In which Larry discover why he shouldn't take any more overnight train journeys...
On the Train Emveryville Station 1998 Jul 29 Wednesday
The lights came back on. The train started moving through the night, only one and a half hours late. I looked out at pools of light cast by streetlamps. I looked at scraggly fields, the undersides of overpasses. I heard my neighbors across the hall talking to their travelling companions.
The old man who had removed his shoes had returned from an errand down the hall. Someone asked him: "Did you take that shower already?" He answered, "Yes, yes." Eventually, the travelling companions left, leaving just my neighbors, an (of course) older white couple. The wife asked the husband: "So how did the shower go?" The husband replied that he didn't know, he hadn't taken a shower.
I decided I was ready for a shower. I snatched up a bar of complimentary soap, got together a fresh shirt and undies and wandered downstairs. The uniformed lady (or, more properly, the cabin attendant) was there. "Uhm, is there a shower somewhere on this train?" I asked. She pointed with her chin. I was standing next to a door labelled SHOWER. Oh, ah. "Great," I said, "I thought I was going to have to stay all stinky." "Nope," she replied. I stepped through the door, locked it, stripped in the little changing area, stepped into the shower area, snapped the shower curtain to the walls to keep water from escaping, showered, emerged into the changing area, and discovered I'd forgotten to bring a towel.
What to do? It was late, probably there was nobody walking around outside--maybe I could just run for it. My room was pretty close to the shower. But what if the uniformed lady was still right outside? Did I want to get tossed off of a train for streaking? I squeegied water off of myself with my hands as best I could. The air was pretty dry, I discovered. I spun a bit. I distastefully dabbed myself dry with my dirty t-shirt. I was dry! I got dressed and escaped back to my room.
There were a few toilets in the downstairs of the car, but only one upstairs (where most of the passenger rooms were). At first I thought this toilet was some strange example of train technology, but I eventually figured out that it was broken. The first time I used it, it started howling like a banshee after I'd been sitting on it for a minute. It wasn't a good time for me to jump away. So I sat, covering my ears (yes, ears), thinking, It's probably nothing, probably nothing. And I suffered no harm. Later, I would return to this toilet, see papers covered with menstrual blood within, unflushed, unflushable. "Soon, we will have no secrets from one another," I thought. Later on, I found the other toilets downstairs. I used them from then on.
I looked from the window of my little room. The train rattled past the backs of factories, lit by little lights. We went past highway construction. We went past mysterious lit metal piers on a river. I crept under the covers.
1998 Jul 30 Thursday
At 6:00 AM, I wrote:
Dirt is red, trees are plentiful, and I did not sleep very well.
I had discovered that sleeping on a rattling train is about as easy as sleeping on a sailboat anchored in an exposed harbor. I hand't exactly slept per se, instead spending my night trying desperately to hang on to something that would keep me from rocking back and forth.
Outside my window, I saw a few power lines, drainage ditches, utility sheds. Mostly I saw natural splendor. Beautiful rivers, bright green forest. Each tunnel robbed me of my view. Still, after a while, the view became annoying. If I'd been in a car, I could have said, "Hey, let's pull over for a second and look at this. What's that mountain in the distance there?" The train trundled on, spending too much time in the boring parts, not enough in places where something interesting came into view.
By reading the train literature, I'd figured out that I was in first class. If you had a room to sleep in, you were first class. The back of the train is, apparently, full of seats, full of people who'd spent the last night sitting up. Maybe I could have traded with one of them; I didn't really get to sleep anyhow. What I didn't understand at the time was that first class has its own lounge. And so I, in my quest for breakfast, walked into a lounge car with a buffet and a whole lot of older, comfortable-looking, unrelentingly white people. If I'd known that there was another, scummier lounge further back in the train I might have kept moving, found a place that didn't set me on edge.
Instead, I grabbed a couple of danishes and some pineapple, set out a coffee cup in hopes that someone would fill it, sat down in a lounge chair and stared determinedly out the window. I stared at my coffee cup. When I'd first entered the car, an attendant had been circulating, filling up people's cups. Where had he gone? I didn't want to sit here. If someone would just bring me some coffee, I could drink it and go. I didn't want to leave without getting some coffee. At the time it seemed of paramount importance.
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