Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | Texas Monthly

Strangers on a train: with a nineteen-year-old Houston street kid as my guide, I hopped freight cars, gave bulls the slip, and tasted freedom--for a day, anyway.

Article Excerpt
As one might guess, there are simpler ways to hop a freight train than the way a gutter punk does. For instance, you could wait outside a rail yard for a train to stop, find an open boxcar, climb in, and remain inside until the train gets where it's going. Then, presumably, at that final destination you'd step from the train with a new view of yourself. You'd have shaken free of the confines of schedules and even concrete time. You'd have tweaked the system, gotten something for nothing, and accomplished a feat few dare to attempt, having seen the country by a means of travel that most folks classify, in terms of desirability, somewhere between hitchhiking and getting kidnapped. But that would be boring compared with the gutter punk way, or so I learned from a nineteen-year-old Houston street kid, a hopped-up thrill seeker with multiple lip rings, a taste for WWII-era military attire, and a home in a tattoo parlor doorway near the intersection of Westheimer and Montrose.

Already I need to back up. It was a year ago April, in a Mafia art gallery, of all places, that I met "Dennis," a made-up name that will hide the kid's identity and make him sound significantly less disaffected than does the nickname he actually goes by. It was opening night for an exhibit loosely billed as an installation/performance piece: The gallery had moved an Austin music lover's living room and 10,000-volume record collection out west for a ten-day listening party and lecture series. Among the usual crowd of 75 or so ranchers, writers, artists, and tourists was a handful of gutter punks who'd swept in with Dennis. He had just jumped off a train in Alpine, a tall, wiry, engaging kid, with eyes the color of the sky on the first day of spring break and a slack-jawed grin that softened his sharp cheekbones into a look of perpetual amazement. When he laughed, he looked as if he couldn't believe just how wonderful and funny life could be, and when he told a story--like the one about how his heroin-addict mother had been sent to prison for killing a liquor store clerk when Dennis was ten--he looked surprised that you might think such a thing was unthinkable. He was an upbeat kid and handsome enough that you could actually forget the foot-long cherry-red mohawk that, left unattended that night, fell to one side of his head.

When the record collector played something by the Ramones, Dennis approached the turntables with a request. He knew that the punk forefathers had once covered "Do You Want to Dance but it was not...