Living People Wanted

You look down at your free breakfast that you bummed from your friend John
who works here. He tells the cook what to make you, then he writes down that you just
had a water on the check. It’s a nice system, and they don’t mind as long as you don’t
order food that costs them too much. Bacon is one of the more expensive foods. You
managed to convince John to give you bacon today. He was in a good mood.
The food here really is pretty bad. It is tasteless and seems quite greasy. But
since your mother sits at home on welfare doing nothing but watching T.V., and your dad
died, and didn’t have any life insurance, you have to rely on your friends who work at
local restaurants to give you free food. Utopia is one of your favorite places because you
are friends with most of the people that live there. You like the name for some reason.
Perhaps it really is a Utopia? Maybe it’s some sort of haven in disguise. It is in a way.
John was saying just the other day how it was a place where kids can work, make money,
make new friends, and make dreams come true.

You recall the story John told you about your other friend Chris, and how his
dream was to smoke up in booth 41 in Utopia. They told him to bring supplies, and after
they closed the place for the night, they all smoked up in booth 41. You think about your
own desire to go to the college in this town. You recall with a grin how you sometimes
go to the lectures they have in Weatherill Hall room 200. You like to go up on the small
balcony and listen to the lecture. It’s also too bad that Utopia does not have a way to
make that dream come true.

Just before the lunchtime rush that day, all the friends at Utopia are sitting around
“shootin the shit” and the topic turns to childhood stories. You get a depressed look on
your face as you recall many bleak days of playing in the backyard with no toys. You
had to make do with sticks that fell off of the big dead maple tree in the corner of the
yard. At one point, a long time past in your foggy childhood memory, you remember
mommy and daddy sitting happily under the tree while it was in full bloom in the early
days of a warm May. They played with you and smiled at each other. Then your dad
died at the factory. That changed everything. You remember how much you hated
school after that. You didn’t have many friends, because you kept to yourself.
John goes on to tell a story about when he was little; he and one of his brothers
jumped an Amtrak train to Chicago. Somebody at the table wonders how you can do
that. Don’t they keep the doors closed after everybody is on?

John says, “Of course they do. But sometimes the doors are still open. And the
train is only going like 3 miles an hour leaving the station. So you just run alongside the
train and jump into an open door. And you’re on. Our dad wasn’t too happy to hear
from us once we called him from Chicago. It was funny, we called him and he said
‘You boys better get your asses back here for dinner. And I am not picking you
up. Find another train.’
And that was it. That’s all he said. Needless to say, we found another train quick
as we could and got home.”

You think about how fun it would be to get away from this hellhole of a town by
jumping a train. You start thinking of places to catch trains in Lafayette. There is that
one crappy train that always goes through the middle of town. Those tracks go through
your neighborhood, just down the street. It’s a supply train though, and you wonder if
it’s easy to jump one of those. You grab your book that you are reading and leave.

“See ya later Greg. We’ll be hangin out here after we close tonight if you want to
stop by”

“Right, bye John”

On your walk home, you start to think of the dorm rooms that some of your
friends live in. You cannot understand for the life of you how they can do it. All your
life, you have had your bedroom, and it is the same size of some double rooms.
Especially the rooms in Cary Quad. You compare the size of your closet to their rooms.
They’re about the same. The furnishings in your room at home are very sparse.
You sit down at your desk and look at the three books on your desk you have
stolen from the library. Your desk is a solid-core door, laid down across two stacks of
cinder blocks. You think back to when you were walking along the railroad tracks, and
you happened upon this door. The bottom edge was broken, but it was still workable.
Perhaps it was the top edge. It is hard to determine these things when the door is not on
its hinges. Which way did it open, to the left or to the right? You sawed off the bottom.
It makes a nice solid desk. The only downfall is that the grain shows through when you
write on it. You have to write on top of a stack of paper. Or in a notebook.
Notebooks are your latest thing, ever since your friend Amanda got her job at
Osco. She steals one for you every month or so. It’s just one 150 page spiral bound
notebook. Nobody notices. You like to write about stuff. Mainly stories. Stories about
escapes from prison. Sometimes you like to set it in the future, so that the prisoner has to
dodge lasers and other cheesy sci-fi devices. The stolen library books that occupy your
desk and the floor of your room are good inspirations for your stories.
The books on your floor are splayed open, often with pages folded in half under
the weight of the book. They look like a flock of dead birds. The books that you can see
that aren’t covered in clothes. The three on your desk are your favorite ones. They are
very worn copies of 1984 by George Orwell, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

You decide to distract your senses while you turn over your train plan in your
mind. You turn on the dirty black Panasonic black and white television on your dresser.
You got it at Goodwill. On half price day. It only cost you $7. It was marked down
from $15.00. They round down on half price day. Nice folks there. You sit on your
scantily covered twin. You prop your back against the wall and pad it with a pillow.
You think it would be quite nice to ride a train out of here. Those tracks run northeast
and southwest. It would be ideal to catch a train going to the southwest.
You envision the train ride in your head. You would be gone for some time.
Perhaps it would be smart to pack some sort of food package? You would need a
container to hold water. The trains probably don’t stop very often. You would need a
jug. Perhaps an old milk jug would work just fine. The one in your refrigerator is almost
empty. You go to the kitchen to pour yourself the last glass of milk. You look in the
cupboards for some food to take. A box of macaroni and a banana are all you can find.
You look back at your mom laid out on the couch. The couch has a prominent
sag in its frame from her body perpetually occupying it. You can see the sag from here.
The sunlight makes a glare on the television. Mom does not like that. So she draws the
curtains very tightly, and tries to wrap them around themselves in the middle to try to
fight back every photon of glorious warm sunshine. She is watching Days of Our Lives.
Her eyes seem unblinking. You stare. Your eyes dry out, and you have to blink. Damn.
You didn’t see her blink, but she could have blinked when you blinked. The death of
your mother is not a new idea to you. It would be much easier to live here without her.
You wouldn’t always have to tell her to go to bed when you got home late from lounging
with your friends. The eerie blue glow of the television would not light up your room
when you try to sleep. Your friends would stop making fun of her.

“Did you get a job yet?”

The pieces of the shattered silence almost kill the cat walking by your feet to its
empty food bowl. The wet hatred in your voice almost leaves a mark on the far wall.

“Ssh! I can’t miss this part. Marlena is telling Hope about J.T.!”

The cat looks up at you with longing eyes, and squeezes out a meek “Meow.”
You could see it compress its diaphragm to make the noise, and fell deep sorrow at its
protruding ribs. It is a nice cat. Too bad it could not have had a better home.

“Yea Jake, I know, I am going to talk to Jim at the pet store today and see if he
can hook me up again.”

You pick up the cat, and send an angry glance into the family room that could tip
over a cow. She doesn’t care. Even though commercials are on, she still stares fixedly at
the glass screen of her world. A small world. 18 inches diagonal. 155 square inches.
Multiply that by the five channels that we can get on the antennae, and you get a
whopping 775 square inches. You can turn this into 97 cubic inches. Your mothers’ life
can be fit into your backpack. You could carry it around for a while. Then throw it off of
the pedestrian bridge into the Wabash. This idea brings a smile to your face.
“Go get a job damnit. Jake is starving.” you say into the family room, as you pass
into your bedroom, with Jake in one arm, and your milk in the other hand.
You know of a place just down the street where the railroad tracks go by a cul-de-
sac. You make plans to get your package together by tomorrow, and wait for the train.

*

You find a shady spot underneath a nearby tree. You borrow a neighbors
injection molded lawn chair. You open your book, a ragged copy of On the Road by Jack
Kerouac that you stole from the library. Chris at Utopia told you that it was about acid.
So far, you are having a hard time finding the references to the drugs, but it’s a pretty
good book otherwise. The main character travels a lot in this book. He has many an
adventure with his crazy friend Dean Moriarty. Dean seems to have a lot of disrespect
for society. Your favorite part in the book is when Dean and Sal drive from Denver to
Chicago in eleven hours. They were driving about 110 mph in a big Cadillac limo. You
haven’t ever left Lafayette, but you have been known to drive around in other friend’s
cars for weeks on end. Mostly its kids who go to college, and hardly have a use for their
cars because they can walk from the dorms.

*

You hear a clacking, and look over your shoulder. You see the bright light of the
engine down the tracks. You try not to look like you care one way or the other about the
train’s existence until the engine passes, so the conductor doesn’t get any ideas about
you. You look up and see a maroon boxcar with its door cracked open. “Here we go,”
you think to yourself. A strange quote from a stupid movie flashes through your head.
“This is the beginning of the rest of your life.” What does that mean? Isn’t this always
the beginning? Sometimes you think that script writers aren’t thinking when they write
that garbage. It doesn’t make any sense. Isn’t every moment the beginning of the rest of
your life? And after an infinitesimal number of beginnings, it would seem that whatever
makes the beginning so novel, and “beginningish” would start to wear off.
You start running alongside the train. The mass of the thing makes your stomach
do a flip or two. It’s shockingly big; you look down at the massive solid steel wheel
rolling along the track. If you tripped and that thing ran over you, it would cut you in
half, no problem. You look down and see the railroad ties bending slightly under the
huge weight of the railroad car. You throw your backpack through the open door, as
some sort of commitment to forcibly overcome your fear. You keep running, because
you start chasing your backpack now.

You grab the ladder with your right hand, and jump. You swing around, and
manage to land both feet on the bottom rung of the ladder. Once on top of the car, you
walk unsteadily over to the top of the door. You lie down on your stomach, and look into
the car. You can see your green Jansport backpack peeking at you, just outside of the
beam of light entering the car. It seems dead, like it fell from high up, and broke some
bones on landing. You examine the rails underneath your hands. If you grab them just
right, and twist your wrists in a funny way, you can kind of swing into the car. The train
traverses a city block before you finally get yourself into the car. You pick up your
backpack, and stand in the doorway. You look out at the cars backed up on the streets the
train crosses.

You look at the people in the cars. The blank expressions on their faces.
Briefcases sitting next to them on the seats. Just large enough to hold their worlds. They
see the train without seeing it. The train continues, un-stopping, as trains are wont to do.
The city is slowly eaten by the horizon. Nothing left of it but brown plumes of
smoke. You look out over vast cornfields. Your eyes start to adjust to seeing distances
they have never spanned in their lifetime. The world is huge. One farm seems to span
the size of a whole city.

Night comes. You can no longer read your book. The scenery is amazing. It is
astounding in its unique monotony. Vast spaces all filled with so much infinite detail.
You look up to see more stars then you have ever seen in your life. You follow the
cascade of the stars to the horizon, and see a small glow. Thousands of people staring at
their glowing two square foot lives. Catching up on monetarily motivated plots.
Mindless. Careless. They have no idea how beautiful the world is. They only see it
through the 155 square inch glass bubble that has become their eyes and ears. They don’t
even use their own anymore. They don’t see the world. They see it without seeing.
They watch and listen for what to do from their glass worlds, and then blindly chase it to
work. They chase the same thing back home. They dig for it in their gardens. They fight
for it in their lunchtime aerobic classes. They hope to find it in every new box they open
from the mail order catalogue. They hope other people think they have it by looking at
their neighbors’ houses and cars. And you realize, this doesn’t matter. The world needs
to be experienced. It is lonely. It is sad.

In its vastness and its grandeur, it puts any man-made object to horrible shame.
The wide-open spaces. The forests. The mountains. The oceans. So much more
fulfilling in person than in textbook pictures, or television shows. Everybody has lost
touch. But you have come back.

You look at more people, glaring out of their glass prisons at this train, this thing
passing in front of them, making them late to work. And you smile. They don’t know.
And you do.