What is a monster? Why has a fictional character like Dracula stayed in our minds through the centuries? In this piece for Guernica, Alexander Chee asks us to revisit and sit long and hard with Bram Stoker’s Gothic classic while also considering the modern real-life evils of our world. Chee also makes connections between the story and Stoker’s potentially queer love triangle with Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, the latter a possible inspiration for the Count himself. The essay is the foreword to a new edition of the novel, published by Restless Books.
During the tumultuous months of the Trump presidency, during the Covid-19 pandemic and the George Floyd uprising, the feeling that our fictional sense of evil was not sufficient to match the evil in our world repeated as I watched some of the popular entertainments meant to help me stay inside my home, safe from the virus and out of the overburdened hospitals. As Covid reshaped the world’s economies and democracies, and the spectacle of, first, the Trump administration having competence forced upon it and, second, the playing out of the Biden administration, I kept thinking, “The scale of this evil is set too low.”
Pop culture has tried to improve upon the monster of Dracula, with not entirely satisfying results. Thanos, the popular Marvel villain, for example, while technically more powerful than Dracula, is boring in his omnipotence. How am I supposed to fear an ecoterrorist — a popular villain in movies, but never seen otherwise — when Trump undid air safety regulations around particulates that now kill 10,000 people a year — likely more now, with Covid — and it doesn’t even rank among the things for which we might prosecute him? How do I get myself worked up over a single murderer, of any kind, as thousands die every night due to governmental terror or neglect in countries all over the world? Trump and Bolsonaro’s destruction of Latin America’s healthcare system, done in the name of fighting Cuban Communism, while Covid spread — while they themselves had Covid — is closer to the scale of the horror I speak of, the horror we must write about.
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Catching nonagenarian Nazis, trying to live forever, the overpowering need to return home, forgiving your dad, and finding humor in getting scammed, repeatedly.
Tom Lamont | GQ | September 12, 2023 | 6,622 words
Thomas Will is the bureau chief of—wait for it—the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. He is a Nazi hunter. The last to hold the role in the same capacity; it will end here, in the 2020s, with the final generation of perpetrators already in their 90s. Tom Lamont has spent a great deal of time with Will for this piece, much of it in offices. Yet, somehow, in setting scenes of bureaucracy, Lamont creates a searing, chilling atmosphere. At one point, Will uses a packet of sugar and an empty espresso cup on a conference table for a demonstration. The cup represented mass murder, and the sugar the limits of criminal culpability. The sugar is now at the outer limits. They are investigating secretaries, not camp commandants. People who would have sat in similar offices at similar tables, typing up death orders. The Holocaust was so efficient because every day, civilians turned up at an office and did their jobs. Incredibly uncomfortable to think about. Incredibly necessary. At one point, Lamont asks Will: “What if Hitler’s army had conscripted him and sent him to work in a camp? Would he have gone?” His answer: “I don’t know.” Some people question sending nonagenarian office workers to trial—but it is noticed, it is discussed, and therefore worthwhile. There is such powerful writing here, with many subtle messages. I could not stop thinking about it. —CW
Charlotte Alter | Time | September 20, 2023 | 4,575 words
The idea of rich people trying to live forever is nothing new. But Charlotte Alter’s profile of entrepreneur Bryan Johnson offers food for thought in a time of fast-evolving AI. Johnson is developing a life-extension system, optimized by an algorithm, in an attempt to reduce his biological age. “The goal is to get his 46-year-old organs to look and act like 18-year-old organs,” writes Alter, by following a peculiar lifestyle routine and strict diet, including dark green sludge and a special chocolate that “tastes like a foot.” Johnson seems to view himself as some kind of elevated biohacker in an unprecedented age of humanity—“I have a relationship with the 25th century more than I have a relationship with the 21st century,” he tells Alter—but critics are skeptical of his age-reversal experiments that aren’t backed by science. (Quite frankly, he looks pale and lifeless, like an android straight out of Alien, thirsty for hydraulic fluid. That said, maybe he’s on to something?) Alter visits his home, which resembles an “Apple store in a jungle,” to see what an algorithmically controlled (and ultimately austere and cold) life looks like. Come for the hilarious lines and bizarre scenes, stay for (and ponder) the profound questions: “Aren’t humans more than just brains and meat?” asks Alter. What makes us human? —CLR
Dženana Vucic | Sydney Review of Books | August 14, 2023 | 3,876 words
“Bosnia is a long way away, and it’s an expensive journey,” writes Dženana Vucic in this haunting braided essay from The Sydney Review of Books about escaping from and returning to a place that was once home. There is so much meaning packed into Vucic’s spare, yet beautiful prose. The distance implicit in “a long way away” is far more than just physical; the “expensive journey” exacts a cost far more profound than a monetary sum. In relating the habits of migratory birds, Vucic notes that caged birds prevented from migration feel anxiety, marked by “changes in their sleep behaviour, frantic jumping and wing-fluttering in the direction of migration,” she writes. “When I haven’t been home for a while, I feel the absence welling in the pit of my stomach, a hollow with the gravitation pull of a black hole. Time passes and a mass rises into my chest, my throat, becomes a thing with texture, edges.” In returning, she describes the physical scars of conflict in post-war Bosnia. “The land wears this loss in ruins and abandoned homes with gaping windows, in exposed brick and plastic UN sheeting which, thirty years later, still replaces glass in our poorest neighbours’ homes. Trees erupt from broken walls; blackberry and nettle swarm the hollow bellies of houses across the street.” What’s less plain to see and well worth examining is how Vucic reveals the personal, human toll of a war that forced her to migrate away and yet compels her, time and again, to return. —KS
John Paul Scotto | The Sun Magazine | October 3, 2023 | 2,110 words
We’ve all done it: we’ve concealed our true selves to conform to another’s idea of acceptable behavior. John Paul Scotto did it at school, after being told to shut up for sharing baseball facts and figures with enthusiasm. He did it at home too, shouted into silence by his father. Scotto does a brilliant job reminding us of the power that parents have over us, one that persists into adulthood whether we like it or not; how a sharp word or a dismissive comment can diminish us, reducing us to that frightened child determined to avoid notice—and their parents—as much as possible. “I’d learned how to keep him calm: Don’t complain. Don’t speak to him when he’s focused on a task. Be where he wants you to be at the precise time he wants you there. Do what he tells you to do immediately,” he writes. The beautiful thing about Scotto’s essay is an epiphany worth examining more deeply. His father’s anger and need to maintain order—even at the expense of his son’s spirit—was not because they are so different as humans, but because they are so much the same. —KS
Devin Friedman | Insider | October 1, 2023 | 6,021 words
Devin Friedman and his wife wanted a pool. So they hired a contractor. And when their contractor emailed them to ask them to wire the money to a couple of odd-sounding usernames, they did. Then they did it again. And again. And then they learned that those emails weren’t from their contractor at all. Rather than simply marinate in the shame and self-pity of getting royally scammed, Friedman tried to get his money back. When that failed, he wrote a piece about why he couldn’t get his money back. Sounds like a bummer, right? Not so fast. I mean, it is for them, but it also turned into what might be the funniest feature I’ve read all year. Sure, there’s a little Joel Stein here. (“Like so many things I use to conduct the most critical tasks in my everyday life with a carefree obliviousness, I didn’t really know what Zelle was.”) But Friedman’s self-deprecation is perfectly tuned, and even when the reporting gets heavier, he threads humor through at just the right angle, a necessary weft to the piece’s warp. (“Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the financial industry regulator banks most love to hate, has been petitioning Zelle to find out exactly how much fraud there is. And the data she’s collected suggests there’s probably, technically speaking, a whole fucking lot.”) As he says himself, “[o]ut of all the kinds of money, money to build a pool is probably the very best kind of money for the world to suffer the loss of.” There’s no poor-me going on here. You, however, will be poorer for it if you skip this one. —PR
Audience Award
Do you hear timpani? Here’s the piece our audience loved most this week:
Katherine Laidlaw | Toronto Life | September 20, 2023 | 6,174 words
A cop with expensive taste and money troubles. A wealthy woman who loved and supported him. An old man with dementia with a large estate and no next of kin. And a secret girlfriend and a fake will. Mix these elements together and what do you get? Katherine Laidlaw’s latest story for Toronto Life about a romance and financial scam gone wrong. —CLR
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So you’ve hired a contractor to install a pool in your backyard. Congrats! Unfortunately the contractor’s a little busy. Not the best communicator. So when he emails you and asks you to wire payment to a weird-sounding user name, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that you’d do it, simply for the sheer relief of getting one step closer to Pool. Hopefully things don’t go as colossally wrong for you as they did for Devin Friedman and his wife. And if they do, hopefully you can write a piece as hilarious and insightful as this one.
So yes, we fell victim to some highly suspect shit. But let me ask you this: If your contractor seems like they’re doing something a bit dodgy, would that really surprise you? Don’t you kind of assume your contractor has angles? Don’t you suspect that every contractor is subtly fleecing you, while also subtly fleecing the people who work for him or her, in a velvet-gloved mafioso kind of way that everyone has tacitly approved? Isn’t our national OK-ness with Donald Trump a subconscious admission that we assume everyone in the building trades is on the grift? And isn’t what a lot of us actually look for in a contractor someone who’s a little suspect? Who can maybe find a way to not have to get the permits? Who’s maybe going to pay some folks under the table? Would you bat an eye if your contractor asked you to make your check out to his wife instead of him (which has happened to me)? Or if he told you to just Zelle the money to Personal Breezy?
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We all perform, sometimes to conceal our true selves, sometimes to escape notice. John Paul Scotto recounts concealing his true identity to avoid inviting his father’s anger, and what he lost as a result.
By the time I was rewatching these videos as a teen, Dad never yelled at me. I’d learned how to keep him calm: Don’t complain. Don’t speak to him when he’s focused on a task. Be where he wants you to be at the precise time he wants you there. Do what he tells you to do immediately. Don’t talk back, don’t cry, don’t be noisy, don’t ramble about your obsessions — besides football. He liked to hear me talk about that.
As I’ve become an adult and struggled to manage my own temper, I’ve realized that Dad, like me, craved a calm and predictable environment, and his atypical eldest son’s chaotic energy destroyed his sense of equilibrium. I don’t fault him for this. His impatience, his need for control, his fury — these traits were a part of him long before I showed up. From what I can tell, we all have little or no control over who we are or how we operate. Our personalities just happen to us.
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The fudge sold at Copper Kettle was so creamy, so sweet, so beyond compare, that many candy shops on the Ocean City boardwalk didn’t even sell fudge, because there was no point. During summer vacations to the Jersey Shore in the 1970s, my father would take my brother and me as a treat, when we behaved. A pretty girl in a pinafore would greet us outside with a tray of free shavings. We’d load up on them until her smile strained, then proceed inside. Once we popped actual cubes of the magic stuff into our tiny mouths, we were as high as kids are allowed to be.
For decades, Copper Kettle lived in my head as a kind of childhood memory-scape: the salt air coming off the ocean, the shiny vats of molten fudge, the too much sugar all at once. Then, during the pandemic, my family decided to return to the Jersey Shore for my mother’s birthday, so everyone could gather outside. I told my brother we should make our way back to Copper Kettle, and he informed me that it had long since gone out of business. He had some more information too: about what had become of Harry Anglemyer, the man behind the fudge.
In the early 1960s, Harry had a string of Copper Kettle Fudge shops up and down the Shore. So revered were his stores that Harry was known far and wide as the Fudge King. He was even in talks to build a fudge factory—something that would’ve taken his Willy Wonka–ness to the next level—when he was savagely beaten to death on Labor Day 1964. His body was stuffed under the dashboard of his Lincoln Continental, parked at an after-hours nightclub called the Dunes. The case was never solved.
I spent the next two years sorting through a trove of whispers and accusations around the murder. At first I was just curious, but the more I learned about Harry—a figure beloved by friends and strangers alike—the more intent I was to identify his killer.
I scoured blogs, Facebook groups, newspaper archives, and thinly veiled fictional accounts of the crime. As one local put it, over the years a veritable “Jersey Shore QAnon” had blossomed around the murder, raising questions of culture, class, sexuality, and hierarches of power. I discovered a plausible myth, a trove of red herrings, and, finally, what appeared to be the truth.
Almost six decades on, I wasn’t sure anyone wanted to hear it. When I visited Ocean City while reporting this story, a shop owner I engaged about Harry Anglemyer lowered her voice and said, “You know he was murdered, don’t you?”
I admitted that I did.
She responded, by way of warning: “You sneeze in this town and everyone hears it.”
The Fudge King became one of the richest men for miles, with no qualms about flashing his wealth.
Harry Anglemyer, a stocky charmer out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was born in 1927. His high school summers were spent in Wildwood, New Jersey, where he apprenticed at Laura’s Fudge Shop. He was told that this was a little sissy. He didn’t care.
He left high school to join the Navy, served two years at the end of World War II, then returned to the Shore to open his own fudge shop in 1947. In those days, Ocean City seemed postcard perfect. Ten blocks at its widest, situated on a barrier island about 11 miles south of Atlantic City, it was lined with boarding houses, deep porches with rattan rockers, and striped canvas awnings that softened the summer sun. It called itself—and still does—America’s Greatest Family Resort.
The author Gay Talese, who grew up there, once described Ocean City as “founded in 1879 by Methodist ministers and other Prohibitionists who wished to establish an island of abstinence and propriety.” Prohibitionists remain. To this day, you can’t buy booze within city limits. Or have a cocktail at a restaurant. Or go to a bar, since there are none. If you want to bend an elbow, you must belong to one of the few private clubs that allow it. You can also import your own adult beverages, stopping at the Circle Liquor Store in Somers Point before entering town across the Ninth Street Bridge.
You would think that such a gauntlet might encourage at least a semblance of abstinence and propriety, but a 2017 USA Today article deemed Ocean City the drunkest city in New Jersey. It was and is a place of contradictions.
Just like Harry Anglemyer was a man of contradictions. He donated generously to civic causes and charities, including religious ones. He sat on the city’s planning board at the behest of the mayor. He joined the Masons and the chamber of commerce. He befriended prominent men and their wives, whom he squired to social functions when their husbands were busy. He hobnobbed with local luminaries, including the Kelly family of Philadelphia, who kept a summer cottage in Ocean City that Grace Kelly visited—first as a child, then as a movie star, then as a princess. Harry was so well regarded that 1,500 people showed up at the Godfrey-Smith Funeral Home in September 1964 to view his body. Businesspeople, politicians, and socialites came to pay their respects, packing the place with flowers.
Many of them also knew of Harry’s other, less civic-minded side. When he wasn’t delighting families with his fudge or charming the local elite, he liked to go out. He shut down bars. He was a fixture at Atlantic City’s racetrack, where he played the horses. He spent time at the nearby Air National Guard base. During the summer of 1964, he seemed to have acquired boyfriends from both locations.
Harry was, in fact, a little sissy.
Which everyone kind of knew. He was 37 and handsome, he’d never married, and he dressed fastidiously. He had a small dog, acquired on a trip to Fort Lauderdale—which, he confided to a friend, was perhaps “too obvious.” He once had a girlfriend who wondered why they weren’t having sex. She seems to have been the only one in the dark. Men both known and strange came and went from his large suite of breezy, ocean-view rooms above Copper Kettle, right on the boardwalk, where he lived in the summer.
Harry took no pains to hide any of this, an astonishing fact given the pre-Stonewall, postwar pinko-homo panic. In the early 1960s, and especially in small towns like Ocean City, which had a population of about 7,500 during the off-season, men were expected to find a girl and put a ring on her. Especially handsome men with killer smiles, fitted jackets, and penny loafers that shined like onyx.
But something saved Harry from too much scrutiny—for a time, anyway. He was an entrepreneur, and he elevated the boardwalk’s game. He saw the future, which might have been his shield. Other local business owners looked past his sexuality. They wanted even a little piece of his magic.
Harry placed gleaming copper kettles in the windows of his boardwalk shop, poured in liquid fudge, and positioned above them teenage boys with bronzed skin and sparkling white teeth, gripping big wooden paddles, churning and churning. Outside on the boardwalk, children panted as they watched, their faces cracked from too much sun, their bare feet sandy, their eyes wet and hungry. They wanted that fudge so bad. At night, after the last box was sold and the shop had closed, the kettles remained pin-spotted from above like Ziegfeld girls.
Money surged in like the tide. Soon Harry had shops in Atlantic City, Sea Isle City, and Stone Harbor as well. The Fudge King became one of the richest men for miles, with no qualms about flashing his wealth. He purchased a two-story colonial in the Gardens, Ocean City’s fanciest neighborhood, where he lived in the off-season, and kept two cars: the Lincoln Continental where his body would later be found, and a Chrysler Imperial purchased just months before his death.
Most spectacularly, he acquired a blinding ring: five emerald-cut diamonds, approximately eight carats total, set in a band of white gold. It was valued at about $10,000, almost $100,000 in today’s dollars. Harry wore it everywhere. Which was quite a big deal. With the exception of a few families, including the famous Kellys, whose fortune came from brickmaking, Ocean City was for the most part a resort of the working class. Its tourists and year-round residents had likely never seen such jewels except on television, worn by the likes of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Or Liberace.
Harry’s success made him an object of allure and envy, though by all accounts he shared his fortune with others. He frequently bought dinners for his staff. He gave loans to friends and told them to take their time paying him back. (After his death, his family found a drawer full of IOUs.) He even had a brand-new clothes dryer delivered to a young mother burdened by a bad marriage. She wept knowing there was at least one good man in the world.
That’s what most people said about Harry: how good he was, generous and kind, fun-loving and curious. But in the summer of 1964, they noticed something else about him. The Fudge King was uncharacteristically on edge.
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Despite the current psychedelic boom and promising developments in psychedelic therapy, there haven’t been enough large-scale trials for researchers to really understand how drugs like psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA interact with the nervous system. So a group of researchers—including a machine learning expert and a researcher mapping a mysterious region of the central nervous system focused on introspection—harnessed AI to mine through thousands of testimonials on Erowid, a drug forum from the early days of the internet. The drug experience is so varied—from mystical and blissful to dark and panicky—so the idea was to use existing data from honest, real-life accounts of people who have been sharing their experiences for decades.
But we are far from freely administering psychedelic medication—getting the appropriate dose to the right patient will require a tremendous amount of fine-tuning. But for people to someday be able to use these drugs for therapy, without the hallucinatory side effects? What a trip.
While some entries can be bleak—particularly for harder drugs like meth or heroin—the vast majority are written in a companionable, curious voice that will be familiar to anyone with an older sibling or cousin who likes to test the limits of consciousness from their own backyard. The testimonials include highly specific descriptions not just of the chosen amount and imbibing method, but also the subtle shadings of each experience; sometimes with humor, but always with rigor, vibrancy, and clarity, often down to the passing minutes. These are good faith arbiters, truly interested in exploring the variance of human perception and making sure others can do so safely. There are none of Hunter S. Thompson’s “fools or frauds” here, though any one writer tends to give the distinct impression of being a bit of a weirdo.
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In this beautiful essay, Noreen Masud, a University of Bristol lecturer and the author of the book Flat Place, reflects on landscapes: the nature and wildlife of the flatlands and wetlands of the UK. But there’s a deeper introspection here as Masud recalls a painful childhood in Pakistan and her experiences of trauma and cPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder). Masud’s words are haunting, and her gorgeous voice carries you through to the piece’s strong end.
My life in Pakistan, full of painful nothing, had left a flat landscape inside my head. Not a bleak, dead one. That would almost have been easier. This flat landscape seared with painful livingness. It wouldn’t let me look away: kept me mesmerised by its agonised, intense emptiness. And it seemed more real than any of the strange world around me. Even in safe cosy Britain, where there were consequences for hurting your children and education was free, I sensed something sinister under the gleaming surface. Something stark and painful, and utterly relentless that refused to know how much its wealth and serenity was built on the pain of others, stripped for parts by white colonisers and taught to hate themselves.
From those flat places, drained and bare and empty, and which hid nothing – which, like me, couldn’t stop showing their damage – there rose up stories of more migrants from Asia and Africa. Not birds, this time, but cockle-pickers, farm-workers, a human zoo, a labour battalion. Migrants whom Britain does not know how to see; whom it prefers not to see. I wrote about these walks in my book, A Flat Place (2023). I put the flat place inside me on to paper, made it into a solid flat rectangle bound between boards, so that it didn’t need to surge up under my eyes any longer. I could show it to friends who loved me.
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As a child, Dženana Vucic was forced to leave Bosnia after muslims were targeted for genocide in the Bosnian War between 1992 and 1995. In this beautiful braided essay, she relates the dissonances of returning to a place that once was home, one that compels her to come back despite the steep personal and financial cost.
In Bosnia, I learned to speak my mother tongue, albeit haltingly; to drink coffee short and strong and sweet; to cook grah with Vegemite in place of suho meso. I learned, too, that I had been gone too long, that I could not stay.
I don’t remember much of my village during the war and nothing at all of it before the gunfire and makeshift sniper nests. My father tells me it used to be bigger, all the houses full and whole, and there were shops too – cafes and a bakery and, in the next village (where my mother grew up), even a cinema. After the war everything was different, everyone dead or gone. The land wears this loss in ruins and abandoned homes with gaping windows, in exposed brick and plastic UN sheeting which, thirty years later, still replaces glass in our poorest neighbours’ homes. Trees erupt from broken walls; blackberry and nettle swarm the hollow bellies of houses across the street. Yet few fields have been left fallow, since without employment people have had to grow their own food. Now it is mostly the old who tend the rows of tomato and cucumber. The villages are empty of young people; they’ve gone to look for work.
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Brian Donovan, a 51-year-old sociology professor, offers an honors seminar called the Sociology of Taylor Swift at at the University of Kansas. The academic—and Swiftie—uses the musician as a vehicle to discuss topics across American life, including celebrity and fandom; race, gender, and sexuality; and the culture and creative industries. For Kansas Alumni magazine, Steven Hill shares Donovan’s insights on the importance of studying pop culture, and why a pivot during the COVID pandemic to study joy, happiness, and Swift’s life and career was an effective research move.
“Seeing strangers connect in a positive way—that’s always a good sign of the value of a given cultural phenomenon,” he says. “Anything that can move 55,000 people for good or ill is worthy of our attention.”
One fan Donovan interviewed through his TikTok outreach, a 30-something Swiftie with a high-pressure job, suddenly found herself stuck at home during the height of the pandemic. She noticed that another resident in her apartment building had a Taylor Swift doormat. She left the neighbor a note, and the women began texting, then talking—with masks, at a distance, in the hallway—before eventually getting together for an overnight listening party to celebrate the midnight release of one of Swift’s 2020 recordings. Three years later they’re attending together an event that seemed inconceivable during those dark days—an Eras Tour concert uniting thousands of thrilled fans—asking, for a few brief hours, nothing more than what we have always asked of our idols: joy and deliverance.
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Harrison Scott Key| Longreads | October 3, 2023 | 14 minutes (4,055 words)
In 2014, the National Rail Passenger Corporation, best known as Amtrak, pulled off one of the epic marketing coups of U.S. railroad history—granted, there haven’t been many of late—when they announced the Amtrak Residency for Writers, where they would send 24 writers on cross-country trips, meals and beds gratis, to write the Great American Novel. The announcement of this perfect marriage of two beloved dinosaurs—trains and publishing!—set Twitter aflame, like hearing Panasonic and Oldsmobile had teamed up to launch a new line of gas-powered fax machines.
Around the same time, evil scientist Elon Musk announced his plan for the Hyperloop, a high-speed transport system where humans would be jammed into cans like Vienna sausages and shipped across the nation via pneumatic mail; meanwhile, Astronerd Jeff Bezos and his Amazonian Savings Monster continued to strip-mine the foundations of the literary ecosystem. So this little PR stunt by Amtrak, the desktop PC of the global travel industry, a national embarrassment to hide from your European friends, smelled of quiet revolution. Together, trains and writers would lay siege to the behemoth of late-stage capitalism.
Attention was paid. MacDowell, the celebrated New Hampshire residency, receives 4,000 applications a year. Amtrak received 16,000, including mine. Having just landed my first book deal, I was in urgent need of somewhere quiet to finish the manuscript, and when I think “quiet,” I think “trains.”
I knew just which one I wanted to ride. I was born hardly a mile from Central Station in Memphis, Tennessee, midpoint for that fabled locomotive of song, Amtrak’s City of New Orleans. As a boy, this train called me awake at my grandmother’s house in Greenwood, Mississippi, its sonorous horn summoning me to a day of biscuits and books. As a young man, the same train clattered over a derelict coffee house in Jackson, Mississippi, where I loafed on allergenic chesterfields and first dreamed my name onto a title page. As a grad student in Illinois, attempting to finish at least one story that would not induce suicidal ideation, I watched the City of New Orleans roll past the windows of another coffee shop, slow and steady. How perfect to ride this train while actually finishing a manuscript. I applied with gusto.
Together, trains and writers would lay siege to the behemoth of late-stage capitalism.
But alas, Amtrak did not pick me, and I was forced to finish that book at a residency in the Hamptons, like a peasant. Two years later, I applied once again, but the Amtrak Residency for Writers, that hope of insolvent rail barons and writers everywhere, had already disappeared without a trace. Subsequent books I wrote in my driveway in Savannah, Georgia, tortured by the sound of other Amtrak trains—the Silver Star or the Palmetto—while the City of New Orleans was out there somewhere, heaving its way through natal lands.
And so, earlier this year, with the idea for a TV pilot rattling through my brain, I decided it was time, finally, to ride the train that ran through the landscape of my young imagination. As an American author whose books command upwards of $3.09 on eBay, I could fund my own residency.
“Where will you sleep?” my wife asked when I announced this plan.
“I have no idea.”
“Will you poop on the train?” she asked, troubled at the thought.
“I assume so, in the designated areas.”
“It doesn’t seem safe.”
I’ve wandered solo across three continents, from Cannes to Kowloon, but maybe she was right. When I travel solo, I can lose my grip a little—neglecting hygiene and ordering Caesar salads nonstop. Generally spiraling. So I texted Mark, my oldest friend.
Mark and I met in ninth grade in Star, Mississippi, and have been best friends now for nearly 35 years, though we’re opposites in almost every way. I come from a tortured nuclear family of farm chores and football, while Mark was a peripatetic child of divorce, shipped from Mississippi to California and back again, an underage drinker lost in books and skipping school. I once discovered in his bedroom a waterlogged library copy of Plutarch’s Lives, three years overdue.
“You should return this,” I said.
“What are they going to do, arrest me?” he said.
His insouciance toward authority shocked my young soul. Senior year, I broke into the guidance counselor’s office and forged his school records, just so he could graduate.
“Thanks, I guess,” he said. He had the highest IQ in school.
After graduation, I took the academic track across six different states, covering my steamer trunk in diplomas and achievement, while Mark lit out for the horizon on the City of Neverland to guide raft trips, work in secluded mountain resorts, and play his guitar up and down river gorges for women who couldn’t easily run away, due to the gorges.
I wanted to write stories. Mark wanted to live them. I’ve never stopped seeking achievement and he’s never stopped seeking places to go, the Peter Pan to my Wendy. He even married a flight attendant, mostly for love, but also for the free plane tickets that allow him to join me for book festivals, readings, talks, and conferences across the nation. If I’ve got a king mattress booked, paid for by someone else, Mark’s there. He flies standby and always shows.
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Normally when we travel, I spend much of my free time back in the room, writing, while Mark wanders the city. A few years ago, though, I began to notice that whenever I got stuck on a story, Mark always had the answer, a suggestion that broke the block and carried me through. He had become a kind of muse, a talisman. I write better when he’s around, so much so that we’ve even collaborated on a script or two over the years, with Mark shouting ideas from a jacuzzi while I type. Maybe we could write something together on this train.
“Congratulations,” I texted Mark. “You’ve just been selected for the Amtrak Residency for Writers. Also, you owe me $350.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever ridden a train,” he said.
“It’ll be an adventure.”
“What’s the food like?”
The only thing Mark loves more than a trip is cheap, delicious grub—hamburgers most of all—and his grail is the burger at Port of Call, a tiny Polynesian-themed food chuck wagon on Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans. Mark’s a wayfaring evangelist in the Church of Saturated Fat, confronting heterodox servers about the origins of their meat and fearlessly contesting Yelp reviews that reek of heresy (“Best burger in town my ass!”). To paraphrase a meme making the rounds: the energy Taylor Swift fans have for her music, Mark has for Hebrew National chili dogs.
“We can start with pizza in Chicago and end with a burger in New Orleans,” I said.
“Can we bring our own food?”
“This is Amtrak. We can probably bring our own livestock.”
A month later, in June, we stand in the breezy colonnade of Chicago’s Union Station, a neoclassical block of limestone that makes most train stations look like a garden shed.
“This place is amazing,” I say, fondling a frigid column for inspiration.
“It’s so cold,” Mark says.
The most interesting part of this particular summer’s day in Chicago is that it’s actually winter. I fully expect to see narwhals nosing bergs in the river below us. We’re warmed only by the two Giordano’s pizzas we now carry, so heavy that they, too, seem fashioned of limestone. We picked them up minutes ago, along with six packs of smokes, two bottles of wine, assorted chip selections, candy, gum, and a case of beer for hydration.
Mark is almost 50 and I’m not far behind, but that’s the thing about traveling with old friends. You become young idiots again. Soon, we duck inside and behold Union Station’s palatial interior, two middle-aged Pinocchios inside a Gilded Age whale, and make our way to the Metropolitan Lounge, where Mark raids the complimentary snacks, adding Sun Chips and Sprites to our growing pile of foodstuffs.
“A writer cannot have too many powdered donuts,” he says, handing me a sleeve.
When the call comes, we heave our provisions into a rumbling underground cavern, where the City of New Orleans awaits us. Up close, she’s a mammoth prehistoric beast with a head nearly two stories high. We breathe in the heady fumes. Around the world, 75% of rail transport is sustainably electrified, but here on Amtrak, we burn old dinosaur bones. The fragrance of discovery! Diesel vapors loosen the circuits in my brain, preparing my mind for miles of collaborative writing and toxic hallucination.
“Remind me, what are we going to write?” Mark asks.
“I have a hundred bad pilot ideas,” I say. “We’ll get settled and hash it out.”
“I believe in you,” he says, though I can see he’s talking to the pizza.
A woman in a fun conductor’s cap studies our tickets and with a jerk of the neck sends us aboard the sleeper, whereupon we discover a hobbit-sized vault called a “roomette,” where we, two full-sized creatures of the race of men, will have to eat, sleep, write, and breathe in fraternal disharmony for a thousand miles. I fall forward into my seat as Mark falls into his, for there is nowhere else to fall. Our kneecaps greet one another with a holy kiss and soon we creep backward into Chicago dusk. The seats may seem small, but on Delta, they’d be business class.
Around the world, 75% of rail transport is sustainably electrified, but here on Amtrak, we burn old dinosaur bones.
“So, the TV show,” I say, but I’m interrupted by Ricky, our car captain.
“Dinner time!” says Ricky, handing us two menus.
“We have pizza,” I say.
“I’ll have the braised ribs in a cabernet reduction,” says Mark.
I cave, opting for the Thai red curry with “plant-based meatballs.”
While waiting for dinner to arrive, we have dinner. The pizzas defy Mark’s highest expectations. We crack open beers and make merry. Ricky soon returns with two additional beers and a pair of brown paper tote bags, marked “Beef” and “Vegan.” Mark winces through his salty entrée, while my plant-based meatballs taste like neither meat nor plants, but a secret third flavor profile you simply cannot find on faster, better trains.
“Okay, the script,” Mark says, as we scoot silently through the heartland. I begin to conjure possible scenes when Ricky interrupts again to announce that breakfast is at six.
“Would you like to eat here or take your meal upstairs?”
“The dining car will be fine,” Mark says, like a monocled tycoon. He cracks another cold one and I pour a cup of pinot. I would like to write, but the blood required in my brain is rerouted to my core to deal with my plant-based decisions.
“Let’s explore,” Mark says, and I agree, hoping that movement will aid digestion.
We climb up the narrow stairs to make our way aft. The gangway is steely and bright, very Death Star, with knobs and fat buttons that open the doors with a deep rattling swish.
In the dining car, we discover an elongated series of Waffle House booths and I make a note for us to return here with my laptop. Moving on to coach, dimmed now, we see a Grizzly Adams type, big as a Kodiak, snoring through his beard, dreaming of pelts. Through the windows, the landscape now gone dark, I see that we’re passing some small prairie village. We stroll through more cars, quiet fathers and sleeping sons in Cubs apparel, a klatch of women in hijabs. The snack bar car features a concession stand serving hot dogs and nachos. Mark wants a wiener, I can tell, though I’m not sure where in his body he plans to put it.
Back in our room, we’re sleepy. Together we attempt to transform the roomette into a pair of bunk beds, but the gallons of beer and wine we’ve poured into our livers have made such large puzzles difficult. Eventually, Mark claims the top bunk and climbs up.
“We’ve got all day tomorrow to write,” I say. “The morning is better anyway.”
“Let’s do it.”
Mark is always a let’s-do-it kind of friend, but it’s possible he was not listening, because I can now hear him snoring. Generally, though, I could propose we paddle a tandem kayak to Bora Bora and he’d consider it. His Neverland lifestyle is highly flex. He now sells life insurance over the phone, a remote job he can hate from anywhere.
As he sleeps, I find a notebook and prepare for the thrill of night writing as we juke through the fruited plains. Around two in the morning, my pen lost in the endless crevices of the world’s tiniest escape room, I awaken. We are stopped.
“What the hell?” Mark moans, above.
“Carbondale,” I say.
We step barefoot out onto the moonlit trackside pavement of this village where I once composed many plays, now mercifully decomposing in nearby landfills. In the dark, Amtrak employees wait patiently for the few stirring passengers to finish inhaling the heavier night air. The South creeps up on you. Home’s getting closer. The idling staff seem somehow both familiar and strange. Large people mostly, tall and rotund, not at all like the fastidious attendants of British Airways. This lot seems capable of throwing human bodies off the train.
Soon, we are back in our berth and dead to the world. At dawn, the train eases us awake as we hum through hills and trees that crowd closer, set to a yellowy fire by a low Southern sun. My notebook remains empty.
“Man, this is beautiful,” I say.
“What’s beautiful?” says Mark, above.
“The landscape.”
“I see nothing but a wall. I’m trapped.”
Central Station in Memphis, an instrument in delivering our nation’s musical genetic code from the Deep South to the world, has now, more than 100 years after its construction, petered out to a single track. But when you stand on the lonely platform at seven on a clear summer’s morn and look over the city, you can see why some bluesmen said to hell with everywhere else and stayed. I was born here, lived here for many years, and have never seen Memphis so pretty.
“Say, can you boys watch the door for me?” says car captain Ricky.
“What’d he say?” says Mark.
“He deputized us. Guard the door.”
Mark and I ensure no tramps hop aboard (yet another charm of the rails), and soon we are moving again. The next four hours we’ll chug through the Mississippi Delta. To prepare for a solid stretch of writing through this flat-earther’s paradise of swamps and soybeans, I gather a change of clothes and step gingerly to the bathing closet to revive my tired body. In seconds, I am covered in a rich lather and warmish water coughs its way onto my flesh as I’m lovingly thrown from wall to wall with each new curve. Refreshed, I return to find Mark eating the last gelid slice of Giordano’s as curly-headed Hereford cattle rocket sideways past the window, followed by an announcement encouraging passengers to flush.
“That reminds me. We should eat,” says Mark.
“We need to write.”
“Definitely.”
But when you stand on the lonely platform at seven on a clear summer’s morn and look over the city, you can see why some bluesmen said to hell with everywhere else and stayed.
In the dining car, a server in Amtrak uniform—with the slight costume addition of an apron—takes our order, quickly presenting us with an omelet and pancakes that taste of motor oil, along with meat-based meat in both link and patty form. We don’t finish the food but appreciate the speed and friendliness with which it was presented. But the real luxury here is what we see through the windows: Swamp. Farm. Weeds. Cotton. Cow. Meth addict. Miles disappear, and so does our motivation. This view’s too good not to sit and stare, the way campfires make you do. Something about the endless movement invites easy contemplation.
“Greenwood! Greenwood!” comes the announcement an hour later. Porters run through cars like captains of the 82nd Airborne, rousing the paratroopers.
“Next stop, Greenwood!”
We disembark briefly to see the town where I first heard the siren call of this old train.
“This is a very historic place?” a blonde giant asks.
“Yes.”
He studies the sad little station, looking around for something to photograph, an old courthouse or one of bluesman Robert Johnson’s dozens of possible graves. We can see nothing from here but a ramshackle depot that looks like it hasn’t seen a train since Bob Dylan sang freedom songs at the voter push in ’63.
“Where are you from?” I ask.
“Norway,” he says. “Where is your home?”
“Here, sort of,” I say. “My grandmother’s buried past those trees.”
The Norwegian Goliath looks past the trees, disappointed. Not even he can see that far.
Back aboard, we move to the observation car—a long-windowed box optimized for viewing the bountiful emptiness all around us—where a shindig has broken out. We’ve picked up many new travelers, ready to party in their Saints jerseys, cowboy hats, and shiny boots fashioned from the hides of slithering swamp creatures. Not much quietude for writing, but plenty of action for research. I count at least three Bluetooth speakers playing music at a full crackling roar—musica ranchera and Bobby Caldwell and Tina Turner. I see cans of beer, purple sacks of Crown Royal, and a woman with nails long enough to get her cast in the Wolverine franchise watching a cattle auction on her phone while eating Corn Nuts.
“I didn’t know they still made Corn Nuts,” says Mark.
“How many stomachs do you have?”
“I’m a complicated man.”
We haul out what’s left of our warm beer and pound a few in good fun. A multiethnic church group in matching T-shirts enters the car to pass out free candy and speak blessings upon us all.
I see cans of beer, purple sacks of Crown Royal, and a woman with nails long enough to get her cast in the Wolverine franchise watching a cattle auction on her phone while eating Corn Nuts.
An hour or so later, just past Yazoo City—where I was married—we climb up Loess Bluff and into deep, dark, dripping woods, where, with a great juddering jolt, the party train stops. Fallen power lines sizzle across the track up ahead, we’re told, as well as a few large trees for good measure.
“Could be an hour or two,” the engineer explains over the P.A. “Get comfortable.”
The passengers opt instead to mutiny.
“What the hell?”
“Where we at?”
“A reminder to flush the toilets!” comes a second aggrieved announcement.
“Y’all better be flushing them toilets!” says a passenger to everyone in the car.
The delay affords precious stolen hours to write, and we scoot forward to the hushed Waffle House car—empty—where I pull out my laptop and portable charger. Mark ducks out and returns with a cartoonish hot dog large enough to require its own ticket, setting to work on the massive link with knife and fork.
“How do you not weigh five hundred pounds?”
“This dog’s no good,” he says, finishing it.
Maddening silence descends. For all the green around us, we could be awaiting bandits in a Panamanian jungle. Minutes go by. Mark eats the last of the powdered donuts wistfully. He is out of food and I am out of inspiration, which has rattled on down the tracks without us. We sit in silence inside this hulking old beast, hardly a murmur from man or machine. I return to my screen, wondering at the emptiness before me. How many hours, how many lifetimes, have I sat across a booth from this strange and beautiful man in faraway places—from the frigid glacial shores of Wyoming’s Colter Bay to the briny paradise of South Beach—and tried to write? I’ll never stop trying to fill my days with words. I will die at a table like this, the cursor waiting for a new thought that will never come. I long for Mark’s ability just to sit with food and moan gratefully.
“I’ve got nothing,” I say, closing my computer.
“That’s cool, whatever,” he says.
I pull out the last bottle of red and, after fetching two coffee cups from the galley, pour us a drink. Writers need time, and Amtrak, it would appear, has all the time in the world. But maybe they ended the residency program for the same reasons Mark and I have written nothing on this train: There’s just too much else to do and see. America changing shape before your eyes.
“I love you, dork,” I say, the wine turning me watery-eyed. I’m spiraling.
“I love you, too,” he says.
We unload feelings on each other, the way near-drunk men will, grateful, meaning every wincing word. I talk of my darker days, which he and others brightened with love and care. He shares much of the same. What a gift, to have someone who knows everything about you and loves you anyway. I have so many people in my life demanding things from me: pages, rewrites, interviews, blurbs, money, mowed lawns, answers, food, water.
Mark is one of the few who requires only my presence—and my occasional thoughts about food. If he’s taught me anything, it’s that doing nothing, asking nothing, expecting nothing, is a precious skill to be mastered in a life well lived. Sometimes you have to do, but sometimes you can stop and just be, like this man. Like the City of New Orleans.
We lurch forward two hours later, the bottle empty, along with Mark’s four stomachs and the Microsoft Word document. We soon roll through Jackson and then plummet through the Piney Woods that stretch from here to the Gulf. The party car is quieter now, everyone dozing away their liquor. It begins to rain. We amble toward coach. I choose my place of rest among the many open seats as we lumber toward the Gulf. It’s been slow going, but that’s the point of Amtrak.
Planes always put me in a bad mood. They herd you like slaughterhouse fodder, compel you to undress among strangers, pat your crotch with gloved hands, gouge you for a club sandwich, shame you for bringing luggage, park you on overheated runways, dare you to hate your fellow man. Humanity is stolen in exchange for speed. Sure, you get there quicker. But who are you when you arrive?
We could’ve flown from Chicago to New Orleans in a remarkable 144 minutes. Mark and I will have managed the same journey in a little under 24 hours, counting delays, but you know what? Nobody yelled at me for bringing my own water. And while the roomette was indeed small, I was allowed to walk freely about the length of this wondrous machine and escape every so often to breathe in new air from some new town, while discussing my grandmother’s burial place with a Viking. They even let us bring a case of beer and three bottles of wine. Try that on United.
They say we’re on the “cusp of a passenger rail revolution,” thanks to a new $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, which includes “an unprecedented $170 billion for improving railroads,” which I can only assume includes meat-based meatballs and improved wieners, in addition to speed and convenience, though maybe we’ve got enough of both already. Maybe we need to slow the hell down.
I awaken from a nap to one of the dreamiest visions I have ever seen out a window: an ocean planet beyond the glass, placid water stretching as far as the eye can see, gray and wet as the sky—the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the longest bridge in the world. New Orleans materializes across the expanse, high-rises pushing up out of the water. Sublime is the word. Alien, though I’ve seen this inland sea a thousand times.
We slide quietly through estuary marsh and into the heart of downtown under the brutalist concrete arcs of I-10 and come, finally, to the station. The clouds break and the sun shines down hot as we step down off the train into the city that gave her its name.
A rotund man follows us down, and, tangled in his many bags, tumbles and somersaults onto the platform to great laughter and applause, hopping upright and with a fat smile declaring, “I feel blessed!”
“Port of call,” Mark says.
“I could eat,” I say.
We didn’t write a word, but I don’t mind. I’ve achieved enough for now. Mark and I have done something far more important on this old train: nothing. It was lovely.
Harrison Scott Key is the author of three nonfiction books, including How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, Congratulations Who Are You Again, and The World’s Largest Man. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.
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