Slump
A writer in his groove can seemingly pull stories out of thin air. I have long believed that there is a kind of magnetic attraction between author and subject. When I am writing every day and juggling a half dozen stories, a half dozen more will flop into my lap unwittingly like frogs raining out of the sky during a biblical plague.
If you believe the magnetic attraction argument, there must conversely be a magnetic repulsion of stories away from a writer when he is in a slump. The first law of thermodynamics paraphrased for the writer might read: good stories are neither created nor destroyed but transferred from one writer to another.
So when I am in a slump, as I am now, I figure that my stories are out there but are actively avoiding me. Indeed, they are looking for better representation. Of course, the creative polarity will eventually shift back to where it was and good stories will once again befall me, but I am too impatient to sit back idly and wait.
In the past when I have come up against dry spells I have gone to Starbucks for inspiration. I have never gone to a Starbucks coffee shop searching for a story and come away empty-handed. Today, though, it looked as though my luck had run out. I walked into my local Starbucks with high expectations as usual, but nothing was going on. There were a few people hanging around: a businessman working on his laptop; a couple of women with their toddlers; a teenager working on a crossword puzzle. Nothing to write about there. I looked around at the cardboard advertisements scattered throughout the store, trying to find something to poke fun at – the pretentious wording, perhaps – but there was nothing. I got my coffee and hung out for awhile at a table, my radar dish open for discovery.
A few more people came and went, all of them as dull as dishwater. I finished my coffee and got up to leave. I was in a slump, all right; no doubt about it. But wait. From the back of the store, a short, stalky figure appeared. A disheveled old man who had been in the bathroom this whole time. His clothes were in tatters. His long beard and hair was slicked down as if he had just washed in the bathroom. Slung over his shoulder was an overstuffed bag of sorts.
Homeless people sometimes come into this Starbucks to get a cup of coffee and use the restroom, but this was no ordinary homeless person. This was a hobo. An honest-to-goodness, Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, dustbowl era, down-on-his-luck hobo. And that was no backpack, but a rucksack. A hobo with a rucksack in Starbucks!
The hobo looked up and saw me staring at him. He turned around and ran to the back of the store. I ran after him. He hit the latch on the service door and scrambled into the daylight. I followed him outside and saw him running at full stride. This hobo ran pretty fast for an old man. He must have been eighty years old. I caught up with him a short ways down the dusty hardpan road and knocked him to the ground. The air smelled kind of funny, like mesquite or something, and there were mountains off in the distance, even though there shouldn’t be any in this part of the coastal plain of Virginia. I didn’t care about that, though, I had a hobo pinned beneath my legs and I was determined to know his story.
“Who are you?” I asked.
The hobo just squirmed to get away.
“Who are you?” This time my voice was raised and I pushed my knees into his chest.
“I can’t tell you,” he grunted in desperation.
At that very moment a loud clanging noise rang out. I looked up and saw a railroad crossing sign blinking and the gates closing on both sides of the road leading up to the tracks. I rose to my feet. I didn’t recall there being any railroad tracks around here. This is the suburbs; I thought they’d all been paved over. Then again, I had never been on the back side of this Starbucks before.
A train whistle blew and, from right to left, a huge, black, steam engine pulling a seemingly endless line of cars crawled up the tracks. The hobo was on his feet now. He grabbed his rucksack and ran toward the train. He caught the ladder of a freight car with its belly wide open and pulled himself up. He turned to me and shouted something, but I didn’t catch it because the engine had blown its whistle again. I put my hand to my ear indicating that I missed what he said. He waited until the whistle quieted and yelled again as loud as he could, “It’s not your story.”
“The hell it isn’t,” I yelled back, but he was too far down the tracks to hear. I dusted off my pants and walked back to the Starbucks service door. It was locked from the inside. And isn’t that just the way things go when you're in a slump.
10:26:43 PM 
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