Ellison's Ghost

The following is a true story. Except one detail, if you can find the lie, I will give you a prize. Blair


The train smelled of diesel fuel and close quarters. I sprawled all gangly over the seats nibbling orange peanut butter crackers and reading Invisible Man. The train pulled through the night oblivious to the Midwestern cold. I was tired, cooped up angsty tired. I thought about visiting the lounge car again, but the competitive conversation reverberating off the bulkheads made reading impossible. My insides craved some action - action Ellison was not giving me.
I was returning from an interview at a tiny liberal arts college in Indiana. The trip from Florida was an act of heroism – maybe heroic enough for the admissions department to overlook the fact that my GPA made me appear slightly retarded. I was the kind of student professors wanted to take a chance on – capable of great things, possessing a wealth of ideas and intelligence but with a disappointing lack of what academics call “give a shit.”
I fell asleep, aware of the cold air seeping into my sock through the hole in my sneaker when the train stopped somewhere in Ohio. I feigned reading while new passengers boarded, awkwardly stumbling with too much luggage. They were too encumbered to even notice me. One man was apparent , in a grey short brimmed hat with a burgundy band, a white oxford shirt and his canary yellow tie tucked squarely under a burgundy vest. His luggage looked as if a bomb had gone off near it. He pushed the bag forward with a burgundy polyester leg.
It looked as if someone had taken a rasp and attacked his face with it, scouring the deep brown flesh until it hung in meaty chunks from his cheeks. His eyes matched his tie, yellow. I looked directly into those infected eyes and nodded. This was the action I was looking for.
The man sat kitty corner to me, allowing for observation. I returned the neighboring seat to its original upright position, and was able to see him as he settled into his seat. He pilfered through his belongings, shifting from his pockets to the luggage to the pouch in the seat in front of him. He shifted his legs, crossing and uncrossing them compulsively without deliberation until he suddenly folded into sleep. I opened Invisible Man and began to read.
The man awoke and began searching again. His hands made rodent noises as he scraped his long yellow fingernails across everything he touched. His movements, gnawing, grew louder and more desperate. Suddenly he piped up, his voice as textured and coarse as his face. His words erupted from some other organ, someplace more southerly and dark – feverish.
“I’m Gonna kill all you motherfuckers!”
That woke everyone up, and not just a little bit either. I snapped up and peered into the man’s seat. It was darker there, like the light was being absorbed by something.
“I need a cigarette!”
I looked at the old woman who sat across from him and in front of the man in the vest. Her arms drawn up close, eyes set straight. She must have believed him, at least about the first part.
He repeated: “I’m gonna kill all you motherfuckers”
He stretched out the all you for effect. I peered into the unnatural shadow around him and could not make out any movement.
He belched out “I need a cigarette!”
He continued to cough up more strangeness:
“First they had me on an airplane, now they got me on a bus. I know, I’m gonna kill all you motherfuckers! I need a cigarette!”
This wouldn’t last long. Earlier, while reading in the dining car, I witnessed a fight between a drunken man with a bluish tattoo of what looked more like a large bruise than a mermaid or a bulldog or whatever bullshit forty year old men liked when they were younger. The man argued with the bartender and threw a drink in her face. Within seconds, the train had stopped, and the man and his luggage were tossed forcefully overboard. Amtrak was not to be fucked with. I waited for the coming confrontation while pretending to read.
The conductor appeared in the doorway with a flashlight. Systematically shining his light into each row of seats, a few people stirred, the old woman looked at the conductor, motioning toward the lunatic.
“This motherfucker can’t see me. I’m hidin’! Who in the fuck do y’all think you are messin’ with! Now I am hiding; he can’t see me.”
The conductor continued, unphased by the fact that a lunatic in a strange outfit was screaming out that he was invisible and was going to kill everyone on the train. The conductor passed the lunatic, who was still shouting, without lifting his flashlight to even acknowledge the seat had an occupant.
I was blissfully observant.
“Y’all motherfuckers are bigger than me! You got no power over me. You can’t destroy me, ‘cause I’m too motherfucking small. I’m like a lepton motherfuckers! I need a Motherfucking cigarette!”
I wanted desperately to have a smoking habit. I searched my backpack for something to offer the lunatic. He continued his rant about power and the establishment’s inability to nullify him. He complained about being “shuffled around” and “packed away”, never rising from his shadowy corner.
The Puerto-Rican woman with the adorable two year old, loomed nervously over his seat. In her left hand was a packet of cigarettes and a lighter.
“Here,” she said, “take the cigarettes. My daughter is sleeping. Would you please be quiet.” Her voice trembled, but her resolve was firm. He lifted his hand and a cigarette appeared between his craggy fingers.
“You already have a cigarette. Do you need a light?”
“Yeah, that’s what I need. I need a light.”
He reached out with his other hand to reveal an old brass lighter, worn, but still functional. A raspy, crackle erupted from his lungs and if you couldn’t see his face, you would think he was coughing. His jaundiced eyes were wet with mocking tears. The Puerto Rican woman slinked off.
He laughed on and off for a few minutes until he announced loudly that he was going to lie down. He stood up, unfolding his pixie stick frame from his cave, stretched himself out on the aisle of the train and fell asleep, snoring from the same moist organ that he spoke and laughed with. It smelled like burnt fur and cheap liquor. I looked down at him while he slept, canary yellow socks under the cuffs of his burgundy pants. Despite the smell and the snoring and the death threats, I remained relaxed.
Another conductor entered the train, big gut hanging over his belt like a fertility symbol. The conductor stopped in front of him, shined his powerful Mag-lite directly into his horribly scarred face and paused. he didn’t budge. The conductor nudged him with a patent leather toe. He didn’t budge. The conductor hovered over him as he slumbered in the aisle. The conductor was doing some sort of math in his head. The conductor stopped figuring, turned around, and lumbered off toward the dining car; presumably to get some help to toss him from the train. I waited watching as he slept quietly on the floor.
The motion of the train and the darkness though won out over my watch-standing and soon I was lulled off to sleep. When I awoke, he was getting up and re-contorting himself back into his old seat. The smell of a lit cigarette stabbed at my nose as he began smoking in his chair. I skooched my butt lower so I could better observe what he was up to.
He smoked, rigid in his chair. The cigarette, a non-filter, was smoked down to the butt and extinguished on the arm of his seat. Ralph shifted around a bit, fidgeting, searching for comfort. A fart trumpeted from under his seat - a half note with timbre vibrato, and of course a stench, all sulphur and nitrates. The smell was the opposite of cleaning chemicals. The odor hung and clung to the air in the car for a few minutes until it was finally beaten back by notes of diesel fuel, old coffee and sweat.
He remained silent for the rest of the night. Looking at him through the crack in the seat as he slept in his chair, the muted light of dawn rhythmically chopped by the motion of the train, He looked peaceful. I finished Invisible Man that morning, just as the train was pulling into Union Station in Washington D.C. where I would switch trains to ride back toward Miami.
Shuffling off the train, I made my way to a newsstand and picked up a copy of the Washington Post. While waiting in line for coffee and a muffin I read that Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, had died of pancreatic cancer the night before.

Homophobia: How I stopped being an asshole...sort of

Back in the days when I was an asshole…I know what you’re thinking: “Blair, how could a smart, good-looking, modest person such as yourself be an asshole”? Well, it doesn’t require nearly as much effort as one might think. No, I used to be a homophobic asshole. I was a teenager, which answers about 90% of the asshole equation right there, but the question still remains: “Why was I a homophobic, and what stopped it?” The second part of the question is the easiest to explain so I will begin there and maybe move on to intellectually speculate (read Bullshit) about the bio-philosophical reasoning for homophobia.
I stopped being a homophobe in the February of 1991. I had just graduated high school, and my sister was getting married in Providence, R.I. My family was staying in a hotel in downtown Boston near a family friend. After my sister’s wedding, my family made the trek back to Boston and I snuck out of my hotel into the icy Boston night. I walked around the city a bit, got coffee at a bar near Fanuial hall, and eventually hopped on the T (read subway) to head back to the hotel. I was bleary-eyed from insomnia and trying desperately to stay awake so as to not miss my stop. To stay awake, I started doing what I always do: observing people. It was late on a Saturday night, and there were all manner of the club crowd and college kids and roughnecks co-mingling in the air of the T.
I looked at the pretty girls first, conjuring up my best Penthouse Forum letters. Then I looked at everyone else, until I stopped at a gay couple. Two men, one dressed in overalls that hung from his hips, the other bundled up in a sweater and collared shirt. I saw their hands and fingers touching like self-conscious teenagers on a first date. The man in the overalls looked at the man in the sweater casting a gaze on his lover that I had never personally seen, but immediately recognized as love.
No one had ever looked at me like that, or if they had, I was too wrapped up in my own teenage narcissism to notice. I knew that was love, and there was noting wrong with love in any form. It was at this moment that my homophobia ended. I watched them until my stop, got caught, and remember smiling- both of them smiling back at me as I left and went back to the hotel.
The next morning, after eating breakfast with my ultra-religious father in a gay bar, (another hysterical story that I will tell at some point) we flew home. The moment on the train stayed with me. It was the moment when I learned that love is bigger than sex, race, or sexuality. It is subtle and delicate and beautiful, and I finally got to experience love myself a few years later.
As to why people are homophobic- I have no clue. All I can say is I wish they could stop and take the T one night and just look at the world around them. Maybe, just maybe, a few of them might see the nature of love and choose to preserve and protect it in all it forms.