Boxcar to AZ

I laid belly down against the cold gravel bed, arms akimbo, sweat pouring down my forehead as I looked at Johnny to say “Give me a kick when you know the train is leaving. I am brokenly tired.” He nodded so as not to arouse the suspicion of the railroad bull, who was less than ten feet away. I try to sleep, even though my heart is racing like a rabbit across an open field, the hounds chasing after him, planning to tear his guts out of the tender flesh that surrounds the fragile body. I feel this way because the bull, a policeman that is hired by the railroad company to make sure everything is within the law of the rail, is a few cars away. If we are caught, he will beat us with a metal pipe that he finds in a scrap metal yard, as he screams at us to keep off the tracks, or the next time he’ll kill us. His dog will be tearing out jeans, as it rips into our flesh with his razor sharp teeth.
The train ride to Arizona came at the last minute, after Johnny had heard from Boston (one of the old cronies that hung out at the Promenade) that the peyote would be ripe for the picking this time of the year. His plan was for us to catch the seven twenty bus out to Union Station at ten fourty- five Pre-Menstrual, and find out which train left for Tucson. We would catch it out, and just before we arrived at Tucson, we would jump off in the wilderness of the desert, where no one would be able to follow us. The whole point of an inebriated journey is to just get lost.
Johnny was ecstatic, but I was really just looking forward to the half gallon of Bicardi Silver that was giving my back a comfortable chill. I put it safely between a pile of clothes and other essentials I would need for the long ride through the night. I longed to be on the train, bottle to lips, as we waged through the desert heat, singing our heads off of old rock n’ roll songs. Even in the middle of winter, desert days still allowed t-shirts and shorts to run freewheeled.
I felt the kick, and we slid out from under the immobile car. We rapidly jumped to our quiet feet, trying our best not to give off any noise to the bull, who was standing – back faced to us – yammering away on his walkie-talkie. He didn’t even budge when we ran off. Sometimes you get lucky with a decrepit old bull.
Bolting after a train that is only increasing in speed is no easy task, especially when you have a seventy pound tramping pack strapped to your back. Johnny raced ahead of me, and tossed his pack onto the flat bed of the car, as he said in a still small voice “Move your fucking ass!” I got close enough to toss my bag into the car, Johnny catching it without even the slightest sign of fatigue. If he hadn’t caught it, I would have been screwed, and would have made it back to the pit that exists in Malibu.
Tired after only a few minutes of running, I felt the super human strength that comes after running past the breaking point, and with the strength of a cheetah, I lunged myself onto the flatbed of the car, just barely making enough of a leap to get half of my body in. Johnny pulled me in the rest of the way. We made it, and without giving the slightest inkling to the bull that there were two transients on his rail. I have known many others who were caught, and suffered the tutelage of the bull.
My friend Eric was one of them. He was riding from Tucson to Boulder one summer, and was pulled off of a rolling train by an angry bull. “You tried to run like a rabbit, now you’re going to look like one,” the bull said as he beat all but Eric’s front teeth out. He drinks all of his food these days. The medical expenses that were supposed to come from his tours in the military wouldn’t cover the replacement of his old teeth for old ones, a tough break for a soldier that served in Iraqi more than four years, for a country that he loved.
At eighteen years old I was already on my way to having train adventures of extreme magnitude, grateful to be swigging on a bottle of booze, and laughing at my friends who were sitting at home, preparing themselves for the American dream that was already planned out for them, whether they knew it or not. I kicked back on my sleeping bag, as Johnny set up the primus stove for dinner, while describing to me when he lost his virginity to his stepsister Simone. I always thought it was creepy, but he always had a funny way of bringing you over to his side, making you believe, if only for a moment, that what he was doing was right. Even when we first started using heroin on the weekends, he convinced me that it was a good idea.
I scribbled primitive drawings into my sketchbook, flashlight protruding from my mouth, not worrying about staying warm. The gin which was in a consistent up down flow towards my lips was doing me just fine. I sat on the tattered sleeping bag, which had been handed down through the generations. My great-grandfather may have even brought it over on the boat from England when he first came to this great land, but I’m not sure.
The smells that ululated through the boxcar were toxic monoxides and other resonating pollutants from the Los Angeles air. They set off my asthma, causing me to hack up phlegm of the red variety, but I didn’t care. I was ready for anything, and after a few minutes, the hacking stopped. I guess the gin was good for a lot more than I thought, as it was giving my throat and lungs a healthy coat.
We both sat around the primus stove at eleven thirty with every ounce of clothing on so that we wouldn’t wake up sick in the morning. These cars get extremely drafty, especially at night, so any wind was coming in whether we liked it or not. At least the stove stayed lit, as our refried beans cooked on the blue flame protruding from the metal cylinder, the half-gallon heating us from the inside out. A friend of mine told me before I got on the train, that a friend of hers got onto a car without the proper clothing, and froze to death from frostbite.
The primus stove finally heated up the two cans of beans, and we ate hearty, ripping insidious farts, and laughing all the way. Santa Claus had nothing on our laughter, ho, ho, ho! Johnny even managed to get a bag of herbs, so we could stay lifted the entire trip. Even when he was completely slammed, Johnny managed to think ahead
After a restful nights sleep, over eight hours, we were bearing closer to Tucson. Johnny was already mending from the freezing night, and basking in the radiant sun, skulling back the half drunken bottle of liquor, Marlboro sticking out of the side of his mouth as he scratched his dirt stained pants. “If this isn’t living youngster, than I’d rather be dead,” he said as he put the bottle down in between his legs, and took a long drag off of his cigarette, and in one swift movement, he flicked the stoge into the air, smoke catching to the wind as he smiled his grizzly smile.
We both sat at the opening of the car, legs dangling as we sang fragmented versions of purple haze, dazed and confused, and war pigs. Johnny sparked up a fat one, as I pulled the primus stove closer to me to start up on an extravagant oatmeal breakfast. We ate, and just as we finished breakfast, a sign came lunging at us, bearing the inscription:
WELCOME TUCSON
CITY LIMITS
Quickly, we gathered up all the gear, and drove it into our sacks. Jumping off the train almost broke my ankle in half, but luckily my mom had always told me that milk helped build strong bones from a young age. I still believe it to be true, and upon checking my ankle, everything was fine.
When I turned around, Johnny disappeared. I turned again, and the desert was gone. I woke up from the dream.

It’s been eight years since Johnny overdosed, the same day that my mother threw me out of the house, with nothing but a backpack full of clothes, and my dreams of grandeur about my destined travels of N, S, E, W. A hot shot of heroin at twenty-two must have done the trick.
The truth is, is that we never made to Arizona. We never made it out of Los Angeles County. The furthest we ever got to was the alley behind the Smart n’ Final, a box of Franzia wine to our lips, as we had talks about the trips we were going to take. We even made lists of all the gear we would need on the blank sides of the boxes of wine we drank from. But somehow, they were just out of our reach. The fizzy lifting’s of life had us in it’s grip.
The last time that I saw Johnny was at an RKL show at the Lush. Before the show, he shaved my head into a Mohawk, tossing back a bottle of Wild Turkey, as white riot played in the background. We got into the club with a couple of wristbands that a guy slid to us as he was leaving, and we made it in without the slightest inkling of judgment from the bouncer. We drank through the whole show off of the sixty dollars that I stole from my mothers purse, as I snuck out of the house that afternoon.
We left the bar so tossed that a random punker gave us some strength as a crutch to Johnnies old beater. We both came to in the first a.m’s, and Johnny gave me ride home. He was found dead in his apartment the next day by his girlfriend.
That night I had the boxcar dream, and when approached with writing about a memorable event in my life, I couldn’t think of a better way to write about my dead friend. I have taken a lot of cement looks at my life before sobriety happened to me. Hitchhiking around the country, dangerous rides with strangers, drunken bouts in forest, jail bars slamming behind me, and multiple friends dying from a disease that almost killed me. These thing’s, along with the tools I have learned to live a better life, have held my sobriety in tact, and have allowed me to live the life that my friends can’t.
I honor Johnny’s death, as well as the death of all the others, by waking up another day sober and present in the lives of my friends and family’s.