Chapter 22: Journey on the Super Chief

My stay in the City of Angels was a short-lived adventure. Nine months after I arrived, I was on my way back to Massachusetts and my mother.

After her suicide attempt, it was clear that my stepmother, Dory, was not ready to raise an adolescent boy. Dory was a beautiful, caring, and loving woman but she was fighting her demons. As a bipolar, or manic-depressive person, her mood swings were a frightening roller coaster ride and it took all she had to hang on and stay on track. She had nothing left over to deal with a rambunctious boy.

Less than two weeks after my stepmother attempted to end her life, I found myself onboard the Super Chief, a Boston-bound train.

The Los Angeles sky was a yellow-green haze as I hugged my father, Dory, and my little stepsister goodbye. I took a window seat and waved to my west coast family until they vanished from view.

For the second time in less than a year, I would be traveling across North America without the company of an adult. My mind was a bit of a mess as I took my seat. My stay with my father had been a bizarre experience; my English teacher accused me of plagiarism, I got shot at by a gang of bullies, my stepmother tried to kill herself, and my babysitter raped me. Other than all that, I had a great time.

My mood was a smorgasbord of emotions and I did not have the appetite for any of them. I took a small taste of the thrill of travel (needs more salt) and sat back in my seat and sulked. As bad as my time had been in California, I dreaded the thought of returning to my mother.

Going back to live with Joyce felt like I was jumping out of the frying pan back into the fire. Joyce and I were in a constant state of combat. She never missed an opportunity to humiliate me and let me know how inadequate I was as a human being.

My mother dismissed my writing as childish crap. When I did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen, she would rip apart my work searching for something to complain about and then launch into an extended rant about what a lousy job I had done. Virtually every exchange I had with her began or ended with a complaint or criticism of something I had or had not done. Given a choice, I would much rather have stayed with my dad. I suppose most children lived life to enjoy childhood. My goal was to survive.

I had enjoyed my time with my father and had tried my best to make it work. My stepmother was a different story. We each tried to do right by the other, but her shifting moods were an impossible moving target for both of us. Try as we might, we just could not connect.

The landscape gradually changed from shitty looking neighborhoods to crappy looking blocks of rundown buildings as the Super Chief wound its way into the foothills around the city. As we climbed into the hills, the view shifted from flat and dusty brown to hilly and dusty brown. Without irrigation, most of Southern California looked like a garden badly in need of watering.

I left my funky mood behind in the smog bank as the train emerged into clean air beneath bright blue skies. I decided to explore my temporary home on wheels.

Powered by a diesel engine, the train featured Pullman sleeping cars, several coach cars, a dining car with tables and beautiful white linen tablecloths, and three dome cars that afforded a grand view of the countryside. I loved the elevated view and it was kind of like flying slowly across the land at an altitude of fifteen feet.

On the evening of the first day, an elderly gentleman offered me a seat next to his. Since it was the only vacant seat in the observation car, I accepted his offer.

Karl Decker was his name and he had a peculiar foreign air about him. He spoke with a thick German accent, but his English was precise and sharp. He pronounced every syllable of every word as if he were stamping them out on a punch press.

If Father Christmas ever wore a crew cut, he would have looked like this man. The old man’s carefully cropped hair was snow-white. A neatly trimmed white beard framed his face. His face had a weathered look, which suggested that he was no stranger to the wind and nature’s elements. His eyes were a dark blue behind a set of gold wire spectacles. When I shook his hand as I introduced myself, he had the grip of an iron vice wrapped in soft velvet.

The old man had been a soldier for most of his life and now he was too old to serve and with no wars left to fight, he had retired. “I fought this country in two wars,” he shook his head and waved his arm at the passing landscape. “America is a strong, beautiful, and very strange country.”

While we talked, he told me, “You would make an excellent soldier. You seem to come from good stock. Real soldiers are trained to obey orders.” With a sigh, he turned and looked out the window into the twilight. For several minutes he gazed at something only he could see.

“In the war, I had many young soldiers under my command. They were all real beautiful young men, and today [cough] they are no more. They followed their orders to the gates of Hell and beyond,” he said.

Karl Decker talked into the night. Mostly he spoke about growing up as a young boy in Bavaria and working on his parent’s dairy farm. He spoke little about his time at war, and when he did, he used words which seemed reserved and carefully chosen.