Tumbleweed
by Jimmy Trout

Tommy the Timeshare Hobo: 

Jimmy Trout meets his Bizarro world twin

In the Bizarro world, everyone has their opposite, their mirror image, their photo negative, their evil twin.  I met mine last Tuesday.

Being a hobo generally means a rather humble lifestyle, involving fewer jacuzzis and more public swimming holes; fewer jars of caviar and more cans of sardines; fewer satin sheets and more newspapers ("California blankets").  But those aren't hard-and-fast rules, particularly in Bizarro world, as demonstrated by my new acquaintance Tommy C. Billings, a Texan living in Paris.

Tommy retired five years ago after spending three decades slaving away in various eccentric enclaves of the oil and gas industry.  As a 20-year-old dropout from the chemical engineering program at Texas A&M, he found his world turned upside-down when he answered a job announcement for an offshore-drilling gig.  To that point, Tommy had never ventured more than fifty miles from his hometown of Snook-fifty miles being an altogether miniscule distance in the Great State of Texas, roughly equivalent to "down the road a piece" in most parts of the world.

For countless generations, Tommy and his stock had known virtually nothing beyond Snook and he was suddenly finding himself in places like Cameroon, Kazakhstan and Qatar.  On his first trip back home after entering the oil business, he bought his parents a Rand McNally World Atlas, Deluxe Edition, just so they could keep up with his whereabouts.

As often happens in the oil and gas business, Tommy managed to squirrel away a decent fortune, even working jobs with titles like "roustabout" and "roughneck."  He also saw quite a bit of the world, especially on stopovers between projects, where he would visit the likes of Dubai and Bangkok, Cairo and Reykjavik, and he liked what he saw.

So at the age of fifty, he called it quits and returned to Snook to settle back into the family business.  But within six weeks, his addiction to itinerancy got the better of him; he needed another fix and quick.  During his decades on the go, he never realized how much he not only loved it, but needed it.  It was an old itch he needed to scratch once more.  Just as this realization was percolating through his consciousness, an old college roommate from A&M called and offered that he tag along for a golf weekend deep in the woods of Virginia in the timeshare haven known as Massanutten.  Thus began Tommy's second unexpected, extended escape from Snook.  And he never looked back.

While in Virginia, Tommy got roped into buying a timeshare, which was, after all, inevitable.  The arm-twisting pastime known as the timeshare business is virtually the only economic activity taking place within a hundred miles of Massanutten.  If that sliver of the commonwealth of Virginia were its own country-which it almost is-the timeshare business would be its number one industry, employing thousands upon thousands of former car salesmen, pyramid scheme veterans and fake-Rolex dealers, not to mention groundskeepers and groundhogs.  The demon who personally entrapped Tommy proudly admitted to being a retired spokesman for the tobacco industry.  So once Tommy accepted the golf weekend, there was no turning back; he would not leave Massanutten alive without falling prey to its pungently persuasive pitch-first a hard pitch that didn't work; then a soft pitch that did.

The deal that Tommy and his old college buddy had fallen for was that, as part of a purportedly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, they would receive a free golf weekend in the mountains of Virginia-free room, dinner each evening and unlimited golf-all in exchange for one hour of their lives.  Sometime during the weekend, they would be asked to attend a presentation about the resort.  Not that bad of a deal, they thought.

So they golfed the weekend away, half-drunk up and down the fairways, until Sunday afternoon when they couldn't put off the one-hour presentation any longer.  At 2 pm, they met Mr. Leisure Suit himself, the former spokespimp for Big Tobacco.  He showed them a predictable brochure and a floor plan and gave them a memorized speech on the benefits of timeshare ownership.  For example, Tommy was told that he could exchange his one-week timeshare whenever he liked for a week at any one of hundreds of other timeshare properties around the world, which didn't interest him in the least.  At the 45-minute mark, Tommy and his buddy said, no thanks, they wouldn't be buying a timeshare.  The brochures, floor plan and pushy speech were the hard sell.  And it didn't work.

But since the hour wasn't up, the Big Tobaccan took them for a ride in his car, a gaudy souped-up Cadillac; the vanity plate read Smoooth, but should have read Tacky Incarnate, if Virginia allowed that many letters.  As the three of them rode around the development and Mr. Spokespimp pointed out the shrubbery and whatnot, Tommy was so proud that he was immune to all of this.  "Shrubbery, yeah, right," he thought, "it's going to take more than that to make me fall for this trap."

At precisely 58 minutes into the one-hour presentation, they pulled into parking space 1,482 and stepped into one model unit among hundreds.  With no one looking, Tommy let his guard down for a moment as he peered out the expansive windows on the back side of the unit, which looked out across the luscious rolling hills of deepest Virginia, with the turning shades of red, yellow and even a shade or two of gold leaping toward him from the thousands of trees dotting the landscape.  He was in awe, but couldn't admit it to anyone: this was natural beauty at its finest.  

As he turned toward the kitchen, with just the slightest teardrop in his eye, he spotted an elderly woman by the oven.  She wore a big blue apron, blue oven mitts and, most notably of all, a billowing bonnet of blue hair.  She was smiling willingly, although she appeared to have been abducted earlier that afternoon from a Wal-Mart, where she clearly was a greeter; the smile told it all.  Betty (as her nametag read) handed Tommy a warm Tollhouse chocolate-chip cookie fresh from the oven and told him to take a bite.  This was the soft sell-the soft, sumptuous, gooey, melt-in-your-mouth sell-less violent arm-twisting and more Garden of Eden.  "Just take a bite," she said.  And the soft sell worked.  That first bite may as well have been his signature on the dotted line.  He was sold.  And now Mr. Leisure Suit owns a new Caddy.

The day after his timeshare purchase, Tommy awoke with the same feelings of disgust, regret and embarrassment that he'd experienced on similar mornings after evenings of drunken debauchery during those otherworldly stopovers in the likes of Dubai and Bangkok, Cairo and Reykjavik.  But in this case Tommy had not been inebriated by a deadly combination of fragrance and whiskey, but by the deadlier combination of golf and fresh air.  His resolution: to never return to Massanutten; to always use his timeshare privileges elsewhere.

Tommy took the map of the timeshare properties where he could exercise his timeshare privileges, hung it on the wall of his room and chose his first destination at random-a property on the other side of the country in Arizona.  Unbeknownst to Tommy, however, this simple act began what became an addiction from which he has yet to recover.  When he arrived in Arizona, he was promptly swindled into buying another timeshare, which he then traded for a week in Florida, where he bought yet another.  Although he repeatedly swore that he would never fall for it again, the cookies got him every time.  This pattern continued until, in just over a year, he worked up to owning fifty-seven separate timeshares, almost all of which are tradable in-yes, you guessed it-Paris, France.

Tommy C. Billings thereby became the most itinerant hobo I've ever known.  By their very definition, hobos are fidgety types.  We never want to stay put, always feel the urge to move on.  But Tommy is so itinerant that he makes me look like a normal, responsible adult-the kind with a porch-full of kids and a mortgage the size of a small country's GDP.  Most hobos often stay put in one place for weeks or months at a time, but Tommy never has the same address for more than seven days running.  He moves to a new home exactly once a week, every Saturday afternoon.