Date: 2004-03-17
To: Springer Mountain, GA
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: scattered clouds

The Train to the TrailThe Journey begins..Amcrack Arizona-New Mexico border. Little hexagonal reservation homessit queerly on the old west train set landscape just beyond the I-10canyon intersection of these two dry and stunning open states. Onboard the Jigglebox again. Passed out hard atop my six month pack notlong after boarding last night in San Bernardino. A largely emptytrain means two seats to myself. Not counting on it lasting, buthalleluja for now. Rose with the sun at Flagstaff, kinda bleary,kinda freaked. Then from the northern window comes that magical motelfrom my youth. Now a Travelodge (and perhaps always that, I don'trecall) the horseshoe shaped inn once had swings in the wide grassycourtyard where a young man, a boy of 13 sat swinging and watching,counting the cars as endless processions of boxcars and locomotivesrolled east and west. The boy was bound for California and a new life,a transition time, the end of a life, the beginning of a new. Iremember it with the fondness of a sweet dream of Heaven. And thus weride out a few not-so-sweet recent memories of Flagstaff, like thearduous and angst-ridden hump across NM & AZ in a dying art car. PoorDuke. Poor me riding the train through here near a year ago on thatugly mission of mental health, that cruel test, that sadistic auditionfor the lead role in a nightmare I'd been fighting alone for years. But aaauurrgh! Fuck all that! To better days. Beside me sits abackpack loaded with all the love and logistical genius necessary tosustain one on a six-month trek. In my lap a yard of fleece, a needleand thread with which I stumble untrained through the creation of acamping pillow soft and small. Gallup now, TG& Y Hardware, Busy BeeLaundromat, The Road Runner Motel, and tough love over the Amtrak publicaddress system: "this is the conductor speaking. there is no drinkingof any beverages or eating food in the smoking car. The smoking car isfor smoking cigarettes only. No cigars, no pipes, no children. If wefind remnants of food items or drinks in the smoking car, we'll shutdown the smoking." Aside from the smoking children, this strikes me asthe most absurd rule on Amtrak. Smoking and drinking go hand in hand. Yet the drinkers can't smoke in the cocktail lounge and the smokerscan't drink in the austere iron lung prison-like cell of a roomdownstairs they call the smoking room. Paula is a painter who paintsin oils and rarely shows, the disappointment of years creating forlittle or no audience or praise shows in her soft eyes, her gentlyresigned face. I know this look well. It is the face I see in themirror these days. She asks about my writing and have I beenpublished. I give her the Cliffnotes version of the unsung andunrequited. We compare heartaches briefly, then sit bonding silently,our stillborn dreams conversing subliminally whilst her husband talksof wind sprints and pains more physical. All this over breakfast atone of those cramped little Dining Car tables where Frau Glotzenbozathe DC Steward sits you with the curt warning that she WILL be seatingothers with you. The first to the table, I respond to her threat with"Lucky me!" She doesn't like this and is quick to penetrate myAmerican-bred dining space privacy bubble. Paula and David turn out tobe fine company, so all's well. When asked where I'm headed, Ioffhandedly relate the details of my mission as though it were atrifle. I'm kidding myself, of course. The journey ahead is mammoth,the biggest thing I've ever undertaken. As the red bluffs, tumbleweedsand trailer homes of the west roll away and away, I feel very little,almost numb. Perhaps this numbness is the key. The numbness says:"It's time for a change of perspective." I numbly roll towardAlbuquerque, my city of failure full of snapshots and people and stuff,memories just as well forgotten. maybe this is the numbness, a defensemechanism, a deadening of the heart set to last out the afternoon andinto night until the train has carried me far away to the east and theblissfully unknown, unscarred, unscathed. My heart is black and blueand smiling still, hopeful, like a toddler badly beaten but beamingwith love unconditional for its rotten, abusive parents. God grant methe serenity...-RSM Dear Mr. McKinney,It has come to our attention that you will shortly be embarking on atreacherous lengthy journey. Sheer cliffs, poisonous snakes, deer ticksand siren-like women will abound on your journey. We at Mutual of Omahawould like you to keep a few things in mind and in your backpack beforeyou set out: 1. Proper walking shoes. No stiletto heels as you are so often inclinedto pack. 2. DDT. Or whatever the properly approved politically correct insectenergy zapping spray may be today. Keep that Lyme disease away! 3. Plastic wrap. Siren-like women trap men with their baby makers. Youmust protect yourself from your unborn children.4. Bribes/gifts for rations from the stills. It's not physicallypossible to carry enough beer to last this entire journey. Or, at leastfor me, to carry enough even for one day of this journey. Wine maybe.But I digress. Porno would likely be a good bribe for some swill. Carry2 or 3 mags with you and a page per bribe/ per drink and you're set forprobably a week. Beware of the still owner's daughters, however. Wehave some statistics on that topic.5. In instances of extreme danger, pretend to be mentally challenged. Truly evil people with bad intentions have an absolute fear of thesetype of handicapped people. 6. Write to everyone on the outside. They really wish they could gowith you and will be living vicariously through your words. 7. Write to your Mutual of Omaha agent more often than everyone else.We at Mutual of Omaha always have your best interests at heart andtruly want you to enjoy your lengthy treacherous journey. Ciao,Sister Maria Margaritaaka Agent RedMutual of OmahaLife Insurance; Department of Salvation and CopulationTexas RegionP.S. Your time allotment allowed for this journey (before the Mutualof Omaha life insurance/pulse check team come out there to locate yourbody) is until August 30th. After that date, if your presence has notbeen confirmed in Black Rock City, Nevada, you will be consideredwithout breath and full life insurance benefits will be dispersed toyour designated family members. Las Vegas, New Mexico. One more stop on the trail of tears &weirdness. LVNM, home to the location shooting of the film "Red Dawn,"now a lesser known 80's ratpack flick but one with a strong impact onmy teenage years. Red Dawn, the tale of the Commie invasion ofAmerica, setting: a rural town in "Colorado." If you've seen theflick, you'd need only a short stroll through downtown to know that youwere there, standing smack in the heart of that fiction's real-lifelocation. A weird town, Las Vegas. One of those last stop settlementsfor freak healers and outlaws and supposedly home to Val Kilmer. I hadheard strange tales of the place before visiting there, and now I havemy own. For some synchronistic reason I may never know, I took my love,my girlfriend, my common-law wife K there for the novelty of the threehour train ride and an overnight in the old historic hotel downtown forher birthday.. For reasons a little less murky and a whole lot morepainful as I stare at the town from the window of a train 2.3 yearslater, Las Vegas NM is where that love ended for me, where I waitedanxious for the last time for her midnight-whiskey-crossover and I,sick from worry the next day, tipped the domino that sent the whole kitand caboodle and commitment ala carte tanking hard and fast like achopper outa fuel. Out the window I'm staring at the faded signproclaiming the identity of the no-doubt once-famous "Castaneda" hotel,now boarded up. And inside, deep in my buckshot heart, I know thathere, right there whilst waiting for this very train, there is where itended. I wanna buy the old hotel and burn it to the ground. But hey,Las Vegas NM ain't all bad. There's the semi-public hot springs, somegreat old crumbling architecture, and of course the remnant memories ofRed Dawn, the best of which for me came years after the film when at aprivate Sheen family dinner, I recognized the red Wolverine lettermanjacket on then-Charlie-girlfriend Kelly Preston. Without hesitation,Charlie took it off Kelly and put it on me. In my coming-of-age in the80s pop culture consciousness, wearing that jacket (even for a minute)held more significance for me than the treasures of Tutankhamen or theholy Shroud of Turin. So Vegas NM is alright. Or maybe it's the Vegasof fiction that I really like, and in the going there, thethinly-veiled fictions of my own life just couldn't hold up.Further on down the track, or North of Vegas that is, a black print onwhite background railroad-looking sign says this is "Waltrous" or somesuch weird name. I can't deny that the landscape here is fascinatingto me. I'm stupid with its blonde beauty, its cliffs and buttes andsculpted rock faces forever , its deciduous trees now winter barren ofleaves left branched and budded golden and all the golden rocks andthe streams running though it and dry desert scrub trees also golden orochre or a green that borders on black and all that blue, blue, bluesky above. I cannot deny that I am in love with New Mexico, much asI'd like to think I'm not. Worming into AlbuQ from the west and thesouth, I felt my numbness turn to nausea, vertiginous sadness for all Ihad tried to be here, for all I thought I had going, and for thefinger-snap fast conclusion of it all not two months after my sojournin Kaseman. I didn't try and kill myself because of her, no, far from it. Perhaps it was the change of meds. Perhaps it was the balloon crew job and my instant subservience to somany privileged people. Perhaps it was the Ritalin going around,chopped and snorted for something to do, to give TV a run for itsmoney, as it were. But most definitely there with K on the grounds ofthe Castaneda awaiting our return train, it was a few well phrasedwords by Herman Hesse and an all out "abandon ship" sensation in thewake of so many, many whiskey psycho drunk "Fuckoff!" messages from themouth of babes, from the mouth of my lover, my friend, my abusive andamnesiac alcoholic mate, K. The train is well past Las Vegas now, andI am glad. There are no more scarey "scene(s) of the crime" for menow, not on this train route anyway. I am relieved. Part of me hopedagainst some silly hope that Dave, who came late to visit me at the station in AlbQ and saw me thus foronly a moment, would have roared north in his sleek black Saab (or isit a Volvo?) to intercept me there and ride with me awhile. But this,like so much of my life, was just a fantasy, based on no amount ofeveryman's reality, and far too much of mine. K and our house and thebottle room I built, they're all gone now. They're there, back therein that weird little city that to rock bands represents a necessaryevil, a throwaway performance way point between bigger cities to theeast and to the west. They're there indeed, not really gone but there.Like the guy who says "I lost my job.. well, I didn't really lose it, Iknow where it is, but someone else is doing it now." Or was hespeaking of his lost love? Either way, Georgia awaits. And with her adream, like the tiny Tinkerbell in my pocket, stolen from Duke to charmmy voyage strange. Tinkerbell in her tiny lamp, a little piece of a far greater magic. Icarry her with me, and faith will carry us both. Farewell then NewMexico. Farewell Casteneda Hotel. Farewell Hesse and sweet love'sdying duress. Farewell. The horizon then is bright. It is blank as an empty page. I willwrite on it. Write on it I will. -RSMI write-a too mucha today. I loosa my mind. the trainjiggles to and fro and on the cafe car. i have alwaysloved her with the love of a boy, the boy who watched her in "A LittleRomance" with Olivier and fell hard at 13. "The train track throughthe Alps before there ever was a train." Turn me over, I'm done onthis side. Boy am I crocked. Scott Frank, famous writer and friend,greeted me on the platform in his straw hat and white beard, darkglasses, his blackjack winners getup, he calls it. so nice to see hisface there in that queer and unsettling land where I've been throughso much and would like to forget, as much. Hopeful of Dave's arrivalbut not confident of it, we ducked around the corner into some new Thaijoint lorded over by blatantly gay guys who happily welcomed us in andpoured me a saki and a Singha and Scott a sober iced tea. We drank and reveled in ourrelative wealth (he from gambling, me from government sponsoredgonzo-ness. And that saki and beer sure got me rolling at one o'clockin the afternoon. Then it was time to chase the train, where of coursewe ran into Dave, late, and waiting, but almost too late as the trainprepared to leave and did in fact pull out three minute later. Theboys in solidarity waited on the platform, and as we passed I threwopen the downstairs window and howled a grateful "Hoorah!" It was abrief yet sweet moment, a snapshot of redemption to counter the numbness, the nausea, the rolling-into-AlbuQ blues. An hour later Iawoke with a start, startled from a drunken stupor by the too-loud andgrammatically-strained p.a. announcement about the night's dinnerofferings, a true auditory nightmare, especially fresh from aflash-fast gonzo noontime train drunk nap. Medication was definitelyin order. And then music. Loud and of an infinite selection, the sortoffered by my Archos, the 20 gig jukebox that I swore I wouldn't carryon this long, long journey but which I realized in the last minute thatI just couldn't do without. Six months without music? Not likely. Ifsome literature professor someday asks the question on an exam, "Whatwas the principal influence of Rick McKinney's writing?" don't believethe bullshit about pain and depression. it was music that made mewrite. And beer. Hefe Weizen if possible. Naz Darovia. -RSM