Detroit = Hell.

I woke up early the next morning to the sound of hammering in the house. Trumbleplex was a petty large house in itself, not including the showspace I had slept in last night as well as the house next door which was part of their land trust. Getting up, I followed the sound of hammering to the upstairs area where I found one of the house members installing a door. He accepted my offer to help him with it, and while awkward at first, we eventually got into a deep discussion about various aspects of anarchism.

It was something that kind of bothered me about a lot of 'activist' houses that let random traveler's stay at their house. Most of the time I was met with a guarded stance on my presence there, almost like I could be an infiltrator from the FBI... until I could find some way to break the ice. Which could be hard sometimes. In a way, I could understand the caution. I mean, they've probably been screwed over by someone like me before. I remembered how I got fucked over so badly that I lost my house because I wanted to help my fellow 'traveler punks' passing through... but at the same time in our culture that preaches 'love and anarchy' so easily, I still dreamed of a place that would greet new people into our homes with open arms without having to be so guarded.

After breaking through their shell, members of the house were actually really nice and helpful, one of them actually giving me a ride to where he thought would be a good place for me to hop a train out of town.

I walked under the train track overpass where I had been dropped off and explored the train yard on the other side. I didn't really know what I was looking for, so I walked between the rust colored train cars looking for something with an engine attached. Nothing. I started walking back to the woods nearby where I could hide and wait. I was impatient, and decided to take a look at the south end of the yard.

Emerging from the trees onto a nearby residential street, a white dodge neon stopped next to me. I knew this was trouble. A man in a brown officer's uniform stepped out.

"Were you walking around those train tracks over there?" It was a bull (railroad police). I'd never encountered one before.

"Um, yeah." I replied, figuring a railworker must have seen me wandering around the yard. No use denying it.

After running my identification he asked, "Did you come in on the train?"

Pulling my camera out of my pocket, I lied and said, "No sir, I was just taking some pictures,"

"What's in there?" he said, pointing to my backpack. "Yer camera equipment?"

"Um... yeah... among other things," I mumbled. With my sleeping bag sloppily strapped to the bottom of my backpack, I thought it was pretty obvious I was more than just a railfan.

Handing me my ID he continued, "You're SURE you didn't come in on the train?" while eyeing me suspiciously. I told him I hadn't I was just hitchhiking through, even offering to give him Tasha's phone number to verify my story. "Well, you gave one of the workers there a start, thought you might be a terrorist or something. Look, I'm gonna let you off with a warning this time, but we have your ID on file now. If you get caught in a train yard again, we'll throw you in jail for tresspassing."

"Thanks," I said as he climbed back into his car and drove away. I knew he was full of shit. There was no national database all the train companies looked at when they ran your ID. He was just looking for warrants because he couldn't prove I was in the train yard and bust me for tresspassing.

I continued over to the other end of the yard later that night after doing the rounds of the local dumpsters. It was well into the early evening by this time, just dark enough to make it hard to see me walking near the tracks. I waited in the trees once again, waiting for my train. Hours passed with several trains going by, but nothing with rideable cars. Drops of rain started pelting my head and I was thankful for having the presence of mind to steal a rain poncho from an army surplus store a few days ago. Sitting there in the trees with that poncho draped over me, I tried to think and meditate while the rain poured harder over me. Nothing came for the rest of that night and I eventually surrendered to the rain, walking over to a place with a small outcropping of a roof behind a bowling alley. Sheilded from the rain, I pulled out my sleeping bag and went to sleep.

Waking up in a coughing fit, I looked up to see a police officer standing over me. "You gotta get moving along son," he said. I sat up, apologizing for some reason and rolled up my sleeping bag. It felt like a piano had hit my head. My chuck taylors squished with each step away from the bowling alley. I had never seen it rain so hard in my life. I was soaked, freezing and miserable.

I walked over to a highway nearby, choking back coughing fits. Spitting onto the sidewalk I looked at it realizing it wasn't phlem, but blood. Great, I thought. I probably had pnemonia. I desperately tried to hitch a ride in the rain on that onramp, getting more drenched by the minute, passing cars only adding wave after wave of water to my clothes. I could only take so much punishment, and took the bus into downtown with my last dollar. It was time to spange up for a greyhound ticket.

What I didn't expect was how empty Detroit would be. I looked out the window of that bus at the passing neighborhoods as we plunged into the heart of the city. It was the worst ghetto I had ever seen. Nine out of ten buildings were abandoned. It looked so desolate...

I got to the greyhound station in downtown and instantly knew I was doomed. Foot traffic was almost nonexistent, and the space seemed to be spoken for by the local crack heads. After trying to spange for a few minutes, it was pretty apparent there was no chance of getting any money here.

One of the guys in front of the station struck up a conversation with me while trying to hustle up money by selling american flag pins to people passing by. After I explained my situation, he finally introduced himself as Carl. About forty years old, he wore a bulky blue winter coat, blue jeans, and a black ski hat.

He told me he could help me get a greyhound ticket from the local church, but they were closed for the day, and offered to let me say in his truck for the night. I wasn't sure if he had some ulterior motive, but hesitantly accepted the offer. Besides, the wind was biting cold, dropping the temperature down to what I figured was around twenty degrees and I had no idea where I could sleep without freezing to death.

I gripped my pepperspray in my pocket as we walked back to a junkyard about a mile from the greyhound station where he showed me where he lived. Carl's home was an out-of-commission big rig truck in the middle of a bunch of broken cars and school buses.

Fortuneately it was warm inside and shielded from the wind. "You can take the top bunk." he told me, pointing out the fairly large camper section of the rig. Through the front windows I could see the river only a few hundred yards away and the opposite shore of Canada in the distance beyond it. We sat there talking about guitars and smoking cigarettes until the sun went down that day, and I finally relaxed a little.

Carl just seemed like a lonely guy. He pretty much told me his life story that night, about how he used to hop trains when he was young, how he became a big time crack dealer, eventually losing it all to his wife and the police when he got busted, and finally becoming a truck driver until his truck broke down a few months ago. "I'm kind of acting as a security guard for this junkyard," he would tell me, "He lets me sleep in my truck here as long as I keep an eye out for people trying to steal his cars." Which people had tried to do before. "This one time I called the owner and said, 'Hey Scott, are you selling that school bus on the far end of the lot? Cause if not, you better call the cops.'" The owner wasn't selling a school bus. Carl had been the watchdog of the yard ever since.

The next day Carl took me to one of the local churches that bought stranded people greyhound tickets. The pastor there told me of the new rules they had saying they could only pay for 1/4 of the ticket. "One-fourth?!?!" I said. "Where the hell am I going to get the other three-fourths?"

"Well, you can try going around to the other churches, but their policies are the same, so you'll have to find three more churches that will help you." he continued, "I'm sorry it has to work this way, but we've had people taking advanage of us, selling the greyhound tickets for drugs." The cruel trick of it all was that all the other churches were open at all diffrent times and it would take me a week to talk to them all. I was fucked.

On the bus ride back to the junkyard, Carl said, "Don't worry man, I'll get some money and buy you a ticket home." I told him not to worry about it, I knew he didn't have any money and I'd figure something out eventually. "I'll get it man," he said. "It's something have I do every once in a while anyway when I really need the money."

Not liking where this was going, I asked, "What's that?" He pulled down his black hat over his face revealing holes for his eyes and mouth. It wasn't a hat.

It was a ski mask.

"Oh." was all I could say. Meanwhile in the back of my mind I nearly shit myself.

Pulling it off his face and back up into a hat, "Ya know, it's just sometimes I don't have any money to eat or I need money to to work on my truck, so I go out when most pople get paid and find a drunk mexican stumbling in a dark alleyway somewhere." I tried to keep my cool.

"Then I push him down when he isn't looking, take his wallet and run like hell... it's about that time of the month again, so I'll buy you a bus ticket after I go out tonight."

"Oh... really? Um... okay." I said, the backburner of my mind still shitting bricks. He went out that night while I stayed in the truck practically pissing myself trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do. I had to get the hell out of here.

If I left while he was gone where would I sleep? I could stash myself in the school bus Carl had shown me on the other side of the yard, but I figured he might be upset if he found me and realized I had tried to ditch him...

My thoughts turned to whomever he was robbing. It scared me even more, imagining it going horribly wrong and that innocent person getting hurt or worse. I was literally sick to my stomach with worry by the time he returned. "What happened?" I asked as he closed the door of the truck behind him.

He replied, "Slow night, nobody's out." Thank god, I thought to myself. He went to bed and I stayed awake in the bed above him clutching my pepperspray until well after he was asleep. What little trust I had in him was sure as hell gone now. Tomorrow I was getting the fuck outta here.

The next morning I told Carl I was going to hitchhike out of town. He showed me where he thought the best spot would be and even made me a sign. Finally he left after wishing me luck. I sat there on the streetcorner watching trucker after trucker slowly creep by until the cops arrived and told me to 'move along'... which the way I saw it was stupid because I was only trying to get the hell out of their town.

I had come here determined to make it on my own and failing completely. I had been trying to get out of Detroit for the past five days now. I was cold, miserable, and a total wreck hacking up blood everywhere when I picked up the phone back at the greyhound station.

"Mom?" ... I had tried to avoid this for the past five days and now here I was giving in and having my parents bail me out.

The other end responded, "Hi honey, how are you doing?"

"Um, not too good... I'm kinda stuck in Detroit."

"Oh honey, do you want us to get you a ticket home?"

"Um, well," I said coughing. "I was kind of wondering if you could get me a ticket to Philly," I swear, I don't know why my parent's put up with me sometimes.

After a short sigh, "Okay dear." I leaned my head onto the payphone. Relief couldn't come close to what I felt.

Thanks guys.