I’m going to try something a little different with the next two or three chapters and thread several related strands together to tell a story that unfolds over several years and in several cities – but mostly in Central Illinois. The narrative starts in the early Summer of 2008 when the Living Hell tour had just come to an abrupt end and I had moved back into my room with Stephany in Chicago. Stephany and I had lived together across a couple of Pilsen apartments for most of 2007 and 2008 but the time that I was actually at home for all of this couldn’t have added up to more than two or three months.
The last place we shared was on 23rd Place near the big cathedral. The Polish landlord had been pretty good as landlords go – we never heard from him unless we were calling him to fix something and then he sent over his handyman named Ziggy. Ziggy had a big bushy mustache and an about medium thickness Eastern European accent and seemed to take genuine pride in getting the bathtub to drain again or the heater working. One month we didn’t have rent the day it was due and when we didn’t get a late payment notice we just didn’t pay it and continued to not pay for several months.
We didn’t know if our landlord had died or left the country or what but we didn’t look too far into the matter because of superstition and that thing about gift-horses and mouths. While I was out traveling a woman named Ewa showed up to the door one day and explained that she had received the building as part of a divorce settlement and rent would now be due to her. It seemed a little suspicious but she wasn’t saying anything about back-rent and it seemed like the safest course of action was to just pay it. This is where things sat when I moved my things into the attic and relocated to California.
Ewa evidently didn’t receive Ziggy as part of the same settlement and wasn’t interested in finding or contracting somebody similar – she was extremely interested in the passive income part of being a landlady but not so much in the maintenance and upkeep parts. Enough things had broken and gone unrepaired in the apartment that Stephany went on rent strike. What Ewa did have was an appropriately evil looking henchman and one day he delivered an eviction notice.
Stephany thought the notice looked suspicious so she brought it to her alderman. In Chicago an alderman is roughly analogous to a city council member in other cities but I feel like they are more involved and helpful in the lives of their constituents. In this case the alderman told Stephany that the eviction notice was a counterfeit – Ewa hadn’t completed any of the necessary steps for a legal eviction and was banking on Stephany just being intimidated by it and moving out.
The alderman told Stephany that she could take Ewa to court and sue for this offense but more practically she could hold it over her head to get free rent in perpetuity because an actual, legal eviction would require going to court at which time the revelation of the counterfeit eviction notice would cost more and get her in more trouble than Stephany’s rent payments were worth. She got the Mexican-American family downstairs in on it and the entire building lived rent free for at least a couple of years until a bank or some other flavor of LLC acquired the building.
Stephany asked them how and where to start paying rent again and they told her “not to worry about it” which is always code for they wanted to blindside her with an eviction notice that was done legally and by the book and delivered too late for Stephany to really do anything about it.
Ewa most likely got out of the landlady business for good but on the off chance she didn’t her full name is Ewa Mogolnika so if you live in Chicago and have a landlady with that name pay close attention to your lease or eviction notices or any other documents and you just might win the lottery as well.
Anyway there’s three things in the title and I haven’t touched on any of them yet. Let’s talk about trains. I got to ride freight a few times but it was almost always with more experienced friends acting as Sherpa. I’ve never personally owned a copy of that Holy Grail document known as a crew change but the people I was riding with usually had one. The fact that I didn’t insist on hitting up a Kinko’s and getting my own reproduction at the first possible opportunity should indicate how serious I was about the whole thing.
I definitely enjoyed my rides and getting to see the kind of true wilderness that only appears when train tracks diverge away from highways but for most of my travels I was always either on the way to see or play a show and hadn’t scheduled for the unpredictable pace of freight travel. Besides the counterfeit Greyhound passes were still nearly universally accepted during these travels and it was generally the faster option.
Technically my first ride was a 2007 short and unplanned trip from Illinois to Missouri. The Garden of Bling’s final port of call was a stretch of river bank in Venice, Illinois – a town that was mostly known for its strip clubs and a creepy daycare in one of their parking lots called Leonard Bo Peep’s. The most revealing anecdote I have about the area known as East Saint Louis is that when I was an extra on an episode of The Real House-Husbands of Hollywood the rapper Nelly insisted that the writers amend a joke suggesting he was from there.
His songs did first achieve breakout success in the area’s strip clubs but nobody wants to be known as being from there.
It was a long bike ride to the bridges we were legally allowed to bike across and most of our destinations in Saint Louis were almost directly across the river so we had gotten in the habit of biking across the bridge that was only for trains to save time. One day I was crossing with Alexis when a train came and when we moved to the other set of tracks another train started coming. There was nothing to do but grab our bikes and climb onto the one that was at least traveling in the right direction.
It started to slow down for the curve as it approached the yard so I suggested we grab our bikes and jump off. Alexis was hesitant:
“I’ve never jumped off of a moving train before…”
“Neither have I but this seems like the perfect time to try it!”
We made the jump onto gravel ok but it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. A private train cop, or bull, was waiting for us in an SUV blocking the path to the closest streets and bike trail. The entire maneuver with the two trains had been designed to catch us the moment we were spotted illegally crossing the bridge:
“Y’all picked a really stupid and dangerous way to try to get across the river!”
Alexis answered back in feigned innocence:
“Well it seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time…”
He ran our IDs and because neither of us had been charged with trespassing on railroad property before this point he let us off with a warning. He tried to give us “safe” directions for biking to our destination that involved an absurdly roundabout path designed to avoid all of the neighborhoods where Black people lived and we pretended to listen then biked right through them like we always did. I can’t think of any part of any city I’ve been to that felt particularly unsafe and especially not in Saint Louis.
A handful of months later when me, Alexis and Jacki rode trains from Memphis to New Orleans for Mardi Gras she was already an old hand at every aspect of the process and carried her own Crew Change. It’s crazy how much people can change in small windows of time. I’ve written about this ride already in the fifth bus chapter. It was the take-a-hit-of-acid-every-hour-on-the-hour train ride.
We were either extremely lucky with this ride or nobody gave a shit about freight riders between Memphis and New Orleans in early 2008 because we were being extremely careless, sitting up where anyone could see us and waving to cars and the like, and we still made it to our destination without interference. We did pass through a city where there were a lot of people hanging around the train tracks – Mobile Alabama. When the train slowed down near what you would call a “hobo jungle”, an encampment of freight riders, drunks and homeless near the train tracks, this guy hopped off that we hadn’t realized was even on the same train as us.
We tried to bum a cigarette off of him as we’d all run out of tobacco at this point but he said he didn’t have one. There were a few people around but nobody seemed to have any. This might be prejudiced by the view of the city from wherever the train tracks go but Mobile, Alabama looked more absolutely busted and run-through than any city I’ve ever been in. Like overgrown-with-kudzu-giant-holes-in-the-side-of-cement-silos destroyed, nothing but blight as far as the eye could see. I forget which of us said it but it perfectly summed up the feel of the place:
“This place looks like it’s been out of cigarettes for a long time…”
Anyway I’m about to tell a story about taking acid on a freight train that didn’t turn out so well. It was the beginning of my trip to California for the Living Hell reunion show and I was trying to get from Chicago to Saint Louis with Leg and Brodie. I wrote somewhere that I knew or met a handful of photographers who were especially gifted at capturing the essence of a generally documentation-resistant underground and Mike Brodie ranks possibly highest among them. If you haven’t seen his book A Period of Juvenile Prosperity you’ll want to check it out.
It even looks like it’s back in print.
I don’t know all the technical names for the different kinds of train cars but from what I saw the best kind to ride on are these ones that are kind of shaped like the little stiff paper trays that hot dogs, french fries and nachos come in. Either a single shipping container or a double stack of them will be in the middle and you can ride in that little space on the end where it slants upward. The containers provide shade some of the time if you’re riding in hot weather and they probably make it harder for the automated camera things to pick you out.
All of this could be different now as I haven’t ridden freight since 2008 but I know that people still do it.
Brodie had moved beyond just using a Crew Change and had gotten some kind of app on his phone that’s probably just supposed to be for rail workers where he could type in the number on the side of a car and see where it was going and approximately how long it would take. Despite this added advantage he was having a hard time finding a good ride for us. We started out in a box-car which is what people always ride on TV but actually isn’t a very good idea as the workers can seal the doors without realizing you’re in there and then you’re trapped.
After a little while we ended up in a gondola. If you’ve ever seen the big dumpsters outside of construction sites you know exactly what these look like – a big metal container that’s open at the top. Sometimes these can be full of coal or garbage or rubble but we found one that was mostly empty. It had gone so well the last time I had decided to while away a long train ride by giving everybody acid and we were finally moving along nicely and I had exactly three hits so I thought it might be a good idea to do it again.
It wasn’t.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 