Leave Out the Tragic Parts

by Dave Kindred

  Road dogs? Road dogs are family. They’re not someone you drink with while you’re in town or at a hop-out spot. They’re not kids you haven’t seen in a while and then hang out with for a week. Road dogs are people you make miles with. They are your brothers-in-arms, your confidants, your running partners, someone whose side you’ll take and fight [for] even when they’re wrong! I’ve had only four road dogs—three girls and one guy. Two are dead, one retired, and the other is in a van. The one I rode the longest with was “Coon Head,” real name Beth. She was a young kid from San Antonio and didn’t know anything. Got suckered into going on the road with a dude she thought she could trust and ended up getting ditched.

  My ex-husband—long story—found her in a drinking circle and took a shine to her. Not in that way. He just liked adopting kids. I hung out with her for a few days before deciding I liked her too. We became fast friends, and she was always my road dog before his. She rode with us all through the South, down to Florida and up into Kentucky and Tennessee. I wish we had ditched his ass then and went our own way, maybe we’d still be riding. But she went back home to help out her folks and stayed. We keep in touch, and I’m always asking when she’s coming back.

  If it’s not a family out there, it’s certainly a fraternity or sorority with expectations. The best way to know who’s good and who’s not is to invite them to pitch in on booze and drugs—unless, Aggro said, the wannabe is a girl and she’s alone “and one of your boys wants to get laid.” That gets her into the circle. “Which is really annoying to us sisters.”

  How do we get along when we’re wasted? We get along great! Once again, the key is respect. If you do or say something that someone is offended by, apologize and move on, don’t do it again. I’ve got a saying, “Puppies get schooled.” If you keep messing up, we’ll let you know. Unlike any other group, we can put away a lot of booze and get really rowdy but still be completely coherent. One second, it’s all fun and games. The next second, everyone’s looking to kick some ass.

  The thing about the train-rider culture is, we take care of our own. A good friend told me that “hobo” stands for Helping Other Brothers Out. Here’s my story. When I first hit the rails, my road dog and I came to Sacramento. We raged that town hard. Making out like bandits, acting like land pirates. (Take what you can, and give nothing back!) Then I got sick. My liver started going out on me. I couldn’t even get out of my bag to feed and walk my dog. This ol’ ’bo I had met the day before heard from my road dog that I was sick. So he came by to check on me. Said I looked like death on a cracker, but he knew I wouldn’t go to the hospital on account of my dog. He came by every day, bringing me food, water, and tall cans of PBR so I wouldn’t die. He walked and fed my pup too. After a week of me in the bag, the cops showed up and said I had two hours to get moving or they were calling an ambulance. I got up and made a quick eighty bucks. You can do that in downtown Sac if you look like death and you’re only twenty years of age. I gave the ’bo the money, he tried to give it back and I told him no. So, he and I proceeded to the booze store and got everyone drunk. That’s how it’s done out here.

  We can be a rather melancholy bunch sometimes. We get depressed and lonely, just like everyone else—although I suspect some of us like it. Feeling pain is sometimes the only way to know you’re alive. We handle it the same way we handle everything—self-medicate. The most popular methods being alcohol and other drugs. That’s why train kids are so weird when we’re sober. We operate outside of society inebriated for so long that we forget how to interact with it. Things that would disgust and horrify a “normal” person, we wouldn’t bat an eye at. Our most proud moments are when we simply walk off the darkness. One thing about riders: we don’t dare show weakness. We don’t see tears as weakness, but that’s more of a private thing. I can’t even force myself to cry in public. If I can’t swallow my pain, I’ll ride hard until I can’t feel anymore. Some might say that’s running from it. I call it therapy.

  Pain and sorrow are a rider’s worst nightmares. They can eat us alive, and we’ll do anything to avoid those feelings, even if it means becoming an alcoholic or a junkie because being sober is so much worse. A lot of us come from broken homes with fucked-up pasts. We choose this life because it’s the most free and the happiest we’ve ever felt.

  Aggro and her guys wound up in Jacksonville, where cops rousted them from a street corner because, Jared said, “The white people were afraid of us, like we’re crackheads, just pulling stuff out of their ass.”

  The day produced memories. Jared called to tell me: “I saw this really cute black girl, Grandpa, seriously, she was, like, seven feet tall. I asked her if she was a basketball player. Nope, a fry cook. Had tattoos on her arms and face. I liked her.” A pause. “I think she’s a lesbian, though.”

  It was the first of his flirtations that day. “We also ran into this guy Aggro knows, name’s Eddo. He’s gay. Apparently, he thought I was gorgeous. Yep, that’s how it works for me. Had a lesbo and a gay guy after me.”

  Eddo. Another name from the grapevine.

  Cheryl told me later that Jared mentioned two friends who had died that week of drug overdoses.

  “You’re not doing drugs, are you, Jared?” she asked.

  “No, no,” he said.

  On September 12, up from Jacksonville to Myrtle Beach, Jared walked with his mother at the ocean’s edge, near the place where she had asked him what in his life he would want washed away and with his walking stick he had scratched in the sand, BOOZE.

  To Aggro, the sight of mother and son at each other’s sides was further confirmation that Goblin was “a different dude.” She said, “I’m still not sure what it was, but it was like he lived on another plane of existence. He could laugh at whatever life threw him. Like he knew something we all didn’t. At Myrtle Beach, I watched him and his mom walk down the beach together. They were looking for shells and shark teeth. For everything else that was going on with him, he was so content at that moment. It was like at that moment nothing else mattered and everything was right with the world in his eyes just because his mother was near him.”

  Lynn believed he wanted to quit drinking. “No one can tell me he didn’t want it,” she said. “But the alcohol did what the alcohol wanted to do.” That day in September, she offered him a bedroom in her home with the guarantee of a job at a custom-motorcycle shop.

  Thanks, he said, but no. He was happy out there.

  Lynn said, “Why do you say you’re happy, Jared?”

  “Everybody else is always worried about money and paying bills and they’re never happy, Mom. I’m happy every day. Like today, it’s going to be a good day.”

  “But, Jared, a good day? A good day drinking? You do realize that alcohol will kill you. You do know your pancreas won’t get better unless you stop. It will just get worse.”

  “Mom, c’mon. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m cutting down on the vodka.”

  “Your liver doesn’t know the difference, honey, it’s all alcohol. One day a seizure will kill you or leave you in a vegetative state.”

  “Mom,” he said.

  “One day I know I’m going to get the call. I just know I am. Bottom line, Jared, I gotta know one thing.”

  She had tried everything else. Now she would try to scare him.

  “Do you want to be buried or cremated?”

  “Mom! Wow, Mom.”

  Lynn had failed, as everyone had failed, to talk her son out of his drinking. Now she had moved to a mother’s primal scream.

  She said, “Yeah, Jared, ‘Wow.’ Which is it?”

  That bright September day the mother gave her son a seashell they’d picked up on the beach. She told him to keep it forever and whenever he put his hand in his Carhartts pocket and felt the seashell, that was her giving him a hug and kiss.

  SEVENTEEN

  A month later, Cheryl and I drove south out of Washington, DC, and wound our way west and south again through Civil War battlefields to our son’s hou
se, a little farm in the scrubby pinewoods outside Orange, Virginia. The next morning we would stand on the same ground as Jeff and Jared, ground where Kindreds from northern England settled three hundred years earlier. We had never seen this Goblin who was Jared. Nor did we know what our son, Jeff, thought of his son, the Jared who became Goblin. The three Kindred men would be together for the first time in four years. The night before that meeting, I sat with Jeff at his kitchen table, and we talked in ways we should have talked years before.

  I had gone too long in silence, burning with anger since that phone call from Montana thirteen years earlier. I had become an old man, and it was time, before time ran out, to do a right thing. I had not done right by my father that day of the muzzle-loading shoot, refusing to stand with him for a photograph as he lay dying. Silence owned me then and owned me in Montana and now, with my son in his home, I would not allow silence to own me still.

  I wanted to know how Jeff had come to shout, “I’m the parent here.” I still considered those words tormenting reminders of a workaholic father’s failures so grievous that a son not only would dismiss the father’s advice against splitting up brothers, he would do it with rage in his voice.

  “I’ve felt bad about our phone call ever since,” I said.

  “Yeah, we sent Jared to Lynn’s,” Jeff said.

  “When you shouted, ‘I’m the parent here,’ I just hung up on you.”

  Jeff didn’t remember it. “A phone call like that? Nope.”

  He popped open a beer. He held the can in one hand and popped the top with the thumb of that hand.

  A son shouts down his father and forgets it?

  Again, as on that Montana night, I said nothing. But a lifetime later the silence hid no anger. I had come to see Jared, not to force open old wounds. I had come for a purpose that I didn’t realize until it was happening. I had come to tell my son I was sorry.

  “I’m sorry that we had to have that call,” I said. “And I want to say I’m sorry that I wasn’t a better father for you.”

  Jeff put down his beer and looked at me.

  “What?” he said. “What are you talking about?”

  “How I screwed up.”

  “C’mon, you were a great father.”

  “I was gone all the time.”

  “Dad, don’t beat yourself up. You did great. I work like I do because you did. The work ethic I have, I got that from you. My job now, the boss is all about family. If you need a day off to be with your family, the boss says take it. And it’s stressful for me to even do that. I worked the way I did for one reason. My motto was ‘I’m going to be as good a Ford mechanic as my dad is a sportswriter.’ I still remember all those days you took me with you to the sports department in Louisville. I wasn’t even in school yet and you’d go in early to try to find a story. You’d set me at a typewriter and give me some paper. I’d go through your mail and get the Speed Sport News, Chris Economaki’s paper about racing. You had me working before kindergarten. The best part, though, was the vending machine—Cokes and candy.”

  In high school, my history teacher, Phil McCullough, once told the class that my father was a hard worker. He said those two words—“hard worker”—more than a half-century ago and I never forgot them. It was a small thing from a teacher, an aside in class, a moment that had nothing to do with teaching history and everything to do with teaching life. Now, at my son’s kitchen table, I heard what I never expected to hear: that what my father taught me about work I had taught Jeff about work.

  “And what other kid gets to do the things I did with you?” Jeff was on a streak now. “Like that day with the Louisville Cardinals. That football game, the spring game, where they had you as a celebrity coach. You took me along, I was maybe six or seven, and we stood on the sidelines, you coaching and me your assistant.”

  Really?

  “And Daytona. We went to all those 500s. How many kids get to do that? I sat on a pile of tires in the garage area talking to Richard Petty. I took a piss next to Buddy Baker while Cale Yarborough was taking a shower in the drivers’ room. Ever since, I have been everybody’s go-to NASCAR expert. At school I’d go around asking my buddies, ‘So where’s your dad this week? Mine’s at the Super Bowl, goes every year, brings me back stuff.’”

  Well…

  “And the bikes we rode together.”

  Jeff was ten years old when we bought motorcycles. I’d ridden once, crashed, bummed up a shoulder, wrote a column about it. So while Jeff became a motocross racer, I was happy to ride alone in the woods and hills and gullies, where it was safer for old men.

  “Like that day you put Mom on your YZ,” Jeff said. “Soon as she kicked it in gear, she ran it up a tree. It was great. You both were great when I was growing up.” (Nah, I was bad, totally. Cheryl’s very good, excellent day on a motorcycle became the stuff of family-bonding lore. I wrote a comic column about it. Writers write.)

  Okay, maybe there were moments. Maybe, in my silent way, I’d done for Jeff what my father, in his silent way, had done for me. I was relieved by Jeff’s recall of glad moments a generation old. I was happy that we had ended a long silence that had come between a father and a son. To celebrate, I next said, “Son, can I have one of those beers?”

  Now I could ask a storyteller’s questions. “Why do you think Jared chose a life on the road?”

  “Good question,” Jeff said, and he said it in a tone suggesting he

  had never considered asking such a thing. “I don’t know. He just liked having absolutely no responsibility, evidently. That’s the only thing I can come up with. That, and being free to do what he wanted to do.”

  After all of it—the divorce, separating the brothers, Jacob’s feeling that they weren’t welcome at home after high school and they should go join the Marines—Jeff said he wished he’d done one thing better. “Sometimes I’d be on the phone with Lynn and I was so angry I’d be calling her every filthy name in the book—and the boys would be hearing it all. That’s a regret I have. I shouldn’t have been doing that.”

  He also saw one curious thing in Jared’s early life.

  “He didn’t care about getting a driver’s license. What sixteen-year-old isn’t excited about getting his license? He just didn’t care. Like he wanted to stay off the grid. Like he was a nineteenth-century guy and wanted to live in a world where there weren’t licenses and taxes and he could just live off the land. A modern-day hobo.”

  Then this:

  “Bottom line,” Jeff said, “he liked drinking and being drunk. It’s what he liked.”

  “When, you think, did he start drinking?”

  “He must have started doing it when he was a senior in high school. I never knew it, except that time he was seventeen and the sheriff’s office brought him home. They said he’d been drunk outside a Food Lion. Also, he might have started five years before that—when he went to live with Lynn in Fairfax. He probably got in all kinds of crap up there before he came back to live with us his senior year.”

  “You ever talk to Jared about the drinking?”

  “Just to tell him he had to stop. He’d done a really good job of hiding it. He did that because he didn’t want to be a disappointment to me. I never said anything like, ‘You’re a worthless loser not going anywhere.’ But I do get criticized a lot for my facial expressions. I’m sure I displayed my disappointment that way. But all I ever said to him was ‘Jared, you got to stop, you got to slow down. You got to stop the drinking. It’s going to kill you.’ And he’d say, ‘Oh yeah, Dad, I’ve almost stopped.’”

  Leaving I-95 that morning, going to meet them all at Jeff’s place, Cheryl and I had driven west on Virginia’s Route 3 through Fredericksburg and on another fifteen miles to Locust Grove, nothing more than a dot on the map. Sixteen years earlier, we had bought a house and 175 acres there along a stream called Russell Run. Two hundred yards from our house, we built another house that we sold to Jeff and Lisa. The property was a world unto itself. Down a lane a mile long,
everything we could see was ours. The day we moved in, Jared and Jacob were eight years old, bouncing back and forth from their parents’ house to ours. Again, as in Newnan, we believed we’d be there forever.

  Now Jared was twenty-four. He lived nowhere and everywhere. We knew only a little about his life. We’d heard about Maggie and the speeding car in Arizona and the Michigan doctor’s warning. We’d heard that dark stuff. If we didn’t dismiss it, we didn’t accept it either. Life is hard and you get past the dark stuff and everything turns out good, doesn’t it? We were excited about seeing Jeff and eager to see Jared the next day. Jacob was out of town working, but we would be on the little farm with Jeff, Lisa, Kaleb, and Josie. We’d spend a day with Jared and his new road dogs, Jimbo and Aggro.

  EIGHTEEN

  On the morning of October 19, 2013, Cheryl and I saw Jared. As we drove between tall trees and up a lane, he stood by a garage on his father’s little farm. The boy I held on my right hand the first week of his life. The golden child in a white tuxedo and purple cummerbund. The teenage punk in his studded jacket and Mohawk. There he was now, twenty-four years old, a travelin’ kid off America’s railroads. Waiting for us on Jeff’s lane, covered with road grit and grime, a raggedy-ass beard sprouting down from his jawline. And he was by God beautiful.

  Beautiful in his travelin’ kid uniform. Dirt-smeared Carhartts, the pants too big at the waist, held up by suspenders. Cuffs rolled high above scuffed leather boots, unlaced. A ball cap, with a string woven through it and knotted under his chin so it wouldn’t fly off in a train’s whirlwind. Around his neck a bandanna, once red and now blackened with oil and grease, the “train rag,” as travelin’ kids call it, worn unto death or disintegration, whichever came first.