Yesterday was a walking day, today’s going to be a driving day. Gonna drive up to a nearby mountain called Whistler. I’m in it for the drive, not the destination.

Travel Tip: If you’re ever gonna rent a car in Vancouver, go to www.budget.com or www.orbitz.com. I found a convertible for cheaper than most standard mid-sizes. (Forty-five bucks.)

The counterwoman tells me this rate is unusual, making me feel like I'm getting away with something. But the guy next to me seems to be having a tough time.

“That’ll be $185.60,” says his cashier. The man is apoplectic.

“What? The day rate I was quoted was forty-something!”

“Yes sir, but with the insurance and the gas coverage and surcharges, the total comes out to $185.60.”

“That’s crazy,” he says.

My cashier interrupts my observations. “Sir, would you like the insurance?”

“Um, no.”

“And the gas fill-up?”

“I’ll take care of it myself.”

Then I remember the news special I saw the first night I got here. Said car theft is becoming a big problem in Canada.

“Actually--how much is the theft insurance?” I ask.

“There is no theft insurance,” she says.

“What happens if the car gets stolen?”

“Then you pay us for the car,” the woman says, firmly. She even seems a little...concerned, like I’m going to claim the car was stolen, or something. This is funny to me because in America no one would care. No one cares about their job, or the welfare of the company; but this woman seems to have a vested interest. It’s actually endearing.

“If the car is stolen and you still have the key, we’ll initiate an investigation first,” she explains. “But if you don’t have the key, you’re responsible for the full value of the car.”

“Which is?”

She checks some papers. “Sixty thousand dollars,” she says, in a tone bordering on confrontational. I would’ve liked it better if she used the tone of a game show host. (“Sixty, thousand, dollars!!!”)

I shouldn’t have watched that damn news special; now I’m all convinced the car’s going to get stolen. Well, I better make sure I hang on to the key. I wonder if they have Carjacking here.

People often own the tools of their own destruction, but it’s very rare that they rent them.

In the Budget lot I climbed into the white Mustang convertible assigned to me. After cranking the ignition I was surprised to hear the distinctive, guttural warbling of Ford’s 5-liter eight. You hear it in their trucks and ‘Stangs, that unmistakable rumbling that sounds like a dinosaur clearing its throat.

I figured I was mistaken, ‘cause everyone knows rental whips come with the crappy base-model engines. (I’d rented a Mustang two years ago in California, and with its anemic six that thing wouldn’t burn rubber if you set it on fire.) I put my foot down hard but heard the eight winding up again. Muffler tricks?

I shut the engine off, got out of the car and walked around to the back. There was a GT badge on the trunk. Fuckin’ A--they rent these things?

rrrrrrrrr

WOOOOOOOOO

rrrrrrrrrrrrrr

WOOOOOOOOOOOOO

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

rrrrrrrrrrrrrr--SCREEEEEEEEECH

Whoa the brakes aren’t so good on this thing.

Go!

Five-liter eight indeed, which is five liters of bad news. Some people have drinking problems, I have speed problems. The second I had a straightaway to myself I nailed the pedal like I was kicking a door in and the acceleration was fucking frightening. (Back home I drive a Volkswagen that has less horsepower than most stagecoaches.)

Later I tried it from a standing start, ripping out of a gas station. I was rewarded with a neck-snapping shove in the small of my back, a roaring launch up to highway speeds and an immediate increase in wind. It felt like there were fucking flames shooting out the back of this thing.

This car produces an absurd amount of torque, meaning I’ll have to work a little harder to keep from wrapping the damn thing around a tree. I love Fast.

Two years ago I bought my Steven Spielberg cap. I was out in San Francisco preparing to fulfill one of my lifelong dreams: Rent a convertible and drive down the coast, U.S. Route 1 from San Fran to L.A. (Never said it was an ambitious dream.)

Driving around San Francisco all day, my head was getting sunburnt. I spotted a Gap and pulled over in search of something to cover it. Amidst the retarded logo-laden headwear I found a nondescript and nearly shapeless grey baseball cap, perfect for me. Zero style and no logos. I call it the Steven Spielberg cap because I think I’ve seen him wearing something similar.

It looks terrible on me, but I don’t care. I like the cap because of what it symbolizes. It’s been sitting in my closet for a while but I brought it along on this trip. Now, cruising up Route 99 I pull it on for the first time in a couple years.

I really hope you enjoy this photo!
Because I almost died trying to take it.

Fiddling with the stereo controls so I can hear the bassline on the Impressions’ “We’re a Winner.” For around ninety minutes I’m rocketing up these twisty mountain roads, trying to lose the spies on my tail.

I’m also trying to maintain a certain level of adrenaline without pulling a Thelma-and-Louise. I guess going over a cliff in a convertible isn’t a bad way to go, but I haven’t been to Cuba or Helsinki or had kids or sold any books yet.

I suppose this photo would’ve been better with
the flashing lights of an angry cop behind me.

How can I describe the feeling? It’s like this: Mountain scenery, check. Fresh air, check. Stereolab/Led Zeppelin/Radiohead/Motown, check. The sun is shining down on me, the wind is blowing through my, er, scalp. A rumbling vibration can be felt beneath my right foot, and when I press it down everything starts happening faster. It’s a pretty total sensory experience.

Whistler seems like a nice resort town, skiers must love it up here. There are a bunch of pricey restaurants (fifteen bucks for a sandwich!) and a McDonald’s, so guess where I went. I had something called the Big Extra. (Unlike Japanese McDonald’s, it tastes the same as in the ‘States.)

On the mountain there’s some sort of gondola ride sure to afford sick views, but I figure I better save something for next time. I think I’ll be back when New York starts wiping me out.

A piece of construction machinery that
just doesn’t want to live anymore.

On the way back to Vancouver I took it nice and slow while Stevie Wonder told the mountains not to worry ‘bout a thing. I stopped at a lot of the pullouts to stretch and peer slowly over the edge. In a valley I stopped at a sunny park by the water to shoot some video and get some writing done. If I lived here, man--there are so many good places to write!

In the evening I ripped around town for a while, then stopped at some gym on 1st Avenue where they have a hapkido class. Read about it on the web. I introduced myself to the master, he was pretty cool and let me watch the class for two hours. Big sweaty dudes kicking and throwing each other. It’s interesting to see how they do it at different schools.

“Next time you’re in town, bring your dobok you can hit the mats with us!” said the master. Nice guy.

Unfortunately I had to check out of the Sylvia, and into someplace called the Bosman Motor Lodge. Hotel rooms were pretty scarce in Vancouver at this time of year so I had to book three different places. (Two nights at the Sylvia, one night at the Bosman, two nights at the Riviera.)

The Sylvia and the Riviera both had rooms for $90 Canadian a night. The Bosman was more expensive at $120 but it was all I could find.

I’d checked into the Bosman earlier that morning, after getting the car. A German guy was working the counter. “Mr. Noe,” he said, finding my reservation. “Two nights.”

“Two nights? I thought it was one.”

“Two nights,” he said sternly, pointing to his computer screen. I’d made the trip plans in haste, so I figured he was right and I was wrong. Guess I’d only booked one night at the Riviera. Goddammit! A thirty-dollar mistake.

Well, better make sure I don’t make a $60,000 mistake. “Do you guys have a security guard in the parking lot?” I asked.

“Why?” he said.

“I’m just worried about the car getting stolen.”

“Well, it’s a big city, things get stolen all the time,” he said, which I thought was kind of funny.

After walking all day yesterday and today’s drive in the sun, my farmer’s tan is now completely incurable. When I take my shirt off I look like a black-and-white cookie. (Reference check: You guys know what that is, right?)

In the late evening, in my room at the Bosman I find hair in the bathroom, which grosses me out because, well, I don’t have any. I start taking a shower but the tub is clogged, and starts filling up. Little brown flakes of something bubble up from the drain. One of the towels has an ominous stain on it.

I try turning the lamp on next to the bed and the knob falls off in my hand. Jeez.

I call downstairs to see if I can get an iron and ironing board. (I pack by rolling everything, so stuff is getting wrinkly.) “We don’t have any ironing boards,” says the clerk.

“You don’t have a single ironing board in this entire hotel?”

“That’s right,” he says.

I get dressed and go downstairs to complain. “Listen,” I say. “There’s hair in the bathroom, the tub is clogged, the towels are dirty, the lamp is broken and you guys don’t even have an ironing board?”

“We have an iron though. You can iron on the bed,” says the clerk, a soft-spoken Russian guy. Same guy I spoke to on the phone.

“So I’m dropping a buck-twenty to iron my shirts on a bed?”

“Sorry, there’s nothing I can do.”

“Hair in the bathroom you can do something about. Just ask them to clean it better!”

“Well, this isn’t a four-star hotel,” he sniffs.

“So what are you telling me, a four-star has no hair, a two-star comes with hair?”

He says nothing, just looks at me patiently. After a moment it becomes clear I’m yelling at the wrong person, and I don’t want to be that guy who yells at the wrong person. I want to be that guy who slaps the wrong person. So I grabbed that motherfucker and started slapping him. Or maybe I just went back upstairs, can’t remember.

The sun doesn’t set here until like, 10pm! Fucking amazing. You can have a totally full day and still catch the orange streaks of sunset afterwards. I like it here, and in the grand scheme of things who cares about a little hair in the bathroom.

A series of short-term goals. My eyes open. Goal #1: Get dressed. Goal #2: Find some fucking coffee.

Downstairs in the hotel there’s a restaurant, and though it’s sparsely populated there’s a line to be seated, never a good sign. I skip it and head outside.

Holy shit! There’s a beach like, right across the street from the hotel, overlooking a wide bay. I didn’t see this last night because I came from the other direction. Will have to check this out later.

I check goal #2 off the list at a nearby café, then chart a course for goal #3. I need to check my spam. A compulsion. On Denman there’s a ridiculously cheap internet café (CAN $2/hr), and after responding to a few “increase the size of your penis” offers and restructuring my mortgage, I’m off to have my head shaved.

With goal #4 scattered on the floor of a Chinese woman’s barbershop, I hit the sidewalk rubbing my newly shorn pate and wonder what I’ll do today. I figure I’ll spend the first day as if I just moved here. I don’t mean I’ll spend the day having my utilities hooked up--

--I mean I’ll case the joint. Cover as much ground as I can on foot, get the lay of the land, see what’s what.

Robson Street seems much the same by day, a collection of shopping and hangout spots. I find it pleasant even if I don’t like the architecture. Maybe it’s the weather? Sunny, pleasant and breezy, zero humidity. Back home The Weather is something you have to deal with, something to withstand; here it seems just a pleasant backdrop against which you can conduct your life with one less hassle.

I stroll over to Gastown, but am disappointed to see it’s been gussied up like a whore intended to snare commercially lustful tourists. Anytime you see, stretched across a street, a banner proclaiming the name of the neighborhood you’re in, you can be sure you’re about to have some very unfulfilling experiences. At least, that’s been my experience. So as soon as I saw this sign

I turned around and walked the other way.

What should a tourist do? Buy things? Take pictures of landmarks? There’s some kind of steam-clock contraption that lots of people seem to be shooting, and a bunch of stores. Commercialism and rote picture-taking turns me off, so I bounce in search of something else, though I’ve no idea what.

From what I can see there’s a nice, fixed-up part of Gastown, then there’s the shithole part, which looks like the high-crime New York of thirty years ago. In particular they’ve got these garbage-strewn alleyways (complete with horizontal junkies) ripped straight out of a 1970s cop show.

For the hell of it, I walked down one of these alleyways and was gradually flanked by several shuffling street denizens (like the zombies from the “Thriller” video) and at least one crack whore. Tell you the truth I wasn’t sure it was crack she was on, maybe there’s a Canadian variant. Like Maple Crack or something. Anyways looking at junkies seemed like a terrible way to spend my vacation, so I exited the alley after a couple blocks. Er...junkies are people too.

Next I swung through Chinatown which, as I should’ve known, was harlot-ed out in much the same way as Gastown. There was a big, cheesy red gate, I feel like everything was painted bright red. It looked more like a diorama in a museum than a place where people lived. Also I don’t like to see Chinese people go about the business of living while camera-toting families take pictures of them.

I did see this interesting bus though, check it out:

When the little pink curtains go up, each
window features a different puppet show.

I guess those are sleepers in the back? Like a capsule hotel on wheels.

I like Canada because I like Canadians. They don’t have a lot of the bullshit issues we Americans do, nor the superiority complex. And they’re so friendly! Like sometimes I’d be going to cross the street in the middle, far from any crosswalks--and cars would actually stop to let me cross! This is nothing short of shocking to me, flabbergasting. This is how humans are supposed to treat each other.

The “I’m-stopping-so-you-can-cross” thing happened to me once in the morning. It set the mood for the rest of my day, dialing it from “Apprehensive” up to “Good.” I think too much time in New York has added too many settings to the nether regions of the mood scale, i.e. “Mild Dread,” “Bitter-But-Survivalist” and “Fully Willing To Be Hit By A Taxi Because Really, What is the Point of All This.”

The weather’s as good here as it is in L.A., yet I can experience it without having to deal with the City of Angels’ vehicular bullshit. Vancouver’s a walkable city, huge plus.

I walked from Chinatown back to English Bay, to fill the notebook at the hotel. But I got antsy again so I set off after a couple pages. This time I crossed a bridge.

The bridges here are kinda scary to walk across because there’s not much of a barrier, just the railing and then the drop-off. You know what I mean? Like if you want to commit suicide by jumping off the Brooklyn or Manhattan bridges, it’s actually a hassle to get to the edge. The walkway on the Brooklyn is all the way in the center, and the Manhattan’s got that anti-jumper mesh fence on it. (I’ve errantly thought about climbing it more than once.) But here I looked behind me periodically to make sure no one was gonna run up on me and hoist me over. Wouldn’t take much effort with a low railing like that.

If I was a hitman in Vancouver that would be my M.O., shoving people off bridges. They’d call me the English Bay Hoister and instead of practicing my aim in an impromptu shooting range in my basement, I’d stay sharp by hoisting sacks of potatoes over the couch in my living room.

I hear in Japan the hitmen get behind you on a crowded crosswalk, then shove you in front of a moving car or bus. Interesting, no? So if things got too hot for me in Van I could move to Tokyo and become the Shinjuku Shover.

After crossing the river I walked west and ran into streets that have counterparts in my home city. West Fourth, Broadway, et cetera. I hoofed it for around an hour or two, at which point it looked like I was heading into suburbs so I turned around.

Right track, left rail.

I walked along some deserted train tracks near the water, then took a different bridge back to the West End.

When the sun started going down I headed to the beach behind the hotel. It was fucking gorgeous. Bunch of people just sitting around on logs or the sand, couples strolling here and there. It blows me away that you can be in a fully urban environment, then walk mere fucking blocks and see something like this.

I sat on an available log, broke out the notebook and started filling it with the events of the last five days. Feeling the breeze off the water makes it much easier to write, and it was pretty quiet, too. A guy could get used to this.

I love this, it’s almost midnight and I can still walk down the block and have a wide variety of dinner choices. Ignorant though it may be, I really thought only New York was like this.

When visiting other places, I’ve now stopped soliciting anything more than basic info from other people. I’ve gotten so many bum recommendations, through no fault of the recommender--the problem is what most people find interesting and what I find interesting are often different.

So for dinner I headed to Bin 941 with low expectations, that were met when I reached the front door. The place was crowded by a bland demographic and the food was tapas. I’ve had tapas, good tapas, and I wanted to try something different.

I walked the other direction on Davie Street, and eventually passed an attractive restaurant called Vu Le Vu. The interior was dark, red and comfortable, with well-spaced tables. Most importantly it was nearly empty. Seemed very comfortable.

On the menu in the window I saw two things I had to try: Tuna steak in a spicy chocolate sauce over lime-coconut dumplings and jalapeno bread with cilantro butter. The prices were out of the budget--entrees in the 20s--but I figured if I skipped an appetizer and dessert and ate fast food for the next two meals, I could swing it.

What’s better than eating in a comfortably empty restaurant? Well actually, lots of things I suppose, like eating with a person whom you love and understand and vice versa, but since that seems a pretty fucking remote possibility, this is the way I want to eat my dinner.

The food was fucking delicious, the best thing I’ve eaten since I got back from Tokyo. I simply could not believe how good it was. Almost like it wasn’t food, but something above it. The service was outstanding too; at different points the waitress, the hostess and the chef each came out to check on me.

I ended up getting into a conversation over coffee with the chef, an outspoken, focused-looking guy named Graham. He talked a mile a minute and had strong opinions on food, you could see he had a real passion for what he was doing. “The food critics hate me,” he said. “Because I’m not afraid to say things.

“This neighborhood used to be a mess,” he said, indicating Davie Street. (I’d moved to an outdoor table so I could smoke.) “They cleaned it up in the seventies but just left it, they didn’t do anything with it. It needs a place like this,” he said, gesturing to the restaurant. “I’m trying to do something different here.”

Graham also had a background in art and music, a real interesting cat, and bits of Mad Scientist showed through his frenetic sentences. After ten minutes it became clear he was the type of cat I’d like to profile for a magazine, and luckily I know of a New York start-up I should be able to get him into.

I left around 1-something a.m. Graham didn’t charge me for the coffee so I left the waitress an extra-fat tip. Fast food for the next three meals.

Anyways, enough chatter, here’s some flicks.

Oh these motherfuckers got boats.

Waterbug.

Bridge over untroubled waters.

Remote self-portrait.

If I was the landlord who owned this glass
sphere, I'd only rent it out to superheroes.
"Can you fly? No? Then you can't live here."

An arrangement of cranes sure to please Christians.

You should always build high-rises next
to elevated expressways. Makes for much
more dramatic earthquake footage.

If the sky falls down in New
York, it's not a big deal.
Vancouver, different story.
They got a lot more of it out here.

The windows on this bitch actually open!

There's a seagull in this photo
but he came out all tiny.

I'll watch this shit like it's cable.

Donors for loners.

I’m the first off the Clipper, and first through Customs. Love at the passport counter was in no mood to dilly-dally, so after a terse Q&A he waved me through, and I wandered onto Canadian soil unwittingly packing a knife. (Forgot to take it out of my bag back home; came across it later at the hotel. It’s small anyway.)

Victoria seems nice, and reminds me of Nice. Or Cannes, or one of those towns in the south of France that’s beautiful and sunny with hotels on the water and that requires buckets of money to appreciate properly.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time to see if my assessment is correct--I suspect it isn’t, since Canada’s pretty affordable--because I’m trying to make the six o’clock bus.

The Clipper woman said I’d never make it, but since I couldn’t bring myself to believe her I ran through Victoria like fucking Carl Lewis. J’ever try running while pulling a carry-on? Don’t ever do this in front of attractive women; your spaz factor goes way up.

I was the last one onto the bus, collapsed in my seat gasping. Soon as I was in the driver pulled the door shut and hit the gas, like he was B.A. Baracus and I was Hannibal.

Inside of thirty minutes I’m inside a bus that’s inside a boat. Me and the other passengers de-bus to find ourselves in what looks like a large, packed parking garage. A staircase inside an enormous iron pillar leads upwards. Three flights up I find the ferry’s deck.

It’s sunny out, the wind is blowing like Dizzy Gillespie and the water’s pretty. The deck is dotted with these large metal boxes, I think they hold the lifeboats. I laid down on top of one, enjoying the entirely foreign sensation of feeling unobstructed sunrays on me in the complete absence of exhaust fumes and that smell Chinatown starts producing around June. Headphones, where are my headphones, there we go.

I suppose I ought to go be social and strike up some jawboning with fellow ferrygoers, but after three days of taking meals with strangers I’ve got maybe one good conversation left in the tank. Better to save it and hope there’s a filling station in Vancouver. The only person I’m listening to right now is Ray Charles dispensing marital advice.

Later I open my eyes to see the kind of sunset that makes you forget your problems. Pictures won’t do it justice--it’s a 360-degree experience with more senses than sight, after all--but I snap a flick anyway, hoping that later when I’m back in the middle of some shit I can look at the pixels and try to remember this feeling. This feeling of being far, far away from home, and what the hell is home anyway, when out here I have no name and no jobs and there’s no beginning or end, just Now. And This.

For the second time on the trip I found myself happier than I could remember being, happier even than I was falling asleep on the train, which I didn’t think possible. I stared at the sunset like I was gonna die tomorrow, like this was the last one I’d ever see.

All the donors and readers, I have you to thank for this.

The ferry excretes the bus onto the mainland, and forty minutes later I’m getting my first look at Vancouver. The sun has long since gone down. Through the windshield of the bus I can see a bridge and city lights, the glorious and obscenely excessive clusters of lightbulbs that say Urban.

What’s better than a city at night?

Don’t get me wrong, the nature/water/sunset combo was fantastic. It’s like the sunset was the orgasm and the sight of city lights, the post-coital cigarette.

“Hotel Vancouver,” says the driver, signalling my stop. “This is as close as I can get you to the West End.”

“Do you know where the Sylvia Hotel is?” I ask. “And how far of a walk?”

“Whoa--you can’t walk there. The Sylvia Hotel is really out there. That’s really out there in the West End. You’d better take a cab, Chief.”

The Seattle-to-Vancouver leg of this trip has already run me $90, so there’ll be no cabs for me, even though I am apparently a Chief. “Which way is west?” I ask.

“That way,” he says in a well-you-asked-for-it tone, and in a minute I’m on the sidewalk, breathing in fresh bus exhaust. I call the Sylvia to get directions.

The woman said to take Alberni, but Robson Street looks more interesting so I head that way, trying not to hit people’s legs with the carry-on. I’m happy to see the sidewalks are crowded at 10:20pm on a Tuesday. Means there’s some life in this city. Around me I hear Japanese, then English, then Vietnamese, then the familiar, staccato nattering of Cantonese, which most non-Chinese find jarring but which I find soothing.

While the high-rises I saw on the way in were nice, the architecture in this part of town isn’t much to look at, it’s mostly strip-mall style. Low-rise structures apparently erected with little consideration for the impression they’d give.

The storefronts are lively though, and the sidewalks are thick with people. Lots of cafes, restaurants, shops. More than a few places selling postcards, and more than a grip of Japanese hipsters slouching in front of signs that say Currency Exchange.

The bus driver must have been out of his mind, because I make it to the Sylvia in less time than it takes to do a load of laundry. What is it with people being afraid to walk? I’m amazed evolution has allowed them to retain their legs. People’s legs should turn black and fall off if they don’t use them a certain amount. Fifty blocks a day minimum. S’good for you.

The Sylvia Hotel is “quaint,” meaning my room smells funky. There’s only one power outlet and my room has more funk than James Brown. The lobby and hallway smelled fine though.

Well, what the hell do I care. All I want is a clean place to sleep, and at ninety bucks a night (Canadian) this was the cheapest deal in town outside of a hostel. I can only charge one item and I choose the camera.

I smell the sheets, they seem clean, and more importantly they lack forensic evidence of previous guests. Unable to locate the source of the smell, I throw the windows wide and take a shower hotter than that cup of coffee the lady sued McDonald’s for.

Post-shower, I find a knife in my bag and wonder how the hell I’ll get this onto the flight out of Calgary. (I never check luggage, only carry-on.)

Then I turn the TV on to check out Canadian News. The ‘casters have regional accents, which I like because it reminds me I’m out-of-town. They’re going on and on about the rising rate of car theft in Canada. Surprisingly, they recommend using The Club. (You know those things are useless, right?)

Lying down, I start scribbling some in the notebook but am surprised at how heavy my eyes suddenly become. The one thing I haven’t been getting on this trip is sleep. Only one way to fix that.

-Click.-

"Oh, come on. If he was alive, would he be
floating face-down like that? Honey that
guy has been dead for at least a week."

Investment Thanker.

In a day I went from this...

...to this.

Coincidences are strange things, and here’s the damnedest one: Yesterday when Naoko was going through my iPod, she saw the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra tracks. “Oh, I went to their concert in New York last month,” she’d said.

“Get the fuck out of here!” I’d said. “I was at that same show!”

I remember this as I’m listening to “Utsukushii Moeru Mori” and the train is pulling into Seattle. What are the odds.

All of my travel friends are gone, so I’ve got no one to say goodbye to when I hit the platform at 10:30 in the morning. I give John Cube a pound and I’m off.

The cliché “It’s about the journey, not the destination” has never been truer than in my trip from NYC to Seattle. I had an interesting time on the train for 3+ days, and I’ll be spending only a few hours in Seattle. Gotta hop the 3:15pm Clipper to Vancouver by way of Victoria.

So I guess I could say “It’s about the journey and the post-destination destination, not the original destination” but that won’t fit on a bumpersticker. Unless you’ve got a really wide car or a bumper that runs along the side.

King Street Station in Seattle is nothing like Union Station in Chicago. It’s small and utilitarian. At a payphone I look through the Yellow Pages to locate a Verizon store, and scribble the address in my notepad. Then I call the Clipper terminal to get directions.

“The taxi driver will know where it is,” says the Clipper woman.

“I’m on foot,” I say.

“Oh, you can’t walk here!” says the woman. “It’s much too far.”

I’m thinking that means it’s too far for her to walk. “Are you north of King Street Station?” I ask.

“I think so, yes,” she says.

I figure I’ll walk west until I hit the water, then walk north ‘til I hit the Clipper dock. The woman actually spends a couple more sentences trying to convince me not to walk.

I grabbed a map from the Information counter, then went outside the station. On the sidewalk I checked the position of the sun to determine west, then double-checked the map to make sure Seattle wasn’t in some weird bay where the water would be on the east.

Okay so this is kind of embarassing. The breakfast I’d eaten on the train wasn’t quite sitting right, and I kind of had some, you know, well I wanted to go outside where it was windy and release some, er, tension. So in front of the station I walked a considerate distance away from the taxi drivers and silently let loose while I was checking out the map.

All of a sudden this middle-aged woman comes out of nowhere and stands right next to me, peering at the map. “Do you need some directions?” she asks.

I felt really bad, because I’m sure this woman had no idea what she was walking into; she was standing close enough that if I was wearing cologne she could’ve smelled it. But cologne is not what was in the air immediately around me. I hoped the wind would suddenly pick up, but you could’ve dropped a blade of grass and it would’ve fell straight down.

“No I’m fine, thank you very much though,” I said, hurriedly reaching for cigarettes and a match. I tried not to look her in the eye.

I’m walking a little weird, all shifting to the side. Three days on the train has given me “train legs.” I hope I don’t get mugged, or I’ll try to kick the guy and totally kick the wall three feet away from him. Or I’ll run after him and veer sideways and fall down a stairway.

The walk to the Clipper docks was nothing! Under forty minutes and I was towing a Pullman. I swear, do people not walk outside of New York? The woman made it sound like it was the fucking voyages of Magellan.

I left my carry-on with the Clipper countergirl, then checked the map and set out for the Verizon store. It seemed a little far but after three days on the train, I was dying to perambulate. In fact I’m convinced Lewis & Clark were cooped up on a train for a week, and just decided to stretch their legs, and one thing led to another.

On the way to the Verizon store I stopped at some place called Top Pot Donuts. I stopped there because I liked the name, it sounded like something from the 1940s. “Top Pot.” “Hey Dottie, I’ll meet you at Top Pot. I’m off to Top Pot for a spot of coffee.”

The interior was nice, decorated like some kind of modernist library, but the donuts were sub-par. Oh well. In a matter of hours I’d be in the country that had what I consider one of the best donut shops in the world, Tim Horton’s. So psyched! I fucking love that place. They don’t have them in the ‘States (that I’ve seen, anyway).

At the Verizon store I picked up a travel charger for 20 bucks. I hate making mistakes, particularly twenty-dollar mistakes. But afterwards I was free to roam the city.

The area I was in seemed like a central shopping district, so I wasn’t able to find much of interest, just a bunch of brand names. I went into Niketown to use the bathroom. It’s nothing like the Niketowns I’ve been in, it’s more like a Nikehut. Anyways I didn’t really have the time to explore the city properly (which is a shame--must come back) so I just kind of wandered.

Eventually I found myself at something called the Public Market Center, which was an indoor market bustling with food stands, fish markets, and clueless tourists like me.

Inside I saw a sandwich stand that looked pretty good, so I took a seat at the counter and ordered a salmon sandwich. Started scribbling in my notebook.

The early-30s neo-grunge counterguy seems pretty charming. He’s currently charming a charmable blond businesswoman while prepping orders.

I pretended to be studying my notebook while they flirted. The woman was laughing at something he’d said. “Boston,” she said. “Are you from here?”

“I was born a mile north of here,” said the sandwich guy, doing something in the sink. “Now I’ve got a condo a mile south of here. In thirty-two years I’ve gone nowhere.”

The woman laughed again, while I wrote Goddamn, you can buy a condo here by working at a sandwich counter? What can you get flipping burgers, a fucking townhouse?

Tourists flowed past me in a steady stream while I waited for my sandwich. Boston Woman’s order was ready first; she’d ordered earlier.

“Enjoy the conference,” said Sandwich Guy, handing her a bag. “How long are you in town for?”

“Until Thursday,” she said. (Today was Tuesday.)

“Oh, then I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Sandwich Guy, and I think he might’ve winked. I wasn’t quite sure. (Maybe it would’ve been funny if I’d interrupted like “Hey, did you just wink?” and then scribbled something down in my notebook.)

The woman laughed, but not the kind of laugh that ruled it out. “I’ll try,” she said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow!” he insisted, in a friendly way.

I’m pretty sure she’s gonna show up tomorrow.

As I scarfed my sandwich, Sandwich Guy got into another conversation, this time with a guy customer. They were talking about girlfriends. “How did you meet your girlfriend?” asked the patron.

“I met her right here,” said Sandwich Guy. “She was having lunch, talking about going to Spain. I jokingly asked her to bring me. Next week she showed up with two tickets and said ‘Hey, you want to go to Spain?’”

“No kidding!” said the other guy.

“Yeah. So we went to Spain, and hit it off. The next month I returned the favor and took her to Paris. We’ve been dating ever since.”

I almost spit my sandwich out. So let me get this straight. If I move here and get a job at a sandwich counter and wear old T-shirts and a backwards baseball cap I can buy a condo, pick up chicks and take them to Paris. I gotta get in the Seattle sandwich business.

If I was working at say, Gray’s Papaya back in New York, I could make enough to rent a shithole in the Bronx, meet girls that had jailhouse tattoos and maybe take her to Coney Island with an all-day Metrocard. Things really are different outside the city.

On the way back to the Clipper docks, I passed a building with the letters “AI” on it. A bunch of kids with interesting fashion choices were hanging out in front.

I walked inside, thinking they worked on either Artificial Intelligence or Adobe Illustrator stuff in here. Instead it was some kind of art school.

The security guy didn’t stop me, so I continued inside and up the steps, where there was some kind of printmaking exhibit. Pretty interesting stuff. Kids are so crazy these days.

I wandered down this hallway and that, passing a variety of classrooms filled with kids with lots of metal in their face. One room had all these desks that had some type of round computer screen atop the surface.

My cell phone went off, surprising me. First time I’d heard it in four days. “Hello?”

“Hi Rain, my name is [so-and-so],” said a businesslike voice. “I got your number from [vaguely-familiar-name.]”

To make a long story short, it was a PR guy who got my number from another PR guy I’d had contact with some years ago. Basically I was freelancing for this teenage boys magazine (yeah, yeah...get off my back) and the PR guy would feed me products to feed them blurbs about. Like he’d call me up and be like “Hey man, Nike’s got these new Shox sneakers, you gotta come try ‘em out” so I’d go up to Niketown and bounce around in the shoes and write about it.

It sounds fun but it paid like shit.

Anyways this new PR guy is doing something with Guinness (the beer, not the book of stupid records). He says they’re going to take a shitload of writers on an all-expenses-paid trip to Ireland for a week in August. Business-class flight, five-star hotel, tour of Dublin and Kilkenny, tour of the Guinness facilities, tickets to the Irish National Hurling Championships and presumably, all the Guinness you can drink.

“What’s the catch?” I asked.

“You just have to get an article about the trip into a major magazine,” he says, “and some positive coverage of Guinness has to factor into the article.” Aha. It’s sneaky, underhanded advertising.

Well, I’m a whore, I can be bought. So I told the guy I’d make some phone calls, see what I could do.

“Great!” he said.

“Great!” I said.

Later I’d get back to the city and the deal would fall through, but I had no way of knowing that at the time. And it sure was exciting to be in Seattle and get a call like that from New York.

At the Clipper docks I made some ultimately doomed magazine phone calls back to New York, and then it was time to board.

The Clipper was a big boat, much bigger than I’d thought. I mean it wasn’t a cruise liner--if Under Siege took place on this boat, it’d be over in about thirty minutes--but it was sizable.

It was also a catamaran, meaning it fucking cruised. I stood on the little tiny deck out back and stared at the jets churning the water up. The sun was blinding. Seattle began to recede in the background. Oh Seattle, I hardly knew ye. I felt a little bad, like I’d fooled around with some girl at a bar and not even gotten her name or contact info.

I was now getting to feel something I couldn’t on a sealed train for three days: Fresh air. The breeze off the water was fantastic, like natural A/C. Sunlight glinted off the water ahead, and in the distance I could see somebody parasailing.

I half-expected to see Sandwich Guy cruise past in a powerboat, wearing a smoking jacket and backwards baseball cap, holding a martini and flanked by chicks in bikinis. That was one tasty-sandwich-making pimp motherfucker.

That white wake you see
is actually flatulence.

You’ve heard of the itch you can’t scratch?
Well I’m the bitch with no kinda scratch.

I think the sun and I got up around the same time, 6:30am.

If you were standing in a North Dakota cornfield at the moment the train passed, you might’ve spied a half-naked Korean guy in one of the windows, rubbing his eyes and yawning silently into the dawn.

I pulled clothes on and headed up to the dining car. I was seated with two senior citizen dudes, both from California, both quite friendly and engaging. Got into a conversation about land taxes. One had purchased his house in 1964, the other in 1968. One said his wife was still asleep and didn't eat breakfast, the other didn’t mention a wife at all.

After breakfast I went downstairs and made my bed. Apparently it’s John Cube’s job--the Scands stepped aside while he made their bed--but it seemed silly to me to ask someone else to do such a simple thing. In a few moments I’d restored the seating configuration.

I looked at the train schedule. Dammit! The train had stopped at Fargo, North Dakota around 3:50am, and I’d slept right through it. I’d wanted to get out and at least see the station because of, well, the Coen brothers movie. Take a picture next to the sign or something dorky like that.

Even though I hadn’t showered in two days, I actually didn't feel that dirty. I mean it’s not like I’d sweated at all, I had no opportunity to get any exercise on this train. Still, I figured I should go down the hall and try the shower out, at least so I could write about it and let you know what it’s like.

It’s a stand-up, obviously, and the curtain snaps shut with grommets that affix to the wall, so you’re sealed in. It’s pretty tiny, like a vertical plastic coffin. I’m not even that big of a guy, but I thought an efficient way to use this shower might be to smear soap on the walls and just spin around inside.

For water you have to push this silver knob into the wall...every ten seconds, or the water stops. I guess there’s a limited amount of water onboard and they don’t want you wasting it.

The hot water’s not really that hot, but I’m used to this, from years of living with roommates that’ve almost tapped the boiler out. Washing is tricky because of the lateral motion of the train, and I was trying not to lean on the walls because I assumed they were gross.

The hardest part was washing my feet. Trying to balance like a flamingo while the train is moving is nearly impossible. Those cats from Cirque Du Soleil couldn’t do this shit.

It always amazes me how little, inconsequential things can lead to larger things. I’d forgotten to bring something, and this would lead to me having a companion for my next two meals.

Of all my packing fuck-ups, the largest I’d made was bringing the power adapter for my cell phone charger...but not the actual charger. By Day Three my cell phone only had one bar left. I don’t like having one bar. I feel better with three.

In desperation I started showing my phone to my hallway-mates and asking if they had the same one, hoping I could bum someone’s charger for an hour. No dice. It’s a camera phone and a formerly “hot” model, so I figured only a young person would have one, as opposed to the geezers sleeping to either side of me.

I went upstairs and down through the coach cars, looking for people in my demographic.

- “Say, do you have this phone?”

- “Nope.”

- “Hey, do you have this phone?”

- “Nope.”

I was working my way down towards Trand when I stopped and asked a Japanese girl with an iPod if she had my phone. She didn’t, but we started talking.

The girl and I kind of recognized each other, in that we’d both been talking to Trand at different points and passed each other in the observation car a couple times. But Trand had told me he’d met a “Chinese” girl. (Sheesh.)

“So where you off to?” I asked her.

“I’m going to meet up with my husband, he’s in Montana right now,” she said. Her English was slightly accented but fully conversant.

Turns out we both had a lot in common, except for the husband thing (mine left me). We’re both writers, both juggling multiple jobs in the shadow of New York City, both fans of travel and on some conversational level, we were on the same wavelength. We agreed to have lunch together, then I left to continue my cell phone charging mission.

“Hey Trand, do you have this phone?”

“I don’t have any phone.”

Damned hippie.

In the observation car I passed a guy standing by a small counter next to the stairway. There were two outlets there, and he was charging his Mac Powerbook. A fellow Mac user!

“Say, do you have this phone?”

He looked at it. “As a matter of fact, I do,” he said. The charger for it was right in front of my face, plugged in.

“Would you mind if I...”

“Be my guest.” Nice.

It’s weird, like having a temporary wife. I’m in the dining car with Naoko and the whole place is filled with senior citizen couples, and the two of us. Since we’re the only nonwhites in the car and roughly the same age, I figure everyone assumes we’re a couple too.

“So how long you guys been married?” I ask our tablemates.

“Forty-seven years,” says the husband.

“Forty-eight,” says his wife.

“Forty-eight,” he repeats.

Conversation goes smoothly until a certain line of questioning reveals that Naoko and I aren’t a couple at all, and only met earlier that day. My cover’s blown. Oh well.

After lunch Naoko and I chill in the coach car and trade iPods. J’ever do this? It’s fun, going through another person’s playlists.

When an iPod becomes a youPod.

Trand is playing chess with a friend in the observation car while I get into a conversation with Chuck, the guy who let me use his phone charger. Pretty cool cat. He’s on the train with his wife and three kids. Runs his own ad agency in Pittsburgh.

His nine-year-old son pops into the car. “Dad, I got you and mom dinner reservations,” he says.

“The kids decided to let us go on a date tonight,” Chuck explains. “Just me and the wife.” He turns to his son. “What time are the reservations for?”

“Eight-thirty,” says the son.

“Eight-thirty? That’s way too late!” He grabs his son in a mock headlock. “I need a six-thirty. I’ve got to teach you to negotiate, young man. Now you get back in that dining car and don’t come back until we’ve got a six-thirty. Cry if you have to. Sell it! Alright, buddy? Cry! Let’s see some tears!”

His kid rolls his eyes, but I thought it was pretty funny.

In North Dakota I spotted some serious American-style suburbs that put anything we’ve got back in upstate New York or New Jersey to shame. Ramrod-straight streets lined with equally-sized cookie-cutter houses at precise and consistent intervals. Type of place where nobody’s better than anybody else.

The hell kind of a way is that to live! Ha! Ha! Ha!

“Oh shit, Havre’s coming up,” says Trand, to his buddy.

“Why, what’s in Havre?” I ask.

“A pizzeria,” says his buddy. “We can get some real-ass food.” These poor bastards have been eating out of the café car the whole time. I think the food is better in jail.

So at Havre the lot of us hop off. The train’s only stopping for a few minutes, so Trand’s pal makes like The Flash and jets around the corner. Trand and I check out the stations’ vending machines.

His buddy comes back a minute later, barefoot on one foot. “My fuckin’ Birkenstocks broke,” he says, holding up a sandal with a snapped strap. That looked like the kind of thing that would happen to me. I thought of how cool it would be to have a sidekick that could siphon off all your bad luck. Someone I could, you know, go skydiving with, and stuff.

“Where’s the pizza, dude?” says Trand.

“They ran out,” says his friend, bummed. Wow. Never heard of a pizzeria running out of pizza! That’s like a bar running out of booze.

We get back on the train, pizza-less.

Right to left:
Me, Trand, Trand’s brother, Moneygrip with the Brokenstock.

Naoko and I hang out in my compartment for a while, shooting the shit. It’s so much quieter down here than in coach. She’s the first person on this trip that I feel like I’ve been able to get past small talk and really connect with.

She’s also somebody’s wife. She married into a Missionary family. Although her husband is Caucasian, he was raised in Japan, and apparently has the mannerisms and behavior of a Japanese person. Interesting, no?

At dinner Naoko and I are sharing a table with an older Jewish guy from New York. His name is Henry and I like him right away. He’s got a nice, bitter laugh and huge bags under his eyes. Bags that look like they were designed by Samsonite.

Presently Henry’s wife joins us. She’s from upstate New York and a little on the bitchy side.

We small-talk through the salad, then the entrees come. “So how long you guys been married?” I ask, reading from the script.

“We’re not married,” says Henry. “We’re living in sin.”

“That’s right,” says his companion, I think her name was Angela.

“We met on the internet,” Henry confides. This is killing me ‘cause these guys are like, both pushing sixty.

“Tell ‘em about our first date,” says Angela.

Henry lets out a dark chuckle. “So on our first date, after the meal the waiter comes over to us and says ‘I just recently got married. And I just want to say, I hope that when my wife and I have been married as long as you two have, that we still love each other as much as you two.’ Hahahaha.”

“Hahahaha,” says Angela.

“I didn’t wanna ruin it for him, so I didn’t say nothing,” says Henry. “Hahahaha.”

Midway through dinner Angela makes things uncomfortable with a vaguely racist comment directed towards Naoko. Then she draws attention to the fact that Naoko has an accent.

“All of us got accents, just from different places,” I point out. Henry and I in particular sound like we’ve got New York marbles in our mouths. And Angela has a Bitch accent.

“Well, Mr. Politically Correct,” says Angela. “Do you feel better now?”

What a bitch, I think to myself. She reminds me of the lady on top of the Sears Tower. Why can’t you just be cool? No one wants to be made to feel like an alien, especially on vacation. Why can’t people understand this? I started sending her psychic death rays.

By mid-dinner the train had begun passing through the Rocky Mountains, so afterwards Naoko and I go to the observation car to see.

It’s beautiful, almost ridiculously so. Tall, majestic mountains stretching skyward, covered in greenery and giving way to all sorts of cool little valleys. Precipitous drop-offs and hidden waterfalls suddenly springing into view. It was pretty nuts and I snapped an assload of flicks.

We sat there side by side for thirty minutes or so, not really saying much beyond the occasional “Wow” or “sugoi” or “holy shit.” I suppose it would have been just as beautiful if I was alone, but it was nice to have someone to share it with.

Silverfish, Montana is some kind of resort area. It’s inaccessible by plane and only open a few months out of the year, which probably explains why assloads of people got off there.

Chuck and his family got off. Trand, his brother and his pal got off. Naoko got off. She was excited about introducing me and Trand to her husband, so I stepped off the train for a spell.

Her husband was a lanky white guy, seemed nice enough. Don’t know what I was expecting but he seemed decidedly unthrilled to meet the rest of us. I guess if my wife was riding the train and she got off with a bunch of dudes I’d feel the same way.

We said our goodbyes, traded e-mails and all that, and I got back on the train.

Back in my compartment by myself, it seemed extra quiet. The sun had gone down so there wasn’t much to see. I broke out the laptop and ported the mountain photos into it, to free up space on the camera’s memory card.

Seeing the photos large, I got a nasty surprise: The camera had consistently auto-focused on the glass plane, not the scenery behind it! I must’ve been too far from the window. As a result, nearly everything I’d shot that evening--some damn fine shots, I’d thought--came out looking like fucking Impressionist paintings.

“My donors won’t be pleased,” I said to myself, closing the laptop and staring at the wall for a minute.

I only managed to get two bars before Chuck had to get off. Oh well.

Around midnight I make up the bed and draw the curtain shut. I’m excited to go to sleep. Lying down in the darkness, it’s just the same as last night. Stars, motion, klaxon, rumbling. I am alone but completely free, and on my way to someplace. This is the best.

If I ever get rich, I’m going to build a circular track around my manse and put a train on it. Every night I’ll go to sleep in that thing while it circles the grounds.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be in Seattle, and soon after, Vancouver. Almost there.

This bitch makes the six look like a toy.

“Big Sky Country.”
The clouds in Montana look like the
opening credits to “The Simpsons.”

It looks like I shot this
with a goddamn Lomo. Sorry.

This is the end of the Earth.
You can’t tell in this photo, but
once the train moves, yeah--that’s
the end of the planet right there.

Mo’ horses.

There’s eight of ‘em, whatever they are.

The pen casts a long shadow in Montana.

These cats know how to get privacy.

Unfortunately, I’m still short.
(Unfortunately, in more ways than one.)

Every time I’m on an honest-to-god train platform, I think of the scene from Casablanca where Rick realizes Ilsa’s not going to show up. The first time I saw it, I remember being impressed that he threw her note away, thinking I probably would have kept it. That was when I was younger and couldn’t understand. I think now I’d throw it away too.

Anyways, I digress. I’m on a crowded train platform in Chicago, boarding an Amtrak “Superliner” bound for Spokane. While the name of the NYC-to-Chicago train was vaguely Native American--“Three Rivers”--this one has a decidedly colonialist bent: “Empire Builder.”

I’m pretty sure Ilsa’s not coming for me, so I board the Empire Builder straightaway. A sleeper car. I’d booked a sleeper for the second and third nights of the trip, figuring (correctly) that the first night of sleeping in coach would suck. The last thing I wanted was to get to Vancouver too ill-rested to enjoy it.

Soon as you board the sleeper, you see a tiny hallway stretching left and right, along what would be the spine of the train. In the center of the hallway is a small staircase that twists upstairs at ninety-degree angles. At either end of the hallway are doors leading to the larger sleeping compartments. Along the hallway are the doors leading to the smaller compartments or the bathrooms.

“Right this way, you’re in room 14,” said the conductor, who kind of looked like a mixed version of Ice Cube. Sounded like him, too. “My name is John, just let me know if you need anything.” Soon as he turned around I heard fuckin’ around in a crap game, niggas think I’m soft, ‘cause now I’m in the rap game....

I slid door #14 aside to discover a compact compartment with two coach seats facing each other, next to a window. It was tight but comfortable.

“Will I be sharing this with someone else?” I asked John, when he’d come back.

“Naw,” he said. “This is your compartment, this is what you paid for. ‘Course if you wanna bring somebody else in here, I won’t say nothin’,” he said. “You ain’t supposed to but I won’t say nothin’.” ...and I don’t hang out as much, bang out dope cuts, standin’ on stage and I’m grabbing mah nuts....

I dropped the carry-on in one seat and sat in the other.

I faintly heard someone yell “All abooooooooaaard” and a few seconds later the train began moving.

Across the hall (a mere five feet away) was a middle-aged German or Scandanavian couple. We nodded hello to each other. But even though our rooms were close together, the doorways lend them a feeling of privacy, so me and the Scands didn’t feel like we were in each other’s shit.

Our two rooms flanked the door at the end of the hall, which apparently led to one of the large cabins. I saw a family of six disappear into it. I couldn’t see in the room though.

I could hear all six of them in there talking and hanging out. It looked like a husband and wife, three kids and an aunt. I pictured the room being this massive chamber with couches, attendants and a fountain in the middle.

John knocked on the door to the big room first, and since it was right next to mine I heard his whole spiel.

“Okay folks, welcome aboard, my name is John and I’m just going to orient you a little. The dining car is one car over, you have to go upstairs to access it. If you’ll be taking your meals in the dining car, you’ll need to make reservations. Dinner is from 6 to 9pm, breakfast is from 6:30 to 8am, and lunch is from 12 to 2pm.

“There are bathrooms at the other end of the hall, and a shower room, too. There are towels along with soap and shampoo.

“There’s an observation car three cars down, you’ll need to go through the dining car to get there. It gives you a pretty good view of the surroundings. On the first floor of the observation car is the café.

“Around bedtime I’ll come down to make your beds up. In the meantime, I’ll be upstairs in room #1 if anybody needs me for anything.”

Wow! A dining car! An observation car! A café car! A shower! My own compartment! This thing was friggin’ cool.

What was interesting was that when the conductor talked to the other riders, he whitened up his voice like Ultradent, but when he talked to me he spoke in (what I assumed was) his natural tone, which had more of a ghetto twang. I guess to him I either looked “down” or not old enough to have to disguise his true voice in front of. I hoped it was the former.

A female conductor came by the compartment and popped her head in. “Excuse me, would you like to make dinner reservations?” she asked. Which was funny to me, like we were a bunch of kids playing Train, or Restaurant.

“Uh...sure. How about 7:30.”

“Good choice,” she said, marking something on her clipboard and moving to the next compartment. I wondered what a bad choice would have been. Maybe 9:47.

It was still early afternoon, so I went to explore the rest of the train. First I checked out the bathrooms. The guy who designs airplane bathrooms and the guy who designs train bathrooms are either good friends, or they sat right next to each other in design school. The train toilets, though, don’t have that blue liquid. That stuff tastes so good. (Just wanted to see if you were paying attention.)

Next I went upstairs, where there were more sleeper compartments, presumably the expensive ones. I hear these have got their own bathrooms, if you can imagine that. But the toilet is right in the room. So it’s like, a moving jail cell.

One car over I found the dining car, which was in a state of undress. Only half the tables were covered. Waiters flitted in and out, making preparations.

I slipped past them and into the next car, which was a coach. Rows and rows of people ranging from backpackers to families. If there were any ex-cons in here I couldn’t tell.

Beyond the coach was the observation car, which was friggin’ cool. Glass on both sides and part of the ceiling, with individual seats facing the windows.

In the center of the observation car was a staircase leading down, to the “café.” It was basically the same deal as on the first train, a collection of cramped booths and a counter selling awful sandwiches and junk food. There was already a line. I was hungry and thirsty, so I got on it.

There were no tables available in the café car, so I went upstairs with my water and cookie to grab a seat in the observatory. The Korean girl I’d seen earlier was up there, and the seat next to her was one of the few available, until I sat in it.

For five minutes, green fields slid past the window. She ate Cup of Noodles while I scarfed my cookie.

“So where you off to,” I said, between bites of chocolate chip.

“Minneapolis. How about you?”

“Seattle.”

We got to talking, and it turns out the girl had been riding the rails for something like two months! By herself, no less! I asked her where she’d been and the list was crazy. She’d been all over the country. New York. Virginia. Montana. Arizona. California. Oregon. Washington State. Ohio. And all the places in between. Staying in hostels the whole time.

“How can you afford the train fares?” I asked.

“Amtrak sells an unlimited 30-day pass for $500, for students,” she said. Man! That was cheaper than my $660 NYC-to-Seattle ticket. I thought of how I’d wasted any spare time from my student years watching Scorsese movies and hanging out on my rooftop in Brooklyn.

Next she was off for Minneapolis, and from there, a bus to her school, in North Dakota. It blew me away. She wasn’t even a citizen (though her English was pretty flawless), and she’d been to wayyyyy more states than I’d ever been.

I spent the next thirty minutes chatting with her, periodically diverting into a conversation with a friendly, middle-aged black truck driver who sat to my right. After the dark conversations I’d endured on the Three Rivers, it was nice to talk to two wholesome, upstanding people about traveling between states. Both of them had honest laughs.

Outside, during one of the smoke breaks I met a white kid from Montana. (Now I just had to encounter a Latino and an Arab and I would have collected one travel friend from each of the major ethnicities. They should make a board game.) Hippie-style, long blond hair, probably familiar with a variety of drug paraphernalia and new drug slang. (“Hey man, you wanna go boondoggle? Shake a cylinder? Stoke a tram-yappy?”)

His name was Trand, I’m assuming it’s short for Bertrand. (Did you know “Topher Grace” is short for “Christopher Grace?” That’s what I heard.)

“Fuckin’ sucks they don’t let you smoke on the trains anymore,” said Trand. He said he’d ridden this circuit a lot, and there used to be some sort of smoking section. I pictured eight train cars trailed by a ninth, a cattle car filled with billowing smoke and people that looked like us.

I’d never met anyone from Montana before, and asked him all sorts of questions. He said it was beautiful, but that he had to get the hell out or he’d end up pumping gas or working in a saw mill. So right now he was living in Michigan.

“All aboooooooaaaard,” said the conductor. I wished there were some established response for us to yell back, so it would be like yodeling.

“I’ll catch you later bro,” said Trand, as we re-boarded our separate cars. He was in steerage.

Before parting ways the Korean student and I had exchanged e-mail addresses, which should come in handy if I ever decide to move to North Dakota and re-enter college as an undergraduate. Here’s what she drew in my notebook. It’s so cute!

I was back in the observation car, sitting by myself when the train stopped at this crossing. Next to me a bunch of senior citizens were chatting.

“Everybody wave,” said one of them. Most people in the observation car began gamely waving at the people in the cars. Eventually, people in the cars started to wave back. This is one of those things that’s like riding a moped: Fun to do, but you hope your friends don’t see you doing it because it’s dorky.

An elderly gentleman next to me spoke up. “One time we were at a crossing like this, and we started waving,” he said, “and then these kids gave us the finger.” I understood how he felt.

I showed up at the dining car at 7:30 on the dot, ready to chow down.

Space is limited, so every table must be filled. I was directed to sit at a booth with three retirees: Paul, his wife Peggy and Paul’s sister Mary.

At first I was freaked out about having to make small talk with total strangers (I can do it well, but I hate it), but the three of them were very genial and had good senses of humor.

Paul looked like some sort of professor, with a salt-and-pepper beard and spectacles. His wife Peggy seemed pretty All-American, with clear blue eyes and a perfectly oval face. Paul’s sister Mary looked exactly like Betty White from The Golden Girls. (When you’re a writer and you meet people who look like celebrities, it’s great because you don’t have to think of ways to describe them, you can just say “They looked like so-and-so.”) The three of them were headed to Portland to visit some friends.

For dinner I had salmon, which sounded good on the menu but was rubbery in reality. Paul was recommending some books I should read if I wanted to be a travel writer. By mid-meal the conductor announced we were approaching Lacrosse, Wisconsin.

“Oh, Lacrosse,” said Paul, giving Peggy a meaningful look. “The river will be coming up, then. I suppose we should genuflect.” All three of them turned to look out the window while I tried to remember what “genuflect” meant.

A few minutes later we did indeed cross a river, snaking off towards the horizon. The far bank was dotted with houses. “Is that it? No, maybe that one...” said Paul, indicating one or another of the houses. Peggy just smiled.

“After I got out of the army, I got a job with this manufacturing company,” Paul explained to me. “Peggy and I had just gotten married and we were living in Maryland at the time. But they transferred me up here to Lacrosse. Peggy and I lived in a house by the river for a year or so. The winters up here, well, you wouldn’t believe them. When the rivers froze over you could drive a car across them.”

I smiled and forgot about my rubbery salmon. Tried to imagine what it was like to have been alive so long that you couldn’t instantly recognize a house you’d lived in with a new bride. That must be something, no?

“So anyway,” said Paul, turning back towards me. “You really ought to read Paul Theroux....”

It started to get dark soon after dinner, and I repaired to my compartment. I turned the light off so I could see out the window at the dark fields slipping past. Put headphones on and listened to the following playlist:

“Muddy Water” - Aretha Franklin
“Evil Gal Blues” - Aretha Franklin
“Trust In Me” - Etta James
“I Don't Hurt Anymore” - Dinah Washington
“I'd Rather Go Blind” - Etta James
“Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby” - Dinah Washington
“At Last” - Etta James
“Baby, Baby, Baby” - Aretha Franklin
“If I Can't Have You” - Etta James

‘cause that’s the kind of mood I was in.

Around ten-something p.m. the train stopped at St. Paul, Minnesota. I had told the student I’d get off to say goodbye to her here.

I stepped out of the train and lit a much-needed cigarette. The platform was pretty crowded and I didn’t see her anywhere. I stayed put because I thought it would be kind of silly for me to go looking for this girl I’d known for an hour or so. If Ilsa was there I might’ve gone looking for her.

An hour outside of St. Paul, I declined John Cube’s offer to make my bed up and did it myself while humming “Who’s the Mack.” The two coach seats fold flat and meet in the middle to make a comfortable sleeping surface. Overhead was a platform folded against the wall, meant to serve as the second bed. I pulled it down, took one of the mattress/sheet/blanket sets off it, laid it on the first bed, then folded the second back into the wall.

I pulled the curtain over the door so the Scands wouldn’t get an eyeful, then shed my clothes and lay down.

With the door shut, the bed takes up the entire compartment. Although only a twin, it’s super-comfortable and you’re lying down right next to the window.

Outside I could see the stars in the night sky. Every so often the train’s horn would blow (a great sound, as klaxons go.) The inky shapes of trees flitting past gave the impression of speed.

It was the greatest way ever to fall asleep. Lying there in the dark compartment, staring at constellations, hearing the soothing chugging of the wheels, feeling the vibration of the tracks, I was more happy than I’ve been in a long, long time--years and years--and I wanted to fall asleep like this every night for the rest of my life. Fucking beautiful.

There’s a really good song by En Vogue
called “Giving Him Something He Can Feel.
You know what I could feel right now?
A dollar.

Of all the unpleasant ways to be awakened--screaming alarm clock, arguing neighbors, your cellmate rattling the bars with his tin cup--I think the worst is just plain old being cold.

In my efforts to pack light, I’d tossed my grey hoodie out of my bag right before I left the house. Now I awakened to find myself freezing on a darkened train, my thin T-shirt unable to ward off the overzealous air-conditioning.

I rubbed my arms and cursed. What was outside the window, I was disappointed to see, looked nothing like Chicago. Darkened fields whipping past and no trace of dawn in the blackened sky. Must still be in Indiana. Around me in the car, nothing but sleeping bodies.

Some of the scenes from last night flashed into my head. Moving from the café car to the seating section to the platform at smoking stops and back again. Everyone got drunk, then drunker. Greg started getting loud and I watched a distinct personality change come over him--from funny and lighthearted to brooding and aggressive.

Tracey had kept coming over to me, sharing private jokes and making a point of not engaging the others. Using me as a shield, basically--she told me Greg was hitting on her hard and it was starting to become a hassle. Didn’t know what to believe. More on that later.

At one point I’d walked back into the seating car and spotted Rich sitting with the 16-year-old Jersey girl. Elizabeth or Tenafly or whatever her name was seemed really excited. I felt bad for her and wondered if she knew what she was getting into. She was on the train with her grandmother and little sister.

The last thing I remember was Greg creating a bit of a ruckus in the seating car. He had his headphones on and was singing out loud when people were trying to sleep. A woman complained and Greg had exploded. “Whaya say? Whaya say? Whaya say?” he’d yelled back at her, getting visibly agitated.

A conductor had then come over and threatened to kick Greg off the train. “You wanna be stuck out here, in the middle of nowhere, at this hour?” he’d said, and then Greg had calmed down. Soon after that I’d fallen asleep.

But now I was awake again. Next to me, Tracey was conked out. I rubbed my arms some more, but the heat only lasted a few seconds before dissipating.

Tracey woke up and looked at me, sleepy-eyed. She had her legs covered in a shawl with Tibetan patterns. (She was into Tibetan things. Last night I ripped a Tibetan track off one of her CDs she wanted me to hear.)

“You mind if I have some of that shawl?” I said, pointing. “Fuckin’ freezing.”

She unfolded it and pulled the extra material over me. Then she moved her pillow onto my shoulder and placed her head on it. We fell back asleep, the train shaking the both of us.

The next time I awakened was a few minutes outside Chicago, according to the conductor’s announcement. Tracey was already up. I looked out the window and saw what I thought was the Sears Tower and snapped a flick.

Anyone who has ever committed suicide by jumping
had, at some point before their plunge, taken
longing glances at this building.

“How long is your layover?” she asked.

“Six hours. Yours?”

“Six hours. Let me see your ticket, maybe we’re on the same train again.”

I fished it out of my pocket and she compared it to hers. Mine had been purchased with a credit card on the internet and was spat out of a laser-printing self-service machine at Penn Station. Hers had clearly been purchased with cash and was the old-fashioned paper kind.

“Hmmm...no, we’re on different trains,” she said, disappointed. Tell you the truth I was actually kind of relieved.

“What are you gonna do for six hours?” she asked.

“I dunno, walk around,” I said.

“We should hang out. Let’s get some breakfast,” she said.

“Sounds good,” I blurted, but the line was generated by my stomach, not my brain, and in reference only to the breakfast part. Tracey was a nice enough girl but a high-maintenance handful to listen to. Plus I always travel alone, I like it that way, and I doubted she’d want to do the same things I would for six hours.

On top of that, I’d realized the night before that several things Tracey told me about her life didn’t add up. A couple times she contradicted herself in the same soliloquy, indicating one thing or the other had to be a lie. She smelled like trouble.

“I know Chicago a little, they’ve got some great museums,” she said. (I hate museums.)

“But it’s a Sunday, won’t they be closed?” I said.

“You know what, you’re right,” she said. “We’ll find something else to do.”

When the train finally came to a stop within the station, Tracey waited until Greg moved to the front of the car to retrieve his bag, then we exited. First thing we did was light cigarettes on the platform. Tracey kept us moving though, apparently in a rush to avoid Greg.

At the end of the platform we ran into Rich...walking with the sixteen-year-old, her baby sister and her grandmother. “Alright now, y’all take care,” he said, shaking our hands. Something incredibly disturbing about this, but something else told me to keep moving. I would make a terrible superhero; I couldn’t live with the constant guilt.

I tried to put the whole scene out of my mind immediately, and I’m ashamed to admit I succeeded as soon as I rounded the corner.

Tracey and I found the part of the station that contained the lockers. In Europe and Japan, any time I’d gone traveling I’d always ditched my large bag in the train station at the pay lockers, then embarked for a day jaunt with a smaller bag. The lockers were typically coin-operated with mechanical locks.

But the lockers in this station were all hi-tech; they said “Smarte Carde” on them and rather than taking coins, each bank of lockers was enslaved to a single touch-screen monitor with cash and credit card slots. They costed nine fucking dollars for the day.

“You got any singles?” asked Tracey. She was two short so I gave her a couple. She worked the screen, selected the ‘Large’ size and an available locker popped open.

“It’s actually big enough to fit both our bags,” she said, inserting her massive green suitcase and shoving it all the way to the back with her foot.

“Uh, I’m gonna put mine in a separate locker, just in case,” I said. In Europe I’d had a couple bad experiences sharing lockers with random fellow backpackers. It basically meant you either had to hang out with them the whole day--even if they turned out to be assholes--or you had to coordinate meeting up with them again to retrieve your shit, a total pain in the ass that inevitably meant squandering precious travel time waiting on some douchebag who showed up two hours late because he “met this hot girl from Frankfurt.”

I worked the screen, slid my credit card in and a locker popped open. The machine spat out a piece of paper with a six-digit code on it. The instructions said to re-enter the code onto the screen when you wanted to retrieve your bag.

Next I opened my carry-on and pulled out the things I’d need for the day: Camera, notebook and pen, small black shoulder bag (my Japanese bag) and glasses. I put these things in a pile, then stuffed my carry-on into the locker and closed it.

“Ah, fuck,” I said, the moment the locker clicked shut.

“What’s the matter?” asked Tracey.

“Forgot the shoulder strap for the bag.” I’d disconnected it, rolled it up and stuffed it into my carry-on when I packed. I’m all about compactness.

So I entered the code on the screen, and the locker popped back open. I dug through the carry-on, retrieved the shoulder strap, stuffed the carry-on back in the locker and closed it.

“Uh,” said Tracey.

“What?”

“You can only open the lockers and close them once,” she said.

“Fuck,” I said, suddenly comprehending. I went over to the touch-screen and punched in the code number again.

‘LOCKER UNAVAILABLE,’ read the screen. I tried it again and got the same result. My bag was stuck in there.

I then tried buying a new locker, hoping the same one would pop open, but the screen kept giving me an error message. Fucking thing! I looked around for a service counter, but it was 8:20am on a Sunday and unmanned. The locker room was empty except for us.

On top of the counter was a phone. ‘LIFT FOR SMARTE CARDE ASSISTANCE’ was printed on top of it.

I picked up the phone and got a “Smarte Carde” operator with a Russian accent, who said he’d send a technician.

Tracey and I sat and waited. Five minutes went by, no technician. Then ten. Then twenty.

“I’m starting to get hungry,” said Tracey.

“Me too,” I said, starting to get pissed off. I’d made a stupid fucking mistake, and now precious minutes of my travel time was ticking away. I only had six hours in Chicago and I was going to waste it waiting on fucking customer service.

After thirty minutes, Tracey couldn’t wait any longer, I couldn’t blame her, and in fact I was a little relieved. “Alright dude,” she said. “I gotta get something to eat.”

“I’ll catch you later,” I said. She smiled and left.

I lifted the phone and called the operator a few more times, but it wasn’t until 9am that the goddamn tech guy finally showed up. He was a lanky blond kid with a Russian accent. He produced a funny-looking key and popped my locker open.

I bought a new locker, followed procedure scrupulously this time, and was out. Free at last.

First order of business was to find some breakfast. There were a couple commuter cafes inside the station, but I wanted to find a real-ass diner, to see what Chicago’s version was like. A couple stairways and escalators later I was outside the station.

First thing I saw was a couple bridges, there’s a little river right outside the station. I headed for the nearest bridge, then stopped dead in my tracks.

Tracey was walking away from the bridge, thirty feet in front of me.

Her path was perpendicular to mine; she was moving left to right across my field of vision.

Fuck! What were the odds? What was she, waiting out here? I stopped and fumbled with my bag, pretending to be digging for a cigarette until she passed. I don’t think she saw me, or if she did, she didn’t say anything, perhaps waiting for me to call out to her. But my locker fuck-up had fortuitously left me alone, and I decided I wanted to keep it that way.

Yes, she had shared her shawl with me, but the price I paid for that was interminable hours of listening to what it was like for a stripper single mom to raise her son, and her problems with her parents and siblings, and what she was looking for in a man, and what was wrong with her last boyfriend, and on and on.

To be brutally honest, I have a very limited amount of empathy--it’s just the way I’m wired, can’t help it--and I need to save that shit for people I’m really going to invest in.

She walked into a building across from the bridge. I don’t know what it was because I hurriedly walked past it without looking in that direction. I crossed the bridge and went the other way.

I burned this bridge when I came to it.

A block or two later I spotted the Sears Tower. How convenient! A major tourist attraction, just a couple blocks away from the train station. I normally avoid touristy things but I’m a sucker for high views of urban centers. I’d seen a high view of Kuala Lumpur that is permanently burned into my brain, I bet it would show up on an MRI scan.

I checked first with the stomach, who unfortunately refused to approve the Sears Tower plan until it was filled with breakfast.

Ahead of me I spotted a homeless guy lying with his head against a wall and holding a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup.

I dropped some silver in and he thanked me. “Is there a diner around here, boss?” I asked.

He thought about it for a moment, and seemed disappointed with his own answer. “Nope.”

Dammit. “Dunkin’ Donuts?” I asked, pointing to his cup.

“There’s one about three blocks that way,” he said, pointing in the direction I was already traveling. My diner breakfast would have to wait.

“Thanks boss,” I said, and walked off. Thinking about how weird it would be if he actually was my boss.

At the Dunkin’ Donuts I ordered a heart-attack sandwich from the portly South Asian woman behind the counter. Next to me on line was a mid-twenties girl with Middle Eastern features, wearing a blue polo shirt. She seemed local.

“Excuse me--you’re from around here, no?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“I saw an El train outside,” I said, pointing down the block. “How can I get on that thing?”

She laughed a little. “It depends. Where do you want to go?”

“Doesn’t matter, I just want to ride it,” I said, trying not to sound like a dork.

“Let’s see...you’ve got the Orange Line...the Green Line goes to Southside”--she looked me up and down--“you don’t want to go there. You should take the Brown Line.”

“The Brown Line,” I repeated, disappointed to see this city named their subways after colors, like a bunch of savages. “Does it go in a circle?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “The station’s right down the block.”

I ate my heart-attack sandwich at the counter by the window, and on her way out, the girl in the blue polo shirt stopped next to me to do something to her coffee. When she was finished we looked at each other, she pushing the door open, me with my mouth full of eggs, cheese and bacon.

“Have a good time in Chicago, and don’t forget to visit the Sears Tower!” she said, cheerfully.

“Mmrfgh,” I said, hurriedly trying to swallow. “Thanks,” I finally managed, but the door had already closed. She walked across the street, towards the Sears Tower.

New York’s “L” = Lame.
Chicago’s “El” = Elevated.

The El station was pretty cool-looking from underneath. Manhattan used to have these back in the day, before I was born. They cast really great shadows but from what I’ve read they were a nightmare to live next to.

I tried going up one stairway, but there was a Do-Not-Enter-type sign on it. Apparently it’s so narrow it can only be used as an exit stairway. Barbarians.

I found an Up stairway and ascended to platform-level. There was a portly African-American female clerk in a booth. (So far all the counterpeople I’ve seen in this city have been portly non-white females, I wonder if it’s a requirement.) I walked up to the window.

“One, please,” I said, all excited. She gave me a bored look and pointed behind me. I turned around to see a vending machine. “Oh.”

I spent twenty seconds studying the machine, to figure it out. Apparently the fare was $1.75--and it only took cash, no credit cards. Primitives!

Two bucks later it spat a plastic card out. I waited for my change, which didn’t come. After looking around for a ‘CHANGE’ button, I realized--the machines here don’t give change! Fucking Philistines!

Waiting on the elevated platform was cool--and I had plenty of damn time to check it out, since the train didn’t come for like twenty minutes. But yeah, elevated platforms are something else. How different from a New York subway station! You’re all high up, and you can see the sun! The air is fresh! Around you you can see the clean lines of buildings, but not all the street-level garbage and detritus! And there was no urine smell, no rats and not a single stool sample!

Newspaper boxes waiting for the bus.

The train finally came. It was silver, like the four-, five- and six-train. Rather short though, maybe four cars.

Inside was pretty clean, but the seat layout just makes no sense in terms of efficiency. It looks like it was laid out by the train designer’s idiot nephew. Reminds me of the Parisian subways.

If you want to see train interiors that are well-laid-out for carrying massive crowds, look at the layouts of New York, Hong Kong, South Korea or Tokyo’s subway cars. These are among the denser cities in the world and they’ve got it figured out. Not to mention their machines have the decency to make change.

I wanted to drive it but they wouldn’t let me.

Chicago’s buildings look much like New York’s, meaning there’s a good blend of old and new. I liked what I saw because the city looked like it really had some history to it and had been around for a while.

I rode the El around for about an hour, looking at different buildings and pretending I lived there. I tried to imagine what I would see when I opened the front door and put my groceries down. My Chicago wife on the couch, asking me what I wanted to do for dinner tonight.

Tried to check out the library but it was closed. It’s too bad, the building looks like it’s really cool inside.

We open late on Sundays because we’re lazy.

In Chicago they paint taxis according to
whatever Alert Level the country is at. As you
can see we’re currently at Orange, although the
lamppost guys think we’re still on green.

Sears Tower and friends.
(I wasn't introduced to the friends though.)

After an hour wait, I’m on the observation floor of the Sears Tower. I snapped an assload of flicks but realized what an inherently empty experience this was.

Then I witnessed and overheard something that really pissed me off.

In a crowd of people by one of the windows, this loud, southern white woman was asking loud questions about Chicago in general. “I wonder what that funny-looking building over there is,” “I wonder where that road over there goes,” things like that.

A soft-spoken South Asian man who spoke fluent English, albeit with a slight accent, was standing near her. He overheard and began answering her questions, politely I thought. “That’s the [so-and-so] building, that avenue leads to [so-and-so.]”

The southern woman eyeballed him, then began interrogating him about Chicago ruthlessly. He answered all of her questions with familiarity.

“Where you from?” the woman shot, interrupting his last answer.

The man seemed taken aback. “Chicago,” he said.

“No,” said the woman. “Where you fruhm?”

“I’m from Chicago,” said the man, perplexed.

“Now listen, you might live here, butchew ain’t fruhm here,” said the woman. “Now where you fruhm?”

The man was silent for a second, seemingly in shock.

“India,” he said, softly.

It’s too bad you can’t open the windows on the Sears Tower, or I would have swung one wide and given that hick-ass trailer-trash woman the ride of her fucking life. Her velocity would have been appreciable, ending with a spectacular taste of Sudden Deceleration Trauma and a dash of Cement Poisoning. Then I’d high-five the Indian cat and be like “Motherfucker, you from Chicago. Say it! Say that shit.”

So yeah, I got angry on top of the tallest building in America. I guess it’s better than being angry underground.

Maybe Spider-Man could work here.

Back in Union Station, I pulled my bag out of the electronic lockers without event. I was surprised to see a Korean bird pull her bags out of a nearby locker. I think she was one of the few East Asians I’d seen all day.

On the way to my track, I realized the girl who gave me directions in Dunkin’ Donuts had been wearing a blue polo shirt--the same shirt I’d seen the employees wearing in the Sears Tower observation deck. And after bailing out of Dunkin’ Donuts she’d walked towards the Sears Tower. She must work there. Sometimes I can’t connect things in my head until later.

I had a flashback of her saying, in an echoing voice “...don’t forget to visit the Sears Tower!” that dissolved into a shot of the waiting room I was currently in.

Who should I run into in the waiting room but Tracey. She was sitting down in a chair, looking upset. Sad and upset. I told myself it probably had nothing, nothing at all to do with me.

“What did you end up doing?” she asked.

“Walked around, took the El,” I said. “Sears Tower. Nothing special. You?”

“I stayed in the building the whole time,” she said. Hmmm.

They announced my train was boarding, and my line began to move. “Listen Trace, good luck to you, a’right? And good luck with [your son.] Give him the best.” I gave her a hug.

“I will,” she said grimly, into my shoulder.

A second later I was out the door and onto the platform.

There’s something very insulated about airplane travel--the airports are hermetically sealed, and you walk down those clean movable hallways to get onto the plane. But on a train platform--man! You walk between these giant iron beasts with steam coming off them, you smell the diesel burning and hear the engines rumbling. You are in awe of the machinery, there’s nothing to shield you from it.

The line shuffled slowly down the length of track. A few people ahead of me, I spotted the Korean girl from the lockers again, towing her carry-on.

I wondered if I’d meet her, and as I boarded the train, became certain she was some sort of fucking assassin. I just couldn’t see her violin case because the track was so crowded.

You know what, I’m fresh out of captions.
But check out the shine coming off my forehead.

Are you behind on reading?
...‘Cause I’m behind on my payments.
Sigh.

***Please note: All names in the following entry have been changed to protect the innocent.
(And by “the innocent,” I mean...me.)***

(italicized parts are transcribed directly from my notebook)

If you stay up late before a long trip, you can achieve something like teleportation. If you fall asleep on the runway at JFK and wake up 14 hours later on the tarmac at Narita, it’s as if you arrived by magic.

Nothing magic about this train, though. I’m writing this from the “Three Rivers” Amtrak liner from NYC to Chicago. I’m also on no sleep, I couldn’t get any shuteye last night.

I got on the train about five minutes ago. It’s drab and utilitarian, a 1970s version of futuristic. Airplane-style seating and everything is brown or blue.

Peace and quiet, not an option. Directly behind me is a nattering couple. Not a husband and wife, a mother and teenage son. They ain’t speaking English, sounds like Bengali. The mother is meting out one harsh admonishment after another while the boy puts up a whiny, half-hearted resistance. You don’t need to speak the language to understand what’s going on, you can tell by the tones. You could tell even if you were wearing headphones.

Unless you were the fucking headbanger three rows in front of me in seat 54, who is wearing headphones and cranking Shit Rock. So loud it’s annoying me three rows back. If it was good music it’d be okay, but it’s some god-awful crap with a wailing guitar and a whining, high-pitched singer belting out annoying and screechy choruses. I hope that this cat, or his batteries, die at some point during my journey.

Right now I’ve got two seats to myself, but the conductor assures me the train is fully booked and will fill up well before Chicago. Looks like I’ll be sleeping with a “buddy” tonight.

The day started off inauspiciously, with me getting out of the house forty-five minutes later than planned. This was followed by a torturous wait for the D-train, which kept me standing-by longer than AT&T Customer Service. I started to get nervous, thinking I’d miss the train to Chicago and this whole trip would be shot to hell.

Thought about cabbing it to Penn Station, but knew that could take even longer. Plus I thought it would be cool to walk out of my apartment here on the east coast, stroll over to the subway and make it all the way to the west coast on nothing but trains.

Eventually the D came, and at West Fourth I had good mass transit karma and caught the A straightaway. Duke Ellington said You must take the A-train to get up to Sugar Hill in Harlem. But I’m getting off it early and diverting to Seattle.

As the train passed through Jersey I tried writing some in my notebook, but seat 54’s music was driving me nuts.

He seems to have this track on repeat--it’s been ten minutes I’ve been hearing the same goddamn chorus. Holy SHIT I can’t believe how bad this guy’s music is.

Now it’s been twenty minutes.

I want nothing more than to go beat him up. And not just a mere pummeling, I want to go over there and administer a decisive, king-sized, grade-A, weekend-ruining ass-whipping. Oh wait never mind he just turned it off.

The conductor said the train would be full, and she didn’t lie. By Newark an assload of people climbed aboard.

A tank-top-wearing, G.I.-Jane-style mulatto woman--ripped arms, hard body, face a cross between Halle Berry and Jada Pinkett--stopped next to my seat, hoisting an enormous green suitcase. It was apparently very heavy and she was clearly aiming to throw it up on the rack.

“You need a hand with that?” I said, reflexively and uselessly. This woman, though not unattractive, looked like she could bench two plates more than anything I could put up.

“No I don’t need a hand,” she snapped. “I’m a strong bitch.” With that she heaved and practically threw the suitcase onto the rack, which rattled ominously above my head. I heard a voice behind her laughing, at me I guess. She seemed pissed-off about something.

She planted herself heavily in the seat next to me, pulled headphones on over her handkerchief helmet and began blaring hip hop so loud it drowned out anything the headbanger in 54 had going. She sat with her legs wide apart, like a dude--totally intruding on my space--put her hand on her chin and began nodding furiously to the beat.

Looked like it was going to be a long ride to Chicago.

I had no idea that within hours I’d be looking at this woman’s vagina (but not in the way you might think).

I started scribbling in my notebook again. My handwriting is a little peculiar, it looks like this:

I didn’t realize G.I. Jane was reading over my shoulder, until she took her headphones off, pointed at my writing and said “Is that American?”

I was amazed anyone would consider “American” a language, particularly a written one, but Newark is not exactly Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Uh...yeah, it’s American,” I said.

“Doesn’t look like American,” she said. She pulled a massive CD binder out of her bag and began rifling through it. There had to be fifty CDs in there.

“Jeez Louise, you ever think about getting an iPod?” I heard myself say.

“Can’t,” she said. “I’m a stripper, so I gotta carry these around to the clubs. They’re not exactly high-tech. I can’t be plugging an iPod in there. I need my CDs.”

I don’t have much experience with strippers (or with ones wearing their clothes, anyway). But it’s a long ride, and we started talking.

In thirty minutes I had her life story (or so I thought, more on that in a minute). She was a stripper--her stage name, “Lace,” was written on all her CDs in black marker. She was also a single mom. Early twenties. Extremely forthcoming with information. She told me she made six grand last month, all cash.

Said she had just dropped her son off in Jersey, and was on her way back to Vegas to drive her belongings back to Jersey in a U-Haul. Said she didn’t want to do the drive with her baby son. Said she was moving back to Jersey to make a better life for her baby son. I asked her why she didn’t fly and she dodged the question.

Across the aisle from us was a tall Jamaican cat, clearly listening to the conversation. His ears pricked up whenever she started talking about the stripping stuff.

“Lace” would loudly, unabashedly say stuff like “So I made a grand that night, and the DJ wanted $100 in tips. And I was like, fuck you nigga, you ain’t the one sucking dick in the champagne room to get this money! I ain’t giving you no fucking 100 dollars!”

She cursed like a sailor, which stressed me out because there were two kids and their parents sitting in the row directly in front of us. I tried to keep a sober expression on the whole time, like she was discussing stocks or the weather.

The Jamaican dude would periodically interrupt and asked if he could borrow some of her CDs. “Linkin Park, yah gott any Linkin Park,” he said in Patois.

“If yah wan soom reggae me gott some good shit,” he said. “Richie Spice. Ya herda Richie Spice? He rooning* Jamaica now. He Bob Marley numbah two.” I’d never heard of Richie Spice, but I took the CD and ripped it into my laptop while the stripper and I talked.

The funny thing was, the stripper couldn’t understand a lot of what the Jamaican cat said. For my first two years of college I lived with Jamaicans, and my third year I had a roommate from St. Thomas, so I used to be able to understand Patois pretty well. Technically speaking it’s English with innovative slang and inflection.

(*i.e. “rooning” = “running” as in “running a business,” or “in charge of/at the top of.” This concludes today’s Patois lesson.)

This ain’t bragging, but I’m a good listener. I don’t know why. I might not have any damn interest in anything you’re talking about, but I know when to keep my mouth shut, I know when you want to express something and I know how to prompt you to say the things you want to say.

The stripper enjoyed talking about herself immensely, and she seemed to take a liking to me, perhaps because I was really listening to her and was able to throw out some quick jokes to make her laugh when the occasion warranted.

As the train tracks and the boring Pennsylvania towns rolled past, we got into a conversation about traveling. The stripper had seen most of the country, working “the circuit.” I asked her if she’d ever been to Europe and she said no.

“You gotta go,” I said. “It’s amazing. Paris, forget about it.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“Sure you can, anyone can. You should go.”

“I can’t,” she repeated, firmly. “I can’t get a passport.”

“What? Why not?” I said. I’d never heard of such a thing. “You’re an American citizen, right?”

“I got a warrant on me,” she said.

“A what?”

She leaned towards me and lowered her voice. “I was in jail for a month. I was supposed to go back in for another year but I was like, fuck that. So now cops are looking for my ass, and I can’t get papers. That’s why I can’t fly either.”

“Uh...whadidja do?” I asked.

“Some stupid shit,” she said, her eyes narrowing, and I left it at that.

Everyone wants to be good at something, to take pride in something they can do. With the stripper, it was pole tricks. Apparently she had invented some new moves and got to show them off at some type of convention or contest, where she met some prominent porno stars (she practically gushed).

She had photos of the contest with her...and started showing them to me. (The Jamaican craned his head to see, but she boxed him out.) In the first one she was naked and upside down. Nipples, legs splayed, inversion, perversion. I couldn’t understand how she was attached to the pole.

“How the hell are you holding yourself up?” I said, gaping at the photo. Her arms and torso were completely free of the pole, only her legs were touching it.

“I’m squeezing my legs together,” she explained.

I still couldn’t understand it. “You must have really strong leg muscles.”

“Oh, I do,” she insisted. “Look.” She showed me another photo, this one of her from behind, bending over and looking at the camera. You could see every line and striation in what was an extremely toned set of legs. You could also see her completely shorn vagina staring back at you like some kind of mutated Asian cyclops.

I couldn’t believe I was looking at photographs of a fugitive’s vagina. Amtrak didn’t have anything like this in the brochure.

Later the stripper and I were hanging around in the café car as the sun went down. The café car is just a bunch of cramped booths with linoleum tables. We’d walk up there periodically to stretch our legs and buy overpriced and disgusting sandwiches. My turkey-and-cheese smelled like it was prepared in a dumpster.

“You know what’s crazy, I didn’t even get your name,” she said. We’d been talking for nearly seven hours at this point.

“Rain,” I said, and went through the rigmarole of corrections that comes every time someone asks my name.

“My real name’s Tracey,” said the stripper. I felt like a superhero was revealing their identity to me. I made a mental note to avoid watching “America’s Most Wanted” for the rest of my life, because I don’t need these kinds of moral dilemmas.

At certain stations they let you get out to smoke, and this is when all the smokers get to meet each other and bond. Tracey and I met a white guy from the deep south, judging by his accent. Maybe twenty years old, scruffy-looking with tattoos, earrings, and some kind of nouveau mullet. His name was Rich.

“Rick?” I said, mis-hearing.

“Rich,” he said, holding his arm out and pointing to it. His name was tattooed across his arm in big letters.

Late at night we’re in the café car again, this time there’s four of us jammed in a booth. I’m sitting across from Greg, the Jamaican. Next to me is Tracey, who’s playing cards with Rich, across the table.

Everyone except me is drinking vodka, and getting a little boisterous. Rich is dealing cards and raving about how he’s dying to get his hands on some cocaine.

A young Jersey girl, heavily cosmeticized, wanders into the car and everyone notices her. She’s got the unsavory good looks of a sixteen-year-old girl that has made herself up like a sex-starved twenty-four-year-old. If I was her parent I’d never let her out of the house.

“She’s cute,” says Tracey.

“Ahma rap to her in a minute,” says Rich. “Ah’ve had mah eye on hurr.”

Greg is updating my patois. “Ye can call someone fassie,” says Greg (who for some reason has insisted I call him Prince. “My real name is Greg, but call me Prince,” he keeps saying).

“A fassie is someone who is nott a nice person, someone who ain’t treatcha right. Ye can say ‘You a fuckin’ fassie, fuck you nigga’ like that.”

“Fuckin’ fassie,” he repeats. Something about the way he says it is funny and we both start laughing.

Today’s Patois Lesson, Part Two

Wampm, ya kris? - “What’s up man, everything good?”
Yabif wicha sel? - “You beef with yourself” or “Why are you giving yourself trouble?”
Look ‘pon me when me fe chat - Something like “Goddammit, look at me when I’m talking to you.”

Tracey gets pretty noisy after her third vodka. Presently she and Rich, playing Spades, get into a dispute over the rules.

“That’s not how you play it,” says Rich.

“Bullshit, that is how you play it,” insists Tracey.

“Where’d you learn to play?”

“Virginia. Where’d you learn?”

“Jail,” says Rich.

My first day on the train and I’ve met not one, but two ex-cons. And they’re playing cards with each other at a table I’m sitting at.

Travel bonds form quickly, especially when you’re in an atmosphere as intimately conversational as the cramped café car. Everyone got pretty familiar with each other. Strange for me, because I’m not an inherently social animal.

Anyways as the hours wore on and the group got a little drunker, I made the mistake of asking everyone what their final destination was.

“Chicago,” said Rich.

“Whatcha doing up there, visiting relatives?” I asked.

“Naw,” he said. “I’m on the lam.”

I’d never heard anyone say that seriously before, so I figured he was joking.

“There’s a warrant out fer me,” he said, which sounded awfully familiar. I glanced at Tracey, but she kept quiet. “If they catch me, ahm gonna be locked up for a while,” Rich drawled.

“Whadidja do?” I asked.

“What didn’t I do,” he scoffed, nonchalantly taking another swig of vodka.

For the second time that night, I left it at that. Two fugitives playing cards and one of them has got his own name tattooed across his arm. The other one was a stripper and we’d be sleeping next to each other.

Outside the café car the darkened countryside rolled past, and the train continued producing its steady beat: cha-chung, cha-chung, cha-chung.

WOOOOOOOOOOO
F*&%$ing psyched! I can’t wait to get on this thing.

It’s the "Rocky Mountaineer." Hard to believe this train
and the six-train belong to the same family of vehicles.

Today’s soundtrack: just a minute at a time
Today at 12:02pm: trying not to jump up and down like a schoolboy on chocolate milk


I came up a little short but I’m still going! (I’m also still taking donations, in case anyone wants to pitch in last-minute.)

Thanks to everyone who donated! You are the best. If I was in charge of karma all of you would be winning the lottery tomorrow. I don’t have much karmic pull but I psychically sent in applications for all of you, in case you want to buy a lottery ticket.

Mapping out the Canada trip was a logistical nightmare. I think I would’ve had an easier time coordinating U.S. military logistics for Iraq. But then I also would have accrued Evil Karma, which I don’t need. (If I’m going to amass Evil Karma I’d rather it was for something meaningful, like robbing a convenience store, or dashing through the turnstile after someone else swipes their Metrocard.)

So the trip planning is done! The total cost is: $2,909.14

Donors generously gave $1,841.41. Thanks again to each and every one of you! You are now directly responsible for words and images that will appear in this journal shortly. (Which means if I get sued, guess who gets a phone call. Ha ha just kidding.)

PayPal made almost $100 off of the lot of us.

I had to cut some things out of the itinerary, due to my unrealistic planning and finanical reality. On the cutting room floor is: Hang time in Seattle, the Columbia Icefields/Icefields Parkway, hangtime in Calgary, gun battle with mounties, lobby to complete secession of Quebec, running for Mayor of small village in the Yukon.

I will have to save these things for another trip. One-way rental car roadtrips in particular are only economical if you do it with friends to spread the burden, and I’ll only be there with my best friends (in other words, alone).

I’ve also got a wedding to attend in Vancouver.

For the wedding I have this plan. The bride will throw the bouquet, some lucky girl will catch it, and then I’m going to tackle her. I’m going to sack the bouquet catcher and make that football noise (impact combined with explosive grunt). Also, instead of throwing uncooked rice I’ll be throwing fried rice with pineapple bits, screaming “Number 47! Number 47 with fried rice!” the whole time.

Itinerary (the short of it):

Part 1 - NYC to Seattle via train.

Part 2 - Seattle --> Victoria --> Vancouver via ferry.

Part 3 - Vancouver via Nike.

Part 4 - Vancouver to Calgary via “Rocky Mountaineer” train through Canadian Rockies.

Part 5 - Calgary to NYC via aeroplane.

Itinerary (the long of it):

Part 1 - NYC to Seattle by Amtrak.

For some reason, on Amtrak’s map of the United
States a bunch of regions are physically seceding.

This cross-country train takes three days. I’m not sure where, if or when it will stop and if I can get off for little mini-trips, but if I can, I will.

I am planning on bringing some sort of microfilm, with the express hope someone will steal it from me so I can have a fistfight with them on top of the train to retrieve it right before the train goes into a tunnel. If no one steals it from me I’ll have to plant it in their bag, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I couldn’t afford a sleeper for three nights, so I’ll be spending the first night sleeping in my seat. Ideally I’d do this for three nights to save money, but realistically three nights of shitty, upright sleep would fuck my no-longer-young body up. I need to be horizontal when I sleep. (I also need to wear my pajamas with the feet and the bunny ears, but that’s neither here nor there.)

I opted not to linger in Seattle. My rationale was, I could either get a half-dose of two cities--two days in Seattle, two in Vancouver--or I could get a full dose of one, and save the other for another trip, or from when I am on the lam as a fugitive from the law. Seattle seems as good a place as any to hide from the IRS. The copious amounts of available coffee should keep me on my fugitive toes.

Part 2 - Ferry from Seattle to Vancouver. My original plan was to rent a droptop and cruuuuise up the coast, but it won’t fit in the budget. Cross-border drop-off fees are a bitch. So I’m getting the Coastal part in by taking a ferry rather than the bus.

Part 3 - Hanging out in Vancouver. Four days and a wedding, including one cruising day, for which I have rented a car--a convertible! (I found one for only $45.87 US, before you go thinking I’m blowing dough on extravagances). Time to see what this city’s made of.

Part 4 - the “Rocky Mountaineer” train through the Canadian Rockies, from Vanc to Calgary. Easily the most expensive (shockingly expensive) part of the trip, which the bulk of the donations are going towards.

The decision to take this train is what I really struggled with. The train costs a whopping $1,200, in the “Goldleaf” (upper tier) seats. As an alternative there is a “Redleaf” (lower tier) level of service which is nearly half the price--$664.

The “Goldleaf” is a fine-dining, white-tablecloth kind of a thing, which I’d normally pass on, because I'm a coach-class kind of guy. While I can’t sleep on train station floors anymore, I don’t need pampering, fine foods are too fine for me, and I like the types of people you meet in coach better. So I was all set to go “Redleaf.”

What changed my mind was, the “Goldleaf” ticket puts you on the top of a two-storey train car--with a glass ceiling. For photo ops of the mountains this train passes through, this seemed like the way to go. Chances are slim I’ll meet anyone I can actually talk to, but those are the breaks. I’ll keep the photos forever, and I figure it’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing, like dying.

Lastly, a generous donor offered me a $200 Rocky Mountaineer discount, which I’d be a fool not to take. I’m already a fool, but am trying to minimize the ways in which I am. (see chart)

Part 5 - Calgary. I’m curious to see why it’s called the “Stampede City,” though I won’t get to find out. I’m guessing they have periodic riots where they trample people to death in a municipally-sanctioned way. Or maybe they would just trample my feelings:

- “Freak.”

- “Outsider.”

- “Nice pajamas.”

Not that it matters--I’ll have to save it for another time, I ain’t got the time or the bread. So I’ll be in Calgary for less than nine hours, and for most of them I’ll be unconscious, either because I’m sleeping in a motel by the airport or because I’ve been very badly beaten outside of a biker bar. Either way you’ll get updates, even if I have to type them out from inside a body cast.

If I can find ‘net access and the time, I’ll update from the road. If not, see you in two weeks.

Leaving this picture up in case something happens to me.
And if it does...avenge me, like in an old kung-fu flick.

Your Hipstomp is defective.
For repairs, send entire unit to Canada with
warranty info and proof-of-purchase attached.
While supplies last.

Today’s soundtrack:
they got him sitting with his back to the door
now he won’t be my fast gun anymore
Today at 8:52pm: opening my messenger bag for a cop


Since 9/11 I’ve dutifully escaped the city on each major holiday, on the off-chance Al-Qaeda gets their shit together and pulls off another “spectacular.”

This year, for July 4th I was supposed to be straight sitting on my ass outside a friend’s cabin in the wilds of Pennsylvania, but I didn’t make it. Getting backed up on projects and, well, inertia kept me in the city.

I crossed my fingers and even headed down to the Seaport to see the fireworks around 8pm. Type of thing that’d be nice to go to with a chick, but the only girl I wanted to bring was out of town.

I don’t know what I’m doing here. I can’t stand crowds and this is in direct violation of my avoid-terrorist-targets philosophy. The area around the Seaport was packed. They closed the southbound section of FDR Drive for fireworks viewing, and I was treated to the odd site of throngs of people walking up an on-ramp normally occupied by whizzing cars and banged-up taxis.

There were cops everywhere. Tall cops, short cops, fat cops, thin cops. Chick cops and dude cops. Black cops, Asian cops, Latino cops, white cops. You get the idea.

The cops at the bottom of the on-ramp performed perfunctory bag-checks, about as thorough as the bored airline clerk who asks if you’re carrying any explosives. After passing the checkpoint I too headed up the ramp.

FDR Drive was, like a Snickers bar, packed with peanuts. Any pleasure I derived from the novelty of walking on a space normally forbidden to pedestrians was offset by the sheer density of people. Most seemed to have staked out their spots hours ago, some had lawn chairs, beer coolers and defiant expressions that told you they weren’t moving.

I walked what felt like half a mile, through (mostly orderly) mobs before I decided I’d be more comfortable down by the water. Also I wanted to see the fireworks with the Brooklyn Bridge in the foreground, and from up here I couldn’t get the angle.

Twenty minutes later I’d doubled back and was now underneath FDR, in a slightly-less-mobbed area by the water. My timing was perfect; I snagged a spot by a pole (to brace the camera against) just as the fireworks started.

The thing about New York--or any big city, I suppose--is you can be totally alone in the middle of thousands of people, as I was here. I like that. Headphones and the iPod set on “My Top Rated, random” provided the soundtrack to the lightshow:

“Alta Noite” - Marisa Monte
“White Lines” - Grandmaster Flash
“Angel Eyes” - Ella Fitzgerald
“Liberte” - Gipsy Kings
“The Music Sounds Better With You” - Stardust

Multicolored bursts of light, accompanied by somewhat tardy thunderclaps. I tried enjoying the show, but I can’t help thinking about how these thunderclaps are entertainment to us, yet across the globe there are people running from our thunderclaps. There is something...obscene about this.

Took some flicks of the fireworks (which is tricky, so most of them came out crappy). A teenage couple was standing in front of me, and I think the guy thought I was taking pictures of his chick. He shot me the crooked eye and I saw he had four of his boys to the right of him, all tightly-wound bundles of testosterone.

For a second I thought I was going to have the distinct pleasure of fighting my way out of a pack of rabid sixteen-year-old boys, but it didn’t come to pass; he looked me up and down and apparently decided I wasn’t a threat.

After the fireworks was over the crowd dispersed, but I hung around by the water’s edge while everyone shuffled past. Lugging barbecue grills, folding tables and lawn chairs. All seemed in a pretty good mood.

I looked out over the river and had a cigarette. The dark water lit by the bridges looks really pretty, until you look down and see all the garbage floating by. Flotsam and jetsam. Got some and get some.

On the way back to my building I accidentally spoiled a prank.

On Canal Street I passed the local firehouse, Engine Company Number 9. I know the number because a sign announcing it hangs from the front of the building, and every time I pass it I hear “Engine, engine, number nine” in my head.

So as I walk past I see a bunch of firemen hanging out in the open garage bay. Then something catches my eye up high, and I see Spider-Man perched on top of the building. Crouching on the edge of the roof and peering down towards the entrance. Only he’s not dressed like Spider-Man, he’s dressed like a fireman and he’s holding a bucket.

I assumed the bucket was filled with water (or maybe hydrochloric acid, who knows) and that he was waiting to dump it on a buddy. But one of the fireman hanging out in the garage spotted me staring upwards at Spidey, and he said something to his boys, and they all backed away from the entrance.

Here’s to hoping the fireman on the roof doesn’t know it was me who spoiled his prank. With my luck my building will catch fire tonight, and he’ll be the guy who breaks into my bedroom to save me. Then he’ll see my face and be like “Hey, you’re the guy who tipped Frank off that I was about to dump a bucket of hydrochloric acid on him. I ain’t saving you!” and he’ll jizzet.

I guess it couldn’t have been hydrochloric acid, ‘cause then it would have burned through the bucket. Well, maybe it was a special bucket. You never know with these things. Firemen are crazy.

At least NYFD get paid, I think the ones outside the city are truly crazy. I mean you’ve got volunteer firemen--people who will run into a burning building to save people they don’t even know, for free.

I think I’d only run into a burning building to save someone I knew, and knew well. And if you offered to pay my health and dental it might put some spring in my step.

If you ever want me to pull you out of a burning building, you should scream something like “Hey Hipstomp! I ‘friended’ you, jackass!”

Sending me to Canada can reduce tartar buildup by 45%.
I also kill the germs that cause bad breath,
but I do most of that in New York.

Today’s soundtrack:
Bobby’s driving through the city tonight,
through the lights,
in a hot new rental car
Today at 3:02pm: trying to take more shots as the battery craps out


I can tell when I’ve been in the house too long, and today it was such. So after a couple hours of sitting at the kitchen table going through some papers--my latest writing project that will slowly begin to suck as I lose steam--I put shoes on and started looking for my keys.

Walked east through Chinatown and remembered: My idea of fresh air wouldn’t jive with anyone who lives north of Broome. In spots the air down here is so rancid you end up feeling like you just tossed someone’s salad. Most of the time I don’t notice it but today it was like I tossed someone’s Caesar salad.

The walk was nice anyway, because the city was refreshingly dead. The odd tourist here and there--and I should know, ‘cause I gave ‘em directions--but pretty local. Lots of Latino families and Asian kids.

I shot lots of photos and felt pretty good. My serotonin must be re-uptaked or whatever. Or is it the other way around. Anyways I eventually ended up down by the river, like in a blues song. Still felt good though.

The air is much fresher by the water, despite the hundreds of bodies the Mafia must’ve dumped in here from the ‘20s to the ‘80s. I heard there’s some town in...Virginia, is it?...where the beach is eroding, so this company dumped an assload of old New York City subway cars into the water to make an artificial reef. Strange but true, it has to be true because I read it somewhere.

Anyways I was thinking that town should’ve subcontracted the Mafia to make an artificial reef out of guys who are wearing cement shoes for turning state’s evidence. It would be great, you could go scuba diving and find all sorts of neat things. “Look! I found a Rolex with ‘Fat Anthony’ inscribed on it. Let’s put it in the pile with the brass knuckles and that skull with the mysterious holes in it.”

Where was I. Oh yeah, fresh air by the water. So the breeze that comes off the river, old-timers call it the “hawk.” Like they’ll say “Boy that hawk is killing me today” et cetera. Which is also where the title for the (forgettable) Bruce Willis movie Hudson Hawk comes from. This concludes today’s outdated slang lesson.

Speaking of slang, as Yuka spends less time immersed in street culture (like me, she’s only slowly letting go of an extended adolescence), I have to explain current slang to her. Today she asked me why people were referring to things as “gay” when there was nothing homosexual about them.

“‘That’s so gay,’” she said, imitating someone. “‘That movie so gay.’ What does it mean?”

I told her “gay” means “corny.” “Corny” she understands.

“But what if gay person is in the room, you can still say it?” she asked. “‘That movie so gay.’”

I thought about this for a moment. “Better not,” I said. I hope she doesn’t catch on to “retarded.”

“‘This journal so retarded,’” she’ll say. “What does it mean?”

Don’t put me on the spot,
just put me on the map.

Today’s soundtrack: se si bon, se si bon (cherchez)
Today at 2:02am: eating leftover cake


The crowd at the bar was almost exclusively Asian and black. DJ Neil Armstrong’s birthday, from what I understand. When I walked in they were spinning all the right tracks (Zero 7’s “Can’t Turn Me Away” transitioning into Grand Puba’s “I Like It”) but there were about thirteen guys too many. I did a walk-though and opted to wait outside.

I was there to meet my friend Maria, who had something she wanted to give me. I didn’t know what it was so I just crossed my fingers and hoped it was Everlasting Power. (Though I’d probably settle for Power That Lasts For Several Thursdays. Or Power You Can Use On Odd-Numbered Days in July and September. Or a candy bar.)

The first time I went to OpenAir (bar on St. Mark’s) it was practically pitch black inside. The level of light was absurdly low, I mean it was like drinking in a cave. Terrifying to get drunk in a space that dark because you’re like “OH MY GOD THIS FUCKIN’ LIQUOR’S MAKING ME GO BLIND! I CAN’T SEE! MY EYES! MY...oh wait a sec, that’s just the lighting in here.”

The second time I went to OpenAir some guy asked me if I wanted to “blaze,” which I guess is what you crazy kids call it these days when you smoke your hashish. I thought about saying “Why yes, I would very much enjoy it if we could blaze” but instead I said “Nah.”

So now it’s the third time and I’m there to meet Maria, but it’s too thick with dudes, so I wait for her outside.

Two Asian girls are sitting on a stoop. Which would be fine, except I want to sit there too, but I don’t want them thinking I’m hitting on them. So I wait ‘til they leave, then the stoop is mine.

My ass is still assessing the comfort level of said stoop when the pair returns. “You don’t mind if we split it, right?” says one of them. She’s friendly-but-no-nonsense in that native New Yorker way. I scoot down a little and now there’s three Asians on a stoop.

The girl on the end is having a conversation on her cell phone. Suddenly she looks over at me. “Hey, are you Wayne?” she says.

“Rain,” I say.

She turns back to her phone. “Yeah, he’s waiting right here,” she says. As coincidence would have it, these two girls are also waiting for Maria; in fact one of them is on the phone with her.

The girl--Esther is her name--hangs up. “She asked if there was a bald Korean guy waiting out front, so I figured it had to be you,” she says.

The three of us introduce ourselves, and now there’s three Asians that know each other on a stoop. Through the occasionally open door of the bar I hear the strains of Tribe Called Quest.

In a minute Alex walks up.

“What’s up Rain!”

“What’s up Alex!”

I know him from the performing circuit but I haven’t seen the guy in months. He seems in good spirits.

Alex knows me and the two girls I’m sitting next to, so now there’s four of us chatting it up. It strikes me that to a passer-by we’d look like four cats who came to the bar together, but in fact I just came out to receive Everlasting Power and I ran into these three by coincidence.

Maria shows up a few minutes later, I haven’t seen her in months either. She knows all four of us. She hands me a plastic bag, which I thought was odd because I figured Everlasting Power would come in a small gilded ark or at least a paper bag with handles, but then I remembered Maria’s a normal person giving me a normal gift, completely independent of my insane fantasies.

It was a Henry Rollins book! From the Black Coffee Blues series. A travel book! So sweet of her. Maria’s one of those people I owe big time, she’s always hooking me up.

I thought the coincidences were through for the night, but a second later I heard “Hey, Rain!” and I look over to see Lin Yee, whom I haven’t seen in, shit, well over a year. She used to intern at a website I wrote for.

Last time I saw Lin Yee was also in a bar, with her friend Lynn. (Lin Yee and Lynn. Getting confused yet? Well just think if you were Japanese. Then we’d be Rin Yee, Rynn and Rain.) We’d headed over to bOb that night and I cut a rug with Lynn, who is an amazing dancer. So sexy. I remember they were playing reggae and I was dancing with this girl and saying “Damn!” to myself.

So Lin Yee comes over and says hello, and who should be with her but her friend Lynn! I wished I was in a Mentos commercial so I could pop one in my mouth, then drag a reggae selector out of an alleyway and set up a little dance floor there on the sidewalk.

Anyways, twenty minutes later I was walking down Second Avenue by myself. Everyone had opted to go back into the bar, but I didn’t want to drink since I’m working on a writing project tonight. Also Mike left his X-Box and “Midnight Racer” in my apartment, and you shouldn’t drink before you drive.

Maria’s always been a big supporter of my writing, hooking me up with gigs and whatnot, and now she’s gotten me this book. So cool of her. I told myself when I got home I would put the book in a little gilded ark, and after I finish reading it I can use it to destroy my enemies.

Trade you for some Power.