CLOCKWISE YEAR, Part 1 of 2, PORTLAND TO AUSTIN
It’s halloween, or the day after halloween. I remember that it is the day after halloween because november first marked the 2nd anniversary to the night I caught my first train… into jail. I forget most everything besides so it doesn’t really matter.. so I am grabbing onto an eastbound manifest airing up for clearance on champ siding. With my road dawg and his doggy dog hopping up into the grainer ahead of mine.
A little context:
The previous 3 months things have gone about opposite from how they were charted to. I came back down from alaska with 4000, a new outlook and a conservative game plan to go with it. Instead of taking flight out to spain or switzerland or buying a car or spending it all on hookers, I’d resolved to turn myself back into an american citizen and reintroducing myself back into the way of life. Serious business. I set about finding any job I can get straight away so I can build up from there. Pretty simple. But these things, you know how it is, they go their own way for whatever reason… your boots don’t fit right, that extra elevated section in the side walk keeps tripping you up, someone doesn’t like your shirt, or that one day you’re completely fucked up because of all the drinking you did the night before.. and in my case it was the pos of dangerous weapon charge on my backcheck from almost two years previous. I essentially nail THREE jobs in a row, and there is a week there that I am not even sure which one I want. Hertz parking tenant, Fisherman’s finest deck hand, or warehouse associate down in wilsonville? But they all call me back, one after the other, about the same thing. I’m harmless and drug free as a bee but no one wants to hire me and weeks wear on. Taking it like a man, naturally I make no effort to reduce spending and carry on lounging around bars and restaurants like a king. I’ll find something.
A month later I’m sleeping in the fields next to the airport and five days in seven there is not money enough for bus fare into town, so I’m walking. Walking 2 hours into the labor ready at 5 in the morning, walking 3 hours to yellow brick road on thursdays, walking an hour to my weekend drinking spot on the siding or else up to the dawg’s place on Sandy. Walking and walking and walking.
Meanwhile I am leaving my shit in the field where there is no one. But as it happens there doesn’t always have to be anyone there that will take your shit at all for your shit to disappear. One night I get off the lightrail back from a long day of job searching and hitting up food banks, and stepping into my home field I discover that it has been mowed. It and all my shit with it has been fucking pulverized. Steel toe boots, coat, pack, sleep system, everything.
Still I salvage some things that are not completely torn apart and manage with what I’ve got. Summer is still alive and well for another month and all I really need to do before then is find a tarp for the rain.
This is trivial survival shit, but it’s just the kind of shit I was getting tired of and I need to find somewhere to clear my mind. . .
The day we make it out, I get off work with about 120 in my pocket, just enough to buy myself a proper coat down at the carhartt store at cascade station. I’ve got an old pair of boots I picked up in Bend the month before as well as a brand new bivvy. In other words, I’ve covered all the essentials in the knick of time and by the seat of my pants, too.
This train’s been held for clearance for two hours and more and when it finally inches forward night is well underway and I can see the dusky orange-peach blue silver-blooming studs drawing in over west portland from beyond the patches of cloud. I will not see this sky again for eight months.
As we clear troutdale I down my last beer and lapse into tranquility. This ride is a familiar one after my second ever freight train 10 months before. The columbia has always been one of the closest approximations to home for me, next to the cascades, and I have fond memories of this corridor that I won’t soon forget.
We pass multnomah falls and for an instant I glimpse the snow of it through the dark like a colossal apparition, and so moved by the recollection of it from before that I break into song. First mouthing then outright yelling, trying to feel out the correct notes to silkworm’s lepidoptera beneath the tidal waves of wind and steel. I go on like that for a couple of hours, the feeling in my chest swelling higher wider deeper, belting it all out of every cubic millimeter of my lungs as if to pinch out the lights on the far bank with the foghorn in my heart. I go until I run out of all the songs I know words to, and run out of courage in the improvising of my own. And the hand brake chimes in and we roll to a gradual halt on a single main with no signal in view.
We are stopped a good long time before road dawgy dawg and doggy too come down back and pay me a visit, offering gifts of whiskey and tobacco which I accept gratefully like a pilgrim at the first thanksgiving, newly baptized now in the light of a strange moon and changed for the time into someone other than the person that left the mother land.
Dawg screams at his mut, “bedlilly you fucking piece of shit we’re free! .. No more niggers coming to visit and shit on your floor my boy!!
..Not even the floor anymore. No, fuck carpets, seriously. If she aint shaved she’s got no business kissing my feet, know what I mean severin!??”
My voice I discover has sunk decibels lower than normal and I hope my companion is not unnerved by this at all, as he seems to notice nothing. The next day my voice is all but gone and it will be at least a week more before it comes back.
“Fuck carpets and fuck you you fucking goon, gimme some of that bourbon goddammit before I throw yer dog into the river, pussy and all!!”
“I won’t allow it, but you can suck his balls if I’m gonna give you any more of this.”
“He don’t have anymore balls, dogfucker!”
“Yer not gonna have anymore either”
“Maybe cause you gonna be eaten them like a fucking rabbit when I’m passed out on it, fucking honky ass queer. I don’t even want anymore, keep it.”
“HAHAH. Here”
“Thanks. Moons like a jewel tonight isn’t she.”
“Wonder what the fuck they’re doing up there anyway. We’re not even sided”
“Don’t know, don’t even fucking care. Because fuck portland and hello cool breeze.”
“Yeah, stump town can suck my nuts. But we’re in the shit now bud, you and me.”
“Fuck yeah, bitch.”
“Speaking of shit, I gotta take a shit. We’ll be in Hinkle before morning, don’t sleep heavy on it or I’ll come back and stomp yer ass, yer bootlicker.”
“Righto.”
//B Hinkle
I wanna talk about fung shay for a moment. It’s interesting, fung shay, because no one of us ever thinks twice about sound and magnetics and chemistry and what until something unexplained happens. They say that sound is but a partition of color, and color of light.
And light of space and space of time, and I don’t suppose time is but the shell on the back on the turtle of the turtle on the next and so on. So many turds in the swan pond to me, brothers and sisters honestly but there are places that all of these things seem to come together to create something strange. Not this garbage about turtles, I mean there is a music…
There is one night in the week, for instance, one night, the same night every week, a thursday that I’d found that if I’d turned my head at the right angle sometime after midnight on the pillow in my bead I could make out a harmony. Harmony as in the dual sounding of two notes at certain places down the neck of a stringed instrument. Every thursday night somewhere after midnight and provided I angled my one ear in the right direction, there would be perceived a note characteristic of the sounding of two other notes. One is the vibration created between the lower one half-pane of the bedroom window that slides to open and the upper portion. The other source more mysterious but after some deliberation I decide is a low hum coming from the nearby hills out toward east selah and the training base beyond. Every thursday, and the result is a harmonic as I said, created through resonance.
So it is two octaves of roughly the same note in this case, and that is what I came to look forward to listening to as I would drift off, provided I’d not already fallen into sleep.
There are also these things called geoclysmic symmetrations which when one is in place to see it, the entire western face of a mountainside for instance may be transformed into a rough semblance of a bear, or of a man laying on his back for instance looking up at the sky. Think of the face they’ve claimed to find on mars. Fung shay folks, fung shay. That is, providing that it is the right time of day and the sun to the south is creating the effect of the shadow enough to make out the earnest grimace on the man’s face … obviously the martians didn’t get enough lay. But maybe they were too busy. Busy building faces in the dirt for posterity or some thing, I won’t be the judge.
So too, there is this section of track that night on the columbia line, some miles after Boardman as one heads into Hinkle, that I remember particularly for the same reasons. There, shortly after the columbia curves off from us into the trinities and looking off to the south there are again those same thousand red eyes blinking in unison for miles and miles and one is hypnotized, without phone or radio or watch to force out the dark, and laying back to close your eyes there is this distinctly cacophonous low pitched groan created by some defect peculiar to that section of track. It is this wall of noise at first, but then, with a bit of adjustment all harmony. And there is this magic, this music, that is like a symphony in the clouds that seems to bend and bow and billow out of every 3 winged wind powered angel out there and it sings to you. If you’ll let it.
We must’ve hit into hinkle somewhere after midnight. I already know Hinkle by this point and the immaculate desolation one jumps into if one should hit in at night, into all that emptiness. The first time Hinkle is like stepping ones first accidental step on the moon or any moon in a dream, it’s spooky and soulless. The second time Hinkle it’s just the same but you are hit with it again all at once and know at least not to go towards the light, in the case that you’re hungry, unless you’re prepared for a hike, or a swim.
We take cover in the old units there at the Y west of the yard, and sleep off all our whiskey through the remaining dark before dawn comes and china brings us some stacks. We ride all the early day but get only as far as pendleton, where the train stops for no conceivable reason and where we conclude there must be a problem with the dupe as we watch the engineer walking back toward us. We vacate, and the walk into Pendleton is hot and uneventful and hungry, but we make it and we find a place to crash without any trouble. There is, of course, a bus and we take it the next day into La Grande.
How many more days we stay in la grande it might’ve been one, it might’ve been three or four and since already having spent time there a month prior, my memory is foggy on it but I can guess that the holdup was a banal one.. a matter of juggling sleep with odd-duck train arrivals. I already know well by this point the incredible effort of dragging oneself out of a comatose to pack up and charge out for the ride, but I had not been expecting my dawg as experienced as he was to be so neglectful when the time came to gtfo of dodge, rain or shine dawn or dusk… and this would be the beginning of our unraveling partnership, already, as the weeks following would prove.
//C Pocatello
It is dusk again when we have an IM east bound, which we ride through Napa for Pocatello. It is the usual 8–12 hours out and for a couple of days we stay with acquaintances whose names I forget. No, hold up, I am remembering.. Cassidy and Casper.. Cassidy is kind of a lookin’ bitch and Casper is kind of a storyteller, and together they make.. alcoholics.
In the meantime we try different corners both alone once and together the next and after sponging a few bucks from the locals we head out, carefully, from the yard there. It’s a gon for wyoming through the following day and for the first time the distance we’ve covered since Portland is beginning to feel palpable.
It’s here also that I discover the different ways one learns to piss to spite the wind. Kind of like people-politics.. sometimes you gotta get up real close so that your pecker is almost touching in order that no one gets hit with the fallout. And other times the airflow is such that it is only possible to go sideways, into the thin air and when there is a backdraft you stop off the flow and wait or face the consequences. Receiving yourself on the train is a skill and requires some craftiness but one quickly learns, in the interest of not giving ourselves a golden shower. Or, as Penny Jayne and I called it, taking a bitch-piss.
//D Green River
In green river we are met with nothing but kindness and generosity and I am glad that we do not linger there and spoil that impression it left in me for the next time I find myself passing through. A woman and her husband who run a small business there buys us both take-out from the neighboring restaurant without any instigation whatsoever from either of us and on the way back through town there is a cashier bringing us out clearance dog food and candy bars, and there is a passing car a little up the road full of smoking hot young gals shelling out five bucks to each of us, I guess for being so damned sexy ourselves. Blowing kisses they drive off and I feel like dancing a boogy right after them.
“Penny!” I say, “Penny, we’ve gotten to be celebrities!”.. “Penny, seriously. Look here now, it’s been a good run but I don’t know if I can take the fame anymore. It upsets my sensibilities, and you have to understand I don’t want no mo part in it!!!” …
“PENNY PL—“
“SHHHHH, fuck you dork keep it the fuck down and decent, christ.”
“Let’s find some goils, dawgy”
“Don’t be such a goddamn rapist and maybe we can”
“Yer the fucking pedophile here, hoser”
When we finally sack out in the frost bitten air we sleep on bellies gorged with mexican food. The open sky drops cold down onto my face like I was myself orbiting out in the vacuum, and I remember that time I’d blacked out one christmas outside at a bus stop and woke up with my cheek planted numbly on the concrete. When your face hurts and you haven’t just woken from a deep sleep, you know that it’s coming soon. No two ways about that, so long as you’re bundled up anyway.
//E Cheyanne
The plan next day is to grab a denver bound train from here by my suggestion. And when it comes we haven’t waited more than an hour and we are enthusiastic. I don’t know whether the train has been rerouted or the ID itself has a twin, but it was not our train in any case and we found ourselves rolling into cheyanne… 16 hours later.
There is a lot of delay, hours of mystery and waiting on one lonely track somewhere in the nowhere between Laramie and Cheyanne. The dawg’s mut has pissed in their miniwell and he moves back to the dupes at some point, and when I get out to piss myself for the last time and see him flagging me down from 20 fifties or so back. I am surprised I even notice his little arm waving all that way down at the corner of my eye. Turning towards him and squaring my feet I flip him off with both hands high and hard and I scream a big triumphant ‘fuck you’, and laugh as he throws an arm at me in the ‘up yours, then’ fashion. All this quiet with nothing to do and I’m starting to feel like a mongrel myself I’m so backed up. It’s been weeks since I touched my dick but to piss, I’ve been too busy being down and out to get any action or to now and then remember to masterbate. Hoping PJ doesn’t take my middle fingers to heart I grab my shit and mosey on down to his pussie caboose. We don’t know why we are waiting so long and as far as my experience goes it might as well be normal anyhow. PJ switches on the radio and punches in the road frequencies and soon we are able to gain some bearings as we follow the intermittent conversations held between dispatch and crew. Trains stop all the fucking time, for no apparent reason in places, and I was only just learning this then, but did not feel in any rush about it and welcomed the extra downtime. Mapping out other things and plans unrelated when there was quiet, and remembering places and people like they were yesterday when there wasn’t any quiet.
Cheyenne.. for one day it is like any other small town. The market, the bookstore, the world-thirsty locals and their dull conversation, the colorful homebums at the mission, the library. We hold one last sidelong conference for denver, and then we are on a couple of grainers for n platte before sundown.
//F North Platte
North platte is roughly 8–10 hours out give or take and because the yd is the giant that it is the dawg and I disembark at the first clearance light.. close to 10 miles from mcdonalds. I’ve got shit on the brain all night on the ride over and don’t sleep hardly but an hour and on the march into town I witness all the nuances and shades of approaching dawn overhead, time-lapsed in half a step to the rhythm of my right foot and I see stars where there are none and hear birds where there probably weren’t any on this delirious nonstop 3 hour death waltz for mcdonalds.
The rest of the morning I am this grouchy zombie and try not to make any hard remarks but inevitably make a few and the dawg gets butthurt. Can’t be helped.. I am bigger a dick than ever when I haven’t had sleep. But its my own fault if I didn’t sleep and the dawg doesn’t deserve my sour smells. For whatever reason PJ decides not to spange and we don’t make any bills either sitting at the walmart and after lunch do the skeleton dance all over again back for the yard.
There is this woman in her 30’s somewhere on the way there and she looks like Jennifer Connelly. We get my head shaved on her lawn with her clippers. But goddamn if I didn’t want to just get down with the broad instead on her lawn there, and bury my face in her groin. In front of her kids, in front of my dawg, in front of everyone I wouldn’t’ve bat an eye.
We say goodbye and we have a ball the next few hours finding the right train in the biggest departure yard of the us of a… grainers for us this time again and we barely have time to make a run for it as the end is coming just about as soon as we spot the damn thing. But we both find a V, and he w/ his fucking dog. How in all the lands of shit scum and blood he carries on like that, dragging the pooch along in tight situations week after week, I wouldn’t even want to try. So here it is another dusk settling in on us and we’re off on another night train, for KCMO.
//G Kansas City
Bright and early we roll in, and like good little tramps we abandon ship before it disappears into another labyrinth of steel. The walk isn’t far to amenities this time and there is more breath for conversation.
It’s the biggest city I’ve seen since leaving seattle earlier that year and I am met with all of the same old stifling crap. The high rises and traffic and city suits and street talk and construction workers and crazies of all shapes and sizes and denominations.
I run into a friend from alaska at the library and we catch up for a minute. I don’t expect any generosity out of this guy, Cliff, because he was next to bumming it himself and half crazed with loneliness to begin with when I’d got to know him up there. I don’t expect much else has changed in 6 months apart from his haircut and clothing. Poor guy. I say so long to Cliff, “small fuckin world after all, hey?”.. and we beat it to find le ol’ busking corner on the other side of town.
Doggies one and two make no money and, 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.
I’m not exactly a looker myself, I’ll be the first to admit, but a 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 through all the middles of nowhere like ghosts.
That night the temperature snaps below freezing and it’s a fucking blizzard. We have gone from bright summer skies to winter overnight and after trying the NS yard first and finding nothing we decide against chicago altogether and agree on Texas instead… … … where we can get back in touch with our feminine sides and walk around in our t-shirts and drink whiskey without worrying about frostbite.
SO it has been colder than shit for a week here in KC yada yada and my partner in crime’s morale during this time has plummeted alarmingly.
We have a fun time of it at first camping out like boy scouts in the woods while we wait on a sbd. But a rideable sbd never shows and we are beginning to lose our grip on reality anymore… Like, if it says it’s going to come at noon in the little book, then what in the actual fuck is going on??? We begin to starve without noticing as the quarreling turns literally ceaseless, but then when I go to bust him over the nose for calling me a idiot his fucking nose just falls off like he were made of wax, and that’s when we realize it’s been 4 days since anyone has gone out for beer or water. So first we set up to eat bedlilly the dog but Penny doesn’t cook it up right and the carcass spoils overnight … … Sorry, nah, we don’t do that. That’s all just some shit I made up. But we are really beginning to hate each others guts and it’s truly a harsh week, with little to eat.. and the isolation from society is turning my friend into a puss, which turns me into a prick.
A week later we are in a nearby UP departure yd, we’ve finally found a san antonio and are waiting for it to pull off and we are up and down the yard marking cars. I’m doing two three sometimes four monikers at a time, sometimes scrawling random lines of poetry, drawing tits and ass all over the place and getting dippy on 211. It’s nights like this you just don’t give a fuck and you know it and you know you’ve got nothing to worry about because you’ve got your ride and you’ve not been driven completely nuts by the cold or lost any digits just yet and there is still money in the pocket. And when you do lose all of these things, well then don’t suppose there’ll be no reason to worry at all again because there’ll be nothing left to lose.
These are the pillars of happiness, guys. A little money, a little time, and a fucking beer.
//H Muskogee
36–40 hours in this cold steel coffin south to middle OK. My feet and hands and asscheeks all feel like razors in my mind every time I get out to take a leak so I spend most of the days shut up in my bedding, sleeping like a jailbird in 8–12 hour stretches at a time and jacking off during the nights to keep active and semi-warm. A good deal of that time was spent getting flat switched and sorted in the dark of parsons yd, kansas hungrier than shit.. laying inside my ca grainer half mummified, going full retard and thinking of nothing but a fucking burger fries and shake… and sometimes tits. On ronald mcdonald.
Rolling into Muskogee, the cold is already a lot more bearable, and we’re stoked just to have our feet on the ground and headed for the first diner.
The place isn’t half bad and ol PJ makes bank at the walmart, splitting it with me on a “hotey”. 100 bucks more and we might’ve considered a hooker, or so he says. But the cop finally shows when I take the sign, and gives us the thumb. Cops love me like that what can I say.
Pretty gals all over Muskogee, turns out.
//I TEXAS
A coal train takes us south over the boarder to Dennison tx. When we stop it is noon and we are expecting a quick cc, not a 1000 mile check… so we’re in there sharing anecdotes and picking our butts when the door opens without warning and one of the ugliest fucking faces I’ve ever seen in my life pops through the door. He pauses a moment before a look of hostility spreads across this asslicking, baby eating skud missile of an axeface .. and all he says is “ahhhhh shiiiiit”. I throw up my hands in surrender, incase he has a gun. We apologize, flying out the back in a matter of seconds, and off through the bushes for cover like a couple of girls with their titties hanging.
Later, after completing the routine dental-clinic-Mcdonalds-Walmart-Booze-market circuit we make our way back to the yard and find another southward coal train, or possibly the same one.
At this point.. mulling it over carefully, ruminating, I am chewing over the idea of riding another dpu w my dawg and finding the prospect unpleasant. Tensions were pretty high earlier that day and in the interest of safety and perseverance of his health and mine I decide against it. And in the process I decide also that it is high time we parted ways anyhow… only I don’t say that. Instead I let him trundle off for the pussy caboose and after finishing my beer I make for a bucket of coal and verify the trace.
The ride down for ft worth through the night and all that blinding coal dust is warm enough to think but not enough to sleep uncovered, and when we side out halfway to ft worth it is still dark and I sack out behind someone’s garage nearby and take a well needed time-out. I hear the air from somewhere in a heavy sleep 2 hours later and I immediately jump out and roll up again and clamber back into my boots and to my coal with enormous effort, just in time to drag myself up the ladder as it is edging forward.
//FT WORTH
I switch trains in ft worth and ride on a junker that stops and stops and stops, though unimpeded, to hearne.. then houston, then san antonio and then for austin from SA’s South UP yd. Because all all of these couple of weeks gone through hearne, houston, san antonio are all filled with mishaps although funny to me and educational I won’t go on. But to sum it up hearne was a misleading whore, houston a crazy clingy bitch from hell, and san antonio a one night stand.
//J AUSTIN
Rolling in on Austin I only know that it is austin from the spires of steel and all of the restaurants I see in the streets adjacent and when the train slows for the bridge over the river I make up my mind. Knowing I’ll probably not get another chance, I throw off my things first then successfully step down, running it off. I am instantly pleased with where I’ve landed. I am between an unfinished upscale apartment complex on one side of the tracks, and a patch of wilderness on the other. Not bad.
10 minutes later, after collecting myself I head north toward the bridge and before I get to it I see a jack in the box and I climb down the ballast for some breakfast.
It is cloudless, quiet, and warm. There are birds singing and there are leaves, alive and green in the trees. There are two of the most beautiful women I’ve laid eyes on in months on the opposite side of the road and I almost scream “I love it!! I love Austin!!” but I don’t. Just like in a movies, I want to feel myself all and make sure I’m really there, because I have apparently hopped a train into paradise.
A week later I am sleeping at the same spot there where I’d landed, getting shit going in the way of money. I’m asleep just a couple of blocks south of the bridge over the river. Treadwell & Lamar … on the day of the winter solstice there was somebody mauled by a train there where I slept, just up the ballast 15–20 feet away from where I lay.. I wake to engine units and cops and from the way they speak to me I could guess what had happened.
I come back that night w/ half a 22oz in hand in time for the full moon, and having a grand ol time standing over the spot, smelling the spot, trying not to soil my boots on the spot, and contemplating the enigmas of life and death and how strange it is to have known the thing dead when it was just a live stranger and not yet another stranger thing still. And also wondering in my bewilderment if maybe the accident hadn’t saved me from something bad, something worse like a knife at the throat too early in the morning to have a fighting chance.
So I am making a fiction of it already, beer, the full moon, a good buzz. It’s this or pretending my hand is that girl with the face.. when out of the darkness ahead as I am looking up comes running this behemoth of a nigger. All I can see is teeth and a wife beater. He draws closer and I see that this is in fact all he has on him. Tennis shoes, a tank… and a jockstrap.
He stops. The voice of my highschool sweetheart issues from it all and asks me point blank, standing not approximately but exactly on top of this slick of blood and ooze, he asks me if I want a blow-job, “or anything”.
I ask him if he would kindly step off of my dog’s remains and resting place, and that I’d just watched clifford killed early that morning.
Truth in fact I didn’t say that about my dog I said “why not”, and there he went on me, working away like a piglet at a teet. Sometimes if I want to keep myself from going off too soon in some other bed I think of things to make me laugh (for which I have stockpiled a treasure trove over the last 5–6 years) and more often than not I remember this negro, and imagine what he mightve thought about the red on his knees after finding them in proper light. Nothing like a good hearty laugh to kill the moment.
...... Again, Nah. That is the story I stood telling at a graduation banquet last summer to 50 or so people. True enough, but false conclusion. For no reason other than to play off like I was wasted and to see the look on their shit eating faces when I capped off the last line “And that is how I came here to Green String Institute!!! Thank you!!! You don't get opportunities like this very often. Or at least I don't.
Unexpectedly, I get compliments the rest of the night for it. Which is no surprise, in hindsight.. It was after all in that never never land far off in the clouds known as the bay area, where it is rumored to be rainbows and flying elephants and elves and fairy dust.. and there was. That and a shitload of good food and beer.
It’s halloween, or the day after halloween. I remember that it is the day after halloween because november first marked the 2nd anniversary to the night I caught my first train… into jail. I forget most everything besides so it doesn’t really matter.. so I am grabbing onto an eastbound manifest airing up for clearance on champ siding. With my road dawg and his doggy dog hopping up into the grainer ahead of mine.
A little context:
The previous 3 months things have gone about opposite from how they were charted to. I came back down from alaska with 4000, a new outlook and a conservative game plan to go with it. Instead of taking flight out to spain or switzerland or buying a car or spending it all on hookers, I’d resolved to turn myself back into an american citizen and reintroducing myself back into the way of life. Serious business. I set about finding any job I can get straight away so I can build up from there. Pretty simple. But these things, you know how it is, they go their own way for whatever reason… your boots don’t fit right, that extra elevated section in the side walk keeps tripping you up, someone doesn’t like your shirt, or that one day you’re completely fucked up because of all the drinking you did the night before.. and in my case it was the pos of dangerous weapon charge on my backcheck from almost two years previous. I essentially nail THREE jobs in a row, and there is a week there that I am not even sure which one I want. Hertz parking tenant, Fisherman’s finest deck hand, or warehouse associate down in wilsonville? But they all call me back, one after the other, about the same thing. I’m harmless and drug free as a bee but no one wants to hire me and weeks wear on. Taking it like a man, naturally I make no effort to reduce spending and carry on lounging around bars and restaurants like a king. I’ll find something.
A month later I’m sleeping in the fields next to the airport and five days in seven there is not money enough for bus fare into town, so I’m walking. Walking 2 hours into the labor ready at 5 in the morning, walking 3 hours to yellow brick road on thursdays, walking an hour to my weekend drinking spot on the siding or else up to the dawg’s place on Sandy. Walking and walking and walking.
Meanwhile I am leaving my shit in the field where there is no one. But as it happens there doesn’t always have to be anyone there that will take your shit at all for your shit to disappear. One night I get off the lightrail back from a long day of job searching and hitting up food banks, and stepping into my home field I discover that it has been mowed. It and all my shit with it has been fucking pulverized. Steel toe boots, coat, pack, sleep system, everything.
Still I salvage some things that are not completely torn apart and manage with what I’ve got. Summer is still alive and well for another month and all I really need to do before then is find a tarp for the rain.
This is trivial survival shit, but it’s just the kind of shit I was getting tired of and I need to find somewhere to clear my mind. . .
The day we make it out, I get off work with about 120 in my pocket, just enough to buy myself a proper coat down at the carhartt store at cascade station. I’ve got an old pair of boots I picked up in Bend the month before as well as a brand new bivvy. In other words, I’ve covered all the essentials in the knick of time and by the seat of my pants, too.
This train’s been held for clearance for two hours and more and when it finally inches forward night is well underway and I can see the dusky orange-peach blue silver-blooming studs drawing in over west portland from beyond the patches of cloud. I will not see this sky again for eight months.
As we clear troutdale I down my last beer and lapse into tranquility. This ride is a familiar one after my second ever freight train 10 months before. The columbia has always been one of the closest approximations to home for me, next to the cascades, and I have fond memories of this corridor that I won’t soon forget.
We pass multnomah falls and for an instant I glimpse the snow of it through the dark like a colossal apparition, and so moved by the recollection of it from before that I break into song. First mouthing then outright yelling, trying to feel out the correct notes to silkworm’s lepidoptera beneath the tidal waves of wind and steel. I go on like that for a couple of hours, the feeling in my chest swelling higher wider deeper, belting it all out of every cubic millimeter of my lungs as if to pinch out the lights on the far bank with the foghorn in my heart. I go until I run out of all the songs I know words to, and run out of courage in the improvising of my own. And the hand brake chimes in and we roll to a gradual halt on a single main with no signal in view.
We are stopped a good long time before road dawgy dawg and doggy too come down back and pay me a visit, offering gifts of whiskey and tobacco which I accept gratefully like a pilgrim at the first thanksgiving, newly baptized now in the light of a strange moon and changed for the time into someone other than the person that left the mother land.
Dawg screams at his mut, “bedlilly you fucking piece of shit we’re free! .. No more niggers coming to visit and shit on your floor my boy!!
..Not even the floor anymore. No, fuck carpets, seriously. If she aint shaved she’s got no business kissing my feet, know what I mean severin!??”
My voice I discover has sunk decibels lower than normal and I hope my companion is not unnerved by this at all, as he seems to notice nothing. The next day my voice is all but gone and it will be at least a week more before it comes back.
“Fuck carpets and fuck you you fucking goon, gimme some of that bourbon goddammit before I throw yer dog into the river, pussy and all!!”
“I won’t allow it, but you can suck his balls if I’m gonna give you any more of this.”
“He don’t have anymore balls, dogfucker!”
“Yer not gonna have anymore either”
“Maybe cause you gonna be eaten them like a fucking rabbit when I’m passed out on it, fucking honky ass queer. I don’t even want anymore, keep it.”
“HAHAH. Here”
“Thanks. Moons like a jewel tonight isn’t she.”
“Wonder what the fuck they’re doing up there anyway. We’re not even sided”
“Don’t know, don’t even fucking care. Because fuck portland and hello cool breeze.”
“Yeah, stump town can suck my nuts. But we’re in the shit now bud, you and me.”
“Fuck yeah, bitch.”
“Speaking of shit, I gotta take a shit. We’ll be in Hinkle before morning, don’t sleep heavy on it or I’ll come back and stomp yer ass, yer bootlicker.”
“Righto.”
//B Hinkle
I wanna talk about fung shay for a moment. It’s interesting, fung shay, because no one of us ever thinks twice about sound and magnetics and chemistry and what until something unexplained happens. They say that sound is but a partition of color, and color of light.
And light of space and space of time, and I don’t suppose time is but the shell on the back on the turtle of the turtle on the next and so on. So many turds in the swan pond to me, brothers and sisters honestly but there are places that all of these things seem to come together to create something strange. Not this garbage about turtles, I mean there is a music…
There is one night in the week, for instance, one night, the same night every week, a thursday that I’d found that if I’d turned my head at the right angle sometime after midnight on the pillow in my bead I could make out a harmony. Harmony as in the dual sounding of two notes at certain places down the neck of a stringed instrument. Every thursday night somewhere after midnight and provided I angled my one ear in the right direction, there would be perceived a note characteristic of the sounding of two other notes. One is the vibration created between the lower one half-pane of the bedroom window that slides to open and the upper portion. The other source more mysterious but after some deliberation I decide is a low hum coming from the nearby hills out toward east selah and the training base beyond. Every thursday, and the result is a harmonic as I said, created through resonance.
So it is two octaves of roughly the same note in this case, and that is what I came to look forward to listening to as I would drift off, provided I’d not already fallen into sleep.
There are also these things called geoclysmic symmetrations which when one is in place to see it, the entire western face of a mountainside for instance may be transformed into a rough semblance of a bear, or of a man laying on his back for instance looking up at the sky. Think of the face they’ve claimed to find on mars. Fung shay folks, fung shay. That is, providing that it is the right time of day and the sun to the south is creating the effect of the shadow enough to make out the earnest grimace on the man’s face … obviously the martians didn’t get enough lay. But maybe they were too busy. Busy building faces in the dirt for posterity or some thing, I won’t be the judge.
So too, there is this section of track that night on the columbia line, some miles after Boardman as one heads into Hinkle, that I remember particularly for the same reasons. There, shortly after the columbia curves off from us into the trinities and looking off to the south there are again those same thousand red eyes blinking in unison for miles and miles and one is hypnotized, without phone or radio or watch to force out the dark, and laying back to close your eyes there is this distinctly cacophonous low pitched groan created by some defect peculiar to that section of track. It is this wall of noise at first, but then, with a bit of adjustment all harmony. And there is this magic, this music, that is like a symphony in the clouds that seems to bend and bow and billow out of every 3 winged wind powered angel out there and it sings to you. If you’ll let it.
We must’ve hit into hinkle somewhere after midnight. I already know Hinkle by this point and the immaculate desolation one jumps into if one should hit in at night, into all that emptiness. The first time Hinkle is like stepping ones first accidental step on the moon or any moon in a dream, it’s spooky and soulless. The second time Hinkle it’s just the same but you are hit with it again all at once and know at least not to go towards the light, in the case that you’re hungry, unless you’re prepared for a hike, or a swim.
We take cover in the old units there at the Y west of the yard, and sleep off all our whiskey through the remaining dark before dawn comes and china brings us some stacks. We ride all the early day but get only as far as pendleton, where the train stops for no conceivable reason and where we conclude there must be a problem with the dupe as we watch the engineer walking back toward us. We vacate, and the walk into Pendleton is hot and uneventful and hungry, but we make it and we find a place to crash without any trouble. There is, of course, a bus and we take it the next day into La Grande.
How many more days we stay in la grande it might’ve been one, it might’ve been three or four and since already having spent time there a month prior, my memory is foggy on it but I can guess that the holdup was a banal one.. a matter of juggling sleep with odd-duck train arrivals. I already know well by this point the incredible effort of dragging oneself out of a comatose to pack up and charge out for the ride, but I had not been expecting my dawg as experienced as he was to be so neglectful when the time came to gtfo of dodge, rain or shine dawn or dusk… and this would be the beginning of our unraveling partnership, already, as the weeks following would prove.
//C Pocatello
It is dusk again when we have an IM east bound, which we ride through Napa for Pocatello. It is the usual 8–12 hours out and for a couple of days we stay with acquaintances whose names I forget. No, hold up, I am remembering.. Cassidy and Casper.. Cassidy is kind of a lookin’ bitch and Casper is kind of a storyteller, and together they make.. alcoholics.
In the meantime we try different corners both alone once and together the next and after sponging a few bucks from the locals we head out, carefully, from the yard there. It’s a gon for wyoming through the following day and for the first time the distance we’ve covered since Portland is beginning to feel palpable.
It’s here also that I discover the different ways one learns to piss to spite the wind. Kind of like people-politics.. sometimes you gotta get up real close so that your pecker is almost touching in order that no one gets hit with the fallout. And other times the airflow is such that it is only possible to go sideways, into the thin air and when there is a backdraft you stop off the flow and wait or face the consequences. Receiving yourself on the train is a skill and requires some craftiness but one quickly learns, in the interest of not giving ourselves a golden shower. Or, as Penny Jayne and I called it, taking a bitch-piss.
//D Green River
In green river we are met with nothing but kindness and generosity and I am glad that we do not linger there and spoil that impression it left in me for the next time I find myself passing through. A woman and her husband who run a small business there buys us both take-out from the neighboring restaurant without any instigation whatsoever from either of us and on the way back through town there is a cashier bringing us out clearance dog food and candy bars, and there is a passing car a little up the road full of smoking hot young gals shelling out five bucks to each of us, I guess for being so damned sexy ourselves. Blowing kisses they drive off and I feel like dancing a boogy right after them.
“Penny!” I say, “Penny, we’ve gotten to be celebrities!”.. “Penny, seriously. Look here now, it’s been a good run but I don’t know if I can take the fame anymore. It upsets my sensibilities, and you have to understand I don’t want no mo part in it!!!” …
“PENNY PL—“
“SHHHHH, fuck you dork keep it the fuck down and decent, christ.”
“Let’s find some goils, dawgy”
“Don’t be such a goddamn rapist and maybe we can”
“Yer the fucking pedophile here, hoser”
When we finally sack out in the frost bitten air we sleep on bellies gorged with mexican food. The open sky drops cold down onto my face like I was myself orbiting out in the vacuum, and I remember that time I’d blacked out one christmas outside at a bus stop and woke up with my cheek planted numbly on the concrete. When your face hurts and you haven’t just woken from a deep sleep, you know that it’s coming soon. No two ways about that, so long as you’re bundled up anyway.
//E Cheyanne
The plan next day is to grab a denver bound train from here by my suggestion. And when it comes we haven’t waited more than an hour and we are enthusiastic. I don’t know whether the train has been rerouted or the ID itself has a twin, but it was not our train in any case and we found ourselves rolling into cheyanne… 16 hours later.
There is a lot of delay, hours of mystery and waiting on one lonely track somewhere in the nowhere between Laramie and Cheyanne. The dawg’s mut has pissed in their miniwell and he moves back to the dupes at some point, and when I get out to piss myself for the last time and see him flagging me down from 20 fifties or so back. I am surprised I even notice his little arm waving all that way down at the corner of my eye. Turning towards him and squaring my feet I flip him off with both hands high and hard and I scream a big triumphant ‘fuck you’, and laugh as he throws an arm at me in the ‘up yours, then’ fashion. All this quiet with nothing to do and I’m starting to feel like a mongrel myself I’m so backed up. It’s been weeks since I touched my dick but to piss, I’ve been too busy being down and out to get any action or to now and then remember to masterbate. Hoping PJ doesn’t take my middle fingers to heart I grab my shit and mosey on down to his pussie caboose. We don’t know why we are waiting so long and as far as my experience goes it might as well be normal anyhow. PJ switches on the radio and punches in the road frequencies and soon we are able to gain some bearings as we follow the intermittent conversations held between dispatch and crew. Trains stop all the fucking time, for no apparent reason in places, and I was only just learning this then, but did not feel in any rush about it and welcomed the extra downtime. Mapping out other things and plans unrelated when there was quiet, and remembering places and people like they were yesterday when there wasn’t any quiet.
Cheyenne.. for one day it is like any other small town. The market, the bookstore, the world-thirsty locals and their dull conversation, the colorful homebums at the mission, the library. We hold one last sidelong conference for denver, and then we are on a couple of grainers for n platte before sundown.
//F North Platte
North platte is roughly 8–10 hours out give or take and because the yd is the giant that it is the dawg and I disembark at the first clearance light.. close to 10 miles from mcdonalds. I’ve got shit on the brain all night on the ride over and don’t sleep hardly but an hour and on the march into town I witness all the nuances and shades of approaching dawn overhead, time-lapsed in half a step to the rhythm of my right foot and I see stars where there are none and hear birds where there probably weren’t any on this delirious nonstop 3 hour death waltz for mcdonalds.
The rest of the morning I am this grouchy zombie and try not to make any hard remarks but inevitably make a few and the dawg gets butthurt. Can’t be helped.. I am bigger a dick than ever when I haven’t had sleep. But its my own fault if I didn’t sleep and the dawg doesn’t deserve my sour smells. For whatever reason PJ decides not to spange and we don’t make any bills either sitting at the walmart and after lunch do the skeleton dance all over again back for the yard.
There is this woman in her 30’s somewhere on the way there and she looks like Jennifer Connelly. We get my head shaved on her lawn with her clippers. But goddamn if I didn’t want to just get down with the broad instead on her lawn there, and bury my face in her groin. In front of her kids, in front of my dawg, in front of everyone I wouldn’t’ve bat an eye.
We say goodbye and we have a ball the next few hours finding the right train in the biggest departure yard of the us of a… grainers for us this time again and we barely have time to make a run for it as the end is coming just about as soon as we spot the damn thing. But we both find a V, and he w/ his fucking dog. How in all the lands of shit scum and blood he carries on like that, dragging the pooch along in tight situations week after week, I wouldn’t even want to try. So here it is another dusk settling in on us and we’re off on another night train, for KCMO.
//G Kansas City
Bright and early we roll in, and like good little tramps we abandon ship before it disappears into another labyrinth of steel. The walk isn’t far to amenities this time and there is more breath for conversation.
It’s the biggest city I’ve seen since leaving seattle earlier that year and I am met with all of the same old stifling crap. The high rises and traffic and city suits and street talk and construction workers and crazies of all shapes and sizes and denominations.
I run into a friend from alaska at the library and we catch up for a minute. I don’t expect any generosity out of this guy, Cliff, because he was next to bumming it himself and half crazed with loneliness to begin with when I’d got to know him up there. I don’t expect much else has changed in 6 months apart from his haircut and clothing. Poor guy. I say so long to Cliff, “small fuckin world after all, hey?”.. and we beat it to find le ol’ busking corner on the other side of town.
Doggies one and two make no money and, 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.
I’m not exactly a looker myself, I’ll be the first to admit, but a 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 through all the middles of nowhere like ghosts.
That night the temperature snaps below freezing and it’s a fucking blizzard. We have gone from bright summer skies to winter overnight and after trying the NS yard first and finding nothing we decide against chicago altogether and agree on Texas instead… … … where we can get back in touch with our feminine sides and walk around in our t-shirts and drink whiskey without worrying about frostbite.
SO it has been colder than shit for a week here in KC yada yada and my partner in crime’s morale during this time has plummeted alarmingly.
We have a fun time of it at first camping out like boy scouts in the woods while we wait on a sbd. But a rideable sbd never shows and we are beginning to lose our grip on reality anymore… Like, if it says it’s going to come at noon in the little book, then what in the actual fuck is going on??? We begin to starve without noticing as the quarreling turns literally ceaseless, but then when I go to bust him over the nose for calling me a idiot his fucking nose just falls off like he were made of wax, and that’s when we realize it’s been 4 days since anyone has gone out for beer or water. So first we set up to eat bedlilly the dog but Penny doesn’t cook it up right and the carcass spoils overnight … … Sorry, nah, we don’t do that. That’s all just some shit I made up. But we are really beginning to hate each others guts and it’s truly a harsh week, with little to eat.. and the isolation from society is turning my friend into a puss, which turns me into a prick.
A week later we are in a nearby UP departure yd, we’ve finally found a san antonio and are waiting for it to pull off and we are up and down the yard marking cars. I’m doing two three sometimes four monikers at a time, sometimes scrawling random lines of poetry, drawing tits and ass all over the place and getting dippy on 211. It’s nights like this you just don’t give a fuck and you know it and you know you’ve got nothing to worry about because you’ve got your ride and you’ve not been driven completely nuts by the cold or lost any digits just yet and there is still money in the pocket. And when you do lose all of these things, well then don’t suppose there’ll be no reason to worry at all again because there’ll be nothing left to lose.
These are the pillars of happiness, guys. A little money, a little time, and a fucking beer.
//H Muskogee
36–40 hours in this cold steel coffin south to middle OK. My feet and hands and asscheeks all feel like razors in my mind every time I get out to take a leak so I spend most of the days shut up in my bedding, sleeping like a jailbird in 8–12 hour stretches at a time and jacking off during the nights to keep active and semi-warm. A good deal of that time was spent getting flat switched and sorted in the dark of parsons yd, kansas hungrier than shit.. laying inside my ca grainer half mummified, going full retard and thinking of nothing but a fucking burger fries and shake… and sometimes tits. On ronald mcdonald.
Rolling into Muskogee, the cold is already a lot more bearable, and we’re stoked just to have our feet on the ground and headed for the first diner.
The place isn’t half bad and ol PJ makes bank at the walmart, splitting it with me on a “hotey”. 100 bucks more and we might’ve considered a hooker, or so he says. But the cop finally shows when I take the sign, and gives us the thumb. Cops love me like that what can I say.
Pretty gals all over Muskogee, turns out.
//I TEXAS
A coal train takes us south over the boarder to Dennison tx. When we stop it is noon and we are expecting a quick cc, not a 1000 mile check… so we’re in there sharing anecdotes and picking our butts when the door opens without warning and one of the ugliest fucking faces I’ve ever seen in my life pops through the door. He pauses a moment before a look of hostility spreads across this asslicking, baby eating skud missile of an axeface .. and all he says is “ahhhhh shiiiiit”. I throw up my hands in surrender, incase he has a gun. We apologize, flying out the back in a matter of seconds, and off through the bushes for cover like a couple of girls with their titties hanging.
Later, after completing the routine dental-clinic-Mcdonalds-Walmart-Booze-market circuit we make our way back to the yard and find another southward coal train, or possibly the same one.
At this point.. mulling it over carefully, ruminating, I am chewing over the idea of riding another dpu w my dawg and finding the prospect unpleasant. Tensions were pretty high earlier that day and in the interest of safety and perseverance of his health and mine I decide against it. And in the process I decide also that it is high time we parted ways anyhow… only I don’t say that. Instead I let him trundle off for the pussy caboose and after finishing my beer I make for a bucket of coal and verify the trace.
The ride down for ft worth through the night and all that blinding coal dust is warm enough to think but not enough to sleep uncovered, and when we side out halfway to ft worth it is still dark and I sack out behind someone’s garage nearby and take a well needed time-out. I hear the air from somewhere in a heavy sleep 2 hours later and I immediately jump out and roll up again and clamber back into my boots and to my coal with enormous effort, just in time to drag myself up the ladder as it is edging forward.
//FT WORTH
I switch trains in ft worth and ride on a junker that stops and stops and stops, though unimpeded, to hearne.. then houston, then san antonio and then for austin from SA’s South UP yd. Because all all of these couple of weeks gone through hearne, houston, san antonio are all filled with mishaps although funny to me and educational I won’t go on. But to sum it up hearne was a misleading whore, houston a crazy clingy bitch from hell, and san antonio a one night stand.
//J AUSTIN
Rolling in on Austin I only know that it is austin from the spires of steel and all of the restaurants I see in the streets adjacent and when the train slows for the bridge over the river I make up my mind. Knowing I’ll probably not get another chance, I throw off my things first then successfully step down, running it off. I am instantly pleased with where I’ve landed. I am between an unfinished upscale apartment complex on one side of the tracks, and a patch of wilderness on the other. Not bad.
10 minutes later, after collecting myself I head north toward the bridge and before I get to it I see a jack in the box and I climb down the ballast for some breakfast.
It is cloudless, quiet, and warm. There are birds singing and there are leaves, alive and green in the trees. There are two of the most beautiful women I’ve laid eyes on in months on the opposite side of the road and I almost scream “I love it!! I love Austin!!” but I don’t. Just like in a movies, I want to feel myself all and make sure I’m really there, because I have apparently hopped a train into paradise.
A week later I am sleeping at the same spot there where I’d landed, getting shit going in the way of money. I’m asleep just a couple of blocks south of the bridge over the river. Treadwell & Lamar … on the day of the winter solstice there was somebody mauled by a train there where I slept, just up the ballast 15–20 feet away from where I lay.. I wake to engine units and cops and from the way they speak to me I could guess what had happened.
I come back that night w/ half a 22oz in hand in time for the full moon, and having a grand ol time standing over the spot, smelling the spot, trying not to soil my boots on the spot, and contemplating the enigmas of life and death and how strange it is to have known the thing dead when it was just a live stranger and not yet another stranger thing still. And also wondering in my bewilderment if maybe the accident hadn’t saved me from something bad, something worse like a knife at the throat too early in the morning to have a fighting chance.
So I am making a fiction of it already, beer, the full moon, a good buzz. It’s this or pretending my hand is that girl with the face.. when out of the darkness ahead as I am looking up comes running this behemoth of a nigger. All I can see is teeth and a wife beater. He draws closer and I see that this is in fact all he has on him. Tennis shoes, a tank… and a jockstrap.
He stops. The voice of my highschool sweetheart issues from it all and asks me point blank, standing not approximately but exactly on top of this slick of blood and ooze, he asks me if I want a blow-job, “or anything”.
I ask him if he would kindly step off of my dog’s remains and resting place, and that I’d just watched clifford killed early that morning.
Truth in fact I didn’t say that about my dog I said “why not”, and there he went on me, working away like a piglet at a teet. Sometimes if I want to keep myself from going off too soon in some other bed I think of things to make me laugh (for which I have stockpiled a treasure trove over the last 5–6 years) and more often than not I remember this negro, and imagine what he mightve thought about the red on his knees after finding them in proper light. Nothing like a good hearty laugh to kill the moment.
...... Again, Nah. That is the story I stood telling at a graduation banquet last summer to 50 or so people. True enough, but false conclusion. For no reason other than to play off like I was wasted and to see the look on their shit eating faces when I capped off the last line “And that is how I came here to Green String Institute!!! Thank you!!! You don't get opportunities like this very often. Or at least I don't.
Unexpectedly, I get compliments the rest of the night for it. Which is no surprise, in hindsight.. It was after all in that never never land far off in the clouds known as the bay area, where it is rumored to be rainbows and flying elephants and elves and fairy dust.. and there was. That and a shitload of good food and beer.
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