Leave Out the Tragic Parts

by Dave Kindred

  I spoke with a Roseville reporter, Scott Thomas Anderson, as he worked on a story about the woman I knew as Aggro.

  “She was smart, articulate, insightful, self-confident, and unafraid,” I told him. “I’m stunned and saddened.”

  The reporter said he knew no details about Aggro’s alleged involvement in the murder. He suggested, probably from conversations with the local police, that the beating happened because the neophyte Alpert committed some “breach of etiquette” that angered the veteran train-hoppers. They then left him unconscious. Under California law, that would be first-degree murder based on “callous disregard for life.”

  Early in 2018, after the other three defendants pleaded guilty and after insisting she wanted to go to trial, Aggro finally pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to fifteen to thirty years in prison.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  On May 12, 2014, Cheryl and I made our second trip to Myrtle Beach. We returned for Jacob’s graduation from the Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics. He wore a dark suit, gray shirt, and blue tie. He had waxed his mustache and carefully fashioned its tips into curlicues. He was by God beautiful.

  He sat with ten other graduates on a dais before a small crowd of family and friends at the PIA offices. In the aviation mechanics classrooms, he had earned all As and Bs. He had passed exams on airframe and power plant mechanics. That morning he had done the final orals to become a Federal Aviation Administration–certified mechanic. He was proud of his achievement and particularly proud to have persevered.

  “There was one semester I had to skip, and Mom told me that most people, when they lay out a semester in college, they never go back,” he said. “So I said, ‘No way, fuck that. I’m going back, I’m finishing.’ Then, the last semester, which began two days after Jared died, it was hard. It wasn’t the challenge intellectually. It was keeping my mind off things.”

  Never a good student, Jacob had attended his high school graduation reluctantly, just glad to be done. He had dropped out of a local community college after one semester. Until the two years at PIA, he was no less a wanderer through life than Jared had been.

  “Even sitting up there, waiting during the ceremony,” Jacob said, “I thought, They’re not going to call my name. Weird, I knew I had graduated. But it was still a lot of being nervous. It didn’t seem real. It wasn’t that I thought it would never happen. At the start, maybe, I didn’t think I could actually do it. And then I did it. I was walking up to get my FAA certificate.”

  Once, Jared had kept track of Jacob’s progress in school and joked about Jacob’s “big-ass house” with a room in it for him. On graduation day, with his FAA certificate on his bedside table, Jacob told me that story again. I had come to his room at his mother’s house to say to him what I had never been smart enough to say to his brother.

  I had known only the broadest outlines of what addiction meant. Of how it happened, what it did to a person’s brain, I knew nothing. Now I knew more than I ever wanted to know. I could not come to Jacob’s graduation—his entry into a life with direction—without telling him what I had learned in moving from naivete to an understanding of addiction. No need to tell Jacob that his brother was an alcoholic; he knew that. But I needed to have this conversation. I had failed to say the cold, hard truth to Jared when it might have made a difference. Damned if I would fail to say it to Jacob.

  “Jared was an alcoholic,” I said. “He was addicted to alcohol. Do you know, Jacob, how addiction works?”

  He sat silent.

  “You drink vodka, your brain makes you feel good. You keep drinking, you need more and more to get the same feel-good. Pretty soon, and I say this hoping I scare the shit out of you, you drink enough and you’re dead.”

  Jacob made an odd analogy. “Yeah, like when you use too much Chapstick. The body produces moisture naturally. But if you use Chapstick all the time, the body stops producing it and you have to use it all the time. Like that.”

  “Except using Chapstick doesn’t kill you,” I said.

  We sat in his bedroom at his mother’s house. To be certain I said everything I wanted to say, I had made notes on a legal pad. I left the page with Jacob:

  1. Addiction is a family disease.

  2. You are at risk.

  3. The disease came to own Jared.

  4. It literally rewires your brain.

  5. For an alcoholic/addict, logical thinking can become impossible.

  6. The addict thinks of the substance as a nutrient. He not only wants it, he demands it, he needs it.

  7. You must know the signs of addiction in order to ask for help.

  8. Ask for help. It’s there.

  9. But know this. You must ask the instant you suspect addiction. If Jared could have asked for help, he would have.

  10. David Sheff: “Addiction is not a character flaw, not a moral failing. It’s an illness and it can be treated. Ask for help.”

  “Jared said the right thing when he told your mother he’d wash away booze,” I said. “But he was no longer in control. The substance was. The vodka was. The addiction was. He once owned the substance, but then the substance owned him.”

  I talked about my father’s own killing addiction—to cigarettes. “From the time he was twelve, my Dad smoked. All through his life, World War II, after, he smoked until he got lung cancer and died. He was only fifty-one, Jacob, fifty-one—and I’m twenty years older than that now. I never smoked, maybe because our sports coaches told us not to. But I never once thought of smoking after Dad died. I was scared of smoking.” And I said, “Jacob, be scared of drinking.”

  That day he drove us to the airport for our flight home. He hugged me, kissed Cheryl on the cheek, and said, “I’m so happy you came.”

  “Be safe, take care of yourself, come to Illinois and stay with us anytime,” I said.

  As he drove away, Jacob waved and called out, “Love you both.”

  He was gone before I whispered, “Love you, boy.” I whispered not to Cheryl and not to myself. I whispered the words to both boys that I once held in the palms of my hands.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Nine months after Jared’s death, Lynn and I went to New Orleans for Halloween. It was his favorite city and his favorite time. The idea was to walk where he had walked and see what he had seen. She brought along a vial of his ashes to be spread on the wooden steps of a wharf at the Mississippi’s edge. They were ancient steps where the Scurvy Bastards had been conceived. Lynn believed that if we were there, on those steps, in New Orleans, on Halloween, Jared would be there with us.

  We stopped and sat on the sidewalk outside the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurant at 429 Decatur Street. We sat with Lyndzy and another of Jared’s pals, Shamus, until a policeman, at 10:03 p.m., saw the four of us and said, “You two know better,” meaning Lyndzy and Shamus knew better than to sit on the sidewalk, which can get a travelin’ kid a ticket in NOLA, and they should move along and take the old folks with them.

  “Where to now?” Shamus asked us.

  “The steps,” Lynn said.

  We walked north. Everywhere along the street, Jared was there.

  We stopped at a red door alongside the Big Easy Daiquiris and pizza shop, the door described by Christine Maynard in her piece about Sarafina Scarlet, the singer with a baseline of grit who sat on the stoop with her guitar. The door opens to a passage leading to 907A, Christine’s old apartment, where Jared had slept on her Italian leather couch, where they had gone to the roof to see parades and sunsets. I wanted to go in. But the door was locked. A mailbox was stuffed with envelopes postmarked months earlier.

  We passed a cream-colored building, the Jax Brewery where Jared and Puzzles danced on the rooftop, where Jared slept on gravel alongside railroad tracks at the back of the building. Past Jackson Square, where Jared arranged Sarafina’s marriage to Patrizio, and we walked through the Café du Monde, where Jared and Stray Falldowngoboom scooped up beignets left by tourists. We stopped at a fountain to talk with Dice. He had l
ost an arm and leg rescuing his dog from under a moving train. He knew Jared as Goblin. “Beautiful kid,” Dice said. “He introduced me to my girlfriend, Fluff.” Booze Cop was next to Dice. “This fountain,” Booze Cop said, sitting on its edge, “Goblin and me used to scoop out change to buy the next drink.”

  We met a bulky guy named Dragon. Dragon, who said he was thirty-four years old and had done two tours of Army duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dragon, melancholy on this night: “Losing too many friends. Couple dozen this year. If it’s not OD’ing, it’s booze. If it’s not booze, a train. If not a train, cops.” He asked what Lynn and I were doing in New Orleans. “Just wanting to do what Jared did,” I said, and Dragon asked, “You smoke weed? Goblin woulda made Bob Marley proud.”

  Dragon led us to the wharf. Its steps were massive, with treads three feet wide and thirty feet from end to end. They were wide, thick wooden beams embedded in a levee descending to the river. How massive the trees must have been that gave up those steps. Steps made to last forever.

  “Here’s where Jared was,” Lynn said. She sat on the right side of the steps near a waist-high piling. A thick rope was threaded through that piling to the next one down. Lynn had seen a photograph of travelin’ kids on the steps. She had seen her child on that spot. She said, “Here’s where we’ll do the ashes tomorrow.”

  Walking back along Decatur Street that night, we watched two police officers dealing with six home bums in various stages of drunkenness, some passed out, everyone wasted, all gathered in a tiny green space around a statue of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, an early governor of Louisiana and the founder of New Orleans in 1718.

  “You guys want to have a better time in New Orleans?” one cop said to the bums. “Stop getting fucked up! I don’t want to bother you, but get up, put your pants on, take a walk right now.”

  He was ten minutes into writing tickets when I asked, “What do you cite them for?”

  “It’s called ‘disturbing the peace by tumultuous behavior,’” he said.

  “But you don’t arrest them?”

  “God, no,” the cop said. “If we arrest them drunk or on drugs, we have to take them to the hospital. And the nurses have more power than God. We’d have to stay there while they run medical exams, and we’d have to do paperwork out our asses. We’d be there all night.”

  The other cop, older than his patrol partner, asked Lynn and me, “What are y’all doing here?”

  Lynn explained.

  “Let me ask another question,” the cop said. “You don’t have to answer. You look like good people. But your son, your grandson, what happened that he was out here?”

  Of course he asked that question. Everyone asks how he came to live out there. At breakfast the day of Jared’s funeral, Mark, a friend of forty years, had asked Jeff that question. “No idea,” Jeff said, “none at all.” To the cop in New Orleans, Lynn said, “I don’t know.” And the cop nodded, for if anyone knows that life is a riddle never solved, a cop walking mean streets at midnight knows it.

  Back in our hotel, Lynn and I talked into the morning hours. It had been a boy’s lifetime and more since she stood at my desk in Georgia and asked if it would be okay to marry my son. That day I asked her for twins tomorrow. She gave them to me. I loved her for that then and loved her for it now, in New Orleans, along the Mississippi River and on Decatur Street and in Jackson Square, all the places where we felt Jared’s presence.

  At last she had enjoyed a day when everything and everyone reminded her of her child.

  She said, “It was so great to come here. I feel so much better. Now I know he had fun here.”

  “And how do you know that?” I said.

  She laughed. “Because I’m having fun here.”

  On a bright Halloween afternoon, we returned to the steps along the Mississippi. Lyndzy was there with Booze Cop, Tammy, Shamus, Dragon, and maybe two dozen other travelin’ kids. Some came with guitars, one with a washboard and spoons, everyone filthy and stinking and happy to be where they fit. And at 4:57 p.m., Lyndzy shouted to the crowd on the steps, “Everybody, we’re here to honor Goblin. We’re here with his mama, Mama Tiger, and who else’s mama would come here to be with us? We’re gonna spread some of Goblin’s ashes here on the steps and…”

  Not everyone noticed Lyndzy talking. Not everyone fell into a respectful silence in memory of Goblin. Maybe they just didn’t know how to act on a solemn occasion. So Dragon instructed them, “Shut the fuck up!”

  Then Lyndzy poured Jared’s ashes from a vial onto the step where he once sat. As a breeze caught the falling, floating stream of ashes and spread them away from the spot on the wharf step, someone said, “Pour beer on ’em to keep ’em there,” and someone else said, “No, Goblin would hate that, wasting beer,” and laughter fell on the boy’s ashes, and I believe Jared was there, laughing.

  EPILOGUE

  I miss Jared. The phone rings, I want it to be him.

  Now I know some of what happened and enough of the why. I learned the geography of his life on the road and the ferocity of his addiction. Did I, in telling his story, cut Jared some slack? Absolutely. I believed what Ash Dogskin believed. The Lakota Sioux called Jared “my heyoka,” the tribe’s sacred clown empowered to heal wounds, psychic and physical. When the soundtrack of Jared’s life was the nihilistic roaring of freight trains, I also heard songs of redemption. They sang of a joyful animation and goofy poetry that distinguished Goblin from the crowd. Everywhere’s sunshine… Naked girls, Grandpa, and they’re running through the forest, naked… The cute little flirt… The happiest guy I’d ever seen…

  A grandfather knows a grandson’s life moves away from his. But I had never imagined Jared gone, let alone gone to a place where every question brought back dark answers. Until too late, I did not recognize his pain; by the time I understood an alcoholic’s despair, I could not help him. But I so loved the boy that I could not let stand the idea that I had lost him forever. To know what happened, to know the answers, even the darkest of them, was to hold him near again.

  All these months becoming years, I have looked at passing trains. At a crossing gate, I told Cheryl, “See that car with the V-shapes? It’s a grainer. On each end, that’s the porch. Jared rode there.” The train shook the ground under us. Cheryl said, “My God.”

  I went to the local hardware store for nails. One aisle over, Carhartt overalls.

  In Augusta, Georgia, on my way to the Masters, I drove past a couple dozen CSX freight cars sided out. CSX, Jared’s favorite line.

  Our Walmart has a bank where I did Western Union money transfers to Jared. Even a year later, the man behind the counter, expecting to make another transaction, made eye contact with me.

  The coroner’s office in Philadelphia returned Jared’s belongings to his mother. The package included his backpack. The backpack included his Carhartt bib overalls. In a pocket of the bibs, the hugs-and-kisses seashell.

  Off the road, trying to be sober, Booze Cop found a job.

  Stray operated rides at a traveling carnival. She got married.

  The girl named Bird sent a note: “When I found out Goblin was gone, I cried in the street like a little girl and I didn’t care who fucking saw. That year, 2014, I rode hard a lot and finally got some work in California and I miss riding right now. So many things I wish I could tell my friend. He would be so happy that I’m doing so good. Haven’t seen CSX in a while, which is really weird for me. I hope next time I’m on a freight that when that metal melody starts to sing me to sleep, I hope he’s riding with me. I miss you, Goblin.”

  Aggro wrote long letters from jail. In the spring of 2018, my friend Patti Parker and I visited Aggro in a California prison. We sat at one of two dozen tables in a sunny visitors’ room. Patti had known only the road dog Aggro of my stories, a young woman she’d seen photographed in an orange jailhouse jumpsuit, her dark hair buzzed into a bizarre cut. Now Patti saw Charity Ann Williams, healthy and vibrant, and called her “beautiful with long, wavy
blonde hair.” A tattoo on her cheek carried Jared’s initials and, in the ink, ashes from his cremation. As part of the rehabilitation process, Aggro was required to tell of her crime; so we heard how it happened and how she used a frying pan and her dog’s food dish to dig a burial spot for young John Alpert along a creek. “I’ve been baptized in here,” Aggro said, “and I’ve prayed for John’s parents.” At age thirty-two, she is in for fifteen to thirty years, with a first parole hearing on February 2, 2027. I asked how much of our conversation I could use in this book. “All of it,” she said. “Tell the whole story, nothing but the story. It’s important for your readers to know what this kind of behavior can lead to—without villainizing the community.” Before we left, we heard in the near-distance a train’s lonesome whistle blowing. Aggro turned her head toward the sound and said, “It put me here, but I love it.” Her voice went soft. “Now I hear it and can’t get to it.”

  In Myrtle Beach, a kitten cried. Lynn had heard the sound in the night and discounted it; morning came, she walked outside. There the kitten cowered against her garage, a tiny thing, a muted calico, gray with orange splotches. Lynn believed fate had delivered the kitten. On the same date, August 3, five years earlier, Jared had allowed Craig AntiHero to do the facial tattoo. Also, Lynn noticed that the kitten had a broken tail. “Like my broken heart,” she said. She had three cats, Sunday, Havana, and Corona—spoiled pets of the sort that had caused Jared to say he would like, someday, to come back as one of his mother’s cats. Now she had four cats because the calico, once in her house, curled up atop a couch, “like she belonged there.” Lynn named the kitten Goblin.

  Lyndzy, Jared’s first romance on the road, married Jimbo, who had been with Jared the day we saw them in Orange. Lyndzy and Jimbo became parents. They named their daughter Kindred.