Sprink

SPRINK

His name was John Patrick Sprinkle,

everyone called him Sprink.

I met him in a restaurant in Bellingham, Washington.

I was working as the dishwasher

and Sprink was the bartender.

He was 38 at the time

and I was 21, changing so fast I didn’t know who

I was one hour from the next.

Sprink had a long dark pony tail with a patch

of white at the top of his head where a cop

had pulled his hair out while arresting him

when he was an 18-year-old hippy.

It grew in white and stayed that way.

I knew him for years

and he never changed.

I met people who had known him much longer

and they all said the same thing:

Sprink doesn’t change.

Physically he didn’t change, and he always

did the same thing every day.

He had old photos of himself

and in each photo, he was the same.

I could not imagine Sprink

growing old or dying, it was impossible.

He lived by himself in a cabin in the woods.

He didn’t want to get married and do

all that stuff.

He liked to smoke weed

and he slept on a couch instead of a bed.

He told some good stories

like the one about escaping from a Montana jail.

He had this laugh that was rich

and catching, and the girls loved him even though

he had a big beer belly, the same

beer belly he’d always had.

He loaned me two

hundred bucks one time

and he took me to the horse track

a couple times. I lived with him

for a while, he didn’t even charge me rent.

He was a like a rock,

old Sprink.

One day I had to leave.

I decided to ride my bicycle

from Bellingham to Illinois

to see my mother.

I stole a bunch of steak from the restaurant

to make beef jerky

to take on my trip.

Sprink told me to go

through Missoula, Montana

and to go to a bar called Charlie’s.

Charlie’s didn’t have a sign

but everybody knew where it was.

He said I should ask for Sally

and she’ set me up.

Well, I found Charlie’s

but Sally was out of town

and instead, I met a guy named Geezer

but he turned out to be an asshole.

I ended up sleeping on the sidewalk by my bicycle.

My beef jerky was stolen by a homeless man

while I was drunk

and later ate some strawberries

from a dumpster in back of a grocery store.

In a couple of days, I hopped a freight train

because I was tired from riding, tossed

my bike on there and climbed up into the boxcar.

In Kansas, I think,

a railway workman found me near freezing and he took

pity on me and offered to let me

sleep at his house that night.

His walls were covered in dead animal heads

that he had hunted, glass eyes

frozen in time.

I was sure he would kill me

in my sleep so I snuck out

in the middle of the night.

Many times, on those open roads pedaling and pedaling, alone,

I thought about Sprink

and how he never mentioned his mother.

Sometimes I got so tired

and hungry and dehydrated I wondered if maybe

I had imagined him.

I made it to Illinois a couple weeks later

to my mother’s house.

It all looked different, my mother and the house

and everything.

She hardly recognized me, I was so skinny

and I hardly recognized myself

in the photos she had of me on her walls.

My mother looked so old

I wanted to cry.

It’s horrifying sometimes,

how nothing ever

stays the same.

Only Sprink.

END