“He has fear.” Joe said in that Canadian bar where we met. I was trying to prevent a fight simply because I liked the bar and wanted to come back, but Joe was ready. The whitecap fratboy and his friends were well out of place in this mountain town, local bar, and had pegged me and Joe as an easy way to prove they were tough enough to drink there.

Now, I’ve fought in all four of America’s Secret Wars and a few of the public ones, so I’ve killed at least one of everything that weighs more than a hundred pounds and can swing a knife or tentacle barb. I was a little less sure about Joe. I knew he was strong, but when you’re about to get into a fight and your only friend is a guy who’s frightened of vacuum cleaners, you ought to give some thought to backup.

“He has fear” Joe said when I suggested he back down. “I am the boss.”

“Oh ho, this bald motherfucker’s the boss!” The whitecap shouted back to his friends in their booth. As soon as they laughed, Joe’s lips curled back and he breathed out heavily.

That’s when I spotted it. See, back in 1957 I spent some time training dogs to sniff out robo-men. These were wild dogs, bred in the woods and totally unfamiliar with modern technology. Wild dogs, just like Joe.

We were sitting, the kid was standing, a dominant position. The fratboy crowd was egging him on, rewarding him with happy noises. Joe was an alpha dog. He had to be. He lived longer and was cleverer than any other wolf out there; he must be an alpha among the wolves he interacted with every other day of the month. As soon as I saw those lips curl back, I knew Joe was going to assert his position as ‘boss.’

I liked that bar okay, but there were two more in that little town and Joe was quickly turning this into an interesting night. I figured, what the hell, I smiled too, and stared over into the booth of fratboys. I tried to give off the same alpha dog aura that Joe was projecting, but I probably failed. It didn’t matter, I was happy enough to be number 2. I’d still get to beat up some loudmouth, drunken rich kids.

A short time later, I had Joe’s whiskey in one hand, my stout in the other as we cut through a couple alleyways and listened to the sirens approach.

“I am boss.” Joe said. “I don’t like leaving. I am boss.”

I agreed, but explained that the police wouldn’t agree that he was boss, no matter how much he proved it.

“I know about police. They are boss. I know this.” He said, reaching for his whiskey. “I don’t like leaving.”

I suggested that allowing the fratboys to be treated by the EMTs had raised him even higher in the eyes of the bar staff, regulars and other tough locals. He smiled. “They know that I am boss. It is good.”

I stuck around that town for another year, and spent every full moon drinking and talking with Joe. I tried to teach him cribbage, but he never had the patience for it. He liked to look at girls and buy the meat he had to hunt every other day of the month. Sometimes he got looking at girls, but his wolf side and the whiskey would take over and he’d get a little grabby. I made a lot of peace with a lot of waitresses during that time. Some nights he just came over and did his best to read my books.

He was a good kid. I miss him.

Eventually, when I got roped into the Doombridge Project, I had to fake my own death, but I let Joe know what was going on, as a parting gift to my friend, I left him all my public funds, my little house in the woods and all the books I had collected that year. It was more than enough to keep him in steak and whiskey, two or three days a month for fifty years, at least.

I wish I could have gone back to see him, I’d love to hear what he had to say about F. Scott Fitzgerald or Robert E. Howard or to see if he ever managed to smile nicely at a waitress without drooling.

He was a good kid.

Before long, we were rolling across the Rockies in a boxcar full of back issues of Highlights magazine, smoking some of Weedy John Smokey’s finest sock grown fungal-enhanced super-dope and talking about the typical hobo subjects- booze, soup and economic theory. When properly baked, Weedy John was fond of telling stories. None of us ever believed a word he said, but we were all bored with Highlights so we crowded around and listened, pausing occasionally to urinate out the open boxcar door, or as us hobos called it, Performing an Experiment in Fluid Dynamics.

Anyway, John started telling the story of a hooker he new back in Intercourse Pennsylvania. She called herself ‘Intercourse’s Favorite Daughter’ and charged on a sliding scale depending on how much she liked your business card. Her brother, it turns out, ran the town’s only design and print shop. She was good at her job, and he was terrible, so when word got out that she preferred his bland but colorful work, his business skyrocketed. The suspicion that she was also related to the local gossip columnist was never proven, but she did end up marrying the local divorce attorney, having personally been the inspiration for the sharp increase in the town’s divorce rate. She, her husband and her brother ended up retiring quite comfortably.

As John was finishing up his story, and pulling out his torn, yellowed and stained business card, (Professor Emeritus, Hobo-American History, it said), our train pulled into some stop, and after a couple minutes, our boxcar door slid open a crack. We were laughing about the hooker from Pennsylvania and her mustache (The mustache doesn’t really enter into the story, but she had a big, curly one) but we stopped when that door slid open a bit. A scrawny dude with a big beard poked his head in the door and asked if we minded another passenger. He had a big bottle of wine under one arm, so we figured it was time to make a new friend and invited him in. He pulled his lanky frame into the box car, and plopped down his sack. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I am Maurice, the nephew of God, and the lord of the hobos.” Then Tom And His Lies threw a can of tuna at Maurice and knocked him unconscious.

He woke up a couple hours later and offered us some wine. He said nothing about the can or being the nephew of God, just rolled over, sat up and said “gentlemen, how about some wine?”

Then we were all friends. Maurice ended up traveling with us into Mexico, somehow acquiring a new bottle of wine at every stop. Tom never took to Maurcie, but booze buys a lot of friends, and Maurice always had some to spare.

Before long it was Maurice who was picking the direction for travel; north out of Mexico, Rancho Cucamonga, Walla Walla, Kalamazoo, Sugartit, Beebeetown, Pippa Passes, and all the funniest town names in America. Once, in Monkeys Eyebrow, Arizona he saved a kitten from a tree, and bandaged a small opossum’s broken tail. As he finished the bandaging he said “and blessed are the marsupials, for they shall inherit the earth.”

Things took a downward turn when Judy Stinko got arrested in some South Dakota hellhole. He got caught breaking into houses to eat goldfish. He always said he preferred goldfish to any other seafood and liked them best “fresh from a life of indulgence,” so he always stole them from rich fat kids.

Anyway, Judy Stinko, self-centered bastard that he always was, decided to save himself by figuratively throwing Maurice under a bus (something he had literally tried in Yeehaw Junction a couple months prior). He told the angry small town sheriff that Maurice was the ringleader of an international gang of hobo house burglars and safecrackers. It didn’t take much evidence to get Maurice arrested.

The trial was swift, the judge was the guy whose house Judy Stinko had broken into and Maurice was sent to prison and swiftly beaten to death when he tried to heal the rift between the Bloody Smile Gang and the Shitstain Devils.

Without Maurice and his endless supply of wine and doughnuts, the fun was gone from the hobo life. We had lived the easy life for long enough that dumpster diving had lost its appeal. So we packed up and headed home. I went back to Cincinnati, where I was briefly mayor, then into safecracking. Weedy John Smokey went back to Pennsylvania to teach. Sweatstain Luke and Stainsweat Pauly opened a dentist’s office, Tom and His Lies kept up the life until he was killed by a polar bear during a long ride north. I don’t know what happened to the other guys, the hobo life doesn’t offer much opportunity for correspondence, but I miss Maurice to this day.

I didn’t make my first million until 1954, when I created Porkos, the pork flavored breakfast treat.  Maybe you remember the jingle?

No time for bacon
Eggs are too slow
Just pour some cream
And you’re ready to go!

Porkos- the only breakfast cereal made with real pork drippings- part of a complete Breakfast alongside heavy cream and a smooth, refreshing Charleston Cigarette!

The fifties were a pretty good time for me. America had conquered Europe and eliminated war, so we were feeling pretty good about the future. The economy was booming, and each and every American Man was well on his way to a steak and cigarette death. It was really a great decade for making your first million.

It was a decade with great potential: convenience was king, everyday tasks were being automated, housewives were on horse tranquilizers, Father Of Sam was slaughtering the elderly in British Columbia and television was coming into its own as an advertising medium. The breakfast cereal was king, and I was his shining knight.

Sure, I had some good luck with money in my adventurous youth- at one point I had maybe three million dollars worth of uncut diamonds in a giraffe’s bladder- but I had to drop it to avoid drowning in subterranean African river. Of course, that was back when you had to work for money, in the fifties, things were different.

All you needed was a friendly butcher, flour, some lead paint chips for flavor and General Cereal Corp would give you eighteen steaks and a five-year contract.  Next thing you know, America was wolfing down Porkos and the clean, crisp flavor of Frosted Tobacco-Puffs, and you were out-drinking William Holden and buying your wife the services of  the best gigolos Los Angeles has to offer.

Ultimately, my golden years of salesmanship were destined to end too soon.  The underground anti-breakfast campaign was hitting General Cereal Corp pretty hard and the Communists weren’t fond of breakfast either.  With our sales sagging, it became apparent that the golden age of breakfast was coming to a close.  When the Surgeon General required a health warning on the side of every box of Asbestos Crunch, Bangkok Surprise, and Porkos, the General Cereal Corp finally collapsed.

While I enjoyed being a salesman and breakfast executive, the time was right for me to move on.  I’ve always been fond of revolutions, and America was due for a couple: The Countercultural Revolution was recruiting submarine officers, and the Sexual Revolution was looking pretty promising too.

Whenever I meet someone who’s heard of me, they always want to know about the secret first moon landing- the one where we cleaned out the Martians prior to Armstrong and the rest showing up a couple years later. People always want to talk about the moon. No one ever asks about all the other stuff I did. No one asks me about inventing the appletini, or smoked cheddar cheese or the smoked cheestini. No one ever asks about my affair with Eleanor Roosevelt or the time I crippled Franklin Roosevelt with a croquet mallet.

They all want to know about Moon War 1. Well, I’m tired of talking about it.

I don’t see what the big deal about the moon is anyway. You wouldn’t be so excited about it if you went there. It’s just rock and pointy dust. It’s like walking around in the middle of the night on finely ground glass. There’s no place to get a drink and the hookers are hideous.

Sure, there’s the Martian caverns to look at, but they’re pumped full of carbon dioxide and their chairs are all wobbly and uncomfortable for anyone with a reasonable number of legs. On top of all that, the floors are still slick with that weird orange Martian blood that never dries.

A lot of good boys died to get the moon for humanity, and wha’d we get in return? None of the glory and all of the heat-ray burns. Hell, humanity didn’t really get anything out of the moon, aside from a place to keep our tide control machines and kinetic-kill superweapons. (Well, that and the Martian “Compact Disc” technology, but that’s done more harm than good, I say.)

I’e been in piles of wars right here on earth and every damn one of them was much more interesting that shooting those squeaking five-legged, bug-eyed purple bastards on the moon. Does anyone ever ask me about Korea? Vietnam II: The Revenge? No, everyone wants to know about the Moon War.

Well, fuck you. It’s in here someplace. You’ve bought my book you can read all about Moon War 1 and stop asking me about the damned thing, but I’m not going to make it easy on you. I left it out of the index and I left it out of the table of contents. If you want to find the story of Moon War 1 by the only guy to come home, you’ve got to read the whole damned book to find it.

This is my memoir, so if you want to get the meal you paid for, you’re going to have to eat your way through all the parsley, cole slaw and pepper from the pimply kid’s giant grinder to get to that bland club sandwich. It will, however, be the best damn gourmet cole slaw you’ve ever had. Better than the fucking moon-club sandwich you’re so excited about.