Night Train

by Thom Jones

  September 7. Born to suffer.

  September 12. Acupuncture for shoulder. No go, nothing, zip. Just a big waste of time.

  September 14. Rolfed by some Wavy Gravy chick who talked aromatherapy, e.g., the catfish flower.

  September 16. Deep-tissue massage. Yet another flop.

  September 20. The orthopedic surgeon attempts to break the shoulder-capsule adhesions under anesthesia. “I couldn’t do it,” he says later. “I thought I was going to break your arm. Go to a pain clinic.”

  September 24. Pain clinic dispenses narcotics. “Not enough to get you high,” the nurse says with a smile. Meanwhile, “the shoulder will only get worse. There is an osteopath you might try.”

  October 9. Facedown on the treatment table. Dr. Coors, osteopath and Spanish inquisitor, pulls my arm mercilessly. There are loud pops as he breaks the adhesions in the shoulder capsule. The pain is so bad I think my hair will catch fire. Coors says, “Come back tomorrow.”

  October 11. Facedown on the table, I bite a hole through the Naugahyde, swallow a rusty spring and three wads of horsehair stuffing. Coors says, “We’re beginning to get somewhere. We’re making progress.”

  October 24. Lying in bed the evening after my third treatment, I suddenly notice something. My God! For the first time in months my shoulder doesn’t hurt. Ecstatic for a moment. Then I realize there’s a disaster I’m currently unaware of that will announce itself with a thunderclap.

  October 25. Boy, I sure hope I don’t get bird flu.

  October 26. Shoulder a lot better. Nothing to report except a hangnail on my anvil-crushed thumb. By and by it begins to feel like a cobra bite.

  October 27. Slept until four P.M. Thumb still bad. Why are we here? Just to suffer?

  October 29. Elsa calls and says she saw the wolf again, hunkered down behind her woodshed. “It’s an evil beast. Thom, I am so afraid. Why won’t he leave me alone?”

  October 30. Prostate trouble and a searing pain in my urethra. I take an OxyContin and soak in a hot bath to relax.

  November 1. Elsa tells me the five A.M. puker is still at it.

  November 2. Took some Advil for my thumb. The Advil ignites a nuclear fireball in my stomach. Heartburn. The Channel 7 weatherman said there would be a meteor shower tonight. Outside for an hour and all I see are fizzlers. As a result, I get a sore neck and have to dig through the garage to find my cervical collar.

  November 5. Elsa caught the dawn puker. Her immediate neighbor “just couldn’t take it anymore.”

  November 9. I spring out of bed at noon, determined to accomplish great deeds. I tackle a raft of dishes, and through the kitchen window I see the farmer who lives behind me chucking fallen branches from his side of the fence over to mine. With him is the gray Norwegian elkhound Elsa has mistaken for a wolf. It is medium-size, about fifty pounds, and wagging its tail to beat the band. I thank the farmer for the logs and tell him that with all that lumber I can finally build a meth lab. He looks at me and says, “You can kiss my ass!”

  November 12. My diabetic toenails have evolved into hooves. Square them away with a rat-tail file.

  November 15. Decide to use the business-class plane tickets I bought to Africa during my insomnia phase. They cost a small fortune; best I use them. All day packing. Wide-eyed and fearful. Another ghastly trip. What was I thinking?

  November 16. Dawn limo to Sea-Tac, five hours to New York, two-hour layover, then an all-night flight to Heathrow, nine hours to Nairobi, drinking shooters. Arrive drunk. A pickpocket lifted my dummy wallet with my old driver’s license, an expired library card, and two bucks. Thank God for money belts, though mine was purchased during the Jimi Hendrix era. The psychedelic colors will be a big hit in Zambia.

  November 17. Hitch a ride to the tsetse fly zone on the back of a sorghum truck. I arrive with my face pasted with red dust. Prostate trouble, a blowtorch in my dick, all fifteen inches of it. Hop off the truck in a mud-and-wattle village. No hotel, no B&B, no TV, no McDonald’s. Nothing.

  November 18. Late afternoon. Fucking Christ, is it ever hot! I rent a room in the back of the OD Macaroni Factory.

  November 19. I hate Africa.

  November 20. I dug out a flea that had somehow burrowed under my thumbnail. There is a small fan over at the button factory. I rent a stall there. Mealie meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At least you don’t get caught in a menu quandary.

  November 21. The night watchman introduces me to Charles, a university student from Ethiopia who quickly makes himself at home in the stall across from my own. Charles shares a bucket of beer with me. In the light of a kerosene lantern we play cards all night. Lions roar in the distant jungle.

  November 23. Bucket-of-beer hangover persists. Charles constantly sprays himself with DEET. “Tsetse flies, man. Can’t be too careful.”

  November 24. Drunk on palm wine at nine A.M. I buy a fish, oranges, and a banana at the outdoor market. While the saleswoman bundles my purchase, I drop her baby and momentarily pass out on the road. Thankfully, the baby broke my fall.

  November 25. Tonight at dusk, as I walk back from the market, I step off the road to take a leak and, forgetting I am in Africa, disturb a jumping pit viper (Porthidium nummifer). It’s a sturdy, short-tempered snake. This one strikes with such force, its husky body leaves the ground. It shoots past me faster than a left jab and sails deep into the roadside undergrowth. I pick up its Bolivian passport and wallet. Inside there’s a picture of the snake’s wife and children. There is also a letter. “My darling Estella, Africa is very bad. I have lost weight living on mouses. I miss joure shovel-shaped head, joure hort-shaped face, you gleaming fangs. Do you miss me at all? Why have you run off with Kenny Stabler?”

  November 26. Oh God, I promise, I swear I will never drink palm wine again. Save me!

  November 29. Venture into the bush with Charles and a new acquaintance, Sylvester. Chased by warthogs.

  December 2. My stomach hurts low down. Sylvester says it’s roundworms. “Eat a cigarette and it will die,” he says. I wolf down a Pall Mall and become sicker than a dog.

  December 3. I void a nine-inch tapeworm. That’s odd. No wonder I’m so thin. Sylvester wants me to sponsor him to America. “Sell tapeworms to college girls,” he says. “They can eat all they want and stay thin. Make us millionaires.”

  December 11. Charles takes a Magic Marker and points a stake west to Seattle. The sign reads HOME SWEET HOME THOMAS. I doubt I will live to see Seattle again. Another warthog runs through the village at dusk.

  December 14. How come everything feels so much better when you’re lying down? I’m really growing to love my little pallet at the button factory.

  December 16. Sylvester won’t lay off the tapeworm scheme. Now he’s got Charles hot for the idea. I say, “American women, no matter how fat, won’t swallow a thick white worm.” “Yes they will,” says Sylvester. “They will! What do you know anyhow?” Charles pipes in, “No worm to swallow, just a small vacuum-packed worm capsule. Just the ticket, man.”

  December 17. Charles drives me to a three-hut village packed with victims of sleeping sickness. They all look pale, like Michael Jackson. They aren’t so much sleeping as they are “out of it.”

  December 19. The button-factory watchman tells me Charles and Sylvester made off with my passport. My mini-pharmacy? “Long gone, man. Fat man Jimi Hendrix belt gone too.” I fall to the ground and kick at it and beat it with both fists. I chip a tooth on a rock. Send me a helicopter, God, and I swear I will never harbor a mean thought for the rest of my life.

  December 23. Home just in time for Christmas. Three days in the Slumberking riding out a case of sandfly disease.

  December 24. Christmas Eve. A stabbing pain in my foot. I hobble around bowlegged all day, like a busting-bronco cowpoke. I wrap Christmas presents. I can’t get to the Slumberking fast enough. Beyond awful. I wonder what it’s like to die. I’m sick all the time, but the final agonies must be worse. Yet so often I see old people smiling. Putzing a
round their yard, smiling. Horseshoes and lawn bowling between chemotherapy, and still smiling. What is with that? They croak and an influx of new ones rushes in to replace them. On the plane home I saw a woman eight months pregnant, and she had a big-ass smile on her face. Was she just putting on a good show? Was she really thinking, “Why did I ever fuck that ex-con mentally retarded lowlife? Having this kid of his is going to hurt like hell, and I’ll be a walking stretch mark. On top of it all I’ll have a screaming kid on my hands night and day, living on welfare the next twenty years while the old man luxuriates in the penitentiary without a worry in the world. Man, could I ever use another hit of methedrine.”

  December 25. Birds chirping. The distant sound of puking in the bushes. Merry Christmas!

  December 29. All I do is sleep. Jesus, I used to have time to do things, but now life revolves around Crohn’s disease, prostate trouble, heartburn, epilepsy, a hundred million problems.

  January 27. Feel deathly ill. I spend the entire day on the Slumberking. Every once in a while I have to sit up and look at the callus on my foot.

  January 28. I pick at the callus with a small knife. The pain is unbearable. I can’t get anything done. I just hobble from one room to the next looking for stuff I have misplaced.

  January 29. A sharp triangle of glass begins to emerge from the callus. I finally dig it out with my knife. It is a dime-size piece of amber beer-bottle glass. My senior year in high school I was wading in Aurora’s Mastodon Lake and stepped on something sharp. The foot bled copiously. The next day red streaks were working their way up my leg. My doctor gave me antibiotics. From then on, touching that spot with a fingertip sent me flying through the ceiling. It was a lot like stepping on a punji stick. Glass doesn’t show up on X-rays. I had to order custom-made shoes from plaster of paris molds. The shoes looked like Frankenstein boots. People ridiculed them openly. I learned how to find normal shoes that would accommodate the sore spot. After forty-two years the glass works its way out. Amazing!

  February 5. No matter how you cut it, it hurts to die. Asphyxiation is usually involved. With type 1 diabetes I will most likely have a stroke or fatal heart attack. Get out of the easy chair to take a whizzer and “Ahhhh!” Ka-plop. Two weeks later firemen will break inside trying to find the cloying odor that has the neighborhood up in arms. “Jesus, will you look at that? His head is bigger than a pumpkin! I wonder how they will ever squash him into a coffin.”

  So there you have it. The aeons of nonexistence, birth, Shakespeare’s seven ages of man (which boil down to years of suffering in various forms), dreams that seldom come true, and just enough good stuff to keep you going. Then death and the foreverness of all eternity, painless and carefree. No more problems. No demonic tortures. Just nothing, pure and simple. How can you top that?

  HERE LIES THOM JONES RIP

  HE PACKED 2,000 YEARS OF AGONY

  INTO THE SUBSTANDARD 62

  The Junkman of Chengdu

  GO TO CHINA​ and you really don’t want to drink the tap water. It’s the biggest no-no going. Highly inadvisable. Nowhere in China can you take a sip from the tap and live to tell about it. You could be dying of thirst but still, it’s a no-go. You can dump a ton of halazone into this murk and you still got poison. Detonate a small germ-busting nuclear bomb the size of a pinhead in your cup, feel the tiny “flash burn” on your face, and with sunglasses watch the miniature mushroom cloud erupt before your eyes like a five-petaled lotus flower. Still there’s no guarantee all the bugs are dead. So unless you’re a camel whizzing through the country with a seven-day stash of Perrier in your hump, you’re going to need safe and palatable drinking water. I say palatable, as a fresh and delicious taste is also a consideration.

  What to buy? All-natural Ice Dew brand springwater comes in convenient twelve-ounce bottles and it’s fricking delicious. If you’re planning to stay awhile and set up residence, you install a home dispenser and get the five-gallon Culligan-size water jugs. What you do is rustle up some friend/boyfriend handyman type, which for me is where Marcello comes in, hire a cab, and go on a water run. Pick up a ten-kilogram sack of white rice while you’re at it. Marcello is a professional soccer player and he’s in excellent physical condition. A jug on each shoulder is no problem for Marcello. I get him to lug fresh water jugs up six flights of stairs into my place and set a fresh jug in the water dispenser. The five-gallon jugs of Ice Dew come in opaque, dark-blue glass bottles. I’ve got a groovy blue neon light behind the dispenser, the whole setup is very art deco, very sleek; I couldn’t be happier. It’s too cool for words. You find yourself drinking extra water just for the fun of it.

  I brush my teeth with Ice Dew. I wash my hair with Ice Dew and Bright and Shiny shampoo, and then I rinse with Ice Dew alone. You get that squeaky-clean feeling. Pinch the wet hair with your fingers and it really does squeak. An hour later, on the polluted streets of Chengdu, you are a walking grease pit again. But at least you had that hour. That’s the way I look at it.

  I also make my tea from Ice Dew, though in China there are these water heaters all around, in the hall, in the kitchen, in almost every conceivable locale. The cookers are like television sets in America—everywhere, in every nook and cranny, just everywhere. But most of the older cookers do not boil. They cook tap water just to the brink of boiling. Let me hazard an educated guess on the water temp as about 210 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s unreliable because I don’t trust the water cookers and don’t use them in the first place; it’s like Russian roulette. I’m just trotting out a number. But certain bugs thrive in 210-degree water. Those extremophile bacteria that live near volcanoes in South America for instance. I mean you might get Ebola or Guinea worms from drinking that shit.

  I won’t go on about this like some obsessive. I’m not a germ freak, just a careful, prudent person. The almost-boiled tap water is probably sterile but you can see things floating around in it, spooky things, and I just can’t go that route. There is heavy sediment that sinks to the bottom of the cup, like sand and gravel; there are indecisive mid-mug floaters that don’t know up from down and so just hang suspended there; and finally there’s a scummy layer of frothy debris at the very top. It rests there in a layer of foam. I’m not a microbiologist but I would imagine there are millions of invisible things, too. So boiled or not, why take the risk? Not only is Ice Dew a cheap alternative, it’s guaranteed bug-free. I have emailed this information to my father, back in the States, and he thinks I go too far with it. He’s tired of hearing long digressions about water. He warned me about going to China in the first place.

  My dad prefers hearing various other horror stories, stories with an element of danger, and then he writes me warnings he’s gleaned from the Lonely Planet guide to China. Like when I wrote I was going on a side trip to Urumqi, he wrote back, “Danger! Red Alert! Avoid west gate into city! It is filled with a congregation of pickpockets and aggressive robbers who like nothing better than to get you from behind, slash your backpack with a razor, and you are none the wiser as they truck off with your worldly goods.” I’m like twenty years old and I’m getting this. I passed through the west gate at midnight and it was completely tame, a cakewalk.

  One more point about the water. I drink a lot of tea now but (here’s the funny part) I was never a tea drinker until I came to China. You can’t avoid the stuff over here. To this day a sip of coffee has not passed my lips. I had a narrow escape at the Helsinki McDonald’s in Finland. Here’s the story: I was given a small cup with a $29.52 Happy Meal. I opened the lid and ugh—COFFEE! I gave the damn cup to a drunk. I got no Red Alert on that one and I was so tired at the time I almost drank it. I wasn’t in my right mind.

  I like to travel. One day I may pass through Seattle, where thugs like to tie you up, blindfold and handcuff you, and then force coffee down your throat with a funnel: espresso, French roast, Starbucks breakfast blend, and so on. You need to hire a bodyguard in Seattle or in all of Washington State for that matter. They can put a gun to my head, but I wo
n’t drink coffee. One mere cup and you’re an addict for life! Not for all the tea in China would I voluntarily drink coffee. That volatile liquid is like rocket fuel.

  “All the tea in China” is a worn-out expression sliding out of the American lexicon. It’s remembered only by Depression-era seniors and their baby-boomer offspring (like my very own father), who were brainwashed with this phrase, who have heard their parents opine time and time again. Twenty times a day they hit you with “Not for all the tea in China will I do this or that.” It’s hyperbole, meaningless cackle.

  It’s not just water in China that presents perilous health hazards; food is dangerous as well. I’ve seen what happens to careless eaters over here. People possess accurate information about suspect foods but they eat it anyway and thus learn the hard way. You’re in the country for three months for instance and you drop your guard, you think you’re acclimated to the national germ array. But let me tell you the deal: eat tainted food and it’s three days of puking into a squat toilet. Oh ho! Not so immune after all, huh?

  The Chinese squat toilet is a horrible affair where greenbottle flies the size of bumblebees fly blind with their Saran Wrap wings, seduced and entranced by the magical aroma that calls to them like the Sirens of the Cyclades Islands. They furiously circulate the stall, knocking their heavy bodies against the wall—whap, whap. Whap. Whap, whap, and whap. It takes three days for them to get tired but eventually they succumb to exhaustion. As I said, my dad loves to hear such accounts of unspeakable, but nonlethal, horror.

  Not only do you contend with flies, there are roaches and other prowling vermin at Squat Toilet Ground Zero. Rats love a squat toilet. Home sweet home. They’re all too happy to sink a fang into you, and the rat carries plague fleas. Twenty-nine percent have rat fever. I mention this to impart a feel for the romance of travel in exotic climes. You hate it when it’s going on but years later you look back on the experience with fondness. Or so they say about Peace Corps gigs, etc.