Tales from the Tracks and Beyond

I showed up on May 17, 1959, and spent the next eighteen years marooned in a beat-up little house on the Southside of St. Louis. Five of us squeezed into two bedrooms and a single, overworked bathroom, where privacy was as mythical as Bigfoot. Every cough, every shout, every suspicious noise carried through the thin walls like we were living inside a giant bullhorn. And if my old man let one rip in the back room, you might as well call FEMA — the whole house needed evacuating.

Why he insisted on staying crammed in that suffocating shoebox of a house remains a mystery. Maybe he liked the feeling of the walls closing in, a weird kind of confinement fetish, or maybe it was just the way he was raised out in the country with his one brother and five sisters, and that was how he saw life. More likely, he simply refused to give in to change and didn’t give a damn about anyone else. That was his superpower: total self-absorption.

My mother—long-suffering, practically saintly—bore the brunt of his moods, and I was his next favorite target. He’s the reason she had a heart attack before forty. We became allies, weathering his storms like two castaways clinging to the same lifeboat, praying each tantrum would blow over without smashing everything in sight.

He was a mechanical guy, all gears and wrenches; I was a sports kid, all balls and bruises. Our worlds never touched. He had zero interest in what I did, and he had zero ability to explain what he did. Trying to talk to him felt like yelling into a well. I never had a real conversation with him — unless it was about something he cared about. He never asked what I was up to, what I cared about, or what I was into. To me, he was always just “the man that lived with my mother.”

At five, I started hoofing it to school — first Oak Hill Elementary, half a mile away, same fifteen kids year after year, one classroom per grade like a low-budget sitcom on repeat for nine years straight. Then Cleveland High: a solid two-mile march each way. There were no buses, only my feet and my thumb. I hitchhiked every day for three years until I scraped together enough money from mowing lawns, raking leaves, and shoveling snow to buy a bike at 13 and a car at 16. At 15, I added busing tables at an Italian restaurant, so I finally could afford a car, which I purchased from my neighbor. It was a year older than I was, and it cost me 150 bucks, but it was glorious and it meant freedom and a vacation from hitchhiking.  

Sticking out my thumb didn’t guarantee a ride; many days I trudged nearly an hour, longer in winter, and even longer if I stayed for an after-school activity and walked home in the dark. After a few miserable attempts freshman year, I gave up on lugging books home; it was just too much. Naturally, that didn’t do wonders for my test scores, grades, or my attitude.

When I turned 18, my Uncle Bob handed me a golden ticket: a union job with the Missouri Pacific Railroad. My father was more excited about the prospect than I was. So after being out of high school for only one month, I was officially an employee of MoPac. I was a Brakeman when out on the rails and a Switchman when in the yards. Just like that, life flipped on its head. From then on, I was on call 24/7/365 — no weekends, no holidays, no “I don’t feel like it today.” The pager went off, you showed up two hours later, no matter if it was noon, midnight, or the middle of a blizzard. Excuses were for the weak and grounds for termination.

My first night on the job was straight-up nightmare fuel. After two weeks of half-assed theoretical classroom “training” in Texas, they threw me into the deep end without even checking if I could swim. Midnight shift, middle of nowhere. Imagine the sketchiest industrial wasteland you’ve ever seen, then multiply it by ten. That’s where I found myself: a monstrous factory belching noxious smoke into the night sky, the air thick with God-knows-what toxins hanging like a poisonous blanket. The only light was a blinking yellow bulb, pulsing slow and sickly like the heartbeat of a dying beast.

Where I needed to go was into the darkness behind that hellhole. So I navigated down a dark alleyway and parked in a pitch-black lot, stumbled out of my car with my lunchbox and lantern like I was going trick-or-treating in Mordor, and headed for a beat-up shack they called “the shanty.” Inside,  a bunch of crusty, grizzled old guys who you’d swear were extras from a prison riot scene were all clustered around one man who looked like a methed-out Santa Claus crossed with a bloated W.C. Fields. I’m no expert on Dante, but if Hell has nine circles, I was definitely somewhere between layers six and seven.

The guy holding court had a beard white as snow, a nose redder than Rudolph’s, and bib overalls that looked like they’d survived the Civil War. He chain-smoked in a way I didn’t know was physically possible— the cigarette never left his mouth. He’d talk out the corner of his lips like Popeye, the ash growing longer and longer until physics seemed to give up, then he’d casually blow it off like it was part of a magic act. I couldn’t look away. The whole scene felt so bizarre, I half-expected David Lynch to step out with a director’s megaphone.

Someone pointed at me like I was the evening’s entertainment and muttered that I was the new kid— the boss’s nephew. Meth-Santa looked me up and down and slurred that I was a good-looking boy and must get a lot of cock. I stood there, stunned. I wouldn’t find out until decades later that in parts of the South, “cock” can mean, well, the opposite of what the rest of the English-speaking world thinks it means. Back then it just sounded like crazy talk, and I refused to play along. Everyone stared at me, nodding like lobotomized zombies, and I had this crystal-clear moment of: What the actual fuck? 

At first, working on the locomotives was a straight-up adrenaline rush. These machines weren’t just big— they were colossal, thunderous beasts that made you feel like you were commanding something out of Greek mythology. People think locomotives are the size of an elephant; try forty elephants stacked like a Jenga tower or one giant blue whale with a bad attitude. A typical road engine clocks in at over 200 tons—more than 400,000 pounds—with engines pumping out around 4,000 horsepower apiece. On the railroad, each of these monsters is called a “unit,” and most trains had several units chained together to make one unstoppable juggernaut, all controlled from either end like a metal centipede.

My job? Direct these mammoths by physically heaving track switches to change direction and signaling forward and backwards, faster and slower, and start and stop to the engineer. Signaling was performed with arms and hands by day and a battered battery-powered lantern by night. I’d ride in the engine cab, then climb down steep metal stairs—often while the train was still moving—to do the real work on the ground. At first, it felt epic, cinematic even, like I was the hero in some gritty industrial Western.

But it didn’t take long for the magic to wear off. The job quickly revealed itself for what it really was: filthy, aggravating, time-devouring, and flat-out dangerous. One wrong misstep and you could lose a foot, a leg, or your life. Everything was coated in black grit and sticky diesel grime, engines belching oily smoke like dragons with indigestion, and clouds of ballast dust hanging in a choking fog. I learned fast that you needed a set of “ruined forever” work clothes: jeans and shirts so saturated with oil and coal dust they’d stand up by themselves if you left them in the corner. And the coal trains? Next-level fuel for night terrors.

We’d leave the rail yards and chug about an hour outside St. Louis, ending up at a sprawling, alien-looking power plant: enormous, harsh, and pulsing with strange blinking lights and clouds of smoke or steam billowing from random stacks like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie. Our mission was to unload between 80 and 120 coal cars — each stuffed with a hundred tons of black rock — into gigantic, yawning metal pits. I’d walk beside the slow-rolling train over the pits of Hades, armed with a giant Allen key the size of a medieval door knocker. Timing was everything: the doors of each hopper had to open precisely when they were over the pit—not a moment early or late—or you’d spill coal onto the apron and risk derailing the entire train.

So there I was: trudging alongside these towering coal cars, waiting for the perfect moment to jam the key into the side of the hopper. One sharp twist and — BAM! — the doors would slam open with a deafening metal-on-metal crash. The coal would hang suspended for a split second, like it was defying gravity before it screamed downward, scraping the hopper walls with a screech that rattled your teeth. Then came the thundering explosion as the coal smashed into the pit, sending up apocalyptic clouds of black carcinogenic dust that swallowed me whole. There was no safety gear, no masks, not even a nod to self-preservation. I’d finish a shift looking like a chimney sweep in a horror movie, hacking up thick black gunk for days. The things we do for a paycheck.

One blazing summer afternoon, I was trudging along in my standard hot-weather outfit: bib overalls, boots, no shirt — classic railroad chic. At one point, I felt something crawling up my leg, and that’s when panic took over. I launched into a full-body freakout, flailing and slapping myself as the intruder made a beeline for the family jewels. I tore my bibs off right there in the middle of the power plant, down to my skivvies, swatting and yelling at what turned out to be a giant water bug the size of a toddler’s fist. Probably harmless, but it felt like a monster at the time. After I caught my breath and my dignity, I stood there laughing half-naked alone in a cloud of coal dust. From that day forward, I taped my pant legs shut every single time I dumped coal. Fool me once.

Over the next couple of months, I ping-ponged between a handful of rail yards scattered across St. Louis, filling in wherever a switchman was needed. When those gigs dried up, I was offered a brakeman run from St. Louis to Jefferson City. It's kind of the same job as a switchman, except you’re on the road, and they put you up in a decent hotel when you’re on the other end out of town. As luck would have it, the very same day my best friends were moving into their dorms, one at UMissouri-KC and the other at Mizzou, I got the call from some random voice in an office somewhere telling me I was laid off. Perfect. Poetic, even. My life’s trajectory and theirs diverged like light through a prism. I’d been working three months and I’d already been laid off twice. It’s a pattern that would continue through my almost ten-year ordeal.

With a nudge (okay, a shove) from my parents, I packed up in three days and moved 120 miles west to Jefferson City, where I got right back on the rails, running routes between there and Kansas City. My job description? Throw switches, scan for hotboxes (overheated wheels that could catch fire or derail a train), and basically do whatever the engineer or conductors barked at me. Radios? They existed, but only in the engines and the occasional caboose, and even then, they squawked unintelligible nonsense like Charlie Brown’s teacher. On the ground, we communicated by hand signals in daylight and lantern streaks at night. It was like learning a whole new silent, cryptic language— charades with life-or-death stakes.

The train rides were marathons, anywhere from 8 to 16 hours of pure unpredictability. If you forgot to pack food, tough luck. I was young, dumb, and perpetually unprepared, so I starved more often than I ate. My coworkers could’ve tossed me a sandwich, but empathy wasn’t exactly standard issue on the road. Back at my drafty, dirt-cheap apartment, I didn’t have a phone. So when my pager screamed, I had to stumble out, drive to the nearest pay phone in the middle of the night, and call in — the message was always the same, “Be at work in two hours.” It’s three a.m., I should be sleeping: do I go back to bed and risk not waking up or do I just stay awake and go without sleep? Nothing like a middle-of-the-night freeze-your-ass-off conundrum to build character.

Out on the job, I always rode as the head brakeman; the senior brakeman (the person with the most seniority) rode in the caboose with the conductor. Best-case scenario? We’d pull a “through train,” which meant we’d make the run with no stops along the way. Worst-case? A “Local.” Those were a special brand of misery: stopping at every small town to swap out cars at businesses, which meant endless hours standing around, trading hand signals, going back and forth in some mathematical Tetris game.

Most trains stretched over a mile long, so communicating from one end to the other required leapfrogging signals down the line, one guy at a time. Timing was everything, and patience and stamina were mandatory. On through runs, we’d hit a midway point where the engineer would slow the train down just enough for me to hop off into the darkness of some lonely stretch of Missouri wilderness. I’d eyeball each car as it crept past like some slow-moving steel beast with secrets—scanning for axle boxes that glowed like pissed-off coals, hoping never to see one;  luckily, I didn’t. They were becoming a thing of the past because new train cars had sealed bearing wheels. Once we hit the train’s halfway point, the train would stop and I’d pull my best circus act and climb through the gap, clambering over couplers big enough to ruin your whole lineage if you slipped.

Then came the slog back up the other side, remembering to look at the wheels but concentrating on each step trying to not break an ankle. The ballast was basically Satan’s gravel—jagged, uneven, just waiting for one weak step to twist your leg into an agonizing dance of regret. I'd walk like I was sneaking across broken glass, muttering prayers to no one in particular.

It was especially obnoxious when the weather decided to hit randomize. Freezing rain, sideways sleet, mood-dampening snow—like Mother Nature was flipping through her Rolodex of punishments and landed on “emotional assault with a chance of hypothermia.” I had a dented lantern in one hand and a creeping suspicion in the back of my skull that this whole setup had been art-directed by a bored, sadistic god with a train fetish and a dark sense of humor. That sense of loneliness and doom still haunts me today.

I got the call at two a.m. Christmas Eve, and it was 23 degrees outside. After crawling out of bed and driving to a pay phone, I finally hopped on the westbound freight at four in the morning. Spent the night freezing and hungry; the heater was dead, and the window had a gap wide enough for Santa to crawl through—if he gave a damn. He was nowhere to be seen. The KC run wasn’t like St. Louis to Jeff City, where they put us in an old but halfway decent, nearby hotel— walking distance to food, shops, signs of life. The kind of place where you could pretend, briefly, that this job wasn’t eating your soul. KC was different. KC was an exile from humanity.

The KC railroad yard was so big, they built a restaurant and dormitory right smack dab in the middle of the yard. You couldn’t walk anywhere, get anything, or see anyone other than railroaders. The accommodations were abysmal, like hitchhiking through a third world country and staying in hostels. The rooms had single beds with no tv and the showers were communal. It was closer to a prison cell than a hotel room. The crew I worked with had somehow disappeared. Some of the regulars had cars or friends or relatives to come pick them up, so I had the entire place to myself, and that was a little rough for this 18-year-old. After I showered and slept, I went to the diner. There was no one around except an older waitress who doubled as the cook. She was pleasant in that quiet, shell-shocked way people get when life’s been rough for too long. She didn’t mind my company. Might’ve even liked it. We sat for hours, talking about everything and nothing. For a while, she made the place feel almost human. Still, it was the worst Christmas of my life. And that includes the years my dad thought it was hilarious to tell me on Christmas Eve I wasn’t getting any presents, just to watch me cry.

Every farmer within a 200 mile radius shipped their grain through the KC yard: corn, soybeans, wheat, you name it; it came through the yards. Thousands of grain hoppers rolled through every day, and a huge chunk of them leaked like sieves, leaving trails of corn, soy, and wheat along all sixty of its tracks. After a few rains, all that spilled grain would start to ferment, filling the air with a gut-churning stench that was part rotting brewery, part rotting corpse. Nature’s own toxic perfume.

But the worst part? The rats. And not just any rats—these were corn-fed, prizefighter-sized rodents, each one the size of a fat raccoon. When we rolled into the yard at night, the train’s headlight would cut through the dark like a searchlight, and I’d watch in horror as the beam swept over thousands of these giant rats feasting on the endless buffet of spilled grain. It looked like the ground itself was undulating and rippling at the same time As we approached, I imagined Moses parting the Red Sea, except instead of water it was a seething ocean of rats. The first time I saw it, I couldn’t help but laugh at the sheer insanity of it– look at all those rats! Then reality smacked me in the head: I was the one who had to climb down the ladder, jump off the engine, and dive into the middle of that writhing, bucktoothed orgy of corn pirates to throw the switches.

This was no joke; the guys who worked that yard full-time didn’t mess around— they wore pistols strapped to their thighs old-west style. Me? I was armed with only a deep, suffocating sense of fear and overwhelming anxiety. I’m not sure if one ever gets used to such conditions; I certainly didn’t. 

One time during the day, I stepped off the engine, and all the rats didn’t run away as per usual. As I bent over and grabbed the handle and started to pull up, the rats just looked at me; they weren’t afraid. As a matter of fact, I think that through all the grain stench, they could smell my fear. I pulled up the switch and then pushed it over, and when the track slid from one side to the other, the “points” of the rails trapped a rat’s tail. The fit between rail points is super tight so the train won’t derail. That rat’s tail wasn’t coming out. Because of the pain and its inability to escape, the rat totally freaked out. It thrashed around like a possessed demon, throwing its body with all its colossal weight and strength until its tail snapped in two. Then it just sat there, frozen, deciding whether to try to kill me or run away and nurse its wounds. For a second, I stood there shaking, half-expecting the floundering rat to come flying my way and go for my throat. I finally came to my senses and rocketed to the engine and flew up the ladder like a Marvel superhero desperate for safety, heart pounding, only to find the engineer laughing his ass off. He thought it was one of the funniest things he’d ever seen. 

Meanwhile, in another plane of existence, one of my best friends was at Mizzou, living his best life—classes, beer, parties, girls. Traveling just 22 miles away felt like stepping through a portal to another universe: his world was warm, bright, and full of possibility; mine was cold steel, coal dust, and existential despair. He was generous enough to share his experiences with me. His dormmates knew me by name, I went to his college parties and sat in on his large classroom lectures. I almost felt like I belonged; I knew I was missing out on a different and better life. Here I was an 18-year-old grease goblin raking in decent money, sure, but every day made me hate my life a little more. I envied his existence, but with my grades, lack of direction, and my family’s unwillingness to contribute, college felt like an impossible dream.

That’s when the obvious struck me: I’d use the railroad’s decent paychecks to buy myself a ticket out. I enrolled at Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO), aka the K-Mart of colleges, because I thought with my C average they’d probably let me in. I had no parental guidance (hell, they’d stopped reading my report cards by eighth grade) and I didn’t really know what I wanted to become in life. I really liked the thought of becoming Johnny Carson or a game show host. So my goal became to work in television. Why TV? Because, unlike working on the railroad, there were lots of beautiful women and I would have a good shot at making big money. I figured even if I didn’t make it to the top, there could still be a place for me that would be a whole lot better than working for the railroad. Those were good enough reasons for me, and no one was saying otherwise, because once I turned 18, I was pretty much on my own.

After a couple of years bouncing between school and work, I ended up working the Poplar Bluff, Missouri to Little Rock, Arkansas route. You’d figure by now I’d have the railroad thing down cold—know the moves, own the job. Truth was, I was still mostly winging it, half-lost and faking the rest. Out there, one stretch of trees was just another green blur, and the soybeans all wore the same face. At night, forget it—everywhere was nowhere. I tried to keep my head down, show up on time, and do what they told me, when they told me. They kept trying to give me more responsibility, but I wasn’t having any of it; this was just a stepping stone to something better. Poplar Bluff was a 90-minute drive from SEMO via all country roads. By this time, I had come to an understanding with the railroad; they could lay me off at any time for any or no reason without any warning, and I, on the other hand wouldn’t give a shit about them. I was only there for a paycheck. So we did a little dance: I’d work enough to keep my seniority, pay for school, and cover living expenses, and they would lay me off whenever they wanted to, which was often.  Sometimes I was able to collect unemployment, which helped while I was going to classes even though I’d have to drive the three-hour round trip once a week to report in. Other times, I’d take a shift on the weekend, sleeping in my van in the Walmart parking lot, waiting for my pager to buzz to avoid the 90-minute drive in the dark.

Once, after not working for over five months, I was on the return freight train from Little Rock to Poplar Bluff. For some reason we didn’t have a caboose, so all four of us were riding the head end—the engineer and conductor on the first unit, me and another brakeman on the second of four units, facing backwards. It was the dead of night, and our job was simple but critical: watch the train behind us for sparks or fire, especially on curves. Our radio was dead, so no communication with the engineer. I was half in a daze, the other brakeman was asleep. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw something—maybe a spark, maybe something bigger. I crossed the unit and nudged the sleeping guy, and got nothing. No way to contact the engineer, who was right there on my side but also seemingly not looking. I hadn’t worked in months and felt totally unqualified to make the huge decision as to what I should do next. My options? Pull the emergency stop valve, known as “Big Hole,” or keep watching. Pulling the valve releases all air pressure from the brake system, slamming on every brake on every car all at once—drastic and potentially disastrous. I just couldn’t do it because I wasn’t confident in what I’d seen, and I didn’t want to deal with the consequences of being wrong. I chickened out. What I should’ve done was grab my lantern and try to signal the engineer to stop, but in the moment that didn’t cross my mind– like I said I wasn’t very good at my job.

I woke the other brakeman and told him to stay awake. He didn’t. I did. A few moments later, the train slammed into emergency stop mode on its own, and shit got wild. A train as long and heavy as this one would take over a mile to stop even in Emergency. We were on a “Main Line”—two parallel tracks usually running between cities. For some reason the Central Control had electronically switched us from one track to the other. Somehow, one of the cars in the middle of the train didn’t get the memo and, “split the switch.” Instead of following the crossover, the errant car stayed on the original track and all the cars behind it tried to follow. Physics didn’t like this one bit. Several cars in the middle derailed, momentum sent the following others crashing into them from behind. Later, I learned cars were piled three-high. Many of the train cars carried ammonia, which leaked so badly that the FBI ordered a nearby small town evacuated.

We were probably going 50 miles an hour, cars weighing hundreds of thousands of tons were flying off the rails in pitch black of night. We didn’t know what was happening until we started slowing down. The cars from the middle of the train forward started rolling over on their sides like dominos. The two units behind us and that we were facing rolled over. Our unit came off the tracks and smashed its front left corner into the gravel ballast. It was lifted as if by the hand of God to the tipping point and then came to a skidding halt. It stopped just short of a large concrete signal tower—a miracle it didn’t flip onto its side or slam into the tower itself. I popped off my seat during impact– it felt like I was suspended in air in slow motion. Suddenly it was over, I was back on my seat and there was silence. The other brakeman moaned and said he was okay, but I think we were both in shock. We decided to get off the engine so we jumped down from the ladder, which was now hanging three feet higher from where it should have been.

The lead unit was gone—just unhooked itself, stayed on the rails, and vanished into the dark. The engineer and conductor went with it. Never learned how or why, but my money says they were looking out for the only cargo that really mattered: themselves.

Stranded in freezing Arkansas, clueless and greenhorn as hell, we waited. Finally, after what seemed like forever the engineer and conductor on the lead unit miraculously returned. Without any good explanations as to how they detached and why they were gone for so long, they informed us they had notified the authorities. I didn’t care for more detail at that point. I was happy to be on the locomotive and out of the cold. Hours later, someone arrived, I don’t remember who they were—but instead of coffee or concern, we all got handcuffs. Yep, cops showed up and hauled the four of us off like criminals. No care, no check-ins, just jail. Apparently, a brand new law had been passed that required breathalyzers after major train wrecks; we all passed, but it didn’t matter. I was shaken and humiliated, the company cold as ice. No calls to see if I was alive, no support—just corporate apathy. I took 30 days off, the maximum allowed, before I forced myself to return. When I finally showed up, coworkers asked why I was back. Everyone thought I’d been fired for failing the breathalyzer. When I said I hadn’t come back because I’d been scared shitless by the accident, they just stared at me like I was from outer space.

I wanted out. I wanted a technical TV job—hands-on, behind the scenes. A degree wasn’t mandatory, but every application came back with a rejection. One production house, the one airing Cardinals games, was blunt: “Unless your dad runs the place, you’re not getting in.” Talent took a back seat to nepotism. The union world felt like an industrial caste system and I already had my family’s union job. 

My Mass Comm professor—a guy teaching TV production with only a geography degree (sometimes you get what you pay for)—was told he needed a Master’s to keep teaching. So he went back to where he came from and attended Emerson College in Boston. When I complained about my dead-end job hunt, he said, “Why not grad school?”

Brilliant idea. After nearly a decade chasing a bachelor’s from the cheapest Missouri school and graduating by the skin of my teeth, taught by someone without a degree in the subject, in the easiest major available—what could possibly go wrong?