Leave Out the Tragic Parts Read online

  By way of introduction, he said, “I’m Jared Kindred.”

  “I’m Stray Falldowngoboom,” she said.

  Jared laughed. “Really?”

  “I’m a stray cat. And when I get drunk, I fall down, go boom. Call me Stray.”

  “Cool,” he said. “I’m Goblin.”

  Goblin was twenty-one years old. He had a home, but he had chosen to be homeless, unwashed, unshaven, stinking to high heaven, and broke. He had a red scruff of beard and a crude facial tattoo of dark blue lines that began on his forehead and curled around a cheekbone before ending on the bridge of his nose. He became Goblin the night he sat with a buddy called Booze Cop in a high-dollar mall and panhandled for change. They “flew sign,” meaning they held aloft a piece of cardboard with a message. This one, printed with a black Sharpie, read:

  ZOMBIES COMING!

  NEED CHAINSAW

  ANYTHING APPRECIATED

  “People look at me like I’m some spooky creature,” he said to Booze Cop, and Booze Cop said, “Like a goblin or something.”

  Stray was tiny, seventeen years old, pale and freckled with blue eyes and rust-red dreads. The day before, she’d gotten sideways with railroad police in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado. They plucked her off a train’s coal car, clicked handcuffs on her, and put her on a plane to San Diego. They did that on the notion that the girl’s parents, sobbing and grateful, would take the poor child back home and clutch her to their bosoms. The police didn’t know that her parents were long divorced and she lived with her mother, who let her quit school in the sixth grade and do whatever made her happy, which in Stray’s case meant she was free to wander.

  So the mother was fine with her daughter hanging out in San Diego. From there Stray planned to get to Colton, the biggest railroad junction in Southern California, and hop out on the first train she could catch. Waiting at the CVS, Stray told the kid with the brown paper bag, “I’ve been dealing with weird-ass foster cares in the sticks and cornfields and jail under the sheriff’s house in Bumfuck, Colorado.”

  Jared said, “Need a drink?”

  The kid with the homeless, happy, thirsty look said, “Damn right.” And she said, “Hellacious tattoo.”

  “Mom hates it.”

  “Don’t they always?”

  He’d flown to San Diego because of the tattoo. On August 3, 2009, his mother, Lynn Ann Sigda Kindred, had called me, the grandfather, sobbing.

  She managed to say, “Jared has done the one thing I asked him to never do.”

  The anguish in Lynn’s voice had been frightening. I said, “What happened?” What had he done? Arson, a bank robbery, a car theft, what?

  “He has tattooed his face.”

  Her beautiful child’s baby face.

  She said, “Hell, I’ve got tattoos, so I don’t mind tattoos.”

  Crying.

  “But his face.”

  We could laugh about the time Jared went all punk Mohawk, his hair spiked and dyed purple, green, and blue. Teenagers want attention. This was different in degree and kind. The most generous interpretation of a facial tattoo makes it an assertion of individuality and commitment to an artist’s aesthetic judgment. Jared’s was a fuck-you to the world he would leave and a passport to the world he would enter.

  Alcohol was involved when a friend, Craig AntiHero, did the tattoo. Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight boxing champion, may have paid thousands of dollars for a Maori tribal facial tattoo that was a precisely executed work of art. Not Jared. He allowed a buddy off the street to use his face for the first tattoo he had ever done. Craig did what poor folks call “a stick-and-poke.” His tools were primitive: a sewing needle dipped in India ink and lashed to a toothbrush, a contraption powered by a small motor removed from a radio-controlled car.

  “We had no design in mind,” Craig said. “We had a motel room, and I did it there freehand with Jared checking it in a mirror.”

  The tattoo was fresh in Lynn’s mind a year later when Jared told her he planned to go from Virginia to San Diego. A girlfriend had left him, and he was pursuing her.

  “Who’s driving?” Lynn said.

  “Craig.”

  “No, no, nooo,” Lynn said. “If you drive across the country with that guy, you’ll wind up with tattoos up the yin-yang.”

  Lynn knew that inside the travelin’ kid culture was a clique of tattooed and pierced punk-rockers. The “crusty punks” changed clothes and bathed on an irregular basis, and then only under duress. The final certification of authentic crustiness was a facial tattoo. Jared had gone all in. He was still her child, still Jared under those marks, but her sorrow was in realizing what the ink meant. There was no coming back.

  Still, Lynn told me, damned if she would let Jared go three thousand miles in a car with an amateur tattoo artist.

  I asked, “What can I do?”

  “An airplane ticket?” she said.

  And so Jared, having changed from civilian traveling clothes into his travelin’ kid’s greasy stuff, came to meet Stray Falldowngoboom in front of that CVS. Because he had wandered enough to know what a wandering waif wants, Jared dropped a hand into that brown paper bag and with a flourish brought forth a half-gallon jug of Old Crow.

  Stray said, “Exactly what I was trying to get into for the night.”

  As unlikely as it was that either Jared or Stray had read On the Road, they must have felt what Jack Kerouac felt when his man Dean Moriarty slid behind the wheel of their car and gunned the engine: “We all realized,” Kerouac wrote, “we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.” Here Jared had a proposition for Stray.

  “I want to get to New Orleans for Halloween,” he said. “Want to go?”

  Suddenly in from Colorado, Stray had no plans other than the usual wanderer’s plan of seeing what might happen next. She said, “I’m ready. Let’s hit it.”

  He said, “How we getting there?”

  “Colton yard.” Biggest in California, one of the biggest anywhere, the starting point for every train rolling east.

  Jared said, “What’s Colton?”

  She didn’t laugh. Anybody who’d ask that question was new to the life. She said, “You’ve never caught out?”

  Silent, Goblin sipped at the bourbon, and Stray knew he’d never hopped on a train. Last thing she needed was a newbie. Newbies do foolish things, and foolish things can get you killed on a freight train. But she liked him. She asked about the necklace he wore. Sharks’ teeth, he said, put together by his mother, a good-luck thing. Stray liked it and liked his blue eyes and the bird’s-nest mess of dirty-blond hair. He had moxie and independence, or else he’d have never let somebody do a tattoo that he knew his mother would hate. Nor was it a small thing that this sweetheart had walked up on her with a half-gallon of Old Crow.

  Now, in San Diego, chasing a girl who had bailed on him, Goblin had found another, this Stray, a train-hopper.

  “I’m ready to try,” he said.

  “New Orleans, Louisiana—NOLA—Halloween, here we come,” Stray said. “Cemeteries above the ground, all that scary voodoo shit, and drinking by the Mississippi. Forget the bitch here, you’ll find a better one there. We got two months to get there. Listen to me. Riding ain’t that hard. Just do what I do. Only rule is, don’t do anything stupid. Stupid gets you killed. Fall off, best case is you lose an arm or leg. Worst case, you’re hamburger.”

  Together, Stray and Goblin would move two thousand miles in two months, on railroad tracks zigzagging from Southern California to New Orleans. It’s not like a storyteller can vouch for it all in the sense of saying, “Damn right, nothing but the God’s honest truth.” But the way Stray told it, the journey was good and fun, and if it’s true that she painted from a full palette of wanderers’ glory, so much the better.

  STRAY’S STORY

  Jared and I would ride together. It was August, so we had two months to get to New Orleans for Halloween. We’d pass through California, Arizo
na, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana—you can’t believe the shit we saw and did. First thing was a bus from the CVS to Perris.

  In the little California town of Perris, on a dusty street in a Mexican barrio, Goblin and Stray watched fights matching people against dogs tethered to heavy chains. Then a midget and a one-eyed man offered them vodka and a proposition.

  “What’s he saying?” Goblin asked, meaning the midget.

  “He says One-Eye wants to rob that liquor store.”

  Declining both drink and crime, Goblin and Stray hung around long enough to see the banditos walk into the liquor store, walk back out, and immediately be swarmed by a dozen cops.

  By morning, the travelers had panhandled change for bus fare from Perris to Riverside and on to Colton. They took a long, miserable hike in 110-degree heat to the yard, stopping only at a grocery store for wine.

  In Colton yard, standing alongside a railroad boxcar for the first time, Goblin leaned back to see the roofline. From a distance, a boxcar might look like part of your electric train set, but up close it’s a freakin’ building. It can be twelve feet high set on wheels three feet tall standing on rails a half-foot aboveground. It can be sixty feet long and ten feet wide. Sometimes it weighs three hundred thousand pounds, maybe five hundred thousand pounds loaded.

  Goblin said, “Holy shit.”

  Stray said, “Come over here.”

  She led him to a grain car. A grainer is nearly as tall as a boxcar but less terrifying because it has a flat landing at its ends, “porches,” each with enough room for a person, a backpack, and a dog. Above the porch, cut into a wall, is a round hole. A rider can crawl in there and escape some of the wind and weather and relentless thunder of a moving freight train.

  On that grainer, Stray and Jared caught a short ride to a gully south of Los Angeles where, under a bridge, they met up with Booze Cop and one of Stray’s ex–road dogs, a heroin-addicted eccentric called Feral.

  The four rode to Barstow, sharing two half-gallons of vodka that encouraged them to scratch tattoos into their arms and argue about whose was prettiest. At sunset they crawled through a culvert, keeping in mind that Barstow was a “hot” yard full of “bulls”—the railroad security officers charged with enforcing federal laws against train-hopping. Their presence demanded the travelers be, in Stray’s words, “considerably ninja.” She explained: “We gotta jump about twenty strings of cars now without being seen by man or animal.” Once they had squeezed between cars and pulled themselves over the bulky couplings that connected them, the ninjas settled onto another grainer porch. They waited. Then they heard the hiss of air engaging the train’s brakes before the line of cars jerked into motion.

  The ninjas slept through San Bernardino and woke up in Vernon.

  Goblin didn’t know shit about what he was getting into. I told him the facts of life as a train-hopper. The first year it’s an Adventure. Strange places and strange people. Like this, here we are in the worst stinking shithole in the country. Vernon, California. It’s almost as bad as Gary, Indiana. They’ve got these meat-rendering plants with animal carcasses lying around rotting and spoiled.

  I already see that Goblin is different from most travelin’ kids. He sure as hell isn’t interested in being Billy Badass and one-upping people. Kid’s set in his ways, wanted nothing but a good time. Honestly, I love him. This afternoon he jumped over a railing and beat a dude’s ass for calling me a dirty whore for digging through his ashtray. So we’re not even really started yet and he’s showing me some balls.

  Off the grainer at Vernon, we walked to City of Industry, a long walk, one side of LA to the other. Walked through Chinatown and East LA, slept in some park, and woke up to sprinklers soaking us. Goblin screamed like a little girl.

  A four-day trek. We spent most days hiding from rain under a trestle by dead tracks, drinking vodka, and waiting to make our move. Feral disappeared a day or two, but he’s now back riding with us, Feral being this guy who I count as a maniac spirit talking satanic shit. One night he’s shooting up heroin and he’s out, like, he’s straight-up dead. Goblin and Booze Cop start splashing water on him—and he comes to life. Dy-amn.

  We had no business hopping out while it was pouring. Even warm summer rain, when you’re sitting on a piece of metal going fifty miles an hour, will chill you to the bone. Waiting around, we made decent money and shaved the sides of our heads in the reflection of a CD, done out of boredom and drunkenness.

  Our hop-out spot was just off the main road in a ditch, covered in roaches. (LA is dirtier than all hell.) Goblin played with the roaches like pets. He kicked at the vermin and they’d scatter, and I would scream and run across the street. He got a damn kick out of it. We had a good time ruining each other’s good time. What’re road dogs for, right?

  Finally, we made our move, jumped a southbound on the fly, and again scored another shitty porch ride, and started hauling ass out of LA to Yuma, Arizona, where we slept that night in a parking lot by a liquor store.

  We flew sign all the next day for booze and went to the Mexican market downtown and grabbed steaks since Booze Cop’s food stamps were on. Grilled by the river and swam all day in the deadly heat. I’m talking 120-something. You jump in the water and walk out and in two minutes you’re dry.

  We spent the next five nights in Yuma, bouncing back and forth between new Yuma and old Yuma.

  Waiting in Yuma, Stray and her crew settled by the Colorado River and swam to escape the desert’s blast-furnace heat. They were stripped down to underwear when two cops showed up.

  “We’re looking for whoever stole a purse downtown,” one said.

  “Do we look like we’ve been downtown?” Stray said.

  Once the cops moved on, the crew went downtown. There they found an intersection that they hoped would restore them to the prosperity necessary to buy two half-gallons of bottom-shelf vodka and steaks for the evening’s meal along the river. At the intersection, they flew sign to catch the attention of charitable-minded motorists. Stray’s best sign:

  MOM SAID WAIT HERE

  THAT WAS 7 YEARS AGO

  SPARE CHANGE?

  On the fifth night by the river, a kid named Marcos disappeared. He was a refugee from El Salvador they’d picked up in Los Angeles. On the theory that anyone from El Salvador should be suspected of something, Booze Cop called him “The Terrorist.” Someone sent Marcos out for food. He returned with water and tamales. An hour later, during dinner, someone said, “Where’s The Terrorist?”

  Goblin had seen him walking toward the river. “He was, like, moaning, and saying, ‘No más, no más.’ What’s that mean in Mexican?”

  “He’s from El Salvador,” Booze Cop said.

  “Same thing.”

  “Means ‘no more, no more.’”

  They never saw The Terrorist again. Maybe he walked into the river until he couldn’t walk out. Or maybe his few days on the road cured him of train-hopping and he turned toward a bus station. He left behind, on the riverbank, his worldly goods, a hospital bag containing pants and a pair of shoes—evidence enough, as Stray put it in a eulogy of sorts, that “some people are not cut out for this life.”

  They moved camp to a ditch under Yuma’s historic Ocean-to-Ocean Bridge and waited another day for an eastbound freight. When one rolled up, it was a string of “suicides”: cars with no floors, only edges about as wide as a body. Stray said, “We’re heading east on the first train we can catch, and this is it, all suicides. Scary as fuck. You ready, my little Goblin buddy?”

  “Yep,” he said, adding, “maybe,” and he reached up to touch his mom’s lucky necklace of sharks’ teeth.

  “Nice to do riskier shit once in a while,” Stray said. “Makes you feel like your life is actually worth all this bullshit.”

  With three weeks to go before Halloween, they left Yuma and blew through Tucson. Goblin was loving it.

  Rolling across New Mexico, he danced in a gondola, an open-topped railroad car with low sidewalls. It was a night
in summer. He sang Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself.” The train rolled east along the southern edge of New Mexico. It moved through mountains in the moonlight, and in an open railroad car the boy danced, arms and legs flying every which way. Cool, crisp air rushed over the gondola’s sidewalls and lifted dust and scraps of rust from the car’s floor. The boy danced in the night and sang, “If I had the chance, I’d ask the world to dance.” In the moonlit shadows of the mountains, the freight was coming into El Paso, Texas. The city had its lights on. The boy was dancing. How he could dance, no one knew, for as always he had had much too much to drink.

  Before dawn, on the hillsides of Juárez, Mexico, the riders saw Border Patrol guards with semiautomatic rifles. Northeast they rolled, past Odessa toward Dallas and Fort Worth, headed for New Orleans because New Orleans is heaven for travelin’ kids. It’s practically illegal to be sober on the city streets, and diners at fancy restaurants hand out their white-box leftovers. Goblin and Booze Cop had been there many times, but they’d always arrived by car, driving or hitchhiking, bumming their way.

  They’d never done it like this, never by train. Goblin had called home and said, “Mom, so cool. We’re going, like, fifty or sixty and everything’s shaking and I was dancing. All the noise, after a while it sounds like violins.” It was steel wheels on steel rails, the cars squeaking, metal-on-metal screeching, screaming, and in the violence the boy heard violins accompanying his dance. The beast of a moving freight train tosses riders against its steel, beating them with thunder and wind, screaming through the night. Then, slowing down, passing industrial plants and electric towers, there’s a glimmer of light ahead. Night gives way to color and the train coasts into a yard. Riders grab their backpacks, hop off, and run to avoid the bulls.

  They’d done five weeks of desert heat and railroad grime and unforgiving noise and a lake’s worth of vodka. They’d seen a dozen cops come down on a midget and a one-eyed guy in a Mexican barrio. They’d seen the maniac demon creature Feral snap back from the dead. They’d seen, or not seen, The Terrorist drown himself in the Colorado River. Though each day’s travel carried Goblin east, toward home, he was now as far from home as he had ever been. He had dared to do what he told his father he would do. He would leave and be gone forever. Stray dared him to ride suicides, and by damn he’d already decked a guy who insulted her, he would for sure ride suicides with her.