Running Down a Dream

succumbing to hypnotic revulsion

For days on end I vacillate in a rocking chair, debating the best mode of transportation, knowing I will regret it, whatever I decide on.

Shreveport, Fort Smith, McAlester. Taking it slowly, driving across the country: that, of course, would have been ideal. Instead, I am on a train, with the outskirts of Morgan City passing me by rather than myself passing them by, as would have been the case had I stuck to the original plan of driving. But there’s no use getting unspeakably alienated about it. I knew it would be this way.

Jennings—looking good—Beaumont, Houston, San Antonio, Del Rio, Sanderson. The tracks run parallel to a road I would rather be driving on. But if I were driving I would be wishing I were on the train. I’m too sad and stale with undeliverance and repetition for this sort of thing. The only way to keep my spirits up is to not think about certain things, which results in an unhealthy mutedness.

A slim volume titled ‘How To Win At The Races’ by Winston Cobb, explains, much to my eternal detriment, the rudiments of handicapping thoroughbred horse races. The book explains many things, such as how to translate the hieroglyphics in the Racing Form. It makes it look easy, too easy.

I am seated in front of a door. Every time it squeaks open a bland contemporary specimen of the genus Homo walks through it. Across the aisle sits a generously proportioned blonde, rocking her baby back and forth, nothing else. Nothing else is necessary.

Falling asleep is difficult, and when it comes the sleep itself is strenuous. I wake up screaming from a dream of being clubbed over the head with a shoe, which must have woken up every other slumbering passenger in the coach.

Alpine, El Paso, Deming, Lordsburg. One likes to think of a train shooting along the tracks. But not this one, not on these tracks. It rolls along sluggishly, making many unscheduled, stationless stops.

I finally summon the courage to politely ask the fat man to kindly lower the volume on his radio, and he politely acquiesces, turning it down to a slightly less offensive level. Eventually he turns it off entirely and starts snoring loudly.

In order to avoid further radio racket I move to the back of the coach, but it’s noisy back there too. Myself and a young German are the only silent parties amid a clutter of conversation. People are getting to know each other. One woman brags to another that her son, aged thirty-six, has already retired.

The sights roll by.

Across the aisle a 400lb hairball of a man thrusts his finger into his nose, then puts the finger into his mouth, then repeats the process. I don’t have to look, but I can’t help myself from succumbing to hypnotic revulsion. Then he begins snorting, and I attempt to drown it out by stuffing moist wads of tissue into my ears.

I move to a different carriage. A stout middle-aged woman in denim shorts takes the seat opposite mine and starts stroking her legs. Then she just sits there, not reading, not looking, not even stroking her legs. She has that pinched look but it softens, as thoughts—perhaps of her awaiting family—flit pleasantly across her mind. Another woman, of similar appearance and countenance, squeezes into the aisle seat next to me. It isn’t long before it’s show-and-tell time: the family photographs emerge from the bag and she begins to exhibit them to her new friend, accompanied by a loud and proud commentary; she is delighted to be able to furnish proof of having something in her life.

Thankfully, but somehow disconcertingly, I am excluded from the exchange, despite my proximity. Perhaps, sensing that I am not one of their kind, they prefer to pretend that I don’t exist.

I want to take my fellowship elsewhere but, absurdly, despite my invisibility, I’m reluctant to do so, out of concern that they might perceive my egress as a reaction to their presence, when, more likely, they’d be relieved; it would certainly give the woman next to me more room to spread out her considerable bulk.

At the next station I get up and change seats. The train is overcrowded, and the only open seat is across the aisle from another fat family: a mother and her two teenage sons, each of whom is shoveling brightly colored cheesy snacks into their mouths, licking their fingers and smacking their lips; befouling the air, while watching things explode in their private worlds on miniature video games: the banal soundtrack to a noisome age.

It’s hopeless. I’m surrounded. I should have stayed where I was.

Can’t people just be quiet?

They can’t.

I retreat to the rest room, the only place where it’s possible to get a little peace and quiet, and indulge in a remedial spot of masturbation. But while I’m at it, sitting on the toilet in claustrophobic confines, the door flies open and a black lady appears in her Sunday best. “I’m sorry,” she cries out in shock, quickly shutting the door. “I’m so sorry!”

The train pulls into Flagstaff at dawn. Breakfast in a torn booth at the Grand Canyon Café, served by an antique waitress, freight cars idling on the tracks outside.

The neon sign outside the Weatherford Hotel has the El burned out on one side and the Hot burned out on the other side.

I sleep through the day.

A comely young blonde looks me over in a coffeehouse when I emerge in the late afternoon. At dusk I walk up Route 66, parallel with the freight yards and scrap heaps, to the Museum Club, an old Western dancehall still in operation. Jackson Russell and his band take the stage and launch into a selection of time-honored standards, including Charlie Walker’s ‘Pick Me Up On Your Way Down.”

I walk back down the highway. The Academy Awards are screening on TV in the Montevista lounge, drowned out by a dreadful bar band. Refreshingly, nobody present seems to care about the Academy Awards.

A solo bar crawl around town, always entering bars, as if something might be found there, as if something might happen in a bar. It almost never does. I will never get a single moment of enlightenment in these places.

No telephone, no bedside light and no heating. Television noise blasts through the thin wall.

In a cafe the following morning, suffering from insufficient sleep, I notice a review of the new Martin Amis novel on the front page of the London Sunday Times book review section, and ask the woman who’s reading a different section of the newspaper if I can borrow it. She looks up at me with instant distaste and responds firmly in the negative. “I haven’t looked at it yet,” she says sniffily. As I’m leaving I notice her turn to her male companion and utter a disapproving remark. “What?” I break in, rudely. “I was talking to him,” she says. And that is about the most human contact I have experienced in a week. The woman was English, naturally.

I rent a car, and drive off. Earth-toned buildings lead into earth-toned landscape. Sedona is all sand-colored mountains and New Age shopping emporiums. It has changed a lot since Max Ernst’s day.

Underwhelmed, I wander around Jerome, as do hundreds of others, all equipped with cameras, and this a Tuesday in March. No bygone whiff of anything at all; every other building appears to be in the process of being restored. While meandering one of the less traveled streets the pretty blonde I’d seen in Flagstaff the previous afternoon walks by, and offers a slight smile. As she walks off she falters, as if considering turning around. She’s on her own, for mercy’s sakes: a beautiful woman in a strange town, and I lack the courage to approach her. A shameful failure of nerve, proving once again that I lack the courage to live my dreams. How unforgivably feeble of me when I had nothing to lose, when I never had anything to lose.

The next time I see her she’s driving out of town in a vintage white car with California plates.

I’ll never see her again.

Painful, utterly shameful.

The old time saloons of ‘Whiskey Row’ surround the square in Prescott. I have a couple of beers and return to my room at the St Michael Hotel, turn on the TV and bask in the nausea. On one channel ‘La Traviata’ is screening, on another the obnoxiously full-of-himself Quentin Tarantino is being interviewed.

Tourists get out of their cars at designated spots in Monument Valley, take photographs, get back into their cars and repeat the process, exactly as they are instructed to do. Walking off the trails is prohibited, but I wander off into the shadows of a dry and dusty creek bed. I resolve to spend four hours there, considering all the trouble I’ve taken to get there. I last forty-five minutes, and even that is a strain. I ask myself if I am capable of doing the work I have always believed it is my duty to do, and answer myself with a resounding negative.