hear the whistle blow
i wish i was organised enough to board a train like my friend, but i am bad at logistics and she knows the names of all the carriages and train times and how to pass 58 hours in the sun. train travel is free if you are comfortable with laying in the gutter of a cargo tray, usually beside a big gaping hole that one can roll into at any time and get dashed to paste on the tracks below. also known as the suicide hole, this is where you dump your waste on the long train journey, and the great australian railroad must be so festy with piss and shit, bone and gore that the person responsible for hosing it down must have the worst janitorial position in the world. i dont want to add to their workload.
we usually put up with an arduous journey if we have something to look forward to, but all railroads in perth lead to melbourne, which is cold and windy and my ex lives there. it is bad when someone you loved lives in a Plan B city and you have to think of plan C which is teach english abroad or plan D which is roll into the suicide hole. plan A, which is keep living in perth, is ok, but i am missing the zest for life.
all the train hoppers i’ve met are crust punks. anyone can be a crust punk if they learn to sew. crust punks love to listen to crust punk musoc and decorate their clothes with words i don’t understand. sometimes they don’t even know what the words say, they have no affinity for the words, they just like that the letters are long and spiky. one time i was at a bar in savannah georgia with a hundred crust punks. i wasnt very hungry but i saw there was some leftover pizza on the table nearby, so i went over and pretended to clean the table and then did a slight of hand where i slid the pizza slice up my sleeve. then i went into the bathroom and ate it. a crust punk was at the sink washing his hands, taking a very long time because his hands were black from riding a train. on the back of his jacket was a big crazy word. i asked him what it said and he pretended not to hear me. after the pizza i was in a mischevous mood. i asked him if it said bazinga. he didnt respond but washed his hands a little harder. bazinga, i repeated. then he started muttering something. i couldnt hear, but i could see his lips. i think he was saying ‘fuck you fuck you fuck you’.
i didn’t want to get into an altercation, but i needed to use the sink to wash the pizza sauce off my hands. it was evidence and i couldn’t afford to get caught for stealing. bazinga, i said, is from the big bang theory. ‘fuck you fuck you fuck you’ he kept chanting, growing louder. but actually, i said, bazinga originates from the bbt prequel series, young sheldon. have you seen it? the crust punk was no longer washing his hands. they weren’t even clean and he was using them to grab my head. then he was using his hands to slam my head into the urinal. ‘i hate that fuckin show’ he said, and left. my head hurt. i rubbed it and got pizza sauce in my slightly wet hair. i washed both my hands and my hair in the sink and then realised the crust punk had also dripped black soot on my nice clean shirt. i took it off and washed it in the sink. then drying it under the hand-blower, i thought, if this is how crust punks treat people, i want no part. i don’t care about the beautiful savings on pizza and train travel.
this one was originally in the first issue of yiz county public digest but i took it out for worry of upsetting people. now i dont care.