The Coast Starlight: A Review

Servicing stops from Los Angeles to Seattle, AMTRAK calls the Coast Starlight the “most scenic of all train routes.” I took the touted eleven-hour ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco. I had the book Lucky Jim with me and was looking forward to a peaceful day of reading and scenery. I hoped the eighty-five dollar one-way ticket (almost twice as expensive as it is to fly) would be enough to herd the noisemakers, lunatics, cell phone enthusiasts, morons, and general riffraff in the direction of Frontier Airlines where they belong. This is what I had hoped.

*

The dumbest man on the train was named Wayland. He was sitting across the aisle and one row in front of me. When I found my seat he was talking and for the duration of the trip, he never once considered stopping. Somewhere along the way in his life Wayland got the idea that the game everyone was secretly playing was to try and turn basic friendly small talk into rambling, divisive, political speech making, as quickly as possible. The person with the fewest number of words in between saying “It’s nice to meet you” and saying “Mexicans are ruining the country,” wins the game.
His relentless, unhurried, bellow, of a voice stood out as potential trouble the moment I stepped on the train. The first thing I heard him say as I stuffed my bag into the overhead compartment was, “In the old Gas Lamp District in 1977, I smoked a joint right in front of a cop. People didn't care back then. But this country isn’t what it used to be…” A second voice responded to this with a surprising degree of impatience considering we were just boarding and both speakers couldn’t have been subjected to one another for more than three minutes. “Oh, for god’s sake, don’t start with that shit already!” The voice said. This voice belonged to Tim, who, 180 seconds into their relationship, had already had enough of Wayland.
Tim was the second dumbest man on the train and sitting directly in front of me. He was in his mid-fifties and wore a messy kind of handle bar moustache. His right arm was in a sling thanks to a broken color bone. You didn’t have to listen to Tim talk for long to know that this collar bone injury wasn’t the result of some hard luck, million to one shot, fluky accident that could have happened to anybody. No, Tim was the sort of dimwit who the local emergency room workers know by name. Close your eyes and you can picture Tim climbing up onto some unstable looking thing to try to fix something he has no clue how to fix before belting out a few bars of the “whoa… whoa… whoa” song that idiots so often find themselves singing. The next day he’s giggling with his buddies over how many Percocets his doctor gave him.
“No religion or politics on the train!” Tim invoked the old barroom rule. “Everyone just wants to have a nice, relaxing trip!” Wayland talked about nothing but religion or politics for the next 300 miles.

*

I knew Scott in the café car and I were going to have problems after his very first announcement. He came over the loudspeaker and told us he “wasn’t open yet.” In a tone superior and hostile, and a voice weasely and small, Scott lectured us, “I REPEAT THE CAFÉ CAR IS NOT OPEN YET. I WILL MAKE AN ANNOUNCEMENT WHEN I’M READY. PLEASE DO NOT COME TO THE CAFÉ CAR UNTIL I MAKE MY ANNOUNCEMENT.” This beleaguered plea went on and on like this while the train was still just rolling out of Union Station. No one had even seen this guy yet and he was coming on as though we’d been chasing him down for pretzels since the day he was born. To be sure, he thought of his no nonsense manner as a kind of anticipatory self-defense. We may not have bothered him yet, but he knows what life down in the café car is like. If he wasn’t firm with us at the start, we’d be down there non-stop, asking if he’s open when he’s closed. “I’m not open.” He’d have to keep saying. Scott in the café car wasn’t about to watch this happen. He ended the announcement with a series of threats about inebriation and irresponsible drinking. Drunk passengers would be thrown off the train, he warned. He closed with a flight attendant caliber joke: “Just remember that Bud, does not make you wiser.” Yes, it would be fair to say that I had plans for Scott in the café car.

*

Wayland the talker was a peculiar sort of imbecile. At a glance he seemed your typical west coast, burn out, hippie used-to-be. His politics, though, were a blend of right-wing quasi-self-determinism and conspiracy theory hokum. At the Oxnard station, a few stops before Santa Barbra, an excited young couple boarded on their way to wine country. They sat next to Wayland. “How are you folks doing today?” Wayland asked.
“Great!” The woman smiled. “We’re heading up to the vineyards for the first time!” Wayland wasted no time.
“Wine is a terrible thing to put into your body.” He said. “I only shop at Whole Foods. The thing the wine producers don’t want you to know is that grapes are basically a worthless crop. They invented wine so that they could make a profit out of what is essentially a weed. There are some things I’ll buy at Trader Joe’s, but not very many. This country isn’t what it used to be.” Wayland worked tirelessly to ruin these people’s afternoon for the next hour. His lecture was disrupted every three minutes or so by Tim shouting, “Wayland shut the fuck up! No one wants to hear this shit! We all just want to relax!” The young couple couldn’t believe what was happening to their nice afternoon. Somehow Wayland managed to turn his wine conspiracy talk into a Jimmy Carter’s failure to stand up to the Shah of Iran in the 70’s plays a major role in why this country isn’t what it used to be talk. Scott in the café car came over the intercom to tell us that the dinning car would be opening shortly. While the dinning car was open, the café car would be closed. If anyone so much as thought about going into the café car while the dinning car was open Scott would personally throw them off the train at the next stop. Wayland shouted his simpleton politics over Scott’s announcement. With the fist attached to his unbroken collarbone, Tim started pounding his own leg screaming “SHUT UP WAYLAND! SHUT UP WAYLAND! SHUT UP WAYLAND!” The couple grabbed their bags and rushed over to a conductor to have their seats moved. I hadn’t read a single word of Lucky Jim.


*

The dining car was an easy to predict nightmare. It was “communal dining” which left me part of an ugly foursome. Two of the three were no immediate threat. The decrepit looking old Asian woman across from me only had a soon to be dead tonal language and some grunting and pointing in her communication arsenal. The Hispanic man to my right seemed to have a bit of “kitchen English” in his quiver, but mostly just shot confused glances. These two weren’t going to be the problem. If anyone was going to try to talk to me it was Omar; the fourth dumbest man on the train. This swarthy thirty-something I definitely needed to keep my eye off. One false glance and I would extend the internationally and cross-culturally accepted invitation for harassment we call eye contact. I kept my gaze fixed on my plate, reciting my old mantra “He’ll want to talk… He’ll want to talk” to myself. My burger was eaten into its crescent phase. A few more bites and I could get out of there and back to Wayland and Tim, the poison I knew. But Omar sensed I was plotting an escape. He saw it was time to bring out his queen. “It’s a lot bumpier in this car than where my seat is.” He said. I kept staring down at my waning burger, my heart pounding. Omar waited, and then pressed on. He wanted to get to the bottom of this bumpiness business. “Did you guys think it was is as bumpy in the passenger cars as it is in this car?”
“It’s equally bump in all the cars.” I educated. “It’s just that you’re trying to eat and there are glasses of water in front of you, so you’re noticing it more.” Omar thought about this before nodding slowly and looking back down at his plate like the sad, beaten, imbecile that he was.

*

The observation car is where the Coast Starlight makes its money. I was sitting with Lucky Jim closed on my lap looking out the floor to ceiling windows. I watched the scenery change from the picturesque pacific coastline to dusty John Steinbeck country. Every passing shed or broken down barn looked more like what the Palace Flophouse probably looked like. A little old lady carefully made here way into the observation car. Her little old husband was right behind her. He probably had been since a time when Cannery Row was just a row of canneries. They were struggling to walk down the aisle due to the bumpiness Omar somehow believed might be limited to the dining car. When the old lady realized the café car was still a car away, and down a flight of stairs, she looked at her husband in disappointment. “Oh no.” She said, loud enough to be heard by everyone. “I can’t make it that far. Lets go back dear, I don’t need a Coke that badly.” I handled this situation in my usual way. I waited for as long as possible to see if someone else would volunteer to do the nice thing first. No one did.
“Ms. I can go down there get you a Coke, if you want.” I said, hitting the “if you want” perfectly to imply that it would be an enormous undertaking, inconvenience, and a bit rude on her part to even consider allowing me to go all the way down there to get her a Coke. Unfortunately her face lit up at my offer. She said that would be wonderful and that I was a very sweet young man. I said, “fuck me” out loud as I got up and went to get her a Coke.

*

Scott in the café car was exactly how you imagined him. A short, balding, no-good rodent. When I got down the stairs he had a conductor cornered and was bragging about having “cut off” an old man because he had drunk two double scotches in an hour. That made four drinks in an hour. Passengers were only aloud TWO DRINKS per hour, Scott reminded the conductor. A DOUBLE scotch is TWO DRINKS, not ONE DRINK! Scott looked like he wanted to high five the conductor over this near non-occurrence. The conductor seemed as uninterested in this story as any one familiar with the potential of stories would be. I stepped up to the counter and ordered a Coke and a bottle of Bud. Scott asked for my ID. He looked at it and shouted “New Jersey!” but he pronounced it New Joy-zee!

(A digression: I grew up in New Jersey. I spend a fair amount of energy in my life trying to stay away from the place. I find it a preposterous state, full of mostly preposterous people. That said, I will defend it to the death on one important front; I have never, and, thanks to an informal experiment I have been conducting for almost twenty years, I can say safely say that NO ONE has ever, heard a person pronounce the name New Jersey – New Joy-zee. No one. Anywhere. Ever. I have challenged countless people who have made this so-called joke to present me with a person from New Jersey who calls it New Joy-zee. No one has been able to produce such a person. People from New Jersey do call their numerous malls, mawls. Baseball? Basebawl. They drink Caufee. If your name is Paul, goodluck not being called Pawl. When I lived in Boston they would visit me in a placed called Bauston. You see the trends. Linguistically “New Joy-zee” isn’t even consistent with the actual regional accent there. It’s a false memory infecting the collective unconscious. You, dear reader, probably believe you have heard someone say New Joy-zee. You haven’t.)

“Where’s the birthday on here?” Scott squinted at my license trying to find the date. I didn’t answer him. It took him thirty seconds longer to track it down than I would have imagined possible. Scott was the third dumbest man on the train.
“Ah, there it is!” he said. “1975. That’s the year I was supposed to graduate high school!” He laughed out loud at this bit of nothingness. I glared through him. He stopped laughing and stared back nervously. “$11.50.” he said. I handed him a ten and a five. I stared him down like I was about to dive over the counter and snap his neck as he put my change in front of me. I didn’t touch it. I slowly turned away in lopsided victory. I heard Scott exhale as I walked toward the stairs to bring the old lady her coke.

*

Back at my seat, Wayland had begun a campaign of farting. Tim was losing his mind. “Wayland you stupid asshole! Quit fucking farting! I’m trying to relax!”
“It’s not me.” Wayland lied.
Then this exchange (I swear on my life) took place.

Tim: If you have to shit, just go shit!
Wayland: I don’t have to shit! I’m not farting!
Tim: You’re lying! Just shit if you have to shit!
Wayland: (A long pause) Fine! I’ll go shit. But I’m not farting!”

There was simply no way I was going to make any progress with Lucky Jim sitting in this asylum. I got my bag and moved permanently into the observation car.

*

A silver haired man named William sat next to me and made a conspicuous show of looking at what I was reading. He waited a few minutes before saying, “I met him, you know?”
“You met who?” I sighed
“Kingsley Amis.” He said.
I shook my head. Another fucking mental case.
“You should read Everyday Drinking.” He said with a slight but noticeable drunken slur.
“I have read it.” I shot back firmly, letting him know I wouldn’t be pushed around. William told me he studied at Oxford in the 1950’s and had met Kingly Amis multiple times. For some reason I believed him. We talked for half an hour about books. He turned out to be a retired English professor from UCLA. Quickly it became clear; William was the second smartest man on the train.
But, just when I was starting to enjoy his conversation and even company, William laid down the rub.
“Would you mind going down to the café car to get me a drink, much? I’ve been having problems with my knees and struggle down those stairs.” He said. I was about treat him to a vicious stare-down when he told me his drink. When he told me his drink, I smiled.

*
“Two double scotches.” I said devilishly.
Scott in the café car thought carefully about the order.
“You know you can only drink two drinks per hour?” he said.
“One is for a friend of mine.” I said sharply.
Scott paused. He suspected something was up. He wanted to say something. I tightened my eyes. The pasting I had subjected him to earlier was still fresh in his mind. He hurried about pouring the two drinks after calling me “sir.”
“My friend and I really appreciate it.” I taunted him.
He knew what was happening.
“You’re welcome.” Was all he could muster.
I laughed in his face and left with drinks.

*
I tapped my plastic cup full of whiskey against William’s. We toasted California, books, Kingsley Amis, and the piece of shit Scott down below. I watched California roll by and thanks to Steinbeck, whiskey, and Wayland, I couldn’t help but think about what America used to be.

A Philadelphia Story

There was a good-looking one, an OK one, and a big one. This, for reasons presumably known best to them, is a pattern in which women tend to cluster. The showroom was emptying out into the bar area where I was sitting with a drink in front of me. My suitcase was at my feet. The Good-looking One spotted me and walked over with drunken, and some natural, self-assurance. The OK One and the Big One followed her, less steady in their eyes.
“You were really funny!” The Good-looking One said, before adding slyly. “We liked you better than the headliner.”
It’s a boorish compliment that has often lured me down a path of professional solidarity, debate, and eventually to, where with me all roads run, speech making. These undertakings, however noble, all move counter to underlying purpose of post-show chats with comedy groupies. It took me a long time to learn how to respond to “you were funnier than the headliner” correctly. “Well,” I told her, affecting some slyness of my own, “He’s terrible!”
They all laughed too loud. The way people laugh when they’re only in on the less important half of a joke. The Good-looking One touched my shoulder. I still had the second show to do, but I asked if I could buy them all a drink. Not just the Good-looking One. All three of them! The club was paying my bar tab. I held all the cards.

I pulled my wheeled suitcase through “the nuts,” the bar and shop based area of Downtown Philadelphia formed by Chestnut and Walnut Street. The bar I was looking for was the alarmingly named Martini Lounge. Unlike lounges, martinis aren’t inherently worrisome. But pink and green martinis, the kind slung at a breakneck in “martini lounges,” are. A fact self-evident enough not to require many supporting examples, but; “How do you take your martini Mr. Bond?”
“Blue, please.”
It changes everything.

It was my last night after a week of shows in the city of brotherly love and in order to save money on an extra night in a hotel I decided to take the train back to New York right after the final show. Over our free drinks the Good-looking One explained to me, in a run on sentence full of important information, that this attempt at thrift was in fact, “So fucking stupid because Saturday is the best night to go out in Philly and you could just meet us after your second show and you don’t need a hotel room because tonight you can just stay at our place!” Good points all.

There was a long but moving line to get into the predictably hellish Martini Lounge. It was a three level monstrosity of a dance club. Once inside I searched the club from one floor to the next. Demons armed with colorful drinks everywhere. Each floor was hotter, louder, and more horrible than the last. It was Dante’s nightmare inverted. The Philadelphians had been looking forward to it all week.

On the top floor I finally spotted the Good-looking One and things immediately started looking up. She was locked arm in arm with a Hispanic woman and repeatedly punching her in the face. For me, this brought palpable upside. The OK One and the Big One were trying restrain The Good-looking One but the Hispanic One had a fistful of her blonde hair and wouldn’t let go. A mob of cat-fight enthusiasts circled them, cheering in delight. It was hard to say whom they were rooting for. Black tee shirt clad bouncers made it through the crowd and set about restoring order, or whatever had been going on previously. Since this ‘repeatedly punching a Hispanic woman in the face’ business foretold an early exit from a place I was already itching to leave, I still considered myself to be coming out ahead. But the earlier feeling of holding all the cards was in the early stages of slipping away. Sensing a string of cold cards coming, I wheeled my suitcase to the bar and ordered a shot of brown bourbon to drink down quickly before my new friends and I were thrown out.

“Why the fuck did you guys try to stop me? I swear to fucking god I’m really pissed! She fucking deserved to get her fucking ass beat! She has no fucking respect!” This was the nature of the conversation as we tried to hail a cab outside the club. The Big One and the OK One reluctantly conceded that they had mishandled the situation and apologized to the Good-looking One. When the Good-looking One accused them of not respecting her and “always doing shit like this”, they tried to explain themselves but the Good-looking One was above being questioned. They apologized again. Watching these three “friends” operate is the closest I’ll come to knowing what it’s like in North Korea.

I sat in the front of the cab next to its Turkish driver. He had middle-eastern music playing on the radio and was immediately told to “turn that shit off” by “the Dear Leader.” The windows were all open, thankfully, making the racist things she was saying about the driver close to inaudible. Save for the four or five occasions that she screamed, “I’M SO FUCKING WASTED!” out the window, the driver and I couldn’t hear much of what she said. Which brings us to us to an important side note:

When the driver asked where we wanted to go the Good-Looking One said, what sounded like Lanser Street. I was sitting right next to him and I thought she said Lanser Street too. It turned out that she had said, or meant to say, Lake Street.

“Where the fuck are you going asshole!?”
“Excuse me?” The driver said.
“This isn’t the way to Lake Street!”
“Lake Street? I thought you said Lanser Street.”
“Well I didn’t! And we’re not paying for this shit!”
“Yeah.” Either the Big One or the OK One offered in timid support. In the middle of his three-point turn I leaned toward him and whispered an apology. The leathery-old veteran of dealings with drunken apes smiled and told me not to worry about it.

A few seconds after righting our course, the good-looking one started shouting that she wanted snacks. In a moment I recognized as pure ceremony, she asked us if we too wanted snacks. I said no. The OK one said she didn’t care. The big one didn’t have to say anything.

Outside a 7-11 the good-looking leaned into the cabbie’s window and said, “Just wait here, we’ll be right out! I swear to god you better not leave! And we’re not paying for that wrong turn you took. You better not fucking leave!” And she staggered off in the direction of the snacks. I said goodnight to the driver. He wished me luck and drove off.

Inside the 7-11 we were the only white people. The good-looking one immediately muttered “nice outfit” to a video-vixen looking black woman who walked by. The vixen didn’t seem to hear. Neither did the four power forward sized men she was with. It would be an enterprise in itself to begin to try to imagine all the things that could possibly go wrong for me in this convenience store.

In front of a rack of chips, the Big One found her voice. She snatched at bags, muttering “we’ll take one of these. And one of these…” out loud as she stuck them under her arms. The Good-looking One was surprisingly deferential, letting the Big One do her work. It was an area where she must have long ago earned trust.

There was a 16 or 17 year-old black girl standing in front of us in line waiting to pay for a rainbow colored Slurpy. The pageant of colorful frozen sugar-water caught the eye of the Good-looking One who grabbed it while the black girl wasn’t looking and said “Hey, Look at this!” When the black girl realized her Slurpy had been taken she, rather innocently, said, “Hey, that’s mine.” The Good-looking One barked, “Fucking relax! I’m just looking at it!” And she slammed it onto the counter in front of the girl. She looked at me with that same sly smile she had employed earlier when talking about the headliner. It was coming like a heart attack. “That’s how you have to talk to these people.” She said.

“Will you be quiet? Seriously?” This limp injunction was the best I could muster. It was a far cry from how I wanted to deal with her; by caving the side of her head in with my fist. Then this white trash, drunken, foul-mouthed, racist idiot looked at me and slid her hand inside my arm and gave my bicep an engaging squeeze. She slid her hand down my arm and finally slipped it into my back pocket. Now to be fair, she hadn’t really done anything that bad. She was alright. Did I mention good-looking?

Back at the apartment the Big One was in her glory rationing chips and candy into small bowls and strategically positioning the bowls around the living room. Once the bowls were arranged to her satisfaction, we snacked.

The Good-looking One and I were sitting next to each other, arm in arm, on the couch. The OK One told a lunatic story about a kind of coffee beans she doesn’t like. As the OK One talked and the Big One made minced-meat out of bowl after bowl the Good-looking One furtively slipped her phone from her purse and read a text message. She got up suddenly, told me she would be right back, and left the apartment. The coffee bean madness continued. The Big One was enraptured with chips. A few minutes later the Good-looking One came back and nervously waved the Big One over for a conference. The OK One realized something was going on and stopped her pea-brained jabbering. I’ll never know how things ended with the coffee beans. The good-looking one hurried back out of the apartment. The Big One walked toward me with news. She told me, as though I didn’t already know, that the Good-looking One’s boyfriend was outside.

His enormous biceps, along with the tank top and the track pants he was wearing, suggested Tommy had come straight from the gym. The fact that he was coked out of his mind suggested he hadn’t. He pointed at me and asked who the fuck I was. He was already in a rage and not terribly interested in the answer to his own question. At this point I had had just about enough of this evening and these people and, leaping before I looked, I told Tommy to “calm down.” He charged for me. The OK One screamed. The Good-looking One lived for this kind of thing. The Big One bravely tried to stop him, but proved, a bit tragically, not big enough. I glanced around, making a Jason Bourne styled assessment of my surroundings. Maybe I could blind him with the tin of potpourri on the end table? Too late. I was tackled. How does Jason Bourne think so fast? Slamming down to the floor immediately aggravated an old ‘sleeping funny’ injury and my back muscles locked tight. I tried to wriggle out from under this gorilla but it was like having a safe on your chest. Muscle weighs more than IQ. Tommy was about to unleash his fists when three neighbors burst into the apartment. It seemed they had dealt with Tommy before. They pulled him off of me and tried to unreason with him. When I got to my feet the big one was holding my suitcase, “Let’s go!” She ordered, and we ran out of the apartment into the Philadelphia night.

When we got back to her apartment she pulled a frozen pizza out of the freezer and put it in the oven just as mechanically as she had flipped on the lights, hung up her jacket, and blinked her eyes. She was on autopilot. Two beers were popped open and placed on the counter. She apologized for the Good-looking One’s behavior (more force of habit). She was usually a really cool person. I told her I believed her. We drank, ate pizza and joked until 4am. She brought sheets and a pillow out for me and made up the couch. I thanked her for letting me stay and she bid me a good night before going to her bedroom. She shut off the lights, more ceremony, and exactly 13 seconds later, I counted, the lights popped back on. She stuck her head out of the bedroom, “You know, if you’re not going to be comfortable on the couch, you don’t have to sleep out there.” She said. My back, it’s important to remember, really was bothering me.