Re: halloween 2014

Kansas City


Bright and early we roll in, and like good little tramps we abandon ship before it disappears into the steel labyrinth for another crew change. Walk isn't far to amenities this time and there is more breath for conversation. Jane says something about having respect for the rail workers and I say you can't feel personal respect for someone just because they work for your favorite company else your respect carries no weight at all. We wrestle on that and take pot shots for a mile before reaching a mavericks. There we drop in for coffee and burritos then head for the center of town only a couple miles further.


Technically, we were both penniless by this point. But I still had my oregon food stamps which got me by the beginning of every month, and he waiting on a late payment for a gig from months prior, scraping along on handouts from old women for bedlilly, scrappiest labrador in all the land.

It’s the biggest city I’ve seen since leaving seattle earlier that year and I decided then and there that all big cities must be more or less the same. The high rises and traffic and slickers and suits and ties and street talk and construction workers and crazies of all shapes and sizes and denominations. Descriptors. All concrete and nothing real.

We recharge at the library for an hour and when I'm heading out the door at the entrance there to leave I brush by a familiar looking young guy going the other way. Everybody has familiar features in one quality or another. But when I get out to the curbside and pull out a cigarette to wait on pj I watch the dude come back through the door looking like he'd seen a ghost, approaching me hesitantly.

"Don't I look familiar?" He says, pointing at his face. Not an inch short or taller than I.

"Oh.." I remember him then. The guy I roomed with at a hostel in anchorage for a couple weeks. He was a lot more haggard looking before, out of his element.

"Yeah, Cliff, I did think so.. What are you doing all the way out here?"

"I'm asking you the same thing. This is my town, I live here."

"Traveling, as they say, in some parts of the world. Ehh, Right.. lost yer email or I'd have gotten in touch.. How was Whittier then?"

"A total shit-hole, man. Tweakers, shit pay, shit food. I shouldnt've ever gone. They didn't even cover my return flight. I got robbed"

"Sorry to hear that, sounds unpleasant."

"What about North Pacific?"

"Great. 5 thousand overall. And, uh, no tweakers."

"So now you're spending it, traveling?"

"Nah, I spent it all within the month. Now I'm flat broke and riding freight, seein places for the hell of it."

"Whoa"


At this the guy gets a funny look in his eye like he's seeing more apparitions and he wants to slowly back away. Uh oh, I'm losing him already. He thinks I'm insane. Come on partner, whatchu go in yer pockets.

Says he, as if reading my mind, "I'm broke too, I've had to sell my laptop. Even worse, my girl threw me out last month and I've been on my sisters couch. Won't let me see the kids."

"That's a shame, cliff. That's really too bad. You gonna be alright?"

"Yeah. I think so, I think so.."


I didn’t expect anything from this exchange as it was. Poor guy was still a nervous wreck. Pj makes his appearance and we say so long to Cliff, “small fuckin world after all hey?” and we beat it to find le ol’ busking corner on the east side of town.

Doggies one and two make no money, and really in hindsight I don't know what he was thinking, that part of town was so dead. Even worse, I can’t find any cute girls on my solo expedition and conclude they must all be on the far side of State Line road for all the lookers we’ve got running around in this part of town — that’s none.. NONE. Guys gotta have something else to look at in his off hours from the only motherfucker there is to talk to the other 90% of the time, tramping all over the place not pussy enough between us to chew a stick of bubblegum. Of course, half the problem is travel season's long gone and all the pretty train girls and hippy sluts are wintering over in nola or california somewhere trimming weed. The other half is that our mutual patience for one another has reached a breaking point and it has rather a dampening effect on our libidos. If the near constant physical exhaustion isn't enough as it is.

That night the temperature snaps below freezing and it’s a fucking blizzard. We go from bright summer skies to full on winter overnight and after trying the NS yard first and finding nothing we decide against chicago altogether, and decide on texas instead. There is evidently a winter storm set to blast the entire midwest over the course of the next few weeks and chicago would see the thick of it.

Texas... where we can get back in touch with our feminine sides and walk around in our t-shirts and drink our jack straight without worrying about frostbite. So we hit up this wooded area near a travel stop and play boyscouts for a few days, salvaging a new camp out of all the old trash our southbound forebears had left through the years. Chairs, tarps, tents, insulation, snowboots, jackets, single gloves, ear muffs, cans of corn, pots and pans, broken umbrellas, mattresses, nudie mags, rusty knives, shovels, buckets, dog collars, panties, tampons, condoms, golf bags, baseball bats, bubblewrap, beanies, bandanas, blankets, belts, bricks, billfolds, britches, all kinds of shit. But we keep missing the southbound because the times in the book are outdated and we don't realize that it's been coming in the early mornings while we were still frozen solid.

The cold gets colder and the hunger and isolation begins to wear my partner down pretty bad. Me too, somewhat, after a number of uneventful days placidly digging through the garbage bins at the travel stop for cold pizza and breakfast sandwiches. Oh, memories and life events, how many you are. But I had also spent the previous two winters alone outside.. Completely alone... So I'm still yet at least psychologically unaffected in comparison, still trapped in the ascetic complacency of my own voluntary destitution.
Soon though there is a falling out, and I have to stow my chips for a moment and make amends. The alternative seemed too much in bad taste as things stood then. The time wasn't right for it, not by my watch. I wasn't satisfied with the situation yet and could sense a few more miles on this bastard 2 1/2 man crew and therefore intended to drag it dead into the dirt before I cut it loose, before I pulled the plug. I have to follow penny from a distance at first, him yelling threats over his shoulder with every nerve he could manage, panties in a twist because I'd neglected to mention I'd recently received a random 200 via paypal from my mother.. My bad, bro, my bad. The scene continues a mile down the road where he heads into a mcdonalds and there I pull out the mad acting skills I always forget I have and smooth things over with terrific tact.

I even cried. Real tears. Amazing...The trick is to think of something buried in your memory that dredges up legitimate grief, and then double think it into an internal narrative which manifests a belief that it is somehow directly related to the here and now, so that you are effectively reliving it. Only later I'd heard walken himself describe this method in a review, reminiscing on scenes from the old film dear hunter. He had a specific term for it that escapes me now. Boom, genius.

So that same night we've switched over to the other line, in the nearby UP departure yd, neff, and we’ve finally found a san antonio manifest that's been set out. Call-in on the cars weighs it in at t-minus 2-3 hours, well after bed-time. So we fart around for a bit, ears open for air should they slap engines on early, wandering up and down the yard tagging cars. I’m doing two three sometimes four monikers at a time - I have a whole mythos worked out by the end of the night - sometimes scrawling random lines of poetry, drawing naked women and getting dippy on 211. It’s nights like this that make it all worth it. You have everything you need. You have your train and all the time to spare before rolling out the bedding and drifting off in perfect quiet, waiting for the steel to carry you into dreamland and beyond it.

I spent 30–36 blue boned hours on that ride, nearly two days in deep freeze inside my 20 ton coffin. A primitive cryogenic sleep, hobo style. All the way out to Oklahoma. My feet and one asscheek all numb as razors deep in my bag under the unforgiving onslaught of air and metal, and every time I get out to make water I can't get ahold of the zipper because I can't feel my fingers enough to tell fist from fish. So I spend the duration shut up in my bedding like a jailbird sleeping in half lucid 6 hour stretches and intermittently jacking off to keep semi warm when there's too much wind to read or too much everything to anything else. A good deal of that time we weren't moving at all but getting flatswitched in parsons yard, Kansas... the explosions of our containers being unhooked and shot into another string thundering into our bones and the collisions of adjacent strings throughout the night. Bang. Bang... BANG. OwwwwOwwwOwww.

Laying inside that canadian grain half mummified, hungrier than shit, thoughts did not stray far from that of a burger, fries and shake... and sometimes tits. On ronald mcdonald.