Bones’s relationship with the FTRA points up something that I’m coming to believe: that petty squabbles proliferate throughout the membership, and that ultimately the gang is more a danger to itself than to anyone else. During the interview, Bones voices bitterness toward a number of his FTRA brothers whom he says took money from the police to testify against him; he expresses particular loathing for a hobo named Moose who, he claims, had no knowledge of the crime and lied about it to the authorities. “I kept to the code,” he says. “I didn’t give up nothin’ on nobody. And that’s a lot more than some of those sons of bitches did for me.”
Bones speaks of his affection for various gang members, but his attitude toward the rituals of the FTRA is less respectful. For one thing, nobody jumped him into the gang, he participated in no initiation; he started wearing the bandana and silver concho on his own authority. “I wore the red out of Arizona,” he says, referring to the color of the bandanas worn by gang members who ride the old Southern Pacific routes. “Nobody would gainsay me.” He scoffs at the notion that there is any sort of hierarchy in the gang. “You get six or seven together,” he tells me, “and somebody’ll call the shots. But that’s all.” He disputes the idea that rape and beating are part and parcel of FTRA initiations. “Once in a while some punk’ll want to get in, and then there’ll be a fight, but it ain’t a regular thing. I never heard ’bout nobody getting raped.” He’s equally dismissive of the idea that the gang poses a serious menace.
“They’re saying we’re a threat to society, but the truth is, society is more a threat to us. Tramps get murdered all the time.” He tells me about the time he was sleeping with his wife in a lean-to in the hobo jungle near Pasco, Washington, when a local opened fire on them from the bushes with a rifle.
“The thing you got to understand,” he says, “hobos don’t want much. FTRA or independent, it don’t matter. They want a piece of dirt in the shade, they want their food stamps, they want something to drink, something to smoke, and something to screw.”
Bones is scarcely what the law would consider a credible witness, certainly not so credible as Officer Grandinetti. He has an extensive arrest record, and he goes on at some length about “utilizing personal magnetism to subdue ruthless people,” which speaks both to a measure of craftiness and a healthy streak of arrogance. He lies effortlessly; he’s lied to me and subsequently admitted it. Like anyone in prison, he’s working every angle he can, and I suspect he’s working some angle with me. Not that I can fault him for it—he’s alone, he has no idea where his wife is, no one writes him, and, except for his lawyer, I’m the only person from outside the walls with whom he’s had contact. But despite this, and while I’m hesitant to make an informed judgment about his character based on a single interview, I find what he tells me, if not credible, then at least genuine in its essence. My acceptance of what he says probably has something to do with his enthusiasm for hoboing, for trains, for animals—especially his German shepherd, Star—and the outdoors. This enthusiasm seems an irreducible distillate of the man, and the longer we talk, the more what he says seems funded by that portion of his sensibility; and the more frequently he goes back to what we’ve previously discussed in order to clarify some point, or to reshape a story so it better reflects the truth. It’s as if he’s gone past his natural suspicion of me, and is having a good time talking to someone from the world.
Our conversation turns to the trains, and when I tell Bones about my infant experiences on the rails, he lifts an eyebrow and says, “You’ve ridden?”
“Yeah, a little.”
Bones continues looking at me for a long moment, his expression neutral, and I think he’s trying to fit the information into his understanding of me, reassessing my potential. Or could be he’s merely surprised. Then he grins, and I can see the face of the boy emerge from all those lines and wrinkles. It’s a look of unalloyed pleasure, as if everything around us, walls and razor wire and guards, had vanished, and we were sitting on a patch of dirt somewhere warm, passing a bottle.
“Man, ain’t it fun!” he says.
I’m riding in a boxcar south along the Columbia River, which must be nearly a mile wide at this point, and it’s hard to tell which is the reflecting medium and which the source of light—the river, every eddy bearing a captive glint, or the starry sky above. The towering hills that follow the watercourse show dark and nearly featureless, all but their lowermost reaches in shadow, making it appear that the curtain of night has been gathered into great black folds at the edge of the bright stage it delimits. Though it’s incredibly loud in the car, too loud for speech, something about the solitude and immensity of the scene, and perhaps the sense I have of the peculiarly American tradition of which I’m now a small part, the rail riders of the Civil War era, the hobos of the Depression, the FTRA…all this serves to describe a silence inside me, to shut me off from the rattling and the cold iron smells of the train, even from the noise of ambient thought, and after a while, emerging from an almost meditative state, I wonder if this is what Adman means by “the Drift.”
Adman is the train name of Todd Waters, a brisk, fiftyish man with a neat gray beard who runs a successful Minneapolis advertising agency. He’s been riding for more than twenty years, and admits to being what is called a “yuppie rider” or a “yuppie hobo.” Most tramps use shoestrings to tie off their trouser cuffs when they’re boarding a freight to prevent the fabric from catching on something and causing them to fall. Adman uses Velcro fasteners. When I met him he was wearing a sporty cap, and a denim jacket and trousers that appeared to be matching, and I thought he would look more natural steering a yacht than hopping a freight. He’s given to comparing the quintessential hobo to a Hesse character whose purpose in life was “to make men homesick for their freedom,” and he asserts that the experience of riding elevates him into a state he calls “the Drift,” wherein it seems that his dreams and thoughts are colored not by his own past, but by the stars he’s passing beneath and the places he’s passing through.
I can’t quite go there with Adman—I haven’t yet found anyone on the rails who’s made me homesick for my freedom. But you have to respect Adman because he’s done something with his romantic zeal. Back in 1983 he created the Penny Route, encouraging people to contribute a penny for every mile he rode; he wound up raising more than a hundred thousand dollars for the National Coalition for the Homeless. Since then he’s established himself as a respected figure in the hobo community, someone who can speak both to and for the transient rail population. What’s troublesome about yuppie hobos in general, however, are the increasing numbers of sport riders and scenery freaks who sally forth onto the rails without regard for the risks involved. Should someone with a little fame—a minor rock star or a peripheral Kennedy relative—decide to hop a freight in order to research a part or just to feel that “Jack Kerouac thing,” and then fall under the wheels of a boxcar, Officer Grandinetti will be turning up on every television program from Nightline to American Journal, wagging his finger and putting the bogeyman face of the FTRA on the tragedy, whether it applies or not, and the media frenzy will begin.
From the standpoint of the railroad companies, one might think that an intensified law enforcement focus on the subject of the FTRA, wrong-headed or not, would be a good thing, since it would probably result in even more security and fewer criminal incidents involving transients. But Ed Trandahl, a spokesman for Union Pacific, laughed when I mentioned Grandinetti, and said, “Oh, yeah. We know about him.” He went on to say that “The FTRA is a totally overblown deal. Union Pacific has thoroughly explored this with our railroad police, and there’s no massive organization at work here. Our investigators have gone over hundreds of cases and we can’t find any correlation to what Mr. Grandinetti is saying.”
The 39-year-old hobo who brought the heat down onto the rails, Robert Joseph Silveria (aka Sidetrack) has the word “Freedom” tattooed on his neck. In his case freedom is, indeed, just another word for nothing left to lose—on January
31, 1998, he pled guilty to two counts of first degree murder, and was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for having caused the deaths of Michael Clites, 24, and William Petit, Jr., 39, both transients, by means of blunt force trauma. He is due to be tried in Kansas and Florida on similar charges, and there is solid evidence connecting him with the murders of transients in Emeryville, Oregon, in West Sacramento, in Salt Lake City, and Whitefish, Montana. When I first interviewed Detective Mike Quakenbush of Salem, Oregon, who arrested Silveria, he told me that he believed Silveria was “good for a lot more murders than those with which he’d been linked,” and, according to the San Francisco Examiner, Silveria himself told an uncle by marriage that he had killed 47 people out of a deep anger. In letters to a former jail acquaintance, Silveria declared that he was the leader of the homeless nation, and wrote, “I could have tortured others of your world, but I chose to torture my world, because I preyed on the weak.”
Quakenbush described Silveria as being cordial, amiable, having a pleasant manner typical of serial killers, and believes that this allowed him to get close to his victims. Silveria reminds him of Eddie Haskell from the Leave It to Beaver show. But Silveria is not a member of the FTRA. In fact, he made a point during his confession that his crimes had nothing to do with the FTRA. There’s no doubt that Silveria rode and jungled up with FTRA hobos, but such loose associations are common on the rails and hardly constitute evidence of collusion.
Quakenbush’s take on the FTRA is more restrained than that of Officer Grandinetti. In his view, they have the profile of a ’50s or ’60s biker gang, and though they have no set hierarchy, he suspects there may be powerbrokers among them, “people who can get things done.” But he told me it’s impossible to get a handle on them because of the anonymity of their lifestyle, which enables them to slide through the system, to move two states down the road in a matter of hours without going through easily surveilled areas such as airports and bus stations. Maybe, he said, there’s a pecking order based on seniority, on how long an FTRA member has been riding; but again, it’s hard to be sure. My impression of Quakenbush’s attitude toward the FTRA is that they’re interesting to him from a law enforcement standpoint, but that he’s got more pressing matters on his desk.
Madcat’s a veteran of Desert Storm, and he’s got pictures to prove it. Photographs of him and his buddies dressed in camo and posed with their weapons in the sand. He keeps them wrapped in a small American flag, and uses them like ID. Breaks them out, explains the meaning and circumstances attendant upon each, then packs them up, never to be shown again. I’ve tried to get him talking about the war, thinking that the reason he’s on the rails and homeless must have some relation to his tour of duty. He hasn’t told me much. He once described the enormous encampment in the desert where he was billeted, a medium-sized town of lion-colored tents and roaring machinery. One day, he says, he was driving a truck through the desert and came upon a crate of Stinger missiles lying in the middle of nowhere. He thought this was funny until he was ordered to transport them to an arsenal and learned that they were unstable, that a sudden jolt might launch one straight at the back of his head—at least that’s what he was told. He drove at 3 mph all the way, and was disciplined for his tardiness.
“Don’t matter you got smart bombs,” he says, “when all there is, is idiots to drop ’em.”
Madcat doesn’t talk much about anything in his past. From his accent, I’d guess he’s from the south, maybe Texas; the way he says “forward” (“fao-wud”) puts me in mind of people I know in Houston. He’s average height, skinny, got a touch of gray in his ragged beard. Early thirties, I figure. A sharp, wary face dominated by large grayish blue eyes, the kind of face one sees staring glumly at the camera in Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs. Whenever we’ve ridden together, he rarely speaks unless I ask him a question. For the most part he stays quietly drunk and plays with dogs belonging to other hobos. Since many FTRA tramps travel with dogs, he’s gotten to know quite a few of them.
“They’re all right,” he says. “You mess with ’em, they’ll stand up to you. And there’s some you want to be careful around. But you can say the same about a lot of bars you walk into, the people there.”
This particular afternoon I’m supposed to meet an FTRA member known as Erie Flash at Madcat’s office, a Seattle tavern that caters to transients. Ranks of pint and half-pint bottles of Thunderbird stand in front of a clouded mirror behind the bar, and the chewed-up leatherette booths are occupied by an assortment of damaged-looking people: an elderly Santa-shaped gentleman with a lumpish, mauve nose; a pair of down-at-heels Afro-Americans; a disheveled middle-aged couple who’re having an argument. A chubby Aleut woman in a torn man’s shirt and jeans sits at the bar, holding her head in her hands. Madcat’s not in the best shape himself. He’s nursing a glass of wine, pressing the heel of one hand against his brow; he’s been in a fight, and sports a bloody nose and a discolored lump over one eye. Fighting is the most prominent symptom of Madcat’s problem. When he’s staying in a city, in a squat or a mission, he’ll get in a fight a day, sometimes more; he claims that fighting is the only way he “can get the devil out.” But when he’s riding, it seems that the closeness of the train soothes his particular devil. It’s possible, I think, the trains have a similar effect on others, which would explain in part why there’s so much sadness out on the rails—some hobos are attracted to the trains because the potency of those 2-million-ton presences and their metal voices act to subsume their pain.
We’ve been waiting almost an hour when Flash makes his appearance. He’s tall, physically imposing, and has a biker intensity that’s in line with his reputation as a man with—according to the grapevine—no compunctions about murder. It’s said he manufactures speed from starter fluid and drugstore inhalers, among other ingredients, and once he gets cranked up, he’s a dangerous person to be around. Under a denim jacket, he’s wearing his FTRA colors, a black bandana held in place by two silver conchos. Thick black hair threaded with gray falls to his shoulders. Dark, alert eyes. His hands are large, with prominent knuckles; his features are well-defined, strong, but dissolution has taken a toll, and what I’m seeing now is the ruins of a handsome man. He’s been staying with a local woman in her home, and looks healthier than other gang members I’ve encountered. Like most hobos, he doesn’t offer a handshake to someone he’s just met.
I tell him I’d like to hear his angle on the FTRA story, and he says fiercely, “I ain’t got no damn story. Not one I want you to hear.” But after I buy him a pint of T-bird, he seems mollified and takes the stool beside me. As he talks, he has the habit of looking down at his glass and then slowly turning his head toward me, a tight movement, finishing the turn as he finishes his thought—he might be tracking the carriage of an invisible typewriter.
“None of you gave a shit about us before,” he says. “We could dry the fuck up and blow away, you wouldn’t care. Now some nut case kills a few people, and you’re all over us. How’d you like it I come in your house and go to asking a bunch of dumb-ass questions? S’pose I barge into your living room and say, ‘’S’cuse me, buddy. You always drink two martinis ’fore you screw your girlfriend, or is that just ’cause it’s Tuesday?’”
I start to speak, but he cuts me off.
“You got your own nuts you can write about. Ted Bundy and all them other freaks. Sidetrack don’t have a damn thing to do with the FTRA.” He holds up his empty pint, which he’s drained in three gulps—I signal the bartender.
“Sooner or later,” he goes on, “one of you shitbrains is gonna piss somebody off and get yourself killed. Then you’ll have a fucking story. The rails ain’t no place to be asking questions. Hobos want to be left the fuck alone. That’s why we’re out there. Keep pestering us, we’ll let you know about it.”
By the time he’s started in on his third pint, Flash has completely abandoned his intention of not talking to me, and is taking it upon himself to smarten me up, chump that I am. He
’s mellowed; his gestures are not so tightly controlled, and his voice has acquired a lazy, gassed quality, causing me to think that his original hostility might have been chemically enhanced.
“People are setting up Eddie Bauer tents in the jungles,” he says. “Walking around with scanners and hiking boots. You take a stroll through a place where everybody’s starving, and you’re packing a bag of groceries, what you expects gonna happen? The rails is where we live, man. It ain’t a fucking theme park. All this shit you’re stirring up—” he taps me on the chest “—one of you’s gonna wind up eating it. And it ain’t because the FTRA is the fucking mafia, y’know. ’Cause it ain’t. We take care of our own, but that’s as far as it goes.”
I ask him if there’s a hierarchy in the gang, any structure, and he lets out a scornful laugh.
“You think I kill people, don’t you?” he asks. “That’s the reason you’re talking to me.”
The question catches me off guard. “I don’t know. Do you?”
He gives me a steady look. “I do what I have to. We all do what we have to, right?”
“I suppose.”
“Well, that’s exactly what I do…what I have to. That’s your structure. That’s all the structure there is.”
“So you’re saying it’s the survival of the fittest?”
“I’m saying that right here, the three of us—” his gesture includes me and Madcat “—if we’re out riding, one of us is president, one’s vice president.” He grins. “Then there’s you.”
“If that’s all it is, why join a gang?”
“Brotherhood, man. You need me to explain brotherhood to you?”
The Aleut woman a few seats down makes a low keening noise, and Flash regards her with disfavor.
“I got no reason to tell you shit,” he says, coming back to me. “I told you some of the things I done, you wouldn’t understand ’em. The world you live in, the only excuse there is for killing is self-defense. But where I live there might be a thousand good reasons for killing somebody any given moment. That don’t mean you got to enjoy it. But you better be up for it.”
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