[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.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 