25 years ago today I left home for… Home. I remember so many details of the Amtrak trip to New York, which started with a weekend layover at a college friend’s place in Bucks County, PA, that Updike-ian “Rabbit at Rest” suburb of Philadelphia.
25 Years Ago Today I Left Home for… Home.
In return for said college friend’s accommodational kindness I paid for his ticket to see GoodFellas. That $8 outlay was a lot of money for me at the time. He promised to repay the debt but never did.
I got him his first job in New York and did a lot of things to get him started in this town, but he dropped me as a friend long ago, like so many others I wish I could reach out to today.
As a high school geometry teacher once, twice, and maybe 50 or 100 times said: “If you make 2 or 3 good friends in life you’re lucky.” Wise words, stringently repeated.
October 20, 1990, was all about TRAIN. Amtrak #88 left the station at 12 noon right on the fucking dot. At 22 years old I had already become accustomed to mass transit being unreliable on every level. The physical punctuation mark of this pinpoint 12-noon departure struck me at the small of my back. I saw my mother standing in the station, looking confused, standing in place as I moved away. Was I the confused one?
I was so bent on getting out of Tampa that I told her a bunch of indefensible lies about job prospects. I had thoughts that I would never see her again.
As the train strolled through its escape hatch out of Tampa I thought that I had never seen this town. So many trees, houses, people. Tampa passed me by for the first time that noontime.
A lot of memorable things happened on Amtrak #88. I played poker with an older guy who said he had been on Amtrak trains for 6 months, burning his retirement funds on card games and train travel. That poker match attracted more and more individuals, reaching I think 9 players at its peak, all men.
October 21, arriving at the 30th Street station in Philadelphia, I took the most cataclysmic dump of my life up until then, having not wanted to do that on the train (a later dump at the Cosmic Coffee Shop on Columbus Circle in NYC would usurp this masterpiece). It felt like heaven’s gates had busted open and an avalanche of feces had awaited behind St. Peter’s gates.
While I basked in the afterglow of that magnificent bowel movement a dude entered the 30th Street Philadelphia station bathroom and, seeing that all the stalls were occupied, stridently screamed “AW MAN I GOTTA TAKE A SHIT SO FUCKIN’ BAD…” He stamped his feet and made a big fucking prissy drama of it.
Next thing I heard was the sound of everyone else in the stalls frantically spanking the rolls of toilet paper next to them, wadding them up in their grubby palms and, I assume, wiping their asses. I did not catch any crinkling sounds of that, happy to say.
It was impossible to know what happened at that instant in the minds of those other dudes basking in their post-defecatory hum, only to be intruded upon by someone who wanted their seat. But from the frantic sound of those toilet paper rolls being unraveled I sensed that everyone seemed terrified of this guy who needed to “TAKE A SHIT SO FUCKIN’ BAD…”.
Thinking of how the years pass like minutes, like bit players in forgettable operæ. Is time itself alone the measure of a life lived? Are years a reward to be cashed in?
Listening to Lubomyr Melnyk’s Windmills tonight, and I hope you are too.
Maybe it was worth the 3 minutes of your life then.
Happy Anniversary.