Leave Out the Tragic Parts

by Dave Kindred

  “I don’t know what it was about Goblin,” she said. “But that kid could take a shit pile and turn it into gold. You want to talk about perfect? Goblin was everyone’s sunshine.”

  “‘Everywhere’s sunshine’?” I said.

  “Everyone’s.”

  “I thought you said ‘everywhere’s sunshine.’”

  “That too,” Aggro said. “Goblin was everywhere’s sunshine.”

  The funeral’s preacher came properly dressed, in blue jeans and bike leathers. He was passionate about Jesus Christ and redemption and heaven. But he didn’t know Jared, and he said nothing he couldn’t have said of anyone in the room. When he finished, he asked if anyone wanted to speak.

  Yes, I would speak. I remembered that day along a creek in a pasture when I refused to get in a picture of my dying father surrounded by his friends and family. In his dying days, I had not been able to tell Dad I loved him. And I had passed on a chance to kneel at his side in that picture and I had lived to regret it. I would speak this time. I would be with Jared one more time. I stood and looked around the room. I saw Lynn and Maggie and Booze Cop and Jeff and Jacob.

  I said, “No offense to my wife, Cheryl, who is at my side here, but when we got married, I was twenty-one years old and I knew nothing. When we had our son, Jeff, I was twenty-two, and I knew nothing then either. But when Jared and Jacob were born, I was forty-seven, and I finally knew something. I knew that life was a miracle, and I knew those boys were proof that miracles happen.”

  Baptist preachers say they start talking and God takes over. They may be right. I had no idea I would say what I said next.

  “Again, no offense to my wife and our son,” I said, “but I know I never loved anyone more than I loved those boys. I loved Jared, and I love Jacob, to use the biblical phrase, with the love that surpasses all understanding.”

  On our trip to Myrtle Beach for the funeral, Cheryl said she didn’t know if she could handle it. She wasn’t sure she could see Jared without breaking down. Once there, she could not see him enough. Before she left his side the last time, her fingers trembling, she touched his beard, ever so lightly. And I kissed his forehead, ever so lightly.

  When Lynn stood at her child’s side and wept, Jacob went to her. “Mom, please don’t cry,” he said. “Jared was all about making people happy.”

  Then Jacob stood alone and talked to his brother. We could not hear him, but we saw the last words. He said, “I love you.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Everyone followed the Harleys’ thunder from the funeral service to a wake at Donny’s Saloon, a bikers’ bar on the edge of Myrtle Beach. A hundred people crowded around the bar and lined up at a buffet table under television screens showing the day’s sports events. Lynn raised a toast in her son’s honor, asking everyone to share a thing he had created. She called out to the rowdy crowd, “Let’s do a ‘Jared shot’!”

  A Jared shot came with broccoli, not alcohol. Conceived over dinner at his mother’s, it was a sprig of cauliflower and a stalk of broccoli slathered with ranch dressing and served in a small plastic cup.

  The small moment moved Jeff to Lynn’s side. Divorced almost twenty years, they had shared custody, and both were involved in their sons’ lives. There was never more than an uneasy truce between them until Jeff nibbled at his Jared shot and told Lynn, “I’m so sorry I was so mean to you for so many years. Let’s be friends.” As young marrieds, they had been motorcycle people. Now they embraced in a bikers’ bar.

  For the first time since October at Jeff’s place, I saw Aggro. Everything she’d ever said about Jared and their life on the road I took as the best information available. We moved to a side of the room, away from the hubbub.

  I said, “Aggro, I’m going to play the devil’s advocate here. I need to know why Jared was in that life. You know as well as I do that people see you all as damaged goods. You’re all from broken homes, you’re running from pain and everyone who caused that pain—parents, preachers, police. What if I said the pain cast darkness over every day and you self-medicate with alcohol and other drugs. What if I called you lost, wasted souls?”

  Aggro had heard that speech before. “I could talk for days,” she said. “I’ll just write you a letter pretty soon, after we’re done with all this.” Two weeks later came the letter. She wrote:

  We’re not lost, we’re not suffering. We ride freight trains for the same reason a major league baseball player plays ball! For the love of the game! It is for the sheer joy of freedom and a love for life. Haven’t you ever done something that was a little crazy, a little scary and amazing and super-fun all at the same time—and then thought, “Man! I wish I could do that for the rest of my life.” We were brave—reckless, dauntless, really—enough to do it! No holds barred, all chips in, ballsy enough to forsake all that Americans hold dear and plunge headfirst into the unknown. THAT’S what riding freight is all about. If we didn’t want to do it, we wouldn’t.

  Your grandson was better than the kid in that movie, Into the Wild. Goblin wasn’t some pseudo-philosopher who didn’t know shit about living. He didn’t keep a journal or wax poetical. He wore his heart on his sleeve. He didn’t have complexities. He was just like every other hobo! He found something he loved and ran with it. We play at the highest stakes in the WORLD! We are the rock stars of the streets. We scavenge, pillage, and ride off into the sunset. Land pirates! We are all flames burning brightly, and some of us are snuffed out, never getting a chance to burn down to an ember.

  Quit asking, “Why, why, why” about Goblin. I can’t tell you, he couldn’t tell you, and neither can any other ’bo. Just like the old cowboys and wanderers of yore, we all have our demons and skeletons in our closets, but we don’t let them define us. Goblin was a great kid and an even better hobo. He could ride hard with the best of us. He wasn’t running from anything! He ran into the arms of life, took it by the horns, and made it his bitch.

  After promising me that letter, Aggro hugged me and said, “Now I’m going to find out what the hell happened to my little brother.”

  She walked over to a woman I didn’t know. What they said, I couldn’t hear. But the body language was clear. Aggro was in the woman’s face. Every time the woman leaned away, Aggro leaned into her, squared up, shoulders back. After two or three minutes, the woman went out to the parking lot. Aggro followed her.

  When Aggro returned, I asked, “What’s going on?”

  “Her story keeps changing.”

  “Who’s ‘her’?”

  “Brooke. From Philly.”

  “What’s she saying?”

  “That she didn’t know what happened that night,” Aggro said.

  “Looked like you weren’t buying it.”

  “No way. Finally, in the parking lot, I got the story.”

  “And what is it?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Aggro said.

  “I’m a grown-up. I can handle it.”

  Aggro told me enough and I learned more.

  Fifteen minutes after I sent the Western Union $100 to him, Jared picked up the money. It was dark on the barren moonscape of Kensington when he returned to Brooke’s discolored row house with its iron-barred windows. Because it was what they did when there was nothing else to do, the five people in the house, including Jared, began drinking. For three days in the Episcopal hospital, doctors had sent morphine, Ativan, and Dilaudid into Jared’s bloodstream. At Brooke’s, he added alcohol’s poison.

  Brooke was in the house along with a couple other people, including one of Jared’s longtime road friends, Pixie. They all were broke—except for Jared, who had my $100. Because he came to the house suffering the unrelenting pain of pancreatitis, someone suggested heroin. Pixie had never seen Jared do any drugs other than alcohol, but on that night the travelers needed/wanted more than booze. Pixie later told friends, “Then everyone fell out. We got sold messed-up bags.”

  It was after midnight when Pixie saw Brooke and Jared unconscious in the living room.
“Someone called 911,” Pixie later said, “but it was already too late for Goblin. We couldn’t bring him back.”

  When I talked with Brooke, she denied suggesting the dope. “Everyone’s wanting to blame somebody, and I’m the one they’re blaming. But it’s just not true. I hadn’t done dope since I was nineteen, and I’m thirty-three now and I wanted it? That’s crazy. I’d told everyone no dope in my house.… I can’t blame anyone. Jared was a good guy, but he was also an adult and could make his own decisions. If he wanted to take dope, no one forced him. He had been talking about it for a while only because he was in so much pain, he couldn’t take the pain anymore.”

  Twelve days after Jared’s death, upset by the confrontation with Aggro at the wake in Myrtle Beach, Brooke sent a text to Lynn. It read, in part:

  I’m sorry you are going through so much pain. But I need a break. I came all the way down to the funeral to pay respect to my boyfriend who I loved dearly. But I got yelled at by 12 people I don’t even know, blaming me and saying I was lying. Yes, that night was blurry for everyone. But I took care of Jared. I did everything I could to make him safe. I brought him into my home, fed him, and did everything I could to ensure his well-being. I loved him and I wouldn’t do that for just anyone. I was with him at the hospital every day with my friends, not his friends, trying to get him to go to detox/rehab. I dropped a lot of my life because I cared about him so much so. So if those people can’t see that, they are just a piece of shit. I’m sorry, but none of them were there for him.

  Neither Maggie nor Aggro was in Philadelphia that night. They believed Jared had fallen in with people who didn’t know how to help him. “Somebody had to have persuaded Jared to do dope,” Maggie said. “If you lined up big piles of every drug on a table, cocaine, weed, meth, heroin, crack, molly, and said, ‘Take your pick,’ Jared would have said, ‘Naw, gimme my vodka.’” Aggro said, “It wouldn’t have happened if I was there. I’d have said, ‘Here’s eight ibuprofen, take ’em.’”

  Jared’s death was first attributed to “chronic alcoholism.” Toxicology reports later cited “drug intoxication.” Lynn knew that Jared’s body likely had reached its limits of recovery from pancreatitis. She asked the Philadelphia pathologist the only question that mattered to her. She told him her son had been in pain for years. In his final moments, was he in agony?

  The pathologist, Aaron Rosen, said no. When Jared lost consciousness that night, he would have been in no pain. He would have felt good.

  “So my child went to sleep,” Lynn said, knowing it to be true and finding in that truth a kind of peace, “and he will never be hurt again.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  I went to Mount Airy the month after Jared’s funeral. I sat with Maggie in her mother’s little living room, three or four steps from the stairway to the attic bedroom she had shared with Jared. We talked for three hours. She was bright and sober and focused, and we talked about dogs and cats and many things. We left the house to see Mount Airy. We drove past the Red Barn and past the Earle. We had a hamburger at Barney’s Cafe, and we coaxed a tourist to take a photo of us by the Andy and Opie statue. How I wish it had worked for Maggie and Jared, for Maggie, tiny, gorgeous Maggie, had known Jared at his best and his worst, and she wanted to be with him always.

  Of course I loved Maggie, why wouldn’t I? Jared had loved her. But after 2014, I lost track of her as I struggled in the reporting and writing of this book. In December 2015, my wife suffered a major stroke and I wrote nothing for almost two years. On getting back to work, my first order of business was to find Maggie. In the winter of 2016, she did a Facebook post of Dixie curled up on a bed, with the caption: “Dixie Dog is back in Texas and loving the home sweet home I made for us. Hard work pays off.” She was in Austin.

  She had passed through the city in her train-hopping years and always liked it. Now she had a job—$12 an hour washing dishes at a Tex-Mex restaurant. She also had an apartment and a car. It was close to the real-world living that she and Jared once had thought might be theirs. By the time we met up in the fall of 2017, Maggie had been in Austin a year. It was, she said, “the longest I have stayed anywhere in more than nine years.”

  Maggie was twenty-seven years old. The day we talked in Walnut Creek Park, she looked strong and healthy, though much thinner than when I’d seen her last. She had outlived maybe two dozen of her road dogs, and now she thought she might outlive the Maggie she had been, the Maggie who grew up in New York City partying her ass off, the Maggie who had grown accustomed to thinking of vodka by the half-gallons as all in a day’s fun.

  She said she was sober for the first time since she left Mount Airy as a teenage parolee from a detention center. She was using no alcohol, no other drugs, and had been admitted to a city drug rehab program. Even the thought of drinking, she said, now made her sick to her stomach: “I can’t tell you the last time I had a drink.” More important, she said, “I’ve dropped my I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude.”

  She now cared about things that once didn’t matter. Her mother, for one. They had reconnected in Jared’s time, first through Maggie’s drive from Houston to North Carolina with Jared almost certainly dying in the car’s back seat. Now, on her own in Austin, Maggie discovered that she was not alone after all; her mother bought her the car and helped with rent. After ten years and more of not giving a fuck whether the sun came up in the morning, Maggie now made each day a challenge. She told me, “I’m writing. You wouldn’t believe it, but I am. I want to write and make money at it.”

  What I’d read of her stuff told me she had a distinctive way with language and a feel for the rhythm of a story. But the distance is great from ambition to reality. Could she ever be a writer? I knew the answer to that question would be found in the answer to another: Could she defeat addiction?

  On December 8, 2017, on what would have been Jared’s twenty-ninth birthday, Maggie did a Facebook post:

  “Yer my sugarplum, pumpdee dee ummp dee umppp kin, yer my sweetie pie… and I want you to know that I love you so and ill always be right heeere… that’s why I sing these songs to you… because you are sooooo dear!!!” All the nights you sung that song to me, more than I can count. And on the nights I feel like I wont make it or even just cant sleep I replay those memories, on nights that are going along just fine I sing it then too… along with a thousand other memories. I’m still close behind. Happy barrrfffday my goblin king. I miss you rotttssss and rotsss and I love you rottts and rottts. Gobledegook. Boop boop. “Ridiculous nation station. Can you imagine imagining” Not a day goes by. A year ago, remember, I was on a badass high wall grainer riding through Virginia on yer birthday and you were in my pocket—your ashes that Mama Tiger gave me—with vodka in my other hand. And for the first time in a long time I felt content. I miss you so much my love. My promise is still up, the world is still ridiculous nation station, and I still miss you. I know your watching over all of us and keeping us well and safe, I love you, happy birthday sea turtle!!!!

  She said goodbye with haunting words.

  See you soon.

  TWENTY-THREE

  On a spring morning in 2014, I met Aggro near the central fountain in Chicago’s Grant Park. Our meeting followed closely on the arrest of three train-hoppers for a murder in California.

  Reports of that killing had moved on the road dogs’ grapevine to Jared and Maggie in Mount Airy. The victim was a nineteen-year-old college student. John Alpert had told his family he was going to the Roseville train yard to try a great adventure, train-hopping. His family last heard from him on March 13, 2013. Two months later, his body was discovered by a creek near a Roseville hop-out spot. The cause of death was blunt force trauma.

  Aggro told me she knew the three people arrested. She said a detective had called her. In his investigation he had come across her phone number. That was all he wanted, she said, nothing more, a routine call. I had no reason to think otherwise.

  Aggro was in Chicago only for the day. She wanted to find a railroad
yard where she could catch out to Minneapolis. We drove from Grant Park out to Blue Island and around to Bensenville. Finally, giving up on a freight, I delivered her to a bus station downtown.

  “Be safe,” I said.

  “I’m glad you didn’t say ‘goodbye,’” she said. “Saying ‘goodbye’ is like saying you’ll never see that person again. Out here, that happens all the time.” She remembered Jared’s reaction when he saw a friend, Tim Slade, for the first time in months. “He was just so excited. That’s how he always was with seeing people he knew. No matter if they were his best friends or just acquaintances, he was always happy to see people still alive.”

  He was always happy to see people still alive. Said so matter-of-factly she might have been saying he was happy to see people wearing shoes. Death was a fact of life out there. Michael Stephen guessed that Jared, in five years, had called to report the deaths of thirty travelin’ kids. As we walked to the bus station, Aggro said her only worry about dying was who would take care of her dog, Tobias. “He’d just be curled up against my dead body,” she said.

  She hefted a mammoth backpack onto her thick shoulders and walked in the night’s rain to Union Station. She would catch a Megabus to Minneapolis. At her side, Tobias.

  Less than three months later, on July 1, I saw a news story out of Roseville, California.

  4TH SUSPECT ARRESTED IN TRAIN-HOPPING MURDER

  A fourth suspect in the beating death of 19-year-old John Paul Alpert was arrested Sunday in Washington, just days after Roseville police announced a warrant for the suspect’s arrest. According to Roseville Police Spokeswoman Dee Dee Gunther, 28-year-old Charity Ann Williams was arrested Sunday.…

  Earlier this year, Laura Kenner, Edward Anauo, and Jules Carrillo were arrested and charged with Alpert’s murder. As detectives continued to investigate the case, they recently obtained probable cause to arrest Williams.