had sidestepped Wizo on the bench outside (or worse, perhaps strangled him with a length of catgut) and was now preparing to rape me. Many people will tell you hobo rape in a public restroom before business hours is the worst kind of rape ever but it’s only because they’re not creative enough to ponder the addition of the hobo rapist taking his time to strip in front of a mirror while you cower on the handicapped toilet. It’s a fearsome kind of psychological warfare.

I sat very still trying to not release any gas in case he didn’t know I was there and wasn’t really planning on sodomizing me. At this point, I figured it was a 50/50 deal. Either I was about to be used and eaten, or he was just a random raggedy-man up to God knows what. Peering out the door crack it suddenly became all too clear that my initial nightmare was being replaced by a separate yet still quite horrifying (if less penetrative) nightmare. I was witness to one of nature’s rarest sights, rarer than the albino African elephant, rarer than ball lightning, even rarer than a sane Scientologist. I was witness to the hobo bath.

The vagabond had stripped down his shirts, for he had several, and a pair of brown pants best described as slacks. He stood before the mirrors in grey socks and a pair of tighty whiteys somewhat stained with age and the natural lubricants that wild hobos produce in their gitch. I couldn’t decide what disturbed me more, that this man was about to wash himself at a mall sink or that I was sitting there with my pants down watching it. Admittedly, the second one sounds worse but my fear that he was engaging in some manner of perverse chivalry by washing himself before having his way with me was still prevalent so I feared turning away. In true horror movie fashion I was sure that if I looked away for even a moment, a fraction of a second, when I looked back his mad, hobo eye would be pressed to the crack staring back at me as he cackled gleefully and pulled out a tub of bacon grease to use as lube. More likely however, he’d just go in dry. I wasn’t about to let that happen, so my eyes were locked in place and so help me I was ready to drown myself in the bowl before I let him have me.

In my mind I prayed for Wizo, who was surely a bloated corpse now, propped obscenely outside the Cinnabon with hobo hand prints all over his pale frame. I made my peace with my existence and all the regrets I had, the words left unsaid, the calls I should have made, the friends I should have been there for. And I forgave myself for getting into such a situation. For sitting on a cold, bacteria-laden mall toilet seat, my thighs tight together because it’s one of those awful bowls that they designed all weird and if you relax your junk will touch the porcelain which is the grossest thing ever, and I watched a grown man wash his armpits with those shitty brown paper towels and a few squirts of mall soap.

I had hoped, being a hobo, the man would be fast and do a shoddy job. Alas, he was really intent on getting deep in all the cracks and crevices with those paper towels. It seriously lasted upwards of a half hour. Being so early, no one else showed up and, after all that time, Wizo had to have died. I couldn’t imagine what on Earth could hold his attention so long in a closed mall that he wouldn’t come to check on a friend who’d been in the bathroom for a solid half hour if he wasn’t dead.

Eventually, as my thighs quivered from the strain of the position I was holding myself in for so long, the cheeks of my ass numb and my feet tingling as they atrophied, the hobo began his slow dressing. Without a word or a glance towards my stall, he left the bathroom. I waited a good two minutes after the door closed before finishing my business and leaving. I washed at a far sink, fearful of what residue may have been on the near faucets.

I walked out of the bathroom cautiously. There was no sign of the hobo. Wizo, however, was sitting on the bench where I had left him, very much unstrangled. I explained the cause for my extended bathroom stay. Wizo explained how he too had seen the hobo and simply had no desire to enter the bathroom while the man was in there, opting instead to leave me at his mercy. A good laugh was had by all. But I still have this fear of hobos.