I’m So Amtrak I Could Cry

I’ve been traveling again. I have to steel myself against the process. I knew going in what it would be like. The transportation schedules would be byzantine. The cab drivers wouldn’t speak English, or any other Romance language I could take a stab at. I understood from the get-go that the public transport would be rundown and unreliable. I’d have to keep my head on a swivel in public places, because as the philosopher Fagen once opined, “Everybody on the street has murder in their eyes.” I anticipated that traffic would obey the same rules as piglets at the tit, and fender bender disputes would be adjudicated by throwing hands in the street, if not gunfire. The denizens would shuffle by, morose, staring at the dirty sidewalks three feet in front of them, afraid to look anyone in the eye, as crazy people, beggars, and vagrants patrol the sidewalk.

Am I going to Mexico? Moldova? Mogadishu? Nah, Boston.

I know Boston, of course. Well, knew Boston. Past tense, now. Born there. Lived there. Built some of it. Worked there. Met my wife there. We decided to stay at the Parker House, a venerable Boston landmark. The concierge asked us if we’d ever stayed there before. We said, “Yes, thirty years ago.” There was a short, stunned pause, and she said, “That doesn’t count.” Alrighty, then. The Parker House is famous for various things. They invented Boston Cream Pie. That’s like claiming you came up with Zyklon B, if you ask me, who wouldn’t eat it on a dare. They have Parker House Rolls, which are better than snowballs in a fight. They were also the first people to make up a term for off-brand codfish to be served to the Irish pols back in the day. “We went to the Parker House, and we got scrod,” is an old, almost joke.

There is an ominous OMNI in front of the words “Parker House” on the sign these days. The stately pile was swallowed up and made to look like every other thing you sleep in when you feel like paying convention tax and sales tax and accommodation tax and are in the mood to spend $70 for valet parking. It used to have a certain James Michael Curley vibe. Now it has squiggles on the wall.

The Parker House is on School Street. That’s old bastid Boston. The Old City Hall is across the street, more or less. It’s a magnificent Second Empire dustcatcher. It was replaced by the new city hall, which I formerly referred to as the ugliest building on earth, but I no longer do that. Frank Gehry entered the sweepstakes and upped the ante since then. I don’t think anyone was trying to make the new Boston city hall deliberately ugly. It was just deliberately Brutalist, which is bound to be ugly. The architects were simply imbecilic ideologues, not misanthropes. Two hunchbacks don’t try to make ugly kids. They just can’t help it if they turn out that way.  Slice Gehry anyway you like, he was an a-hole through and through. His mistakes weren’t mistakes.

We were doing basically the same thing that gestational Jesus, Mary and Joseph did back when crucifixion was the preferred method of torturing the locals to death, instead of just onerous taxation, which takes longer and hurts more, I think. We had to return to the city of my birth to be taxed. Our patience was taxed, mostly, and our wallet, boy howdy. But there are certain administrative functions that cities hoard for themselves, and we required, so we had to go there. I generally give all cities a wide berth otherwise.

We tried to make the best of it. Took the train. Amtrak Downeaster. The sign on the train was scratched, and it looked like Amtrak Downcaster, which I liked better. If the conductor had asked me if I’d ever taken the train to Boston before, I could have told the truth for once and said, “Yes, thirty years ago,” but he didn’t. His appearance suggested that he was more qualified to tie maidens to the tracks than punch our tickets. Come to think of it, the train might have been the same one I rode in last time. I would have looked for my gum under the seat, but figured it might have stiffened up overmuch in the interim to be useful, so I let it be.

The train station in Portland is a combo with a bus station, because you can never get downscale enough to suit public transit. There was an interesting mix of people in the waiting area. Kliban would have had a field day in there. There was Psychedelic Babushka, Snorting Businessman, Failed Student Athlete, Girl With Dorm Fridge Backpack and a Dent In Her Head. Amazing Mom and Mortified Teenage Son made an appearance. There was a quorum of furtive guys who looked like their backpacks couldn’t stand an olfactory inspection by even an untrained German Shepherd, never mind the police kind. Everyone was wearing workout clothes, evidently to do everything they do in this world except work out. I’m not sure when the shift occurred exactly, but all the men wear ladies’ eyeglasses now, and all the women wear Elton John’s glasses.

The train trip itself was exactly as I remembered it. An endless tour of downscale back yards, more tarpaulins than Harbor Freight, sorry trampolines sleeping under a meringue of snow, all the while the elderly railcars clanking and banging and chugging like an offensive linemen who picks up a fumble and tries to run with it. I knew we’d entered Massachusetts when the stations sported clear lexan trash barrels that were chained to metal posts, with clear plastic liners so you could see if there was a bomb or a baby in them. I did love the train whistle, though, as we passed through the center of towns:

♬ I hear the lonesome whistle blow — I’m so Amtrak I could cry ♬

Ah, Dirty Old Boston. I’d forgotten what it was like to hear car horns blown in anger, with every lane change a fight for primacy. Just like old times. The women in the city have changed, though. When I used to come here, they would get all dolled up for work. Now they’re uniformly unhappy, sourpussed, and dressed alike — all in black, like a giant Mennonite funeral with a crummy paycheck at the end.

We sat in the coffee shop across from the golden dome of the state house, downed our ration of coffee and buns, and enjoyed the hell out of the fender bender played out right in front of us, wild gesticulations and rubbing each other’s bumpers and screaming that it would buff right out. The dogs with better shoes than the people walking them. The whole ghastly wintertime scene.

But we mostly enjoyed it because we knew we’d never have to look on it again.