Carlinville Intermezzo: The Story Of R

The train station in Carlinville, Illinois is nothing more than a ventilated brick box. Cement floor, a single bench, no heat for the winter and not even a fan for warmer weather. I got there around 11:30 in the morning. The train to Chicago wasn't going to arrive until 3:30 that afternoon. The sky was cloudy, the temperature cold, and it was spitting a particularly unforgiving rain that made me grateful for I didn't have to walk the miles from Litchfield.

Nothing about Carlinville impressed me enough to get wet wandering around to explore it. I noticed one clearly No-Tell-Motel on the way into town. (The sign listed a price differential between single and double beds, and the ambiance suggested that there should have also been a price differential for hourly and nightly rates.) I also took note of several bars, none of which looked trustworthy enough to carry my pack into. Other than the rail, which rolled by a deserted grain elevator, there was very little left to describe. Like every other town that grew up along Route 66, it was impacted by completion of the I-55 corridor. And it was clearly impacted again by changes in the railroad industry.

I was alone in the brick box for about 20 minutes before he hurried in and asked if I had a cigarette. And if I was slightly inclined to dig deeper into Carlinville -- named, according to an optimistically written Wikipedia page, after a former Governor -- talking to R would have changed my mind.

He assured me that if I was looking to get laid, that all I had to do was walk down the street.

"Ah," I said. "So they're trying to fish outside of the gene pool?"

"Gene pool. Yeah, man You got that right!"

A man on the run from something has a distinct body language. Jerky movements. Disheveled look. Given the mostly pale demographic of the town and -- except for the Indians who worked in the hotels and the Mexicans who did the service industry grunt work -- R stuck out simply because he was black.

After I was unable to give him a cigarette, he asked where I was going and where I'd come from. So I gave him the quick and dirty version. Hearing that I walked from Staunton to Litchfield elicited a wide-eyed shake of the head.

"Why'd you do that?"

"I had to get here."

"You didn't have a car?"

"If I had a car, I wouldn't need to catch a train."

That seemed to satisfy him for the most part. It also gave him a door to prove the current events of his life more interesting than mine.

R was not from Carlinville. He was from Springfield, Illinois, but came there via St. Louis. And he did it for a girl. The part that seemed to surprise him, even though he was standing in a brick box train depot waiting for the train that would take him back to Springfield with his few possessions in a 33 gallon garbage bag, was that it didn't work out.

"She's a white girl," he said. "And she's... you know... not thick." He repeated this several times throughout the story, as if he was trying to convince himself that it should have, and for those very reasons.

The story unfolded something like this: he met the woman he was trying to escape the day after he got out of jail. R explained that yes, "It was drug related stuff," but that he had cleaned up his act since and was no longer doing whatever it was that got him locked up. But, he admitted that, upon his release, he was on the hunt for the one thing he couldn't get while he was incarcerated. And it just so happened that he got call from a former cellie who had a girlfriend who had a friend.

"I was looking for a one night stand," R maintained. "But it didn't turn into that."

Upon his release, R had been sent to a half-way house to ensure that his rehabilitation would take. After one night with this girl -- whose name, I have to admit, I don't remember -- she took it upon herself to harass his Parole Officer and the Missouri State Department of Corrections to secure his release from the half-way house so that he could move in with her. When calling St. Louis didn't help, R, said, she drove from Carlinville to St. Louis five days a week in order to visit him and track down the dodgy P.O. Naturally, the development seemed to work to his advantage, so he didn't argue. And while he never uttered the word, the confluence of events must have seemed to him, at the time, serendipitous. And when his parole officer secured his release from the half-way house... making it clear that his only reason was to get the woman off his back... R thought he'd stumbled onto the love of his life.

His first indication that something was amiss was when he showed up in Carlinville and discovered that not only did his true love have two kids -- from two different fathers -- and that both of them were medicated for educational and developmental issues, but that she also lived with her sister, her sister's flavor of the week, and HER two kids.

To hear him tell it, his one true love did nothing except sleep all day, eat ice cream and want to fuck. She didn't want to deal with her kids. She didn't want to deal with her sister's kids. Apparently the sugar she ingested while watching Maury Povich was only to be used in the pursuit of more ice cream and sex.

To hear him tell it, she screwed him raw. And in every way possible. And when he was too exhausted to get it up "I'm not as young as I used be, you know" she would insist that he do something else to fill her appetites. And then she expected him to take care of the kids, who wouldn't listen to him. And then she expected him to make her a sandwich. And then clean up the house. And then go buy her some ice cream.

I was waiting for him to admit to something involving a ball gag and a french maid's outfit.

Instead, he told me about changing the sheets on the bed.

Apparently, there was a day when his own true love actually left the house -- for reasons he didn't explain -- and he took it upon himself to change out the sheets on the bed. She had told him he could find clean sheets in a Santa Claus bag in the hall closet. He found the bag and starting digging through pillow cases and sundry unmatched soft goods until he stumbled upon something that wasn't so -- soft.

Actually there were several.

"I'm telling you," he said, "the bitch could open a dildo flea market!"

He found out later, however, that not all the dildos were for her. Apparently she was hoping that R's time in prison made him a more amenable catcher to a stiff pitch.

R would have none of it.

And while he didn't say directly, the eventual decline of the relationship -- he reiterated several times that he was in love with her but "The bitch is crazy, and those ain't my kids!" -- began with his discovery of the toys and his denial of her strap-on passion.

Even love has it's limits.

O Losantiville, Don't You Cry For Me- Intermezzo: By Way Of An Introduction

So tie me to a post and block my ears
I can see widows and orphans through my tears
I know my call despite my faults
And despite my growing fears. - Mumford and Sons, The Cave

We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another. -Lucretius

Even in my moments of deep solitude, I am keenly aware of the fact that I am not alone. Maybe the only way to understand the difference between alone and lonely is to have experienced both and until you have the discussion is purely theoretical. Being Out there have been times when I felt absolutely lonely; but I have never really felt alone. I'm lucky in this regard, because I am fortunate enough to have friends who tolerate me and loved ones who tolerate me even more.

I rarely write about the angels who have taken it upon themselves to look in on me from time to time, who worry for my well-being but who understand that I will do what I will regardless of how little common sense it seems to have. As a matter of fact, I've been accused, more than once, of not having a lick of common sense at all.  If anything, I am occasionally plagued by a certain blindness which looks an awful lot like naivete or an over-abundant faith in my own ability. Mostly though, I recognize that even the most assiduously laid plans are flawed.

When I set out in January and took to carrying my home on my back like any good turtle does, I did it in part with the realization that while I maintained the same obligation of CHOICE that I also was letting go of a lot of a priori notions, ideas people take for granted, in order to follow what I can only describe as THE WHIM OF THE UNIVERSE -- because I have long rejected the metaphor of the white bearded Almighty sitting on a cloud and because I realize that no matter how much good a person tries to do in the world, shit falls on the just and the unjust alike. Which is to say: while I believe that some of the good we do in the world may come back to us, and I do think any negative energy we put out into the world attracts negative people and negative events,

I reject the notion of "visualization" a la The Secret which has somehow managed to be labeled as self-help. 

Yes, we are responsible for our actions and their impacts.

Yes, it's important to be active and to be aware of our thoughts, our words, and our deeds. (Half of this begins with language... not only the words we use to communicate, but those words we use when we are thinking to ourselves.)

But if you decide to "visualize" yourself driving a Mercedes Benz, you will not necessarily end up driving said high end automobile. If you haven't figured that out yet, go listen to Janis Joplin. Even she knew better.

Sorry. 

And since we're on the subject of metaphors -- and with the understanding that all lines that are drawn in the sand are arbitrary -- let offer the one that, for now, offers some explanation of how I go about things.

Probably of no surprise to anyone who knows me, I tend to think in musical terms.

For more time than I cared to admit, life felt out of rhythm. I felt it. I think my now ex-wife felt it, too. When I set out in January, in as much as I was leaving a life that had ceased to work towards the growth of either me or my then wife, I was also searching for an appropriate rhythm.

Not someone else's that sounded good. Not one that was unnatural for me or ran contrary to my soul. I went in search of rhythm that was mine, my own, and no one else's. You can insert here the metaphor of "the path" as well. And as Joseph Campbell pointed out, if you can see the path in front of you it isn't of your making. The same goes with finding an appropriate rhythm. If you take on someone else's just because you like it or even because it makes sense, that doesn't mean it's the one you ought to be humming.

Ah... but back to the angels. And no. I don't mean the winged messengers of Gawd Almighty. I mean those folks who do the good work of the world, who care about others, and who find ways to show it. In my case, I have been visited/helped by more angels than I can possibly justify deserving. \

People I meet along the way, who have made a permanent impression on my mind, and on my heart.

People who have helped me without having a good reason, other than being simply good folk.

People who love me in spite of maybe not understanding me.

One of those angels, for example -- one I have not written about much -- gave me a heads up about the taxi service that saved me a long rainy walk from Litchfield to Carlinville.

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Sometimes, in spite of my (albeit humble) confidence in my ability when I'm out, the universe gives me a hand. In this case, is was in the form of someone who ... not wanting me to sleep out in the rain because it would have taken me much longer than the estimated 5.5 hours to walk 15 miles and I would have had to seek shelter somewhere in between... pointed me in the direction of a questionable but effective cab company that, for the cost of $24 and a lingering sensation that I was about to be become the victim of a team of sadistic rural serial killers, would drive me there.

Along the same route I would have probably walked.

You know who you are, angel. Thank you. You are proof that the universe can, indeed, be kind.