I've Been Thinkin' 'bout the Story 'bout the Train


by Bonny Holder

After September 11th, I hunkered down.

I mean, I wanted to go nowhere, see no one except my husband and my pets, chat with no one on the phone. But I had suffered no personal wounds from the bombing of the WTC, lost no friends, and my personal reality was no different than it had been the day before except for a strange detachment. Glued to my computer screen most of the time, my real world consisted only of what I could see for myself outside my own windows. We live in the mountains east of Albuquerque in a rural setting and the view is quite rarified. After some weeks of watercolor mountains and pinon trees, I needed to see that midwestern America was still there, with its painted frame houses arranged on tidy flat streets, sidewalks punctuated with blue mailboxes and red fire hydrants, concrete curbs and gutters.

People react to stress and heal in different ways. I'm a "driver." I love to drive around far from home, through small towns (some charming, some scary) on back roads. I do this alone because part of my need fulfilled is running on my own time, pulling over to the side of the road when I need to, listening or not listening to music, eating when I'm hungry, taking pictures sometimes through the windshield while in gear. It combines the adventure of the unknown with the therapy of making good choices; and if you don't like something, you turn the other way.

I first ventured out in late October, driving all day to Moundridge, Kansas with Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer as my "destination band." The "destination band" is the live music I hear at the turn-around point of my journeys. If one's going to travel, one may as well seek a musical reward for the halfway point. That fall weekend turned out to be a long, relaxing ride through midwestern autumn, new-bought flags waving on cut lawns spotted with yellow maple leaves and, in the middle of it all, getting to hear this beautiful duo play live in a little club. The experience left me breathless, and newly optimistic about Life.

As a daughter of the midwest, I go there now and again so as to feel as if I originated somewhere orderly. Almost as soon as I got home from Kansas, I longed to get behind the wheel again. Destination? Oklahoma City. Destination "band"? Kevin Welch.

Kevin Welch is a "western beat" singer/guitarist who lives in Nashville. I've loved his music for almost a decade, and hadn't seen him play for over a year. He was scheduled at the Blue Door in OKC on November 10th, a mere ten hours or so from the door of our mountain cottage, which is also painted blue.

Into the truck I climb, along with my usual travel accouterments and a huge bouquet of fragrant white freesia in a waterproof thermal tumbler, a late birthday present from a friend. I couldn't let them die on the dining room table in my absence! When I get there, I think, I'll give these flowers to Kevin. Because of their perfume, my drive to OKC is undeniably spring-like.

I learned that the Blue Door is a club that takes up about half of the promoter's ramshackle home in urban residential northwestern Oklahoma City. It is a legend in its time. No refreshments are sold, but the audience is free to bring their own, including alcohol. I ponder this; you can just walk in carrying a six-pack? Oklahoma is such a wild place compared to New Mexico!

I get there early enough to find a decent motel room, catch the evening news, and chill a bottle of white wine (a Turning Leaf Chardonnay, I believe it was.) I check in with Richard, shower, put on a clean t-shirt, twist my wine bottle in a brown paper sack, and drive carefully through the Blue Door neighborhood, cross street by cross street, to the concert hall. The houses along the streets are mostly old frame two-stories, once single family homes but now divided into smaller rental units. Some of them have hedges and a backyard fence. When I was a kid I wanted to live in a two-story city house. The neighborhood seems almost antique.

I get a free parking space on the street, just at the end of the block. Again I marvel at OKC culture; you can have a club in your house, right there in the neighborhood? And people can bring in whiskey? And park right on the city streets? What, is there no zoning in this town? I'm having a lack-of-zoning adventure! In Albuquerque, I would have to smuggle the bottle of wine into the joint in my bra.

The entrance to the Blue Door is through a gate in the fence leading to a back yard. There I see Kevin talking with friends underneath a tree. I hand him the freesia and go right on into the "club." I follow the narrow boardwalk through the door, make a right turn, and come into the lit performance space. There are two listening rooms ­ must have been somebody's living and dining rooms at some point. I saunter to the front room, the old dining room, wanting to be as close to the music as possible without sitting on Kevin's lap.

Because the November evening is so succulent, fresh, cool but not hostile, I settle on a bench underneath a very large, open, screened window. The window could be closed with a wooden shutter, but it is anchored to a hook tonight, to facilitate airflow. On stage are Kevin's mic and guitars, and a painting of a chicken. I don't ask ­ I don't want to know all the details about everything anymore. Chickens are good.

It turns out to be the perfect choice of seating. Some nice people sit beside me ­ they are a singing duo called the Farm Couple, whom I've seen perform. The farm couple! Monica, the "farm girl" of the pair, is chatty and polite, informative and very pro-Oklahoma. She lets me have my own space but invites me to ask her questions from time to time. She & Patrick brought a cooler. Most people brought beer (or what-have-you) in coolers, which made me feel very naive for holding the paper bag containing my wine. Can you tell I was born in Milwaukee? Like, don't we have coolers in New Mexico?

Kevin wears a red shirt and blue jeans on stage, and his pretty long hair is fresh-combed, greyer than it was last time I saw him. He comments that he is happy to be back in OKC, and to see the Blue Door "still leaning." I quietly and subtly open my wine bottle with a blue enamel corkscrew, the kind whose arms pop up as the point digs deeper into the cork, like a weird scarecrow. No one seems to notice or care. The audience is already in Kevin's pocket.

I get high really fast, or something like high. I can easily drink a bottle of wine in an ordinary evening, so I am careful not to drink too much or too fast when I have to drive. The rush I feel tonight is almost psychedelic, out-of-body, actually, in a pleasant but unsettled way. I see myself sitting in the audience, as if I'm floating above myself, or looking in through the screen.

As I sit on the wooden bench under the wide-open window, I am aware of everything: Kevin in the spotlight, in my ears, but people outside the window, too, cars on the street, sentences of conversation. I sparkle Richard's mother's engagement ring in the reflected spotlight. Night air hits me right on the top of my head, cooling me down. The audience loves their homeboy Kevin, and requests are shouted. He declines to sing the lovely ballad "Annelise Please" because he hates the video so much. I saw it, and I hated it too! Good for him. I think I may have shouted out "Wilson's Tracks" once or twice. There is sort of a pep rally between songs.

I recall the song another Oklahoman, Bob Childers, wrote and sings about the "Restless Spirits in the Night," about a woman playing guitar and singing in her kitchen in the middle of the night, never realizing that a stranger was standing outside listening through the screen, being so grateful for the gift of her song unknowingly bestowed onto him by her. I wondered...had I been walking down the street where my truck was parked, and I had heard Kevin's song through the November night, half magic, half drawl, under the stars -- would that change my life? Where would I go from there? I imagine I would edge closer and closer to the screen, the very screen that I am now directly on the other side of, feeling distinctly gifted and blessed.

I close my eyes and lean back against the wall. I am inebriated with atmosphere, as well as Chardonnay ­ my wine bottle is empty. The Farm Couple gives me a cookie. I smile as if from somewhere else. I am kind of anxious, my mind sailing out that open window and weaving through the old neighborhood through which I am only a visitor.

Kevin begins to play a song I've heard him sing before called" Long Cold Train" written by a musician friend of Kevin's named John Hadley. The long cold train is both a metaphor for the life and the setting in the story of a character named Johnny. Johnny is born on a train, in a Pullman car. He lives but Mama dies. The tune has a fast-train kind of drive to it, and a very clear coming/here/gone motion to it, a triptych painting, a collected whole. Mama dies and Papa cries; Papa dies and Johnny cries; and finally, in heaven, they are united.

But who cries for Johnny?

Lyric:

It's a long cold train, Johnny's in pain
He goes to the station with his mind in flames.
Lay down, Johnny, with your heart on the long steel track.
He says, "Come on train, come on train, come on train, come on train,"
Johnny's goin' to heaven, he ain't ever coming back.

Can't you feel the train coming with its cold steel shoes?
Train whistle blowing soft Johnny blues.
Jesus at the window, he's openin' up the window shade,
Johnny sees his mama, he says "hello,mama."
Johnny sees his papa, he says "hello,papa,
hello heaven, goodbye long cold train."

Did Johnny kill himself to get back to his Mama and Papa, or did he die of longing or heartbreak? There's more than one way to kill yourself, I think. There's more than one way to get back home. It's a sad lyric, though, ultimately about loneliness.

Johnny. Nobody is named Johnny anymore, I note. That's the name of my younger brother, the one just under me. Haven't thought about him in awhile. The last time I saw him was the year before, on his 50th birthday. He was in pitiful physical shape, the results of a life committed to serious alcoholism and concurrent pain. I had the feeling then I would never see him alive again.

I don't even know where my brother is tonight, I realize, as Kevin sings the strangely hypnotic lyrics in his compelling baritone. "Papa's in pain, Johnny's been thinkin' 'bout the story 'bout the train, and his bygone mama, and the night that he and Papa cried."

My bro Johnny Kaske recently bounced from care facilities to slummy apartments to hospital beds. He lied about his drinking and made up stories of a heart bypass operation and asked for money for medicine. Our Papa died of alcoholism in 1993. That was the last time Johnny and I really talked, around that event. None of Papa's five children attended the funeral that his aged brother put together for him. Independent of one another, we "let that train go by." We were a very dysfunctional family, and in the end we all dissed our father. I still feel bad about that. I know why we did it, but it was surely rude. I wouldn't be that rude again if I had it to do over.

"Good bye Papa, good bye Papa...gonna lay down, Johnny, with your heart on the long, cold train...Johnny's gone to heaven, and he ain't ever comin' back."

Poor old Johnny, I mean my brother. Jesus at the window, he's openin' up his window shade. Johnny sees his Mama, says "hello Mama," goodbye long cold train. Our Mama died of cancer in 1976. She was only 51. Johnny took care of all the arrangements, and then raised our youngest brother in the house he was born into.

What an amazing song, I think, pulling myself back to the present. It's like some forgotten memory of my past. It's all about my family, although of course it's really not about my family at all. That makes it a great song, when the listener can relate to it like that. And now, because of tonight, it's "our song," my brother's and mine, although he's never even heard it. We share a song he doesn't know! Some songs have lives all of their very own, intertwining with and frequently enlightening the lives of their receptive beholders.

In most ways, I hate things that make me reflect on my family. It makes me so lonesome! Not for them, but because of them. We had a nearby train that sometimes rocked us to sleep. And the tune of "Long Cold Train" is particularly haunting with its chorus imitating the sound of the train whistle in the dark.

Sustained applause, and Kevin begins another song, but I can't get that cold train out of my head.

I drive slowly back to my motel still feeling much too sensitive to too many feelings, feelings I usually choose to ignore. I don't just choose to ignore them; I work to forget them. I think how fortunate I am to have the life I've had. I'm healthy, I'm married to my soul mate, and I live a pleasant, creative and fulfilling existence. Yet, what a sad family I came from! Tonight I go to a concert, should be no big deal, but then I'm self-confronted with my betrayal of my father, admitted hopelessness for my broken brother, acceptance that I still drink alcohol although the harm its done in my family is unsurpassed by disease or accident, and a renewed recognition of each human's life being a separate saga. So now, this song is part of my own personal soundtrack. And I only intended to have an evening of entertainment.

Driving through the neighborhood with my window down, I think of the concept of "family." What does that mean, anyway? I am in a strange city, there are so many cars here and I don't know anyone in them! I peer into lighted windows. That family's happy, I think. That one is not. Those are students. Those are grandmas. Those people have no taste in lamps. Those people are watching junk TV.

I can't believe it's so warm in November. I wish my motel room had a big screen window like the Blue Door. I doze restlessly with my mind half-awake, uncomfortable in my rented bed, never really giving in to the pleasure of dreams. I'm still awake as the sun creeps up on the eastern horizon.

After a few cups of coffee, I am back in my regular body, in my regular humor, ready to hit the road for home. It was great to see and hear Kevin again. That was fun. It was a lovely though strange evening, and I am still humming that train tune as I speed into Amarillo, halfway home. It means something to me that I yet don't understand.

Back in Cedar Crest, I greet the happy dogs and pick up a phone message. That's when I learn that my brother, John, is dead. He died on Saturday night up in Illinois at about the same time I was listening to Kevin sing about Johnny and the train back in OKC. He died peacefully in his sleep, in his jammies, with the clicker in his hand. Hello, heaven. Goodbye, long cold train.

I don't unpack. The next afternoon I wave goodbye again to Richard and the dogs and climb aboard Amtrak's Southwest Chief to glide northeast to Illinois to attend my brother's funeral. I sleep the whole time, slumped over in my seat, head against the window. Daylight, night time, daylight again. Nothing rouses me. Train whistle's blowin' soft Johnny blues.


You can contact Bonny Holder at bonny-at-rockzilla.net

 
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