A Dilated Journey and Youth
“I’m still young,” I tell myself, plead with myself. Twenty-eight years has left that stain on my soul. I am no longer the new kid on the block, and, somehow, bragging that most of my friends are older doesn’t sound so cool when most of them are …twenty-nine. When he walked onto the train, I knew immediately that in spite of our age difference — probably just eleven or twelve years – we had something in common, youth. Not the youth that I saw in him – eagerly chatting away the ride on his cell phone—but a more profound, American Youth.
The Amtrak to Boston had been delayed out of New York. And though the extra thirty-five minutes on top of the posted ten minute delay had been annoying, they were nothing compared to the scheduled five o’clock train, which had been delayed three and a half hours. It was a Sunday, and pulling out of Penn Station on a rainy summer night felt freeing somehow, finally. The train was crammed. I sat next to a thirty-something who slept for most of the trip, and across the aisle from me sat a sixteen-year-old named Jones.
I did not know his first name and did not speak to him either, but someone, probably him, had painstakingly printed the name ‘Jones’ in black marker on the wide straps of his green rucksack in neat block letters. I had watched many riders’ “is this seat taken?” inquiry, and saw in Jones an unmistakable optimism as he heaved his large green duffel onto the rack above the seats. As the train chugged along through a part of Queens where the vista of the Manhattan skyline is crowded beneath by an endless constellation of warehouses, I heard the Led Zeppelin tune Kashmir chirping through the thin speaker of a cell phone, and turned from the window to see Jones answer it.
It was not just how deftly he maneuvered in and out of conversations with parents and friends, or that he rode calmly to a place he hoped, I could tell, would tell him everything about what it means to be a soldier. It was that he rode the train, as I did, out of one America and into another. And that he could see from everything around him that the journey would be his own.
Buried somewhere in the pitter-patter of teenage banter he told friends that he was headed to Westerly, Rhode Island for a military camp. “It should be pretty cool,” he admitted to one, reluctantly. To another he explained, simply, that he was headed to a camp where he would learn, “army stuff.” He reassured his mom that the train had left the station, and reminded her that he could call for a taxi himself. After several calls, he plugged white headphones into a small digital music player on his lap, and leaned back into the music. That the same white headphones snaked from my computer to my ears assured me that Jones was, indeed, in league with me, as I was with him.
I stared at Hollywood pixels on my laptop, and massaged my temples. The excess of the night prior had remained on my mind, literally, through most of that day. That I was on the precipice of thirty years old served painful reminder, almost as painful as the pounding in my head, that six years in the real world had failed to teach me, yet, how to avoid Sunday hangovers. Also, that thirty years no longer seemed so old, reminded me that youth is as fleeting as those ten years that had passed since I rode, like Jones, towards the campus that I hoped would make me into something. I looked briefly to Jones, who deflected another of his friends from the topic of his military camp, but indulged him a few tales of his own underage drunken mishaps.
More delays were announced over the crackling speakers of the train. I wondered how long it had been in service. The conductors portrayed a certain majesty that even pilots lost somewhere; the haggard expressions of flight attendants, shining through put-on smiles like beacons to lonely travelers, had always reminded me of the truth of daily life, and that if flies from city to city without changing. Jones listened to the apologies that the conductors inserted before station announcements, first for communications problems, then track work, then engine problems. He explained them to his mom who had called again. I heard two conductors joke amongst themselves that, “the machine ain’t broke yet, just the joints.” They pushed down the aisle and ended up sitting with two bluesuits – engineers of some sort – in the café car where cards were dealt seven to a seat — the game, Gin Rummy.
I was reminded that Amtrak had been in a bitter dispute with the President, and that its first new product in a generation, the Acela, had been sent back to the shop after a horribly mismanaged launch. I wondered if the conductors playing cards thought about job security, or if they simply partied on the weekends like most of the people I knew. Most of all, I wondered when my head would stop hurting, and if the train’s soothing vibration would help or hurt my chances of arriving in Boston with a clear head.
Imagine that the train is a country, headed somewhere and late, that the passengers are its citizens, and that the corporate leadership has assured its conductors and regular customers that the company is still on top. Now imagine a country whose leaders have lied and its citizens, bored and tired, and two young men sitting across the aisle from one another, worlds apart, waiting to arrive somewhere.
Jones pulled out his phone again, this time to flip through photos he had snapped at home just before heading downstairs for a waiting car. Could he see that his mother’s grasping eyes didn’t quite fit the round in her smile, and that even his father’s taciturn aloof had stolen a jolt of heat from the lightning crackling outside of the apartment? Did he linger on the image of his sister, already back in Pennsylvania for school, who made a cameo in the family photo hanging on the wall? My movie finished, and I glanced over to the whole of Jones. Here was a young man, fresh faced to the world, setting out on a journey he hoped would lead him exactly where he wanted to go, West Point, his friends ignorant of and disinterested in his true hopes, his family apprehensive about the whole thing.
I was there on the cusp of his youth, and staring at the certainty, only, of arriving at Back Bay station another evening closer to thirty. Would Jones have been able to name every digital device humming along in that silver canister, its brand name? Its value? Probably better than anyone else crowded inside it. But what of the two Presidents who had lied to him, and the tacit accusation that they had avoided going to war themselves? What of the moral rampage threatening to ruin American politics, and the moral paucity of the corporations in charge of the economy? Jones would have mastered that course too, if only viscerally. He would have seen it on his parents’ pixilated faces, and heard it in the cracking voice of the new conductor whose apologies stretched longer than the station announcements. America was changing, and soon to be his.
An hour later, a squat conductor strode down the alley of the train, and paused as she passed between Jones’ seat and mine. Kashmir sounded, again, from his phone, but he dozed gently, and it went unanswered. She removed the white stub stuck into the railing above him, then nudged him gently. “Sir,” she said after he had blinked awake into his eyes a few times, “Westerly is up next.” Minutes later, a shrill version of her voice buzzed through the speakers that lined the top of the silver box. “Ladies and gentlemen, once again we apologize for the delays, we will be arriving in Westerly, Rhode Island next. Next stop Westerly, Rhode Island, five minutes.”
Happy that the once-crowded train had finally started to thin of its human cargo, I waited for a couple minutes after the train had trudged past Westerly before folding my laptop into my backpack and hopping across the aisle into the empty seat vacated by Jones. Within the next two stops, I had placed several calls of my own, eased my seat back, and dozed off into a sleep that carried me until I woke to a wordy apology prefacing the announcement of Back Bay station—an hour and a half late.
From the platform, many somnambulant twenty-somethings rode the escalator with me up to Boston streets cooled by drizzle. We struggled to get our wits about us before hurrying off into the black. The T was fifteen minutes from shutting down for the night, and the announcement of summer’s end fell, apologetically, from the sky in big, wet drops of cool.
[Brooklyn, NY 2005]
