The Train Rolls On

from As It Were: The Long-Lost Blue-Noted Romance Yarn by Amos Bankhead

The train rolls on. In Manzana, Walt is “out of work” again, busy from dawn into darkness in the garden and workshop, if off the payroll. And Lester is back around. As was I, and I’d pitched my tent — figuratively, but also literally — in the backyard beside Walt’s garage. I’d had a falling out of sorts with Benny when I attempted to effect distance, and so now I was on my own and playing gigs sporadically and whenever I could land them. I spent my days working in the garden with Walt, playing guitar and smoking spliffs behind the garage with Lester, drinking morning coffee and evening wine with Elena, and tramping around with our dogs, Muddy and Wolf.

The schoolyard is now a fortress — or a prison? — barricaded entirely by bars and massive security gates; our sandlot days are over. More and larger automobiles are on the streets, and more distracted than ever, and so the dogs and I stick to running the alleyways that run between the backyards of our neighborhood. Back there with Muddy and Wolf, moments of clarity: I’ve always been a dog in the back alleys.

It occurs to me too that Lester and I are here in search of the same thing. He’s told Walt he’s trying to get sober, and Walt with his loving and indiscriminate heart either hasn’t bothered to parse the words, or else is able to embrace Lester and his singular journey without peremptory judgment. One way or another, I think my father knows that Lester isn’t being facetious; while it’s convenient to conflate his station with his disposition, Walt knows Lester, and he knows better than to stigmatize, to mistake the medicine for the malady (though of course it often becomes one) or to settle for simplistic explanations of complex and sophisticated quandaries. And despite his shabby appearance, Lester is sophisticated, and he is honest about his struggle, and aware of the ways in which he is fooling himself, allowing himself to be deceived…

We are here on Proustian business, Lester and I, in search of lost time. In our inebriation, we find obscurity and oblivion; we buy into a bill of goods, into Walt’s river, out back in the garden…

But we know that we are fooling ourselves, allowing ourselves to be fooled…and from within this fool’s paradise, we hear the train in the distance…