Riding With Smokey
Finally I got picked up by Smokey in a beat Chevy and we headed southwest out of Los Angeles into the desert. At his trailer in the middle of that desert I didn't even get out of the car because Smokey just needed to stop briefly to get his gun, before taking us to Yuma, where he would search the jungle there and I would--at his recommendation--catch a Southern Pacific boxcar back to Texas.
The man I met in the yard at Yuma took me under his wing after first recommending that I get back on the highway because I was young and clean like the kind people wouldn't mind too much picking up and trainyards were for the old and dirty, or like in his case, the black.
We waited two days and nights in that Yuma train yard, which was famous for its friendly bulls, until a proper hotshot longhauler came through and then against his earlier teaching ("you don't jump a moving train, wait for them to stop, and then pick your car") we did jump a slow moving flatcar, and climbed onto the next car which was a tiered automobile carrier, three levels high with Camaros.
This was January, and even so far south it was bitter cold at night so the scrap piece of rigid wire was nothing less than a gift from gods as it let us unlock a door, and as he knew their would be, retrieve from the glovebox the ignition key which cranked an engine and gave us heat, and, I'm complaining now, a rather cramped sleeping space.
In El Paso the man said it would be a felony to get caught in one of these cars so he said we had to jump, and catch something else out of the yard, which was patrolled by less than friendly, but not altogether unreasonable, bulls. He hadn't told me anything about jumping, and the train was moving faster than I care to remember, except it is one of the elapsed time periods of my life--the movement, the sound of metal clacking against metal, the two days in the El Paso train yard, dinner and sermon at the mission, the January cold, the mild concussion, the found and dispensed with bottle of tequila, the oranges, and the sardines--which I can transport to with an almost unreasonable clarity.
My feet hit first and then I was skidding along the side of my face along side a train track outside of a train yard in El Paso, Texas in January in what I guess would be the year 1980.
The two day waited for boxcar out of El Paso was boarded still, at night, with glowing cigarette butts the beacons of invitation by grisly greying bearded gentlemen.
In San Antonio sixteen hours of unaligned rocking later, the train began to slow, and I saw the Interstate, either 10, or 35, and it was my time to go. "Let yourself down slow, and get your feet running before you touch down," he told me, and I did what he said, and I was standing tall to receive his parting gesture, the upward thumb.
I was late for school by a couple of days, and as luck would have it so was this guy Dave, who had been a next door neighbor during summer school, and had scared me good n' plenty with a ride on the back of his Kawasaki 900, but was now in the more docile Volkswagen Beetle, heading north to Austin on I-35, when he saw me standing on the side of the road.
"Hey Dave."
"Hey Jim, what happened to your face?"
"Fell off a train, Dave." At the time everyone thought I was speaking euphemistically, and I did not insist otherwise.
It was nice that my roommates were gone away from the apartment on ninth street so I cleaned myself leisurely and I'm not sure why headed for the UT campus.
The flourescent glare and the studious multitudes reflected in glass at the undergraduate library were the last things I remember from that other world, from which, I did on that evening in January duly depart.
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Finally I got picked up by Smokey in a beat Chevy and we headed southwest out of Los Angeles into the desert. At his trailer in the middle of that desert I didn't even get out of the car because Smokey just needed to stop briefly to get his gun, before taking us to Yuma, where he would search the jungle there and I would--at his recommendation--catch a Southern Pacific boxcar back to Texas.
The man I met in the yard at Yuma took me under his wing after first recommending that I get back on the highway because I was young and clean like the kind people wouldn't mind too much picking up and trainyards were for the old and dirty, or like in his case, the black.
We waited two days and nights in that Yuma train yard, which was famous for its friendly bulls, until a proper hotshot longhauler came through and then against his earlier teaching ("you don't jump a moving train, wait for them to stop, and then pick your car") we did jump a slow moving flatcar, and climbed onto the next car which was a tiered automobile carrier, three levels high with Camaros.
This was January, and even so far south it was bitter cold at night so the scrap piece of rigid wire was nothing less than a gift from gods as it let us unlock a door, and as he knew their would be, retrieve from the glovebox the ignition key which cranked an engine and gave us heat, and, I'm complaining now, a rather cramped sleeping space.
In El Paso the man said it would be a felony to get caught in one of these cars so he said we had to jump, and catch something else out of the yard, which was patrolled by less than friendly, but not altogether unreasonable, bulls. He hadn't told me anything about jumping, and the train was moving faster than I care to remember, except it is one of the elapsed time periods of my life--the movement, the sound of metal clacking against metal, the two days in the El Paso train yard, dinner and sermon at the mission, the January cold, the mild concussion, the found and dispensed with bottle of tequila, the oranges, and the sardines--which I can transport to with an almost unreasonable clarity.
My feet hit first and then I was skidding along the side of my face along side a train track outside of a train yard in El Paso, Texas in January in what I guess would be the year 1980.
The two day waited for boxcar out of El Paso was boarded still, at night, with glowing cigarette butts the beacons of invitation by grisly greying bearded gentlemen.
In San Antonio sixteen hours of unaligned rocking later, the train began to slow, and I saw the Interstate, either 10, or 35, and it was my time to go. "Let yourself down slow, and get your feet running before you touch down," he told me, and I did what he said, and I was standing tall to receive his parting gesture, the upward thumb.
I was late for school by a couple of days, and as luck would have it so was this guy Dave, who had been a next door neighbor during summer school, and had scared me good n' plenty with a ride on the back of his Kawasaki 900, but was now in the more docile Volkswagen Beetle, heading north to Austin on I-35, when he saw me standing on the side of the road.
"Hey Dave."
"Hey Jim, what happened to your face?"
"Fell off a train, Dave." At the time everyone thought I was speaking euphemistically, and I did not insist otherwise.
It was nice that my roommates were gone away from the apartment on ninth street so I cleaned myself leisurely and I'm not sure why headed for the UT campus.
The flourescent glare and the studious multitudes reflected in glass at the undergraduate library were the last things I remember from that other world, from which, I did on that evening in January duly depart.
- jimlouis 3-06-2001 3:39 am