I usually remember what the various Greyhound Stations look like because of how much time I spent in them. I really miss the old one in San Diego that used to be on Broadway and shared the block with a run down Hotel. Obviously I grew up there but downtown San Diego seems to have changed more than any other city I’m aware of. The Oklahoma City and San Diego Greyhound Stations both used to have Old West style snack bars with wooden wagon wheels and stuff on the wall.
The New Orleans station is among the most visually arresting – sharing space with Amtrak and having brightly colored mid-century murals on the wall. Using counterfeit passes remained easy here after it was impossible in most cities of comparable size but it’s been ages since the last time I tried it. When I lived there I got a Central Casting job for the movie Elvis & Nixon where they disguised the space as a 1970’s Airport Terminal. I was supposed to be a homeless guy sleeping in the background and I did such a convincing job that the security guard tried to kick me out without realizing I was part of the production.
Anyway I can’t remember the Saint Louis one although as soon as I typed those words I had a sudden vision of a fancy indoor mall with high arched glass ceilings. That’s probably actually Union Station and the trip I’m thinking of would have been onboard Megabus: the company that cut costs by only using curb space at other transport companies’ stations and terminals. No matter how hard I try I can’t seem to conjure up an image of the Saint Louis Greyhound – maybe it was possible to catch it at the small transit center near Cement Land called Jennings.
I think the one in Amarillo looked almost identical to the one in Grand Junction, Colorado that was on the route between Chicago and San Diego so I saw a lot of it. A small building with a low ceiling and windows all around it where the buses pulled up on the side. I think I somehow didn’t have a cell phone yet so I found a payphone to call up LBK. My memory might be inaccurate on this detail but I think I didn’t get a cell phone until 2009.
Wait… I just realized that it has to be because I suddenly got a stray memory of buying used cell phones from a liquor store in Saint Louis while I was on the Rockaway. This place was in the shopping center next to a Laundromat and a fried fish spot I’ll tell a story about later just down the street from Cement Land. It was a bigger store run by Middle Eastern guys that sold a bit of everything – electronics, embroidered hats and jerseys, probably hookahs but they had a bunch of used cell phones people had hocked with them underneath the glass counter.
I must have been losing or accidentally breaking cell phones a lot, probably by accidentally dropping them in the river, because I clearly remember doing this several times. The phones were either stolen or nobody bothered erasing their photos so it was always a surprise what you’d find on them. One time it was all pictures of kids but another one was full of blurry shots of Black boobs and beads at Mardi Gras.
I remember getting one that had a sample of a dirty rap song as the ringtone and I had forgotten to change it before I went back to substitute teaching in Chicago. I think I was actually teaching a Preschool Class by the projects when somebody tried to call me and the song started playing. The kids all thought it was really funny:
“I was gettin’ some head, Gettin’ Gettin’ some head…”
On that note I called up LBK when we got into Amarillo and he took us to the office he was working at with Stanley Marsh 3. Brodie had told me some stories about Stanley – that the Marsh and Bush families were big into land and oil together and were the richest families in Texas, that he had created a roadside attraction called Cadillac Ranch and various “prank” street signs around town and a number of other trickster oriented public art projects. The big thing I’d heard was that he had paid a mutual friend from the Rockaway five hundred dollars to jerk off onto him.
On this trip I was traveling with Leg who was also my girlfriend at the time so I didn’t see as much of the scene as I did on subsequent visits – Stanley really didn’t like when girls were around. The office was on the fifteenth floor of the tallest building in Amarillo – it was later called the Chase Tower but I don’t think it was on this first visit. The moment you stepped out of the elevator you were in a big room with oversized upholstered pool balls that Stanley had commissioned and large insanely valuable paintings everywhere. I mean like Jackson Pollocks, Rothkos even some Henri Matisse stuff and it was all just leaning against walls and shit.
There was one older guy who worked in the office, possibly Stanley’s son, and an older female secretary but besides that it was a bunch of “art-punk” looking young men – teenagers and guys in their 20s. I’m not sure what kind of work was actually done in there, maybe managing Stanley’s assets and buying and selling his art collection, but it was mostly set up for skateboarding in, working on art and grabbing snacks from a big well stocked kitchen.
The scene was kind of like the Foot Clan Headquarters in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but also a lot like My Own Private Idaho. Everything was clearly designed to attract and be appealing to the boys who all kind of had the “rough trade” hustler look and Stanley was very clearly a chickenhawk. On this first visit me and Leg were able to get free lunch, this was always hamburgers or club sandwiches with those fancy colored cellophane toothpicks on a plate with French fries that came in those hotel style metal trays, I don’t know where it came from but it seemed to be inside the building.
Me and LBK played around with a color photocopier they had just gotten. We did stuff with aluminum foil and bits of jewelry and experimented with moving the stuff around while the different colors were scanning. If you’ve never played with one of the old kinds it does four consecutive scans: cyan, magenta, yellow and then finally black. You can get cool effects by slightly moving the image either during or between scans. One cool trick is only leaving the image for one of them and then quickly swapping it out with a white piece of paper to make analog color separations.
Stanley would always call on his intercom to ask about whatever friends the guys in the office brought up and if it was younger boys he would ask to meet them in his office. I think this first time he briefly met and talked to both me and Leg but he didn’t try anything. The guys were talking about how I should really see his house called Toad Hall but we couldn’t go this trip because no girls were allowed. We were trying to catch a train toward California that same night anyway.
I never actually made it out to Toad Hall on any of my subsequent visits either so I won’t attempt to describe it but you can Google it – it sounds pretty fucking crazy.
Personally I have a certain repugnance for prostitution at least where I’m concerned. I have no judgement against anybody that does it but I don’t want money to be the reason that I’m fucking somebody or that they’re fucking me. I’m super down with lesser forms of sex work though, I made a solo video for a site called Alternadudes for example, and only having to jack off onto a dude for five hundred dollars sounds like a hell of a payday. I’d do it in a heartbeat.
The next time I passed through Amarillo was on the homeward leg of the 2010 Bleak End/Generation tour. We were grabbing the same free lunch that always gets people in the building when he asked for me to come talk to him in his office. He had an authentic tiger’s skin rug on the floor and laid on a couch where he could watch a wall of TVs like the villain from Watchmen. He’s still the only person I’ve ever met who watched a wall of TVs like this in real life.
I had been wearing a very small pair of black shorts for most of the tour as it was an extremely hot Summer. They had already gotten me kicked out of the workout room at the Providence, Rhode Island YMCA where they said that they were appropriate attire for swimming but not for exercising:
“There are children here!”
I always thought that was a strange argument as children wear small shorts too and there’s nothing overtly sexual about me showing a lot of leg. I could understand if my genitals were full on hanging out or I was brandishing an obvious erection but neither of these was the case. Besides that there were presumably children in the pool too and if anything the water would make the shorts more revealing as it would cause them to cling to my skin.
Anyway in Stanley’s office we were talking about something completely unrelated when he put his hand on my thigh and brought up an acquaintance who had proffered services for payment. I said that I’d heard about it. He gestured toward a pair of buttons on the armrest of his couch:
“If I press this button it will close my door. It won’t be locked but nobody will be walking in and disturbing us.”
I said that was fine. In light of some further revelations I’ll be getting to in a minute here I find it significant that there were two buttons – that there were absolutely situations where he was locking the door. Everybody in that office knew exactly what was going on and never would have opened that door without knocking so the only purpose for the locking button would be something more sinister. More on that in a minute.
I wanted to get right down to business and talk about money but he wanted to wait until after lunch. He was also rather curious about my tour mates:
“What about those other boys, they like getting their dicks played with?”
“I doubt it. They’ve had a pretty strict religious upbringing.”
His plan ended up backfiring for both of us. I didn’t get five hundred dollars and he didn’t get jizzed on. Rain and Joel had been going hard on the snacks – eating gushers and slim jims and shit but once they got wind of what was happening they were grossed out and wanted to leave. They saw the cabinets full of the favorite junk food snacks of their adolescence as a sinister kind of lure which quite obviously they were.
On the way out of the building Joel gestured to a life size bronze sculpture of Abraham Lincoln sharing a bench with a pair of small children:
“There’s Honest Abe… just trying to get an honest blow job!”
I passed back through in 2011 on the way back to California from SXSW but I didn’t get the payday then either. Stanley went for someone else I was traveling with who although older than me maintains eternally youthful features and a surfer’s physique.
I had only ever heard of Stanley’s arrangement going down with legally consenting adults but there was no denying that he was attracted to boyishness and youth. Later in 2011 he had a stroke and was criminally charged and briefly arrested in a suit that eventually involved ten defendants he had coerced into sexual acts from the time they were sixteen. It wasn’t the first time this had happened either – similar cases came up multiple times in the ‘90s but disappeared after large cash settlements.
The same thing happened with the 2011 case and according to rumors made each of the plaintiffs a multimillionaire. There are plenty of eighteen year olds who look sixteen or younger but Marsh was clearly attracted to youth and vulnerability and repeated his pattern of behavior for decades. He was a predator and an entire city looked the other way for decades because of his wealth, influence and status. He deliberately chose victims from the poorest echelons of society in order to get away with it for as long as possible.
He died in 2014 without ever being formally criminally convicted.
Back in 2008 me and Leg went from the office to a space downtown that some of LBK’s friends lived in. I’m not sure if it was normally a performance venue or practice space but it was pretty dark in there and had the black paint and duct tape look of a community theater space. We got some beers and hung out and waited for it to get dark enough that we could catch the train without much possibility of anybody seeing us.
When night fell we grabbed our packs and walked across town to follow Brodie’s map to the proper set of train tracks. A block or two from our destination we ran into a group of Juggalos outside of a Burger King who were clearly on the road as well. They all looked young and chubby, like teddy bears that were completely unprepared for the harsh realities of the dangerous world they were stepping into.
One of them offered us some advice about hitchhiking that I’d largely say was incorrect:
“If you want somebody to give you a ride you gotta have something to offer: either a good story, some drugs or money or you’re gonna have to suck some dick.”
One of the other Juggalos chimed in proudly:
“I’d take one in the mouth for the team!”
That might be how getting rides works at Juggalo Gatherings but it certainly hasn’t been my experience for hitchhiking in general. If you’re standing on the side of the road with a sign out people are already going to assume that you don’t have anything. They want you to either talk, listen or shut the hell up and to have the basic situational awareness to figure out which one of those the situation calls for. To “read the room” as it were.
I did get into one ride where the driver wanted us to hurt or murder him but that’s far from the norm and I’ll get into it in a story eventually. I’m sure the sexual expectations are much higher if you’re hitchhiking as a single female but that doesn’t mean it’s a prerequisite for getting rides. When that shit happens you get out by any means necessary and you find another ride.
One of the Juggalos said “Jesus Loves You” and handed us a single dollar. I was carrying it around for a while as a “Lucky Juggalo Dollar” but I don’t know what happened to it. Maybe Leg kept it. For a brief window of time I would have thought of this dollar as a sort of talisman but this was all very early in my magical thinking career- before the “World’s Worst Magician” phase.
I had said earlier that most of my freight rides were in the company and under the guidance of more experienced riders but this was the one case where it wasn’t – or the second case of you count the brief ride across the Mississippi River. I might be wrong about this but I think that when we left Chicago it was Leg’s first time riding freight. I found one of the “nacho boats” I talked about before and we slipped into it.
The train sped up on the edge of Amarillo and we were on our way to California…
[Note: for more information on Stanley Marsh 3 and the charges against him I highly recommend the following article]
https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/darkness-on-the-plains/
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 