The Weapon of Young Gods #6: Last Train Leaving The Abyss

I wake up with a stiff neck and sore shoulders as the train pulls into Stockton. The stale air inside the car is shot through with the sweaty reek of many grubby travelers, including myself. For a second I consider stepping outside for a refresher, but then I remember that I’m marooned for the moment in one of California’s many wretched armpit-cities and instead shift my weight and try to ignore the uncomfortable olfactory overload.

Previous Episode

Soundtrack (mp3): ‘Last Train Leaving The Abyss’ by Low Tide

It isn’t too long, however, before I’m colossally bored all over again, and I’m not really looking forward to keeping my brain occupied for the rest of the trip as I duck down to grab my headphones, which had fallen on the floor while I slept. When I sit up again, though, I don’t even press the ‘play’ button, because the first thing I see makes me laugh out loud, and the whole terrible weekend in Chico begins to evaporate away.

My old friend Colin Dawson is gracelessly struggling down the aisle with a heavy bag in one hand and his guitar case in the other, and his brother Ben is stumbling along behind under similar burdens. Colin hears my wry chuckles and looks up, and his whole face erupts in glee.

“Ah shit, Ben,” he quips, “look who we’ll be imprisoned with all the way to L.A. this time.”

Ben peers around his brother’s chunky frame and lets out a loud, harsh “Ha!” of his own, scaring a middle-aged man to his left. “Derek! Wow, man!”

I smile back. The rest of the trip instantly looks a lot less lonely and boring. I get up and help Colin stow his guitar case and then do the same for Ben as Colin tries to fit his bag up top too. “What the hell are you two doing here?”

“Us?” Colin replies evenly. “Ben and I have been at our folks’ all weekend. We’re just cruising back to SoCal, dude. Been sleeping on floors for a few months, but otherwise no worries.”

“Oh- oh yeah,” I say. I totally forgot that their parents live around here in some Gold-Rush-era backwater town. “Cool. That’s cool.” I’d met Colin back in our junior year of high school, when we were both stuck doing a project for English class during Super Bowl Sunday. We’d gotten ourselves hopelessly wasted and had a hell of a time enjoying the alarming similarities between Heart of Darkness and the Dallas Cowboys, before reeling up Crown Valley Parkway to a mutual friend’s house for even more chemically shameful degradation. Our project got a C minus, but Colin and I were pretty tight from then on. His family moved away up north during our senior year, though, and I’d only met up with him a few times when he managed to visit Orange County.

“We got on back in Sacramento,” says Colin, slumping into the seat next to me while Ben slouches over both seats across the aisle. “We were, like, two cars up or something, but we had only just sat down when some lady came back to the seat behind us with her screaming baby, and we couldn’t handle that shit for very long, you know?”

The train rumbles to life and begins grinding away toward Modesto. “And you had to lug your gear down two cars just to find seats?” I ask, astonished. “It wasn’t that crowded when I got on in Chico.”

“Chico?” they say, simultaneously flummoxed. “What were you doing up there?”

“Nothing I wanted to stay awake and remember,” I reply. “I’ve been asleep for, like, the last four hours.”

“Damn,” says Ben. He pushes his limp sandy-brown hair out of his eyes, takes off his natty flannel, and stuffs it behind his head as a pillow.

“But why Chico, dude?” presses Colin, who dismisses my ‘it’s a long story’ protest with a snort. “We have almost all day and night, Derek. Hey, how about this- you tell us about your weekend and we’ll tell you exactly how we plan to storm L.A., rock the charts and conquer the world!” His smirk barely covers an uncharacteristically (as I remember) childlike enthusiasm.

“Fine,” I relent, and offer up the least-melodramatic description of my horrible weekend, a cruel and butchered revision in which I make no stupid mistakes and Lisa has mutated into the hideous metaphysical spawn of Courtney Love and Tammy Faye Bakker. The Dawson brothers squirm and shudder at all the right moments, and I make a mental note to re-tell this version every time I have a sympathetic audience in the future. It’s actually lots of fun, and I only feel a little guilty at how easily the last three days’ tension uncoils from my psyche and simply falls away.

“That is way, way too weird, man,” laughs Colin. “I’m like, astounded or whatever that you made it out of there in one piece.”

“Weeeeelll…,” I drawl sheepishly, “I did leave, like, scattered bits of my soul. There’s also been other shit that hasn’t made life easy, either.” I begin to relate a more complete picture of the last six chaotic months- the family fights, the lost soccer scholarship- but I can see that the Dawsons are less interested, furtively glancing at each other in mildly empathetic amazement, and before I get too involved in more of the “Derek and Lisa” soap-opera backstory, I realize it’s time to stop, and voluntarily cut myself off.

“…and then she said…Nah, fuck it, I’m tired of rehashing all this crap. Sorry guys- I’m just not into dwelling on past mistakes too much, you know?”

“Totally,” says Colin, with undisguised relief. His face brightens further. “Hey, I guess that means it’s my turn, right?”

“Yeah dude, but I will not be held responsible for any pants-pissing excitement on your part simply because everything that happened to me stinks of shame.”

“No way Derek, nothing like that.” Colin hangs an arm over his buzzed pate, a goofy, orangutan-like gesture that I nonetheless recognize as his way of donning a thinking cap. “I was exaggerating before anyway. All we’ve actually done so far is record some demos and play a few shows as a duo.”

“Those were a big deal!” Ben chimes in. “They loved us at Cooper’s, Derek.” His earnest expression is almost indignant at his brother’s suddenly casual descriptions of their recent musical escapades.

I think Colin notices this too, and he nods in concession. “Well, yeah, that one went well, and I guess the Nevada City radio show had its moments, too.” He looks out the window at the endless expanse of California farm country zooming by. “We have three or four really good songs and a shitload of covers, and if we can find someone else to get in this thing, we could actually try to get an even better live act together- be a real band, you know?” He sounds confident but looks skeptical.

“Why would that be so tough?” I ask, then, before either Dawson can reply, the solution envelops me like a warm bath. “I.V.!” I blurt. “That’s it, that’s what you guys should do.” They look quizzical so I keep going. “Isla Vista is, like, the most fertile place for bands these days. I mean, everyone and their dog in I.V. is part of a band, and UCSB is like, right there, you know? Screw L.A.; you guys should just stop at school with me on your way to OC and hang out for a while. We could, um, go to some shows or whatever, and… and just fuckin’ take it in, right?”

I know next to nothing about bands or shows or anything about any music scene in Santa Barbara- I’d been so wrapped up in soccer bullshit and Lisa’s melodrama and everything that I hadn’t actually ventured out for months into the town I now called home- but it occurs to me that I may want some friends in tow if I start to subject myself to the various social hazards offered up by the little student ghetto I plan to live in after my year in the dorms is up. For some reason I think Colin realizes my ignorance and he will be a tougher sell, so this whole time I’ve been looking more at Ben, who is curling his thick, fuzzy eyebrows in another typical Dawson mannerism as he focuses on his brother’s reaction.

Anything Colin might say in reply, though, is interrupted by the presence of the daffy old Amtrak conductor. “Excuse me boys,” he says genially, but with a perceptible hint of authortity, “…but some of the folks in the car have requested that I ask you three to keep it down.”

I glance at Colin, but he’s too busy giving stink-eye to the same man that Ben had frightened earlier, who is hiding behind a copy of Newsweek and trying to pretend we don’t exist. Ben seems about to explode in snide protest, but I decide it’s a good idea to decamp somewhere else anyway and address the conductor.

“No problem. We were just about to go down to the lounge anyway, weren’t we, gentlemen?”

The Dawson brothers snap their eyes on me, surprised, but say nothing and slowly get themselves together for a trip downstairs to the lounge car. The conductor nods to me in approval before returning to the front of the car, like I showed some kind of adult maturity instead of more of the same Derek-patented passive-agressive behavior I excel at. Once he’s gone, I get simultaneous “what the fuck?” looks from Colin and Ben, but I feel like the abyss has long since fallen behind me, and I’m ready to take control of my surroundings for a change.

We slump down the narrow stairway, and end up spending most of the remaining trip there, just shooting shit about music and comparing notes on the treacherous female psyche. I milk it for all I can, cause there’s still a world of shit waiting for me at school, but that’s more than six hours away, and it can fucking wait.