Metrolink608: Playing Hooky
Shelley J Alongi

 

Now it’s time for glen to say goodbye. Quiet hands soothe his restless darling engine into compliance, holding it back only long enough to ring the bell, leaving me standing, looking longingly after the train and its engineer, fuelling my throbbing, aching attachment to sweet trains. I’d play hooky for him; for trains, it’s a sweet contemplation, a tentative yet strong caress these two minutes and the trains. Yes, Glen, I’m playing hooky, you bet I am. It’s my favorite game.
Truth and rumors

There is a rumor circulating amongst the Fullerton train station patio faithful that Shelley will be back her first week at work after the holidays to see her engineer. Janice is the one who instigates this, she is, by her account, and by my silent admission, the one who got him to talk to me anyway. I would have figured out how to talk to him or at least get his attention, it just would have taken longer. He saw me from that first moment in September, he just didn’t yell at me out the window till it was obvious I wasn’t going away. But now here we are, talking, exchanging phone numbers, dropping honeyed tidbits about double stacks and such, and now, I’m scheduled sixty hours and can’t be sure I’ll get there this week. No worries, Janice says, you’ll be back. This part is the truth in the rumor.
Sweet Greetings

By the time Tuesday comes around I have put in nineteen hours, half a work week. When Disney gives hours it gives hours, and when it takes them it takes them. Right now Disney is in a giving mood. The only problem is I’m not sure I’m ready for not seeing my engineer. There is a reprieve, though, because Tuesday is a little stressful in the system department and by the time 3:00 is here I’m ready to go home. It seems that things that should only take a few minutes are taking entirely too much time. Despite my resolve not to do this I put my name on the early release list. I’ve struggled not to do that, thankful for the hours, but the word in the wind today is that we’re letting people give up over time hours because staffing is adequate to handle call volume. This can change from day to day so if I want to go to the station to see my number one engineer or anyone else I better do it today. Less than five minutes after I put my name on the list I get a call arranging for me to finish up my last hour, calling my day an eight hour day. I’m out the door and back to the station by 5:00. It’s kind of a good thing that I did get off because a call to my bank discloses that I am in trouble with my checkbook again due to funds being held for deposit so I fix that problem, something I couldn’t’ do if I had gotten off at my regularly scheduled time. Having solved that problem I enter the café, order dinner, and settle down for a long winter’s nap, or at least a peaceful respite before “the Glen Miller show” starts. Curt, the guy with the bike, Scooter Boy as he is affectionately known calls my two minute time with the engineer the Glen Miller show. It’s the only way he can remember his name. I guess that phrase will just have to work its way into station code.

The Santa Fe café is becoming a place of interest. This is the place where I called my first metrolink engineer on that quiet Friday New Year’s Day and experienced such grand delight and anguish. It is here that bob said he heard Glen on the scanner an I was jealous. I shouldn’t be jealous, I heard Glen on the phone, on Richard’s scanner, and out of the cab. I eat a patty melt and just quietly sit between the ice-cream freezers and the refrigerators holding water, soda and flavored drinks and an assortment of sandwiches, the door facing the archway behind me, the door exiting to the patio and the tracks in front of me. No one is here tonight. Shirley gets off her train in L.A. Janice is working or she and Bob are somewhere, and I am heading over to meet an engineer, my number one engineer. I stand waiting, people rush about as usual, the cool, crisp air gently reminding me that though the holidays are finished we are still in our southern California winter, a mix of sunshine, cool days, clouds, and the ever undecided rain. Tonight there is no rain. There is a vast expanse of rails stretching north and south, shining, beckoning, promising, bringing adventure, whisking it away, calling, comforting, caressing. I await my time to play my little game with the bell, my two minute romance. If I told Glen he was my Christmas present I’m still unwrapping it. I enjoy waiting here, especially after two days of working hard.

Chatsworth and The Question of the Bell
Glen pulls 608 obediently to its spot, my sweet bell announcing my number one engineer’s intensions, stop, wait, proceed, but not before looking down and talking to his best station girl. Does he know I’m his best station girl? I don’t’ know what he knows. Sometimes I think he’s seen it all before and sometimes I think that he doesn’t know my interest in the engineer or the trains. He definitely doesn’t think like me. When he says something and I say the same thing it means two different things. The most notable example is the simple word “Chatsworth.” When Glen says the word “Chatsworth”, it’s a “bad wreck.” When I say “Chatsworth”, it is a fully charged emotional and traumatic experience complete with sight, sound and image, a year’s journey into the world of trains for a former academic looking for something different and something to take up my vast amounts of energy. This speaking of the same word with entirely different meanings and implications is part of the beauty of the differences between the sexes I suppose. It could simply just be that it is for glen and Shelley just a matter of experience. Sometimes I just need the whole event of the Chatsworth train wreck that occurred on September 12 2008 when a Metrolink train slammed head-on into a Union Pacific freight train to be cut down to the engineer’s perspective. It was a wreck. Was it ever!
Now my engineer in all of his vast experience and perspective sits here, I walk almost shyly to the cab, put my hand on the window. A hand on my shoulder alerts me to someone’s presence, a lady it turns out, something I’ve entirely missed because I’ve been focused on getting to that bell. She says something but Glen must stop her with a look or something because she goes away and there I am standing here, four days after talking to him on the phone, waiting for the signal, a signal I don’t get this time, at least not in the usual way.
“Hey,” I say as the lady walks away, “what’s up?”
Okay someone has to say the usual words.
But Glen doesn’t say those words. He looks down from his cab and makes this pronouncement.
“Are you playing hooky?” These are his first words after telling me on Friday to have a happy New Year in that sleepy way of his, a way that might be his usual way of communication when he’s not talking to me thirty feet over my head over the clatter of a sweet FP59 or an obnoxious MpI locomotive. My friendly, sleepy, sweet train engineer remembered! He remembered that we were going to be working over time. He’s still the best.
“they let me out of the cave,” I gush, all my anxiousness about last week’s phone call and all the intervening self analysis forgotten. “We could go home early. We weren’t busy.”They let me go.”
“Is that good or bad?” Glen asks.
“As long as I get my forty hours I’m okay.”
The engineer and the star struck rail fan fall silent.
“I wanted to ask you about the bell,” I now say as his hand coaxes that baby into its accelerated pace. “You ring it much farther back than any of the other people who come through here.”

“that’s because I want people to know I’m coming,” he says, settling in for the next part of his ride. Great. That’s obvious Mr. Number One Engineer. No matter. Someday I’ll get you to explain it more thoroughly, something I’m learning by trying out my questions on a different engineer. Janice suggests to me that I ask Norm my questions so on occasion I pull out my crinkled list and give it a try. I’ll have to reassume my academic mantle and break it all down point by point or I’m only going to get general answers.
No matter, for now, my engineer is ready to go I don’t know that words are exchanged. I cant’ say “see you tomorrow” because I don’t know that I will.

Picking the Best Relationship
Thursday is the last time I see Glen this week. We have been very busy till this afternoon when I put my name on he early release list and arrive at the station by 4:30 pm. It is a nice day today, about 79 degrees It is a perfect day for the nap I haven’t gotten since I started working these hours on Monday. Glen is the lucky one. He gets to Los Angeles then goes and sleeps somewhere curled up like a cat if only in my imagination, and then runs the 608 back to Ocean Side. I get no such luxury so it is with great excitement that I look forward to sitting under the shelter that usually houses the evening train watchers, the man who writes down all the engine numbers and his various cohorts. Today at 4:30 they are not there. It is quiet and so I settle myself and my yellow bag on the bench, waiting for action, or a respite from it. IN the distance I hear a man telling some kids that the Metrolink is about to switch over onto the Fullerton track. Around the corner from us is the switch that takes the train to us. The man’s excited cadence wakes me from a semiconscious state, a state where I’ve been daydreaming I’m sure about an engineer with a mustache and glasses. I know I haven’t been writing a grocery list or engineer questions. I have the questions safely tucked in my bag, but the grocery list remains unconstructed since lately I’ve only been eating out and not doing any serious shopping. I’ve decided while sitting there that there are three relationships between Glen the engineer and Shelley the adult adolescent. There is, first, the one that the station patio makes up, second, the one I make up, the exquisite self analysis, and thirdly, perhaps the most interesting, the one that actually exists; of the three, I’ll take the third one. It is unpredictable, fun, sometimes quiet, sometimes energetic, always friendly, and just, in its own way, perfect. It’s based on a two minute romance with the rails though we haven’t talked much about rails lately and definitely there’s no romance, perhaps the one I make up in my head because I know someone who runs the train. Okay I know the names of several people who run the trains, Norm the freight engineer who, it seems, has been trying to answer the questions on my list, and who doesn’t make me quite as nervous anymore. In fact in a separate incident, he tells us that he was in the Cilmar Quake in 1972 and that he goes to Vegas to gamble. On Sunday, several days after the Thursday I sit sleeping under the awnings he tells us that it is his bills that say “be here” to my admission that lately my work schedule just says “be here.” I’ve talked to Carrey who might have another train meet, and I sometimes talk to Frank on the 707 who doesn’t remember my name. But Glen is my romance with the rails. I’ve worked hard to get him to acknowledge me though I don’t’ think that would have taken much.

“I know other people who visit people they know on metrolink trains,” Dave the man who writes down all the engine numbers tells me later on Thursday. “None are as dedicated.” This is a reference to me. I’m the one who has shown up every day I can to meet this Metrolink train. Since September, 2009, metrolink 608 and its engineer has always been worth the wait.

My Favorite Game

Andy now knows that I have glen’s number. He shows up at the café to meet Ricky off the 608 and joins the banter around the little tables. We’re slowly moving back outside, the weather is getting quieter, warmer if only by degrees. Just when you think you’ve got all the weather changes in southern California figured out, along comes another weather system or high pressure system to complicate things. Tonight the systems are not complicating each other. We sit, we wait, we watch and soon it is time to go across the bridge.

“Did you find your spot?” Andy wants to know.
“yeah.”

The train approaches, its light winking in the distance, the bell sweetly clanging. I walk to the train, look up and smile.

“Are you playing hooky?”

“No. They let me go early. I put my name on the e r list”

“What is e r?”

My inquisitive engineer asks his question out of his cab over the sweet protest of the engine, the rough edge quality that sometimes softens, definitely eases when his star struck railfan draws him out of his lethargic contemplation of New Year’s day.

“That means if there is enough staff to handle call volume they’ll let some of us go,” I explain.

Now it’s time for him to go. Quiet hands sooth that restless darling into compliance, holding it back only long enough to ring the bell, leaving me standing, looking longingly after the train and its engineer and my throbbing, aching attachment to trains, sweet trains. I’d play hooky for him; for trains, it’s a sweet contemplation, a tentative yet strong caress these two minutes and the trains. Yes, Glen, I’m playing hooky, you bet I am. It’s my favorite game.

 

 

Copyright © 2010 Shelley J Alongi
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"