In the golden age of American travel, the platforms of train stations were knee deep in what looked like fog. You see it all the time in black-and-white movies, these low-lying eddies of silver. I always thought it was steam from the engines, but now I wonder if it didn’t come from cigarettes. You could smoke everywhere back then: in the dining car, in your sleeping berth. Depending on your preference, it was either absolute Heaven or absolute Hell.
I know there was a smoking car on the Amtrak I took from Raleigh to Chicago in 1984, but seven years later it was gone. By then if you wanted a cigarette your only option was to head for the bar. It sounds all right in passing, romantic even—“the bar on the Lake Shore Limited”—but in fact it was rather depressing. Too bright, too loud, and full of alcoholics who commandeered the seats immediately after boarding and remained there, marinating like cheap kebabs, until they reached their destinations. At first, their voices might strike you as jolly: the warm tones of strangers becoming friends. Then the drinkers would get sloppy and repetitive, settling, finally, on that cross-eyed mush that passes for alcoholic sincerity.
On the train I took from New York to Chicago in early January of 1991, one of the drunks pulled down his pants and shook his bare bottom at the woman behind the bar. I was thirty-four, old enough to know better, yet I laughed along with everyone else. The trip was interminable—almost nineteen hours, not counting any delays—but nothing short of a derailment could have soured my good mood. I was off to see the boyfriend I’d left behind when I moved to New York. We’d known each other for six years, and though we’d broken up more times than either of us could count, there was the hope that this visit might reunite us. Then he’d join me for a fresh start in Manhattan, and all our problems would disappear.
It was best for both of us that it didn’t work out that way, though of course I couldn’t see it at the time. The trip designed to bring us back together tore us apart for good, and it was a considerably sorrier me that boarded the Limited back to New York. My train left Union Station in the early evening. The late-January sky was the color of pewter, and the ground beneath it—as flat as rolled-out dough—was glazed with slush. I watched as the city receded into the distance, and then I went to the bar car for a cigarette. Of the dozen or so drunks who’d staggered on board in Chicago, one in particular stood out. I’ve always had an eye for ruined-looking men, and that’s what attracted me to this guy—I’ll call him Johnny Ryan—the sense that he’d been kicked around. By the time he hit thirty, a hardness would likely settle about his mouth and eyes, but as it was—at twenty-nine—he was right on the edge, a screw-top bottle of wine the day before it turns to vinegar.
It must have been he who started the conversation, as I’d never have had the nerve. Under different circumstances, I might have stammered hello and run back to my seat, but my breakup convinced me that something major was about to happen. The chance of a lifetime was coming my way, and in order to accept it I needed to loosen up, to stop being so “rigid.” That was what my former boyfriend had called me. He’d thrown in “judgmental” while he was at it, another of those synonyms for “no fun at all.” The fact that it stung reaffirmed what I had always suspected: it was all true. No one was duller, more prudish and set in his ways, than I was.
Johnny didn’t strike me as gay, but it was hard to tell with alcoholics. Like prisoners and shepherds, many of them didn’t care who they had sex with, the idea being that what happens in the dark stays in the dark. It’s the next morning you have to worry about—the name-calling, the slamming of doors, the charge that you somehow cast a spell. I must have been desperate to think that such a person would lead me to a new life. Not that Johnny was bad company—it’s just that the things we had in common were all so depressing. Unemployment, for instance. My last job had been as an elf at Macy’s.
“Personal assistant” was how I phrased it, hoping he wouldn’t ask for whom.
“Uh—Santa?”
by David Sedaris, The New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration: Zohar Lazar
