God of Thunder, of Rock n Roll

Writing assignment for our writing group. This week's topic is "Thunder".

Christ, I started writing a story about how they used to set off some kind of explosive charges to scare away the pigeons and grackles in San Antonio whenever I hung out there. They did it every fifteen or twenty minutes. The city viewed the birds as pests and somehow reasoned that thunderous explosions echoing through the city, sounding like fuckin World War III, would be appealing to all the empty-brained assholes with cameras hanging from their white, pasty necks. In that thing I was writing, I mentioned how my buddy and I had pissed on the Alamo just like Ozzy had famously done years before us. I pointed out that we might never have peed on the Alamo had Ozzy Osbourne not demonstrated how cool it was to do such an irreverant thing. As my friend and I drained our main veins upon the Alamo, we wistfully marvelled that every weirdo and reprobate who had ever visited San Antonio had probably followed in Ozzy’s footsteps and taken a squirt on the stupid Alamo. I wrote a whole buncha shit and then I deleted it, where it is now lost like a man who had died of dehydration in the desert sun. A man who had only days before had a full bladder that he had emptied on the side of the Alamo. Now he is nothing more than a memory, and not much of a memory at that.

So yeah, that was my goddam thunder story. But now it’s this.

Not that this promises to be much better.

Very early in my freight train-hopping career (my first trip, actually, though it was a few days into it) I found myself in Ogden, Utah. I had been following my friend’s lead (it had been his second trip so he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing either) from Seattle to San Francisco. So there you go. We were all the way the fuck out in Utah. My pal jumped on some goddam train that was heading outta the yard (which I would later learn was a surefire way to not get where you were going. Don’t just jump on “some goddam train” if you don’t wanna wind up being completely fucked). It was going fast. Real fast. I managed to get on it too, but there were a couple of old tramps on the car that I got on and I thought fast. “Fuck this” is what I thought in those few seconds and I exited the mystery train. So there went my guide who had managed to get us both lost. What did I do? I got on the next goddam train and wound up in Green River, Wyoming, even further from my initial destination than I had been in the first place.

I woke up on the train in the yard in the morning. I gathered my belongings and walked with what I imagine to be a stride that declared that I really didn’t fuckin care at this point if they kicked me outta the stupid train yard or not. Trains could kiss my ass. I asked the first person I saw where I was and he told me I was in Green River. I asked him where the fuck that was. He told me it was in Wyoming. I asked him how the hell do I get back to Utah, a place where I had absolutely zero desire to be. He must’ve realized that I had no idea what in the everloving fuck I was doing cos he called it in on his radio and then told me the numbers that would be on the lead unit (the engine) of the train I wanted later that afternoon. I told him “thanks”. He gave me five bucks. I bought a couple of forty ouncers and hung out at the library and researched giraffes until it was time to go get on my train back to Whereveresville.

By the time I staggered up to the train and got on it, it was getting pretty late in the day. It was still light out but the sun had sunk behind the mountains. Not long after I had climbed onto the grain car I found, the train lurched forward and I was on my way. Somewhat drunk, I stumbled around and looked off the sides of the train and screamed out the vocals of various songs by Millions of Dead Cops, the Ramones, the Misfits, Rudimentary Peni, and whoever the fuck else I felt like singing songs by. I probably masturbated. Why not? You can’t exactly do anything on a freight train, but whatever you can do you can be sure that nobody’s gonna hear you or see you doing it. Eventually, I passed out.

When I awoke, night had fallen and I had no idea where I was. Not like it would’ve mattered if I had known. I was stuck on a goddam grainer either in Wyoming or Utah. I crawled out of the cozy little hole on the grain car that I had nested in so I could look around while I smoked a Bugler. There was nothing to be seen. Clouds had rolled in and the night was black. I could feel the mist of a steady rain that blew in from the sides of the train. Still new to riding trains, the rhythm of the train rolling somewhat quickly along the tracks caught my ear. I was mezmerized. Intermittently, the sky would erupt in silver like the flash on an old polaroid camera, revealing for a second the mountains that I was slithering between, leaving their images etched upon my retinas for the five seconds or so that followed. The boom that followed those strikes joined the symphony that that the train rolling on the tracks had created. It was so loud and so beautiful, so sad and so angry that I could feel it in my heart. It echoed the thoughts that I was incapable of expressing to the nobody who was my companion.