Tag: Hobo

Los Angeles 2010 : Trains, Talismans and Juggalos Part Four “Murder, Mayhem, Rape, Sodomy”

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[Photo Credit: Jamspackula]

The train barreled through the night. We must have been flying along pretty fast because the wind was making the cold nearly unbearable. I live on an isolated mountain forty five minutes from the closest mid-size city but the night of this ride was the darkest sky and brightest stars I ever remember seeing. You can follow dirt roads in the desert to the middle of nowhere but when train tracks bend away from highways and even the possibility of a headlight for hundreds of miles it’s a different kind of night sky.

Deep inky black velvet with stars as bright as planets and the Milky Way screaming through like a tear in space.

The night felt especially cold because Leg and I were in the midst of a “lover’s quarrel” and weren’t on good enough terms to even share body heat. I’ve been kind of skirting around sex and relationships in these pieces, at least the ones that actually mattered to me emotionally, but I’m going to go into the one I had with Leg in a little more detail.

Chicago as a city is really into it’s corner breakfast spots. They usually have a more in depth menu but everybody is generally getting two eggs, hash brown, toast and either two bacon or two sausages. It’s like every few blocks has it’s own independent Waffle House – similar to donut shops in Los Angeles and burrito places in San Diego. I was eating with friends at the one we had kind of adopted and been adopted by when the Peter Pan-ish blond waitress slipped me her phone number.

Ours was the only relationship I’ve ever been in where we didn’t spend every moment of our available time together from the instant we decided it was “on”. We would see each other once or twice a week – it’s not my usual way but I liked how “adult” it felt. I would find out later that this was usually because she was seeing other people. It’s not like we had ever discussed being exclusive but she was very private and secretive about it.

Most of my male friends have actually cheated and lied about it as well instead of just being ommissive and I’m not really the jealous type but I would have appreciated knowing what was going on.

My personal tendency is to be completely, and often brutally, honest – especially in matters pertaining to sex, drugs or rock n’ roll. Between the end of the Living Hell tour and Leg meeting up with me in Chicago I had been with a couple of people and I thought it was best to be transparent about it. In detail. In retrospect things would have gone smoother if I just kept it all to myself but fundamentally that isn’t my nature. It was one of the many ways that we weren’t completely compatible and reasons that we aren’t together now.

Generally a freezing cold night in the desert means it’s about to be followed by a brutally hot day. Without clouds all the heat from the sun that the ground absorbed dissipates but it also means that there’s nothing to protect you from that same sun when it comes back up. We maintained speed through most of Arizona which created a breeze and made things bearable but as Brodie’s photocopied map showed me that we were crossing into California we slowed down, did a lot more siding (when the train stops to allow higher priority trains to pass) and the sun inched steadily higher into the sky.

The metal we were riding on got progressively hotter and insulating ourselves away from it with sleeping bags only did so much. I had a pink polyester nightgown that I liked to put on whenever I was feeling like a little whisp of a thing but now I was wearing it so that I can hold it over myself like a tent to protect me from the relentless sun. It helped a little but not too much. The picture is of me and my friend Manal after we discovered that we both had the exact same one.

We called them “Hailie Selassies” for a reason I can’t seem to remember.

The sun was approaching it’s hottest position of the day, the desert began to look endless and the sidings were becoming both more frequent and interminably long. We carried at least two gallons of water with us when we first boarded in Amarillo but we were nearing the bottom of our reserve. The sun and metal train had heated it to approximately the temperature that one would steep tea in – I’ve heard that hot water is more efficient in terms of hydration but it didn’t feel particularly refreshing or cooling.

After siding in place for an hour we caught sight of an actual highway that we’d gone back to running along and hitchhiking was started to seem like a better deal than sweating in a hot metal box that wasn’t even moving. We gathered our packs and bags and crawled over to the asphalt. Leg said we looked like the backup dancers from Thriller and she wasn’t far off – we were dirty, our lips were chapped, our eyes were bloodshot, we’d had far too much sun and we were starting to awkwardly move in ways that resembled the signature dance moves.

Leg also figured that the first passing motorist would have to gives us a ride as we were in the middle of nowhere and clearly suffering from sun exposure. This wasn’t the case – traffic was slow but the few vehicles that were going by seemed to have no issues not picking us up whatsoever. Finally it seemed that a car had noticed us and pulled over a few yards ahead. He was visibly shocked when we came jogging up because he had just pulled off to use his cellphone but he agreed to give us a ride anyway.

I don’t know if he had genuinely not seen us or if he was just cool with looking at us and leaving us to deal with sun exposure but he at least wasn’t going to tell us no to our faces.

It turned out that we were just outside of Barstow which meant that from around 9 pm the previous night we had covered nearly one thousand miles – really good distance for freight travel. I would learn later that it was coincidentally a stroke of good luck that we’d thrown in the towel when we did as the Barstow Yard is notorious for using both cameras and thermal imaging to pull riders off trains because of the high number of undocumented immigrants passing through on them.

It’s also supposed to be especially harsh concerning prosecution and punishment, far more than Sullivan, Illinois.

Our ride dropped us at a place called Barstow Station – a combination truck stop, Greyhound Station and Amtrak with an over the top railroad theme. Several restaurants including a McDonald’s were set up in old converted train cars. It was an interesting juxtaposition grabbing free cups of ice water from something that looked a lot like the thing we had just been overheating and becoming dangerously dehydrated in.

I’m not usually one for train themed fashion accessories but I couldn’t resist the Barstow Station embroidered patches they had for sale. They featured a colorful train in blues and oranges with a bit of a Babes in Toyland feel. Maybe there circus animals poking their heads out of the cars or something. We both got one and I carried mine in my wallet for years without getting around to sewing it on anything until I lost the wallet. I poked around online but couldn’t find any pictures of it.

We were able to use the counterfeit Greyhound passes we were still carrying to catch a bus to Oakland without any problems. I didn’t really start having problems using them until a later in the Summer – just before and just after the trip to Australia. It took a lot of having friends drive out to the smaller regional stations but I did successfully finish every trip I attempted. I probably could have stretched it out longer but I decided to quit while I was ahead and hang my hat up early.

I’d had a good run with them – most folks I knew had stopped using them years earlier.

John let us stay in Quinn’s special attic room at the Purple Haus and me and Leg finally made up and she drew a cool flyer for the Living Hell reunion show. I was trying to figure out what to use to replace the talismanic dagger that the train police had stolen when I found a conductor’s baton just stuck into the ground like The Sword in the Stone at People’s Park and it became one of my key talismans and one of the last I lost. The show was the first time I saw Rain performing with her brother Joel but the three of us would end up doing two full US Tours together.

I eventually moved to Oakland and into Apgar and attempted to resume the substitute teacher work I had been doing in Chicago but I dropped off some paperwork in my “street clothes” and got my employment offer rescinded for being a messy genderqueer goth. It was a learning experience – I only appeared in conjunction with education jobs dressed in “business casual drag” from then on out. I got a job working for a private tutoring company doing programs based on No Child Left Behind funds which is an essay in itself I might get around to some day.

When I made the move to Los Angeles I ended up working in one of their tutoring centers, the Bay Area jobs had always been inside of schools, and for several months everything was fine. Then one day I get a phone call:

“It has been brought to our attention that you have a violation in the section of Penal Code related to murder, mayhem, rape, sodomy…”

“Excuse me?”

“And then the list goes on to lesser and lesser charges…”

“Yeah, trespassing probably. I got pulled off a freight train once. I didn’t report it as a conviction on my application because as far as I knew it wasn’t”

“Needless to say we’ll need to terminate your employment…”

“Ok, it was nice getting to teach while it was lasted.”

That was that until I got another call from them about three days later:

“We’ve looked into it and your charges don’t actually make you ineligible to work with minors so if you’re interested we’d love to have you back…”

It was about as good of a review as I could have hoped for: that even with the severe tone of that first phone call they wanted me back tutoring kids again. Brodie went back to Sullivan to deal with his charges but I just assumed that if I ignored it for long enough it would. My employer already knew about it and had decided they didn’t care so I didn’t see how else it would be a problem for me all the way in California.

Then in 2011 I attempted to go to the Gathering of the Juggalos…

Saint Louis 2008 : Trains, Talismans and Juggalos Part Two “The Do-Anything Say-Anything Zone”

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[Photo Credit: Tod Seelie]

At the end of the last chapter I was riding in a gondola between Chicago and Saint Louis with Brodie and Leg. I had written last time that giving everybody acid wasn’t a good idea but that might not necessarily be true. We would have gotten pulled off the train and arrested either way and it certainly made the couple hours we spent locked in cement cells more entertaining. It also slightly reduced whatever possession charges I still have in Central Illinois because the acid was clearly packaged and not particularly well hidden.

As we approached a town called Sullivan the train began to slow down and Brodie was pretty sure it wasn’t siding. He figured that a motorist had seen us and called it in and said we would probably need to get ready to run. We hadn’t been super careless like the last ride I described but we had been peeking over the side a bit to look at the scenery. We mostly put our heads back down when we passed through yards, towns or busy roads – Brodie was a very experienced rider.

The train came to a stop with our car directly between two road crossings and local police SUVs were pulling up to both of them. This was when we realized that they knew exactly which car we were in and we must have been spotted by some kind of automatic camera pointed downward at the tracks as the trains came into town. There probably wasn’t too much we could have done about this besides lying motionless under our sleeping bags with the hope of blending in and that’s a pretty miserable way of riding.

We were just in the wrong kind of car – too much visibility.

There was nothing around but a field of knee-high corn and it was obvious that there was no point in running or trying to hide – plus we weren’t really in the mental state for that kind of thing. We threw our packs and bags over the side, hopped off and started rolling up the sleeping bags and getting ready to move. I also had an eighth of mushrooms and a single Adderall pill in my bag, drugs I’d been carrying for a while but never seemed to feel like taking, so I briefly considered either tossing them, hiding them or just eating it all. They were already jogging toward us with their guns out though so I decided to leave them where they were and hope that they’d be lazy about searching our bags.

The Sullivan Police had pictures of trains on their patches and I was thinking of using one as the header photo but it looks like they’ve changed the design and I couldn’t find any pictures of the old one. I got the impression that their town was quiet enough that all they really did was catch up freight riders. They were excitedly boasting to us and each other about how many they had managed to catch in the last week alone.

They seemed especially proud of having pulled off a group of Mexicans because then they got to hand them over to immigration. They’d probably just recently gotten the fancy automatic camera installed and since then it had been like shooting fish in a barrel. They made us put on our backpacks and then handcuffed us in the front so we could carry them over to the pickup truck they were going to transport us in:

“Let them hoss their own shit!”

They told us that if we wanted we could wait for another form of transport instead of getting transported in a truck bed but we wanted to get the whole ordeal over with as quickly as possible. They had pulled up in SUVs but they probably didn’t want us getting their seats dirty. They made a lot of comments about how dirty we were, how we smelled and that sort of thing.

They took us to a tiny cement substation with a couple of cells for processing. The whole building was roughly the size of the public bathrooms found in parks and rest stops. Inside there was a desk with a computer, some long cement benches they handcuffed us to for processing, a few thin cells and a couple shower stalls. They constantly shuffled us between these spaces for the entirety of the time we were there so that two of us were never together long enough to talk to each other.

We had to leave our bags on the damp grass outside so they could search through them. There was a lady cop behind the computer while I was being processed and for whatever reason she was chatting me up. I forget how she worked this detail into the conversation, maybe she asked me where I was going and why and I told her I was headed to California to play a concert:

“I used to live in Seattle. It was after the whole grunge thing was pretty much over but it was still pretty cool living there with all that history!”

“How’d you end up in a dead end town like this? You move out here for a guy or something?”

“Ooof, don’t even get me started…”

She seemed like she was on the verge of passing me her phone number or asking if I wanted to go get a coffee when we were released until one of her male colleagues with rubber gloves on slammed all of my drugs onto the counter. I immediately took responsibility:

“That’s all mine.”

She gave me a look like I had somehow betrayed her and didn’t talk to me again. She evidently didn’t know very much about the Seattle music scene she was excited to share a city with if she was shocked and offended by a relatively benign and harmless bag of mushrooms. The male cop went through the different baggies with me to identify their contents. I confirmed what the mushrooms and Adderall pill were but I also had a baggie of powdered Syrian Rue that looked like a generic brown powder.

I’d gotten everything from the self-proclaimed shaman guy that lived in Chicago who is mentioned in some other chapters. I’d made the mistake of buying things I didn’t really feel like taking just because they were hard to find and then carrying it around until it got me in trouble. I explained to him in detail what the powder was:

“That’s Syrian Rue, peganum harmala. it’s a naturally occurring MAO Inhibitor that is used to boost the efficacy of other psychotropic drugs but it doesn’t do much on it’s own. It isn’t currently scheduled by the DEA.”

He took my explanation at face value and separated the Rue from the things I could actually be charged for. I wondered afterward if I had said the other bags contained Turkey Tail Mushrooms and a Vitamin C tablet with the same level of conviction I could have gotten away with all of it but that probably would have been pushing my luck. At the very least the Adderall pill had an easily verifiable imprint.

Brodie’s photography monographs hadn’t been published yet but he had either done a few lucrative gallery shows at this point or gotten a decent advance from his representation and he offered to pay everybody’s bail or whatever they were calling the money to be allowed to leave. He stood by the desk with his debit card for a few minutes then concluding the charges he was able to creep by me and whisper into my ear that it sounded like “he was buying thousands of dollars in X-Men cards”.

Brodie would most likely not be “road ready” for several hours to come.

They had us all take showers before they cut us loose and made fun of the fact that nobody seemed to want to use the packets of harsh chemical shampoo they provided us with.

Leg threw out a clumsy and club footed excuse while emerging from her shower:

“You see I just don’t really care for the toiletries, you know what I mean???”

Everybody was doing a pretty good job of just coming off like ditzy train riders and not letting on that we were tripping but Brodie did spend a suspiciously long time staring down into the drain. He later said that there were globs of something down there that looked like the liquid form of the T-1000 from Terminator 2. The cops smirked at him and attempted a joke:

“You sure you didn’t consume some of those mushrooms before we picked you up?”

Brodie answered back both in a way that could be construed as evasive and in a somewhat robotic voice:

“I’ve consumed mushrooms that come on pizza before…“

The cops didn’t really push the issue. I guess they can’t really charge you for being under the influence of drugs except for maybe a public intoxication charge but there’s always the threat of being taken to a psychiatric hospital for 24 to 48 hours if they knew that you took LSD and feel like being extra. They didn’t do any of that.

They took us outside where we discovered that the contents of all of our packs were still spread out on the grass. During my heaviest years of magical ideation, roughly 2008 to 2012, there was a sequence of objects I came to view as magical talismans and essential tools for my practice. This included a silver plated pewter goblet, a conductor’s baton or wand, a rubber witches nose, a studded leather cap and a Ukrainian knife with a goat’s hoof handle that was supposed to be cursed.

At this early stage it would have been limited to the dagger with leather scabbard I used for the Living Hell performances and a small glass bottle in the shape of a maple leaf that I mixed my Florida Water with other fragrances in. Anyway the Sullivan police stole the dagger. None of them ever mentioned anything about it and the part of Illinois we were in was popular for hunting so it’s extremely unlikely that there would have been any law against me carrying it. One of them probably just thought it looked cool and decided to keep it – cops do that sort of thing constantly.

They loaded us into one of those prisoner transport vehicles that’s divided into two sections in the back – kind of like the trucks that dog catchers use. They did allow all of us to ride on the same side of it. Out of the three of us Brodie was clearly the least psychedelically experienced and he had been doing an admirable job of holding it together but his self control was starting to slip. He turned to me:

“Are we in the do-anything say-anything zone?”

The back of the truck was separated from the cab where the cop was driving but there was a tiny window so he could see and hear us. He smirked into the rear view mirror. I told Brodie to hang on just a little longer:

“No we’re not quite in the do-anything say-anything zone yet but we should get there as soon as we leave this truck.”

The cop was driving us to the next county over so that if we did get in trouble again it would be another department’s problem. He knew that our immediate destination was Saint Louis so he gave us general directions to get to Effingham from where he dropped us off. He said it would probably be easiest to find a ride heading to Saint Louis from there and departed with a final piece of advice:

“Guys, don’t get on another train. Catch a ride or hoof it but if you get back on a train you’ll just get caught again.”

He drove off. Brodie let out a massive sigh of relief:

“Holy Shit! I am high! I’m so high! I’m tripping my ass off!”

Leg was smiling to herself:

“A pig said hoof it!“

I put a reassuring arm around Brodie’s shoulder and led him over to a small pile of broken chunks of asphalt so he could climb up on it and jump off a couple of times. I thought it would help him feel more in control the same way I used to jump off of a 60 foot pylon into the Mississippi River every morning as a quick wake up while the Rockaway was docked at Cement Land. He was basically fine to do whatever but we needed to start hitchhiking so the sun wouldn’t go down on us in another small farm town and unless we got a “hip” ride this would probably go smoother if we didn’t talk about how high we were in front of the drivers.

It’s possible to hitch hike without a sign but if there’s any way of making one you’ll be a lot better off. As long as the letters are large, bold and legible passing motorists have no choice but to read them and then they’re already thinking about you. It’s the magic power of the written word – try to look at a word in a language you understand and not read it, it’s impossible. Riding trains always involves some degree of hitchhiking if only to get to and from the remote train yards so we would have already been carrying cardboard and sharpies.

Making a sign is a bit of a gamble because writing the name of a distant destination city can get you lucky with somebody who’s going the entire way but it can also cause potential rides to not pick you up because they don’t think they’re going far enough. For this reason I generally like to just write a Cardinal direction, like “South” in this case, but I might have just written “Effingham” as it wasn’t that far. Generally speaking you want to keep moving even if a ride is barely going any distance but there are some exceptions.

You wouldn’t take a ride from a truck stop if they were only going a couple of exits and potentially dropping you off where there isn’t a truck stop for example.

It took a couple of rides to get to Effingham but I can only remember the first one. A crew cut army looking guy took us down the road a bit to an AM PM. I’m not sure how Brodie ended up in the front seat. Leg and I were a couple at the time but I almost always take the front seat when hitchhiking with a group because I’m good at talking to strangers if that’s what a ride wants. The guy attempted to make conversation:

“It’s gotta be rough hitchhiking in this heat, huh?”

Brodie was staring at his He-Man and the Masters of the Universe sleeping bag:

“It beats fighting monsters all day…”

The driver didn’t try to make any more conversation. It was almost dark by the time we got to Effingham. Effing Effingham – I wound up in this same town again a few years later and when the story gets there you’ll see why I have a little more hatred for the place than most of the anonymous small towns I’ve drifted through. We tried to find a ride but eventually we had to consider finding a place to sleep.

The local homeless tweaker guy named Kenny had noticed our arrival and offered his advice:

“You’re probably thinking of sleeping in the woods out back but you don’t wanna do that and I’ll tell you why: there’s snakes and spiders and who know’s what back there. What you wanna do is go sleep underneath that freeway bridge over there: it’s still windy but it’s dry and there’s no spiders and nobody will bother you. How do I know this? Because I slept there last night and the night before that and I’ll be sleeping there tonight.”

The moment he walked away we all agreed that it sounded like a very bad idea to go sleep where Kenny was. He might have been just trying to help but he seemed a little too eager to have us over there and know where we were sleeping. We could have easily outnumbered and overpowered him but it just seemed like a bad scene.

I think we just grabbed some cardboard from the dumpster full of flattened boxes and laid it out next to the dumpster and slept on it. This wouldn’t have worked long term but we were only staying the night. We had talked to a truck driver around midnight who’d said that he was heading to Saint Louis first thing in the morning and he could take us. He also said that he had a free shower ticket for buying a certain amount of diesel he wasn’t going to use and asked if any of us wanted it.

I was surprised when Brodie took him up on it considering how recently we had showered in the police station but he said that he’d always wanted to see what the truck stop showers looked like. He seemed to just be genuinely interested in big rig trucks and truck culture: a couple of years later he was working as a heavy duty diesel mechanic and the last time I talked to him he had started a transportation company and was driving one himself.

Not too far into the next morning we were dropped off on the Saint Louis side of the Chain of Rocks Bridge which is pretty much across the street from Cement Land. Not too far away a handful of old cabooses sat on a disused portion of track hidden behind walls of overgrown vegetation. Some people had started staying on them during the final days of the Rockaway but now Brodie, Alexis and Jacki had moved in full time ever since The Garden of Bling got burned.

Jacki and Alexis had gotten a couple of bantam chickens, I think their names were Chicken Nugget and Lenny Kravitz, and spent most of their time watching the chickens fight and dig up bugs. It seems like a missed opportunity that it wasn’t “Henny Kravitz” but it was probably a rooster – the kind with big hair and bell bottoms made of feathers. Bob Cassilly was getting frustrated that people from the rafts were still living on a piece of property he eventually intended to develop but they were out of the way and I don’t think he ever got around to kicking them off.

While I was exploring some of the surrounding overgrowth I must have disturbed a bumblebee’s tiny hive and it attacked and stung me. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as a honeybee’s sting but they don’t die from stinging either and they can do it over and over. I wasn’t wearing a shirt and it directed its serial assaults to the spot where Christ’s fifth wound is – it looked like it was pelvic thrusting against me as it stung me over and over. I was too shocked and surprised to think about brushing it off until it had gotten a good five jabs in.

It kind of feels like a dull ache combined with a slight burning – maybe like a combination sunburn and Charlie Horse.

Brodie was staying in Saint Louis but me and Leg would be continuing onto the Bay Area. I forget if the original plan was to ride trains the whole way but we went to a Kinko’s near the arch so I could make us a pair of counterfeit Greyhound Passes. The new plan was to take a bus to Amarillo, Texas and catch a hot shot to Northern California from there. Brodie photocopied a few pages and maps from his Crew Change and gave us the phone number for a friend of his called LBK.

Amarillo, now that is a seriously weird town. I’ll get into it next time.

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Illinois 2008 : Trains, Talismans and Juggalos Part One “I’ve never jumped from a moving train before”

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I’m going to try something a little different with the next two or three chapters and thread several related strands together to tell a story that unfolds over several years and in several cities – but mostly in Central Illinois. The narrative starts in the early Summer of 2008 when the Living Hell tour had just come to an abrupt end and I had moved back into my room with Stephany in Chicago. Stephany and I had lived together across a couple of Pilsen apartments for most of 2007 and 2008 but the time that I was actually at home for all of this couldn’t have added up to more than two or three months.

The last place we shared was on 23rd Place near the big cathedral. The Polish landlord had been pretty good as landlords go – we never heard from him unless we were calling him to fix something and then he sent over his handyman named Ziggy. Ziggy had a big bushy mustache and an about medium thickness Eastern European accent and seemed to take genuine pride in getting the bathtub to drain again or the heater working. One month we didn’t have rent the day it was due and when we didn’t get a late payment notice we just didn’t pay it and continued to not pay for several months.

We didn’t know if our landlord had died or left the country or what but we didn’t look too far into the matter because of superstition and that thing about gift-horses and mouths. While I was out traveling a woman named Ewa showed up to the door one day and explained that she had received the building as part of a divorce settlement and rent would now be due to her. It seemed a little suspicious but she wasn’t saying anything about back-rent and it seemed like the safest course of action was to just pay it. This is where things sat when I moved my things into the attic and relocated to California.

Ewa evidently didn’t receive Ziggy as part of the same settlement and wasn’t interested in finding or contracting somebody similar – she was extremely interested in the passive income part of being a landlady but not so much in the maintenance and upkeep parts. Enough things had broken and gone unrepaired in the apartment that Stephany went on rent strike. What Ewa did have was an appropriately evil looking henchman and one day he delivered an eviction notice.

Stephany thought the notice looked suspicious so she brought it to her alderman. In Chicago an alderman is roughly analogous to a city council member in other cities but I feel like they are more involved and helpful in the lives of their constituents. In this case the alderman told Stephany that the eviction notice was a counterfeit – Ewa hadn’t completed any of the necessary steps for a legal eviction and was banking on Stephany just being intimidated by it and moving out.

The alderman told Stephany that she could take Ewa to court and sue for this offense but more practically she could hold it over her head to get free rent in perpetuity because an actual, legal eviction would require going to court at which time the revelation of the counterfeit eviction notice would cost more and get her in more trouble than Stephany’s rent payments were worth. She got the Mexican-American family downstairs in on it and the entire building lived rent free for at least a couple of years until a bank or some other flavor of LLC acquired the building.

Stephany asked them how and where to start paying rent again and they told her “not to worry about it” which is always code for they wanted to blindside her with an eviction notice that was done legally and by the book and delivered too late for Stephany to really do anything about it.

Ewa most likely got out of the landlady business for good but on the off chance she didn’t her full name is Ewa Mogolnika so if you live in Chicago and have a landlady with that name pay close attention to your lease or eviction notices or any other documents and you just might win the lottery as well.

Anyway there’s three things in the title and I haven’t touched on any of them yet. Let’s talk about trains. I got to ride freight a few times but it was almost always with more experienced friends acting as Sherpa. I’ve never personally owned a copy of that Holy Grail document known as a crew change but the people I was riding with usually had one. The fact that I didn’t insist on hitting up a Kinko’s and getting my own reproduction at the first possible opportunity should indicate how serious I was about the whole thing.

I definitely enjoyed my rides and getting to see the kind of true wilderness that only appears when train tracks diverge away from highways but for most of my travels I was always either on the way to see or play a show and hadn’t scheduled for the unpredictable pace of freight travel. Besides the counterfeit Greyhound passes were still nearly universally accepted during these travels and it was generally the faster option.

Technically my first ride was a short and unplanned trip from Illinois to Missouri. The Garden of Bling’s final port of call was a stretch of river bank in Venice, Illinois – a town that was mostly known for it’s strip clubs and a creepy daycare in one of their parking lots called Leonard Bo Peep’s. The most revealing anecdote I have about the area known as East Saint Louis is that when I was an extra on an episode of The Real House-Husbands of Hollywood the rapper Nelly insisted that the writers amend a joke suggesting he was from there.

His songs did first achieve breakout success in the area’s strip clubs but nobody wants to be known as being from there.

It was a long bike ride to the bridges we were legally allowed to bike across and most of our destinations in Saint Louis were almost directly across the river so we had gotten in the habit of biking across the bridge that was only for trains to save time. One day I was crossing with Alexis when a train came and when we moved to the other set of tracks another train started coming. There was nothing to do but grab our bikes and climb onto the one that was at least traveling in the right direction.

It started to slow down for the curve as it approached the yard so I suggested we grab our bikes and jump off. Alexis was hesitant:

“I’ve never jumped off of a moving train before…”

“Neither have I but this seems like the perfect time to try it!”

We made the jump onto gravel ok but it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. A private train cop, or bull, was waiting for us in an SUV blocking the path to the closest streets and bike trail. The entire maneuver with the two trains had been designed to catch us the moment we were spotted illegally crossing the bridge:

“Y’all picked a really stupid and dangerous way to try to get across the river!”

Alexis answered back in feigned innocence:

“Well it seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time…”

He ran our IDs and because neither of us had been charged with trespassing on railroad property before this point he let us off with a warning. He tried to give us “safe” directions for biking to our destination that involved an absurdly roundabout path designed to avoid all of the neighborhoods where Black people lived and we pretended to listen then bikes right through them like we always did. I can’t think of any part of any city I’ve been to that felt particularly unsafe and especially not in Saint Louis.

A handful of months later when me, Alexis and Jacki rode trains from Memphis to New Orleans for Mardi Gras she was already an old hand at every aspect of the process and carried her own Crew Change. It’s crazy how much people can change in small windows of time. I’ve written about this ride already in the fifth bus chapter. It was the take-a-hit-of-acid-every-hour-on-the-hour train ride.

We were either extremely lucky with this ride or nobody gave a shit about freight riders between Memphis and New Orleans in early 2008 because we were being extremely careless, sitting up where anyone could see us and waving to cars and the like, and we still made it to our destination without interference. We did pass through a city where there were a lot of people hanging around the train tracks – Mobile Alabama. When the train slowed down near what you would call a “hobo jungle”, an encampment of freight riders, drunks and homeless near the train tracks, this guy hopped off that we hadn’t realized was even on the same train as us.

We tried to bum a cigarette off of him as we’d all run out of tobacco at this point but he said he didn’t have one. There were a few people around but nobody seemed to have any. This might be prejudiced by the view of the city from wherever the train tracks go but Mobile, Alabama looked more absolutely busted and run-through than any city I’ve ever been in. Like overgrown-with-kudzu-giant-holes-in-the-side-of-cement-silos destroyed, nothing but blight as far as the eye could see. I forget which of us said it but it perfectly summed up the feel of the place:

“This place looks like it’s been out of cigarettes for a long time…”

Anyway I’m about to tell a story about taking acid on a freight train that didn’t turn out so well. It was the beginning of my trip to California for the Living Hell reunion show and I was trying to get from Chicago to Saint Louis with Leg and Brodie. I wrote somewhere that I knew or met a handful of photographers who were especially gifted at capturing the essence of a generally documentation-resistant underground and Mike Brodie ranks possibly highest among them. If you haven’t seen his book A Period of Juvenile Prosperity you’ll want to check it out.

It even looks like it’s back in print.

I don’t know all the technical names for the different kinds of train cars but from what I saw the best kind to ride on are these ones that are kind of shaped like the little stiff paper trays that hot dogs, french fries and nachos come in. Either a single shipping container or a double stack of them will be in the middle and you can ride in that little space on the end where it slants upward. The containers provide shade some of the time if you’re riding in hot weather and they probably make it harder for the automated camera things to pick you out.

All of this could be different now as I haven’t ridden freight since 2008 but I know that people still do it.

Brodie had moved beyond just using a Crew Change and had gotten some kind of app on his phone that’s probably just supposed to be for rail workers where he could type in the number on the side of a car and see where it was going and approximately how long it would take. Despite this added advantage he was having a hard time finding a good ride for us. We started out in a box-car which is what people always ride on TV but actually isn’t a very good idea as the workers can seal the doors without realizing you’re in there and then you’re trapped.

After a little while we ended up in a gondola. If you’ve ever seen this big dumpsters outside of construction sites you know exactly what these look like – a big metal container that’s open at the top. Sometimes these can be full of coal or garbage or rubble but we found one that was mostly empty. It had gone so well the last time I had decided to while away a long train ride by giving everybody acid and we were finally moving along nicely and I had exactly three hits so I thought it might be a good idea to do it again.

It wasn’t.

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