Some people I met on Amtrak in the USA

 

When you're travelling hundreds of miles across the Midwest or the Southern deserts, you have lots of time to get to know your fellow passengers, and many of them have very interesting stories and trips.

 There was the really nice Texan businessman, Gary, on my first train, who only had one book, a large Bible with him. But he noticed a woman struggling to find enough cash for a meal and stepped in and paid. 

There was the woman travelling from Oklahoma City about 1400 miles to Elko, Nevada to spend time with her partner in his week off from working in a goldmine.

But I'd like to write more about two people I talked to, who had very interesting stories and characters (all real names changed)

1. George, from the Bronx

He was a sturdy and trim looking man in his seventies, with a baseball hat, a Zapata moustache and two tags round his neck, one of which I recognised as the Puerto Rican one. The other tag looked like a military one. I asked him. No, he had never been in the forces. That one was a health warning tag!

We talked about different places, the cities and the country. His daughter had persuaded him to come down and live in Texas, which he had done for three or four years. It was warm and fairly cheap to live there. But he was basically a child of the Bronx and had been in New York the whole time until Texas. He had not known his own parents as a child and was raised by his grandparents, and left to his own devices. He had never walked over the Brooklyn Bridge till his daughter took him a couple of years ago. He liked it. 

We talked about violence and how scared people had been, and it turned out he had been the equivalent of a roadman in the sixties and seventies and had got into some trouble. But he didn’t talk in terms of gang membership, just a boy living as best he could. But he had only had one conviction (DUI) and had never been inside. He said some of his acquaintances seemed to see jail time as a badge of honour, but George was having none of it and made butt jokes back at them when they tried to play the big man.

He had been shot once, not accidentally, but it had gone through his side below the ribs and not hit anything vital. Also stabbed once but no serious damage. He said you have to trust your instincts in all things like this. If your Spidey senses tell you not to go somewhere, then listen. 

He was very funny about a restaurant on Flatbush where he worked as a bus boy in the late 60s/early 70s. They had a side entrance for the Mob and they always ate in the downstairs room (where there were no window to shoot through, I suppose). He never worked there but one day a bus boy was sick and he was sent to work, with clear instructions to say nothing and just nod. He said the first night he took home 600 dollars in tips. But the wise guys weren’t interested in food, just the alcohol.

Later he worked for mister Fibonacci (lets say) as a numbers runner for illegal gambling. All he had to do was collect the bets and the money and he was paid 100 dollars a day in the 70s. You can see the attraction. He said Mr F was really nice and helpful but had also said, I paraphrase, you fuck with my daughter, you sleep with the fishes. and when George asked if the daughter started it, then what, the answer was the same. 

And he said Mr F also told him ‘When you are in trouble it is not your friends that will get you out, it’s money in your pocket’. Sad, but George said it was basically true.

2. David, going to the veteran’s health centre in Austin

I caught the state funded bus that goes to the city and also to the VA centre. David was talking generally about life and weather and hitting deer while driving but then said he was going to the VA centre for a procedure. And not looking forward to it.

He looked only in his 30s but was clearly older than that as he was a veteran of the First Gulf War and had an adult daughter.

He had two disabilities, one with his eyes and one with his brain. The eye problem was that the fine dust of Iraq got everywhere and you couldn’t keep it out of your eyes, which eventually scarred and could cause focus problems, as it had for him. He was on the scope of a Bradley APC so had to keep scanning left and right. Basically his eyes now pointed the wrong ways and he had glasses which corrected a bit, but not enough to drive. 

He had also been concussed in the initial invasion because the engineers had moved a huge stash of mines which they then detonated by the road without telling the other troops. All his squad were blown off their feet. He said you could see the shockwave as it approached. He was smacked into the side of the APC and wasn’t wearing his helmet. But no medivac then so they all just went on in. He had problems caused by the brain damage - I guess severe concussion or worse - but he also said that all of his lot who came back had PTSD

It was very moving listening to him talking about what he remembered most. He said that although Saddam Hussein misled his people, they were fighting for their own country and families and had been told the Americans would rape and pillage.

So these local militias fought back and were slaughtered. And when the families wanted to bury them in the 24 hours they should, the Americans were not allowed to let them while investigating. He said the wives and mothers would come up and beat your chest. It didn’t hurt physically. One boy came up to him carrying his father’s foot. He said the sound of the families was what came often to him if he had nightmares and woke with the PTSD. He did not say if he had been cured. Maybe its not cure that can be given. He said he had the greatest respect for these people who came out to defend their country from the APCs and Abrams tanks. I nearly cried.

So if what I wrote about the Amtrak travel earlier whetted your appetite for it, here is another reason: people when travelling these distances are very happy to talk and to tell you an awful lot about themselves. And the world gets more interesting and wider the more you hear about the lives of others.