Grey Coy, Donnie French, Dee Burch, Scott Elrod, and I decided to lie to our parents and say that we were all sleeping over at each other’s house. But we really went to the railroad tracks in Moraine and set up camp on top of a decrepit bridge abutment that had chunks of concrete falling off it and plants growing out of every crack. We would sit up there drinking and smoking while the trains went by with the locomotives so close to us that our chests would rumble and our breathing would go awry. The cigarette smoke, factory smoke, and locomotive smoke saturated our lungs while we gobbled down candy and fortified wine. We really couldn’t get enough of anything. In the quiet hours of two or three in the morning when it became damp and the fog began to roll off the river a train slowed down enough for us to run down the embankment of the bridge and jump on a coal car. It was the best feeling in the world when we first started a train ride. As the train accelerated the cars would begin to rock and bounce and you just knew people were not met to be riding on them, that they really were met for inanimate materials that could get very hot or cold and soaking wet or whacked by rocks from kids just like ourselves. But really, thinking back on it, we really were like inanimate objects, at least intellectually. Our bodies were immortal and that was all that really mattered. We roared past parking lots in small towns where kids were hanging out around their cars and we pelted them with chunks of coal and wine bottles. We smoked and watched our cigarette butts be swept away into the hurricane that followed the train down the tracks pulling bushes and flotsam into its wake while the wheels clacked and squealed like giant scissors being sharpened in the dark. It was just too good. But after a couple hours it dawns on you that you are far away and getting farther by the second but the train just keeps pulling and pulling with the industrial indifference of commerce while the coal dust gets in your teeth and up your nose. Finally, the thing slows down and we jump off in a freight yard outside of Cincinnati. We make our way to the highway just as the sun comes up and start hitch hiking. Some guy in a hopped up convertible picks us up and we all immediately fall asleep as we head back north. Later, when we’re dumped off back in our town near where we started off, but not near enough, we swear we’ll never do it again because we’re so tired and dirty and sick feeling. I don’t know why, but it takes about two weeks to forget the bad parts and do it all again. Two weeks is just about forever when you’re immortal.
