For the next month or two I will be documenting my travels across the country while on vacation from New Orleans. Each segment will be amount my specific mode of transportation for that segment of the trip and the passengers I ride with. This is my first post of the trip.
My train journey began on a plane. I had sixteen days to travel the perimeter of the States, from California to Vancouver to New York, and the Sunset Limited from New Orleans to Los Angeles would take 48 hours of it. So I flew to San Francisco instead. It took three connecting flights to get there. The first two were run by an airline company based out of Denver called Frontier. They were newer, smaller, and their pilots less adept at landing planes without inducing extreme anxiety amongst their passengers.
When we landed in Denver the pilot thanked us. "Thank you for flying Frontier: We're a whole different animal."
A female soldier in her uniform woke up in front of me. "Did they really say that or did I just imagine it in my sleep?"
"It's true," I told her. "Look at the airplane tails." There were two Frontier planes parked next to us. On the tails they had painted large colorful photographs of wild animals. A lynx, an arctic ram. Ours had a bobcat.
In Kansas City International Airport there were designated tornado shelters, usually the sublevel corridors that lead to the underground parking garage. In Denver's airport there were also tornado shelters, most often the men's bathroom, even though no one in Denver has died of a tornado in fifty years. I used it, feeling safe, and hustled onto my final plane, through United. They would not let a woman on because they couldn't identify where she got her boarding pass. Frontier had issued it. She had been the Frontier flight to somewhere in California until she refused to give up her seat so a mother and her daughter could sit together. She caused a scene by protesting, not knowing that airports were poor places to be noticed, or take any kind of stand, political or personal. Don't be noticed is the best rule of thumb. She was asked to leave the plane. The police were called. Then they put her on United.
"I'm suing," she said into her phone. "They can't treat me like that. I didn't do anything wrong, yeah, I'm gonna sue." Then she began to cry. The person on her phone told her he wouldn't pick her up. "Fine, I don't care, I'll just a take a cab. I don't care anymore." She cried for twenty minutes until she fell asleep.
I arrived in San Francisco at night. A friend picked me up and for the next two days I rode his bike along the coast, across the bridge, though parks, and up and down large hills. At night we drank beer and walked around, reveling in the color of the city: hippies with dreads to their knees in the Mission, cross-dressing transexuals in the Castro, the erotic cookie shop, a guy who built lasers with things from his house with things from his kitchen, carpet-cleaning robots, and pubs with interiors made of glow lights and sheet metal.
I left on a Friday night after a final beer in the lower Haight. I went to the back of the bus where I met Dylan, or Dylah the Killah, and a recently released felon celebrating his birthday with his girlfriend. Dylah was thinking of opening a 4 Loko, but he had just "woken up on the beach, and was like, what the fuck?" after drinking one before.
"Last time I drank one of those I cracked my rib," I told him.
"So you can appreciate the aeshetics of it." Dylah was a rapper. He was high on cocaine and maybe acid. The felon was celebrating his birthday. He spent his last five birthdays in jail and now he was arguing with his girlfriend.
"That's fucked up. I don't care care about your feelings?! How the fuck can you say I don't care about your feelings? Of course I fuckin' care for your feelings. And it's my birthday, goddamnit, my first out..." Dylah the Killah tells him he should fix his attitude and think more positively. That this was a cause to celebrate and he was "going to fuck it all up with that negativity." He offers to sell him acid to cheer him up. They agree to meet up later and then the felon and his girlfriend get off.
I asked Dylah where I should get off to get to Emerville, but he didn't know. He raps about a blonde that is standing in the doorway. He uses five or six-syllable words and improvises complex rhymes. He raps about all the drugs he is on. I ask the busdriver where I need to get off, but he doesn't know either.
I figured it out, taking another MUNI bus, and wandering through a series of parking lots in the suburbs of Oakland to find an AMTRAK station with busted lights and a few people asleep in chairs inside. I figured the train would be a step down in excitement, a relaxed footbridge to the next city. I would ride the train and look out the window, reading, writing, drinking alone, thinking. I was wrong.
NOTES: The felon was given that epithet, not in disrespect of citizens released from prison, but because I didn't catch his name or want to make it up here. He was proud about his prison term just as he was proud to be free again. Next post coming soon: The Coast Starlight and Portland
My train journey began on a plane. I had sixteen days to travel the perimeter of the States, from California to Vancouver to New York, and the Sunset Limited from New Orleans to Los Angeles would take 48 hours of it. So I flew to San Francisco instead. It took three connecting flights to get there. The first two were run by an airline company based out of Denver called Frontier. They were newer, smaller, and their pilots less adept at landing planes without inducing extreme anxiety amongst their passengers.
When we landed in Denver the pilot thanked us. "Thank you for flying Frontier: We're a whole different animal."
A female soldier in her uniform woke up in front of me. "Did they really say that or did I just imagine it in my sleep?"
"It's true," I told her. "Look at the airplane tails." There were two Frontier planes parked next to us. On the tails they had painted large colorful photographs of wild animals. A lynx, an arctic ram. Ours had a bobcat.
In Kansas City International Airport there were designated tornado shelters, usually the sublevel corridors that lead to the underground parking garage. In Denver's airport there were also tornado shelters, most often the men's bathroom, even though no one in Denver has died of a tornado in fifty years. I used it, feeling safe, and hustled onto my final plane, through United. They would not let a woman on because they couldn't identify where she got her boarding pass. Frontier had issued it. She had been the Frontier flight to somewhere in California until she refused to give up her seat so a mother and her daughter could sit together. She caused a scene by protesting, not knowing that airports were poor places to be noticed, or take any kind of stand, political or personal. Don't be noticed is the best rule of thumb. She was asked to leave the plane. The police were called. Then they put her on United.
"I'm suing," she said into her phone. "They can't treat me like that. I didn't do anything wrong, yeah, I'm gonna sue." Then she began to cry. The person on her phone told her he wouldn't pick her up. "Fine, I don't care, I'll just a take a cab. I don't care anymore." She cried for twenty minutes until she fell asleep.
I arrived in San Francisco at night. A friend picked me up and for the next two days I rode his bike along the coast, across the bridge, though parks, and up and down large hills. At night we drank beer and walked around, reveling in the color of the city: hippies with dreads to their knees in the Mission, cross-dressing transexuals in the Castro, the erotic cookie shop, a guy who built lasers with things from his house with things from his kitchen, carpet-cleaning robots, and pubs with interiors made of glow lights and sheet metal.
I left on a Friday night after a final beer in the lower Haight. I went to the back of the bus where I met Dylan, or Dylah the Killah, and a recently released felon celebrating his birthday with his girlfriend. Dylah was thinking of opening a 4 Loko, but he had just "woken up on the beach, and was like, what the fuck?" after drinking one before.
"Last time I drank one of those I cracked my rib," I told him.
"So you can appreciate the aeshetics of it." Dylah was a rapper. He was high on cocaine and maybe acid. The felon was celebrating his birthday. He spent his last five birthdays in jail and now he was arguing with his girlfriend.
"That's fucked up. I don't care care about your feelings?! How the fuck can you say I don't care about your feelings? Of course I fuckin' care for your feelings. And it's my birthday, goddamnit, my first out..." Dylah the Killah tells him he should fix his attitude and think more positively. That this was a cause to celebrate and he was "going to fuck it all up with that negativity." He offers to sell him acid to cheer him up. They agree to meet up later and then the felon and his girlfriend get off.
I asked Dylah where I should get off to get to Emerville, but he didn't know. He raps about a blonde that is standing in the doorway. He uses five or six-syllable words and improvises complex rhymes. He raps about all the drugs he is on. I ask the busdriver where I need to get off, but he doesn't know either.
I figured it out, taking another MUNI bus, and wandering through a series of parking lots in the suburbs of Oakland to find an AMTRAK station with busted lights and a few people asleep in chairs inside. I figured the train would be a step down in excitement, a relaxed footbridge to the next city. I would ride the train and look out the window, reading, writing, drinking alone, thinking. I was wrong.
NOTES: The felon was given that epithet, not in disrespect of citizens released from prison, but because I didn't catch his name or want to make it up here. He was proud about his prison term just as he was proud to be free again. Next post coming soon: The Coast Starlight and Portland
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