Leave Out the Tragic Parts Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by Dave Kindred

  Cover design by Pete Garceau

  Cover images: boy © Nikki Smith/Arcangel; train tracks © iStock/Getty Images

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  First Edition: February 2021

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kindred, Dave, author.

  Title: Leave out the tragic parts: a grandfather’s search for a boy lost to addiction / Dave Kindred.

  Description: 1st Edition. | New York: PublicAffairs, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020008031 | ISBN 9781541757066 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541757080 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Kindred, Jared Glenn, 1988– | Drug addicts—United States—Biography. | Drug addicts—Family relationships—United States.

  Classification: LCC HV5805.K56 K56 2021 | DDC 362.29092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008031

  ISBNs: 978-1-5417-5706-6 (hardcover), 978-1-5417-5708-0 (e-book)

  E3-20210105-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  EPIGRAPH

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PREFACE

  LEAVE OUT THE TRAGIC PARTS One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DISCOVER MORE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  There is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

  —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

  If a storyteller thinks enough of storytelling to regard it as a calling, unlike a historian he cannot turn from the sufferings of his characters. A storyteller, unlike a historian, must follow compassion wherever it leads him. He must be able to accompany his characters, even into smoke and fire, and bear witness to what they thought and felt even when they themselves no longer knew.… They were young and did not leave much behind them and need someone to remember them.

  —Norman MacLean, Young Men and Fire

  For Cheryl

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have never written anything more true than this book. I also have never written anything in which I was less certain of the facts. For reasons made clear in the text, the book’s primary on-the-road characters are unreliable narrators. To give their stories clarity and coherence, I have reported names, dates, places, and events as best I could determine them. It was more important to me that the characters told the truth as they knew it. That, I believe, they did.

  PREFACE

  This is a story about a boy I knew from the week of his birth and a young man I never knew at all. The boy was my grandson, Jared Glenn Kindred, and the young man was Goblin. That was Jared’s road name, Goblin. He lived on the street until he learned to hop freight trains and then he lived on the road. He was one of those wanderers whose lives are a mystery and a bafflement, an undoable jigsaw puzzle. To find the light in that darkness, the storyteller goes in search of those who knew Jared who became Goblin. The storyteller who is also the grandfather then writes it truly. He writes it with tears and compassion and laughter. He writes that every time he talked to Jared who became Goblin he ended the conversation saying, “Love you, boy,” and every time the grandson said, “Love you too.”

  Jared was born December 8, 1988, delivered three minutes before his brother, Jacob, fraternal twins, one weighing five pounds, the other five pounds, one ounce. The week before Christmas, I saw the boys in a braided-twig basket, Jared on the left, Jacob on the right. My wife, Cheryl, lifted them out of the basket and placed them in my hands. They stretched from my palms to halfway up my forearms. I wanted to remember how tiny they were. To me, at last, the birth of a child was amazing, a miracle, twice a miracle, Jared and Jacob. To see them was to remember the birth of my son, their father, Jeff. I remembered my wife in labor for hours, begging me to rub her back and, every time I rubbed her back, screaming, “Don’t touch me!”

  At the birth of our son I was twenty-two and knew nothing. My memory of his birth is a blur of school, job, marriage, the baby’s coming, the screaming, and then we went back to work. Cheryl was a day-shift nurse. I was a sportswriter working days, nights, and weekends because, when you’re young and hungry and tireless, all you want to do is work and get to where you want to be. Where I wanted to be was not in a labor room with the screaming. I wanted to be out making the future happen. I was a kid myself, and I didn’t know the future was happening in that labor room, our son being born.

  Then, suddenly, I was forty-seven years old. And our son was a father, and he knew what was happening even if I never knew. Jeff held the twins in his arms and called them “Jake and Jed, my country boys.” He looked into the camera, and I’d never seen a prouder dad. Had I ever held our son in my arms and had a picture made? I could search in drawers and boxes and maybe I’d find a picture, but that wouldn’t count, because it would mean I didn’t remember and the picture must not have meant much to me when it was taken.

  I made a fool of myself in love with the grandsons, and I figured I did that because I didn’t do it for my son and here was a second chance. Maybe I could show love now and my son would notice and be happy that I’m his dad loving his boys the way I never loved him. Or maybe it would remind him how much he resented the absence of that love. Who knows? We’re all guessing. My guess is my son saw in my love of the grandsons a love he never saw for him and somewhere in him there is a mournful bell tolling for the absence of his father’s love and that bell never goes quiet.

  So I’m the storyteller writing this book about Jared who became Goblin. In every book like this, where the storyteller is lost in the dark and looking for the light, people hearing the story want to know how a father’s son and a grandfather’s grandson goes to live on the street, where he drinks and finds a way to hop trains across America, where he drinks more. People hearing the
story want to know how it happened and why, and the best the storyteller can do is to do what he does, which is find those who knew him, the road dogs who traveled with Goblin, and listen to what they say and how they say it.

  Jared’s journey put him in a small circle of twenty-first-century hoboes who call themselves “travelin’ kids.” A buddy of his called their world “an underbelly of America that most people don’t even know exists.” They get where they’re going by any means available. They walk, they hitchhike, they “ride the dog” (a Greyhound bus). Most often, they clamber onto freight trains, which is illegal, dangerous, and, once done, apparently irresistible. In five years, Jared rode trains twenty-five thousand miles.

  A line tracing Jared’s travels moves through Virginia and the Carolinas into Florida and along the Gulf. It runs to California and back, up to Tennessee, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before turning north to Vermont and south through Massachusetts to New York. He called from Richmond and San Diego, from Boston, Chicago, and Ocala. He loved New Orleans. He paraded in the French Quarter and drank on a Mississippi River wharf by the Café du Monde. There he sang with a crew he named the Scurvy Bastards, raggedy-ass mischief-makers who in another time might have been prankster pirates coming ashore from the Caribbean. He called to say hi or to chatter about his latest adventure. Naked girls, Grandpa, and they’re running through the forest, naked. He taught me how easy it was for a grandpa to wire cash from Western Union. I need a Megabus ticket from Albany to the city, $19 is all. The world of travelin’ kids is at once small and unlimited. There may be only a couple hundred of them, no one knows, maybe a thousand, no one cares enough to count them. They live inside no boundaries. Wherever they are, that’s where they want to be.

  I’m writing in the service of a storyteller’s passion, which is always the same—find a good story and tell it well. I have told a thousand stories about other people, and those were easy because everything could be made to make sense. But when it’s the storyteller’s life and his son’s life and his grandson’s, it’s complicated in ways unimagined and in ways that no one can know until they are lost in the dark groping for a way out of the confusion. Still, the storyteller tries to tell it real and true and the best he can because, for him if for no one else, there was a need to know what happened out there. I had to know what happened. I loved the boy Jared who became the man Goblin who created a life unlike any life most of us will ever know or want to know, a wanderer’s life, not homeless, for he had homes where he was loved, but a wanderer who slept on sidewalks and under bridges and along railroad tracks behind the Jax Brewery in New Orleans. I had to know what happened. I had loved the child Jared, and when he slept in my bed I told him sleepy-time stories. I did it because I hoped that someday he would talk to me about anything and everything in ways my son had never talked to me, and in ways I had never talked to my father.

  Then I lost sight of Jared. Our time together had been counted in hours; it became minutes. Once upon a time, he would not shut up; then, silence. Soon enough he became a stranger, still beloved but a stranger, and then he was gone, and I asked what I might have done to hold him close and, before him, to hold my son close. I asked, what if I’d done this, what if I’d said that, a thousand what-ifs, all with unknowable answers. As best I could do it, I had to find out what happened. It’s not that I wanted anyone to forgive me. I wanted to forgive myself for not recognizing Jared’s pain, not knowing how to help him. Maybe if I could connect the dots and find more dots and connect them all, maybe we would be together again, grandson and grandfather. Could this little book that we’ve done together, the boy’s voice here, his friends telling their Goblin stories, the beautiful ones and the heartbreaking ones, could it bring us together again? I had to know.

  There was a time in the sadness that I had dreams, four dreams in a month. In one I am a major league baseball player. I am getting on the team bus for a ride to Yankee Stadium. But I have forgotten my glove. I return to the clubhouse for the glove and reboard the bus. Only now it’s a city bus and it’s not going to Yankee Stadium. It’s wandering through Manhattan, across a river and into Brooklyn, where I get off the bus and stand behind a chain-link fence. I am watching kids hitting dirty baseballs on a muddy vacant lot covered by rocks. They invite me to play. But I don’t have a glove. Now I have left it on the bus. “Somebody,” I say, “take me to Yankee Stadium,” and a tall, skeletal, gray-bearded man wearing catcher’s shin guards says, “Get in that taxi.” I tell the driver, “I gotta get to Yankee Stadium.” The driver is the movie star Meg Ryan. She has a notebook and seems to be a reporter, and I say, “You want a good story? Today’s my major league debut and I will not get a single to right field because I am here in Brooklyn.” And Meg Ryan says, “Where’s your glove?”

  In other dreams I lose a golf bag and a laptop, and in one I am lost on the ground floor of a vast, derelict building with slivers of light streaming through the ceiling. It seems to be an abandoned steel foundry. I walk up one of its steel-mesh stairways that casts spiderweb shadows, and I open a giant door and I am blinded by light. I’m now in a church. It’s an Anglican church with British people in the pews. They see me and they draw in their breath at the sight of a grimy intruder at their very proper church service. I wonder why I’m there.

  I told people about the dreams, and a friend said the dreams were about loss, the loss of things, the losses signifying the loss of Jared. There were more dreams too, and they all had me groping in the darkness, afraid, anxious, unable to do what I needed to do, unable to do what I’d done forever. I came to understand that those dreams were not about loss. They were about the emptiness that follows loss, the paralyzing emptiness of despair.

  Someone asked, why tell Jared’s story? Why go into the dark, why not grieve and move on? Why write a story that has no answers but only pain and more questions? One answer is, it’s a good story. There is that. There is also the friend who said, “You have to tell Jared’s story. You have to tell it for him and for yourself. Keep him alive in your heart. Tell his story for his parents, for Jacob, and for all the other kids out there like him. All your love and concern couldn’t save Jared, but you might just be able to save some of them traveling the same road. All those kids whose wiring and biochemistry make it impossible to accept the help they need. Tell Jared’s story.”

  I found one of Jared’s road dogs, a brute of a girl called Aggro. She talked and I listened to the music in her story, music that Jared would have heard. She said:

  Sometimes the best medicine for whatever’s bothering us is not a shot or a beer but just taking a ride. Saying, “Fuck it,” and jumping on the next thing smoking, no matter which way it’s headed. Just sitting back and listening to the wheels clack over the ties, feeling the wind and sunshine on your face, smelling the countryside, rocking with the smooth sway of the train. As the miles roll away, so does all that pain, all that worry and melancholy, and it’s replaced by such peace that the only explanation can be is that it’s from God. That’s why I ride trains. For peace of mind that can be found nowhere else. It’s like trains take care of us. They rock us to sleep at night, keep us cool on a hot day, sing to us when we’re feeling down. Some nights you’re rolled out in a field and you hear that train horn in the distance, that lonesome whistle blowing. And you go, “I hear you, baby. I miss you too.”

  I found a picture too. It’s a picture of Goblin and his road dog Booze Cop. They are all grime and tattoos, travelin’ kids looking into the camera lens, Booze Cop bare-chested in a ball cap with a bandanna around his neck, an arm draped over Goblin’s shoulders. I asked Booze Cop about that picture and he said:

  We took this picture on Decatur Street in New Orleans. Goblin musta found that straw hat alongside the road. Not easy to remember what happens in New Orleans, easy to get drunk in that town. Goblin looks like a farmer, the bibs, that hat. You’re asking what people would think seeing us? They’d be like, “Get outta here, scum.” I look at that picture and I’m going, “My littl
e brother! Havin’ a good time.”

  I am a grandfather telling a story about his grandson, and I look at that picture of Goblin and Booze Cop and I think: Look at them. Look past the dirt and the tattoos, and look past the scars of their lives, those real and those no less real for being unseen. Look again. See them. Really see them. They are our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters, our grandchildren. They are us…

  I had to know what happened. As a boy, Jared had lived with us. Goblin, I saw only once and only late in his story. I wanted to fill the emptiness of loss with a story about the love that comes before loss and lives in me yet.

  ONE

  I began this story with a name, and not even a name but a nickname. I heard about a girl who called herself Stray. She had been with Jared on his first train-hopping ride. Doing a reporter’s work—rummaging through social media, following threads there, making phone calls—I found her. We talked, texted, and connected on Facebook. To talk with Stray was to know that Jared’s story best starts with the adventure, the romance, the light. It starts in front of a drugstore in San Diego, California, in August 2010.

  Stray was a wandering waif in patched denims. She needed a drink, so she went to a place where she knew others of her kind would share a half-gallon. She sat in the afternoon sun at that CVS when here came a little guy with a sweetheart’s baby face. She noted with respect and admiration that her beautiful hero carried a brown paper bag of the kind you take away from a liquor store. He was in no hurry, shambling up, sure of himself. He wore combat boots with no laces and brown Carhartt bib overalls blackened by railroad grease and made filthy by nights in America’s dirt. The Carhartts hung loose on his frame, no shirt, his shoulders summer-tan. His blond hair went several directions at once. His wide-open eyes were round and blue and alive and kind.