My Misspent Youth

Sandie says she’s never heard this story, I thought I’d told it to everyone by now. Steph tells it a lot better, but I’ll do my best. Mom, you’ll want to stop reading now.

Back in the day we used to do a lot of drugs. Mostly pot, but some acid and pills as well. Being teenagers and therefore invincible, we often would walk around downtown late at night looking for stuff to do. Sometimes we’d find a building we could get on the roof of and go party up there. Sometimes we’d talk to the pimps and their ho’s. And sometimes, we’d hop trains. The trains always slow down going thru town and you could run up behind them, grab the ladder, and jump on. Usually we’d only ride it a mile or two before jumping off, but sometimes we’d get stuck for several miles – it would speed up too fast and we'd have to wait for it to slow down enough to jump back off. Once we ended up at least 10 miles out, that was a hell of a walk.

We had several places we’d go to hop trains, but one of our favorites was at an overpass. We could stand under it and smoke some weed while waiting for the train. This particular night, which was early in the morning November 1st, we waited for a long time but didn’t see a train. So we started walking along the tracks, picking up various stuff to put on the tracks. There were 4 of us this night, and we were walking in a line rather than all together. Steph was in the lead and she bent down to pick up a shoe lying beside the tracks. Just as her hand touched it, she realized that there was a leg attached. Well, part of a leg. We walked a little further down and found the rest of the body.

We found out later that the guy used to be a reporter in Dallas, but when it happened he was a bum who had tried to hop the train and missed. His leg was caught by one of the wheels and he was dragged for several yards. Of course we were all shocked and freaked out. I was convinced that it was a mannequin, and that someone had played a Halloween joke by putting it on the tracks to try to freak out the conductor.

After a brief discussion and a major freak out, we ran back to the car and got the hell out of there. We made an anonymous call to report it and saw in the papers the next day that he had been a well-known reporter some time ago in Dallas.

And that was the last time we ever hopped a train.