The Motorman

“There is a cosmic law which says that every satisfaction must be paid for with a dissatisfaction.” 
― G.I. Gurdjieff

Call this a meditation on the wages of dreams, a banked balance of debts and credits while in transit.

My hometown was planted in the midst of grasslands and cornfields that stretched as far as you cared to wander. The town itself was no more than two blocks long. The suburbia as it was that surrounded it had planted houses that were identical, neatly spaced with the regularity of army barracks. You could walk from one end to the other in fifteen minutes.

This was my universe as a child. Back in the day, there were grand plans of it becoming a metropolis and the evidence of this was a four lane concrete street that began and ended for a short distance fronting the railroad station. My daily routine in the summer was to walk two blocks past the repetition of the cookie cutter houses , buy a soda at the gas station with the purloined change I had received from returning my father’s beer bottles and sit under the eaves of the station on a slatted green bench to dream of faraway places.

I was ignorant of this story arc, of beginnings and endings. As I grew some years older at the age of 17, I became aware of this and aware that the ending came without a premonition, without a notice and that there were no choices, no choice. Life simply ended. That being said, I made a choice that year to leave my home and family with fifty dollars in my pocket to walk off the edge of the known world. Another time, another place.

Sitting on that bench in the shade even in the bright glare of a summer sun, I could see the approach of a headlight burning in the distance, and as the train rolled toward me, I could see the cars heel and rock over the crossover, the signal change from green to red. Sparks flickered and dust lazily rolled up in a cloud as the brakes squealed as they ground into steel wheels. The uniformed conductor nattily dressed in blue serge pushed open the door and hung on the vestibule anticipating the stop. A small step stool was planted on the platform and off walked old men, young mothers, business types from heaven knows where to hurriedly depart in a momentary bustle of activity as I sat and observed.

The pumping of the compressor sounded as if this train was catching it’s breath as the motorman stepped down with his satchel in hand, reaching for his stool..smiling, seeing this familiar kid planted like a small sentinel with eyes like an owl.

Mysteries abounded.As a child there was not much wiggle room between what you could and could not do. For myself on the platform, I knew I wanted to be a motorman, raising the trolley pole matching it to the wire to hear it crack with a zing,to take the throttle handle, release the brakes and follow the tracks watch the signals, sound the horn and wave to the passerby and bystanders….and follow a dream of mysterious lands full of exotica, mountainous crevices,roaring rivers and moonlit valleys. The captain of a ship, an authoritative figure of nine years old carrying a satchel.  

I had had enough. For weeks I had been directing a large commercial renovation of a apartment complex in far off Arkansas, writing contracts, scopes of work, soliciting bids, and coordinating everything from the color of the shutters to the laying of drainage systems over several acres. A position of responsibility, the owner’s representative and to the locals, an outsider. My word was my bond.

After renting a car, I arrived for a meeting with a father and his son who were constructing endless rows of privacy fences over the several acres of that complex, to approve and appraise their work in order that they be paid. As I pulled up to the rental office there they were, the two of them. The father motioned to the son to find something else to do as I approached and I was to be blind sided. He had not been paid a dime for the last two months by the owners. To buy the material he had taken a second mortgage on his house which he was on the brink of losing as well as facing utter bankruptcy. I had been set up. When I returned to Chicago, taking the elevator up to my office, the approach I wold take to this issue was paramount and I called for a meeting of the powers that be.

The short answer was “Well whats the problem? He will get paid in time..”

They arranged for the corporate property manager to travel with me back to Arkansas to resolve the leaving of this gentleman to swing in the breeze, which I had determined was likely a sham, a  ruse to buy time. We met the man who was more quietly desperate than ever and it was painful to observe as Bill assured him of a quick settling of our firm’s debt to him.

The phone rang and it was the gentleman in question. He had not been paid in the ensuing two weeks. That day, I resigned, packed up my office and arrived at the station, that was dank and dark..empty during a mid day lull. I walked up the vacant platform in search of the arrival of the train and heard a throbbing of an engine in idle several tracks away. Having nothing better to do than to kill time I walked over out of idle curiosity and there battered, with worn paint, grease stains sat an engine that was constructed long before I was born, coughing and belching acrid exhaust...waiting to be called. The works of man live long after their passing. Thats what I said to myself. 

My satchel was in hand.

Transience juxtaposed beginnings, a middle and an end placed in transit and in that cavernous and dark cave beneath the ground on that platform, time stopped and the spacial dimensions of my situation expanded into a seeming infinity of uncertainty marked with the certainty of my resignation. Rising above that station, I saw an invisible landscape that was tied to the string of a kite pulled an pushed by a something I could not reconnoiter or plan against it’s vicissitudes.

The kite was tethered now to a wife and two kids unaware of my decision. Gurdjieff whispered in my ear..”everything must be paid for”

Strings of valuations rolled and pitched in my mind from my bank balance to Arkansas that were folded into a stream running to it’s source, that kid wanting to be a motorman..