‘On a good day,’ Keith said, ‘about four hours. But this isn’t looking like it’s going to be a good day.’
At one o’clock, we saw the yellow markings of an SP locomotive rolling in from the south. Bulldog started jogging toward the tracks, with Keith and me right behind. The train braked its speed as it entered the yard and, by the time the locomotives passed us, was doing maybe ten miles per hour and still slowing down. There was an empty flatcar midway down the line of cars and Bulldog shouted, ‘Jump this one, boys!’ as he sprinted beside the car and got a handhold on the three-rung ladder at the tail of the car. He made it look easy as he leapt up onto the bottom rung and then scrambled aboard.
After Keith repeated the process, he shouted down to me, ‘Okay, throw me your duffel!’
For the briefest of paranoid seconds, I thought twice about tossing him my bag, picturing the two of them laughing as the train rolled on without me. But I was too pumped up to stop now, so I heaved my duffel up onto the flatcar and then made a desperate lunge for the ladder. Then I felt Bulldog’s vice-grip on my forearm and, before I knew it, I was hauled up the steps and standing safely on the flatcar, my heart pumping like crazy and an idiotic grin on my face. By Christ, I did it!
The guys were slapping me on the back as we kept rolling toward the north end of the yard, then suddenly the brakes began to squeal and the whole train jolted to a complete stop. Which immediately gave me unhappy flashbacks to my failed attempt to catch a freight train out of New Orleans. Oh shit, not again!
But Keith just laughed and thumped his head with his hand. ‘We’re morons, Bulldog! Don’t you remember? The SP trains always stop at the end of the yard to switch radios. We didn’t have to catch it on the fly. We could have just waited a minute and climbed aboard without working up a sweat!’
‘How come they have to switch radios?’ I asked.
‘’Cause Burlington Northern controls the tracks from Vancouver all the way to the Canadian border. The SP’s radios are set to a different frequency. So the SP engineers always have to stop here and pick up B&N radios before they make the run north. Why the fuck didn’t I remember that?’
‘Too many mickeys over the weekend, probably,’ Bulldog grinned.
Two minutes later, as Keith predicted, the train jerked ahead and this time we were rolling for real. As the train built up speed, we settled down against the wooden headwall at the front of the flatcar, out of the wind, and rolled up some smokes for the ride. Pretty soon we were going about thirty miles an hour, the noise too loud for conversation. Which was fine with me. I was content to just kick back and take in the scenery. Rolling north through St Helen’s, I caught a glimpse of the volcano, jagged and snowcapped, many miles to the east. It had been seven years since the last big eruption, but I saw plenty of evidence of the volcano’s reach. Along the railroad right of way there were several little streams whose banks were still buried under a thick layer of grey-white ash, its surface rippled by the wind like a sandy beach, and not a single stalk of vegetation had yet popped through to bring the banks back to life.
‘Something’s not right with this train!’ Keith shouted in my ear, as our speed slacked off near the town of Kelso. ‘We should be moving a lot faster than this!’
He was right. When we got to Longview, the train braked to a stop again and we lost another twenty minutes while the brakemen uncoupled one of the train’s two locomotives and swapped it out for a new one. Getting rid of the bum engine made all the difference, and when we got rolling again the engineer goosed it up to fifty or sixty, trying to make up time. Suddenly, the scenery was really flying by.
Just before Longview, we’d spotted some rainclouds blowing in from the west, so when the train stopped to switch engines we hedged our bets by moving to the shelter of an empty boxcar. Now I was sitting in front of the boxcar’s wide open doorway, perched comfortably on my rolled-up sleeping bag, watching everything flash by like a video on fast-forward. The racket from the boxcar’s rattling steel doors was so loud I had to wad some tissue and stuff it in my ears to muffle the din, but that was just a minor inconvenience; it didn’t spoil the show.
We roared right through a string of little towns with their lumber mills and fish hatcheries, and as they slipped past I’d hear the toy-like sound of the crossing gate’s bells receding behind us, then we’d be on to the next hidden waterfall or fern-choked gorge or cow pasture dotted with black-and-white Holsteins. All the while the steady rocking of the boxcar was hypnotic. I couldn’t get enough of it! Then suddenly we were into marsh country, with the salt smell of sea air, rushing along a high ridge above the edge of Puget Sound for twenty miles until we came to Tacoma, forty miles south of Seattle, just as the sun was going down.
We were stuck in Tacoma for another hour while the brakemen remade the train, dropping some cars and adding new ones. During the layover, Keith said we’d better switch back to a flatcar because we’d have to dismount on the fly in Seattle and the low ladders on either end of a flatcar made the manoeuvre much easier. To me, easier also meant safer, and I was glad to be travelling with seasoned hands.
Once the train was rolling again, Bulldog coached me on the proper technique for hopping off a train on the fly. ‘Throw your pack and your duffel off first,’ he said. ‘Then get on the ladder and lower yourself till your feet are skimming the gravel and start running like a son-of-a-bitch to keep up with the train, without letting go of the ladder. If the train’s going faster than you can run, you’ll have to pull yourself back up onto the train. Never let go of the ladder unless you feel your feet keeping pace with the train. But when you feel the right pace, let go and curl away from the train. That’s the crucial thing. Like I said, those steel wheels can fuck up your whole day.’
Keith was hoping the train would slow down enough for us to hop off near the Kingdome, in downtown Seattle, but no such luck. It kept right on chugging, and next thing we were rattling through a tunnel beneath the city that Keith called the ‘Moose Hole’, and when the train finally began to slow down enough for us to dismount we were two miles past the tunnel. Keith and Bulldog hopped off first, to let me see how it was done, and then I pitched my gear off the car and got down onto the ladder. I lowered my feet till they were skimming over the rough ballast stones and was glad I had my thick-soled jungle boots on.
I couldn’t believe how fast I had to run to keep pace with the train. But, rookie that I was, I kept my eyes on my feet instead of looking ahead, which was dumb. I don’t know why, but something (maybe the Hail Mary I’d said before the manoeuvre started) cautioned me to look up just before I was about to let go of the ladder. And it was a damned lucky thing I did because in the nick of time I spotted a steel stanchion full of track lights looming only ten feet ahead of me. If I’d let go then, I would have run right into the stanchion, with no doubt fatal results. Thank God I saw it in time and didn’t let go of the ladder rung until I was safely clear of it. When I bailed out, I managed to keep my balance on the rough ballast as I curled away from the train’s wheels. When I stumbled to a stop without a face-plant, I whooped triumphantly and Bulldog shouted, ‘Congratulations!’
‘Thanks, coach!’ I shouted back, and started jogging along the tracks to retrieve my jettisoned pack and duffel.
Seattle at last! It was after eight at night, and the lights of the Space Needle were winking above the downtown skyline as we set off on the long trek back to the skid row district, near the Kingdome, to spend the night in Keith and Bulldog’s camp.
We were all hungry after the long day on the train, but unfortunately we’d arrived too late to be fed at any of the local rescue missions. Bulldog managed to scavenge up some hard rolls from a dumpster behind the Spaghetti Factory restaurant near the Pike Place Market, down on the waterfront, and we gnawed on those as we continued our hike to camp. But we were still hungry when we reached skid row, so I spent my last two dollars in Food Stamps on a couple of cans of pork and beans at an all-night grocery store, where Keith and
Bulldog knew all the winos loitering on the sidewalk. While I was at the counter paying for the cans of beans, Bulldog entered the store with a big smile on his face. One of the winos had lent him enough change to purchase a ‘square’ of Wild Irish Rose, which he and Keith wasted no time cracking open as we hiked the rest of the way to their camp.
About a mile past the Kingdome and the Salvation Army shelter, we came to the parking lot of a Jartran truck and trailer rental outlet.
‘Welcome to our “trailer park”,’ Keith said. ‘Pick any empty trailer you like. Long as we’re up and out of here before the manager shows up at six to open the place, we never get hassled sleeping here.’
Bordering one side of the trailer lot was a disused railroad spur, all overgrown with weeds, and Keith and Bulldog had their bedrolls stashed in a trackside storage box the railroad had abandoned. While they were retrieving their bedrolls from the box, I opened the cans of pork and beans. After we’d polished them off, Keith set his wristwatch alarm for 5 a.m. and we all retired to separate empty trailers for the night.
I was still sleeping soundly when Keith pounded on the side of my trailer at 5.15 the next morning. I scrambled out and gathered my gear, and after I’d stored it in Keith and Bulldog’s stash spot we set off in the darkness for the Union Gospel Mission, because it opened its doors the earliest.
‘We’ll grab some coffee and stale doughnuts at the UG, then boogie over to the Alpha Plasma Center before the crowd shows up,’ Keith said, giving us our marching orders for the morning. Which sounded good to me. I’d spent the last of my cash on coffee at the Plaid Pantry back in Vancouver.
At the plasma centre, everything went smoother than I’d expected. My ID card from the Stab Lab in Portland was valid in Seattle, too, and after I passed my urine test I was pumping out a bag in no time. At the pay window, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they paid ten bucks a pint in Seattle, instead of the eight bucks you got in Old Town. The Emerald City was impressing me already!
After the Stab Lab, we headed over to the Welfare Office so I could switch my Food Stamps account to Seattle. My DHS ID from Portland made that an easy process, too, although the system in Seattle was slightly more stringent when it came to proof of local address. You couldn’t get away with just marking your ‘X’ on a troll map in this town. If you didn’t have a permanent address, they required you to spend three consecutive nights at the city-run homeless shelter on Third Avenue. Which I wasn’t really keen on doing – until they told me the place’s name. The Morrison Hotel! As a long-time Doors fan, I knew that the album of that name referred to a flophouse in Los Angeles, not Seattle – but still . . .
Outside the Welfare Office, Keith and Bulldog were already half in the bag from the jug they’d bought with their blood money, and when I rejoined them they blubbered it was time to hop on the free bus and take a ride to the ‘Indian Center’ for lunch. Like Portland, Seattle’s local bus system offered a ‘Fare-less Square’ – a square mile of downtown in which the bus rides were free. Which was a good thing because Keith and Bulldog were rapidly getting legless.
Despite its name, the Native American Center served whites, too, and their homey dining room looked more like a grade school cafeteria than your usual soup kitchen. The food was excellent and once we’d eaten a hearty meal of baked salmon and wild rice my two wino guides were much revived.
After lunch, we hopped a free bus back to skid row, where the two of them wanted to split another jug of Rosie and hang out at Occidental Park, a tree-lined green where many of the local tramps congregated. But I didn’t want to waste the afternoon, so I had them give me directions to the public library, where I figured I could find a pay-typewriter and bang out a revised résumé to use when I started making the rounds for galley cook jobs.
The résumé I’d brought with me from Portland was slanted toward editorial and clerical work. I’d have to rework it to highlight my experience in restaurant kitchens if I wanted to land a cook’s job. Admittedly, my experience was rather thin. Except the four years I’d spent working in the college kitchens at Dartmouth and a few summers in the seasonal restaurant at the Dartmouth golf course, my only real culinary training had come at the hands of my friend Danny B, a Tribeca chef who’d hired me to work as a prep cook in his catering kitchen at the Washington Street Café – the last real job I’d managed to land before my coke habit made me unfit to do anything but peddle drugs in bars.
The downtown library, located in a high-rise building at the corner of Spring Street and Fourth Avenue, would become my favourite haven from street life during my time in Seattle, especially the third-floor rooftop terrace café, where you could buy a reasonably priced cup of Seattle’s famous coffee while enjoying a bird’s-eye view of Elliott Bay and the islands that dot Puget Sound in the hazy distance. I doubted there was another public library in the country that could boast such a scenic perch, and I took full advantage of it on those rare days when the sun actually broke through the fog and drizzle – days that seemed to take the locals by surprise. One afternoon when I was up on the terrace I overheard two male librarians discussing the weather during their coffee break, and when the first complained it was too damned sunny, the second one asked, ‘Are you afraid it will kill your mildew?’ Pacific Northwest humour.
However, on that first afternoon at the library I had no time for scenic views. I was too busy burning through half my blood money at the pay-typewriter and the Xerox machine. But the revamped résumé I turned out seemed satisfactory and I was eager to start flogging it around on the waterfront the next morning. First, though, I had to survive a night at the Morrison Hotel – a place Keith and Bulldog referred to derisively as the ‘Zoo’. Both of them were periodically forced to check in there themselves; they were both enrolled in a welfare programme for alcoholics and their caseworker demanded address verification from them once a month to maintain their eligibility for their monthly stipend – which of course they referred to as a ‘drunk cheque’.
The programme that provided these ‘drunk cheques’ was called GAU, which stood for General Assistance – Unemployable, and was designed to help homeless alkies get off the streets by paying them enough each month to rent a cheap furnished room. So, Keith and Bulldog were both being paid $188 per month to be drunks and, like most of their wino brothers, they preferred to spend that windfall on fortified wine instead of housing – which goes to show that when the idiot wind is blowing, even the social engineers can’t build a windbreak strong enough.
Keith and Bulldog had said they’d check into the Morrison with me that night, so I went back to Occidental Park at sunset to collect them. But before heading to the city shelter they suggested we swing by the Bread of Life (Bride of Death) Mission for some chow first. Like most Protestant missions, the BOL dished up an ear-beating before feeding us, and that night’s guest preacher was an earnest young man fresh out of Bible School. The theme of his sermon was our salvation as a gift from God, it not being something we could earn on our own. According to him, no matter how much good we did in our lives, it would never outweigh our accumulated sins. To make his point, he drew an analogy to, of all things, parking tickets!
‘Say you commit only three sins per day,’ he said. ‘Multiply those three sins times 365 days a year times seventy years of average life, and you’ll be going to Judgement with seventy thousand sins on your record. Now, suppose you went before a judge with seventy thousand parking tickets. What do you think would happen?’ he asked.
‘Free room and board!’ shouted one of the wags in the back, and the whole congregation erupted in laughter. Which left the young preacher blushing and momentarily tongue-tied. They surely hadn’t prepared him for skeptics like us in Bible School. But he’d have wised up pretty quick if he’d had to spend a few nights at the Morrison Hotel, I’ll guarantee it.
The Morrison, an eight-storey red-brick monstrosity, had been built in the early 1900s as the home base of the Arctic Club, a social organisation composed of sur
vivors of the Klondike Gold Rush. Now it housed the city’s largest men’s shelter, and hundreds of homeless lined up every evening in the alley at the back of the building to be admitted through the transients’ entrance.
‘Don’t worry,’ Keith said, as we joined the line. ‘We’ll be in and out before you know it. Nobody cares if you bug out early. We just have to go upstairs to the desk, sign in for the night, then sit around on our sleeping mat in the dorm until the clipboard flunky comes around to mark us present. After that, we’re free to boogie,’ he grinned.
‘No shit?’ I said, surprised the system could be that easily manipulated. ‘How do you get an address verification slip from them if you bug out early?’ I asked.
‘They don’t hand out the AV slips till tomorrow anyway. You just swing by when you’re in the neighbourhood and pick it up from whoever’s working the desk. Piece of cake. Me and Bulldog are going to score a couple jugs and head back out to camp as soon as we’re checked in. If I was you, I’d do the same.’
‘Well, hell, if that’s how it works, I’m out of here too,’ I smiled. Which turned out to be a sensible decision, because when we got upstairs I could see why Keith and Bulldog called the place the ‘Zoo’. Even the half-hour I spent sitting on my assigned floor mat in the dormitory – a huge, high-ceilinged room that looked as if it had once been the Arctic Club’s grand ballroom – was enough to make me sure I’d be better off sleeping under the stars than putting up with the racket the Morrison crowd was making.
The variety of manias on display was something to behold. On one of the mats in our section sat a simple soul named Billy Beck, who proudly informed me that he was hitching out to Indianapolis in the morning to pursue his dream of making his fortune as a human guinea pig at the Eli Lilly Pharmaceutical Research Center. On the mat beside him sat a short, skinny black kid in his late teens who was fervently flipping through the pages of a body-building magazine and telling all who cared to hear that he was training for the Mr America championship. He claimed he was going to pump himself up to 225 pounds before he entered the competition, which would have been quite a feat, considering he couldn’t have weighed more than 125 sopping wet. Not even the steroid pills he pulled out of his backpack to show me could work a miracle like that. But you couldn’t knock his enthusiasm.
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