How I Earned My Name

She asked me...the human resources lady..."would you be willing to share a room onboard the train with a coworker of the opposite sex?" I blurted out without thinking "Is this a trick question?" I mean if I said "no" did that make me a prude? Or if I said "yes" was I some kind of a slut?

I was 24 years old. I had majored in drama (amongst other things) in college and was just back from two/three years off and on with a theatre company in the UK. I was living at home with my parents. It was the Spring of 1986. My mother saw an ad in the LA Times. "Amtrak is hiring for On Board Service employees". She showed it to me saying "That looks like it might be a fun job for the summer". Twenty eight years later it turned out to be a pretty long summer. But OH that FIRST SUMMER. It was legend. Back to the interview. I must have had the right answer...because I got the job.

A couple of weeks of class and a few training trips later something happened that on the railroad almost never happens. I got force assigned to a regular run with only 6 weeks of seniority. So instead of having to work "on call" for the Extra Board like most new hires I was going to spend the summer as Waiter 2 in the dining car on the Sunset Limited from LA to New Orleans. I was going to be spending at least three or four nights a month in the Big Easy in a hotel on Bourbon Street. WOW. But it was also three days and two nights there...three days and two nights back living and sleeping on board the train AND serving five breakfasts, five lunches and five dinners back and forth across the country IF nothing went wrong.

I showed up that first day at the commissary in the train yard in downtown LA. There were a bunch of men in uniform standing around the sign in sheet. Not one woman. The Friday Side Crew. These men had seniority with a capital S. I had spent the night before scratching the "trainee" sticker off of my nametag. It turned out that nobody on the "friday side" (the train was a tri-weekly with departures from LA on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays) had less than 25 years railroad time with Big Joe Elder in the kitchen sporting 40 long. They didn't bother to hide their looks of disgust, these men, or maybe what was a kind of desire. Not one of them moved out of my way when I walked up to the sign in sheet to write my name. I was a new hire, summer stock, a split tail and a snow bunny and still on probation. Summers on the road were ROUGH and you could see them thinking that I was some sort of punishment being visited on them by management. They wanted, hell they needed, someone who could do the work. It turns out that I got force assigned to that job because nobody with any seniority had bid on it. Whatever this crew had going on on the inside drowned out the sound of jazz in my imagination blowing across the country from Bourbon Street. This crew was 18 black men, 1 white man. And me. They walked off towards the train tracks as a group. That's when I heard the combination chuckle and sigh. One of the ladies who was working as a clerk in the commissary said to me sort of on the sly "You know your waiter 1 was fired for two years once. He held his waiter 2's head under the hot water dispenser in the pantry...you know the one for hot tea...during the dinner service. But the Union got him his job back." I was waiter 2. As I crossed that dirty, noisy, busy train yard to throw my luggage on the dormitory car I FELT like number 2. I wasn't worrying about the hours or remembering the menu items or unpacking in my room and hanging up my new uniforms that were still in the plastic. The pantry in a dining car seems designed like an obstacle course with every sharp corner at eye or knee level. There are things your coworkers can do that might get you hurt. But there are just as many if not more things they could NOT do, forget to do, neglect to do, that might end painfully. I just wanted to get to New Orleans and back alive.

Everyone on the railroad has a nickname. Everyone. If they like you anyway. Or if you stick. His real name was Alston Harris. But everyone called him "Baldy". It wasn't for the reasons you are probably thinking. He wasn't bald or losing his hair. Back when he started on the railroad there was no "Amtrak". He worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad. He had just gotten back from the Korean War when he hired on. Army. Special Forces. The men that he worked with back then all had BIG afro's. The kind that were so big they laid a towel over them so that they could pat them down and get them even all the way around. Baldy kept his hair army short. And he ran HIS pantry like a military strike force and every meal was a battle to be won. Or survived. Not only did all of us on the crew understand that or suffer the consequences but it didn't take the passengers very long to get the message...most of them anyway.

I don't remember exactly how many trips it took...how many days and nights...how many meals...how much down time sleeping in the upper bunk above him in that 12 by 6 closet they called a "dorm room". Sleeping on top of my shoes at night so they didn't end up flying out a vestibule window somewhere between Del Rio and San Antonio Texas...or how many late trains and early mornings with the passengers whining: "What!!! Are we STILL late? We didn't make up any time? Are we still in Texas? What do you mean you are out of oatmeal? When can you get more? Tell the Chef it's too hot. Too cold. Too salty. Too bland. What do you mean you can't get anymore of that til Houston? How many raisins are in the Raisin Bran?" Two. Two Scoops M'aam. And THAT was just the passengers.

The words of the crew were the one's that actually hurt. "You went to college? Really? But you couldn't count the number of salt and pepper shakers before we left? Look at you. Reading a book on your break. Doesn't she think she's special? You will wish you'd taken that nap by the time dinner is over. Oh...order got cold? Why didn't I take it for you? Youngblood...rule ONE. Don't call it if you can't haul it." It's not like I could go to my dorm room and cry. I was sharing it with HIM. Baldy. I can't count how many days and nights on the road or how many meals. Or how many layovers when after hitting the bumper in Nawlins the crew scattered and left me to make my way to the crew hotel and check in alone. But I will never forget the day it all changed.

Baldy and I were finishing the set up for the sort dinner that was served before the early evening arrival into New Orleans. The train was passing over the mighty Mississippi river on the Huey P. Long bridge. I was sitting in a booth looking out of the window at a horse farm on the banks of the river in Schriever Louisiana. I had had horses my whole life. Still had one that I was boarding at a stable near my parent's home. And again...without thinking...I made a comment out loud about a horse in one of the pastures. Baldy stopped in his tracks and looked at me as if I were a stranger and not the girl who had been crawling into the bunk over his head in sweats for weeks. He said "Which horse?" and sat across from me and looked out the window. We had our first conversation that day that wasn't about the job. Turns out Baldy had been raised on a ranch just outside of Houston and had spent his youth as a star of the black rodeo circuit in Texas. He'd had a roping horse so famous at the time he'd had to sleep with it on the nights before the rodeo to prevent sabotage. That night in New Orleans I went out with the crew for the first time. We went to a place outside the quarter called the Snug Harbor to listen to jazz and have raw oysters and Dixie Beer. Baldy paid for me. It was the BEST beer I'd ever tasted. Maybe it tasted so good because I felt like I had earned it. We were a team the rest of that summer and on into the fall. I took all the orders and did all the talking. Baldy followed me with ears open and delivered the drinks and other things with country club quiet and efficiency. The passengers were lucky if he ignored them. Because he wasn't afraid to tell it to them true. And he wasn't patient with the really stupid questions and rude comments like I was. "We should have flown." "Yes, you fat Ofay bitch. You should have." I'd drop off the check and a lot of the passengers would say "How can you work with that man? He's just AWFUL." I'd give them my sweetest white girl smile and say, "Mr. Harris is really very nice once you get to know him." And you could see them dig deep into their pockets to tip that "poor sweet little girl who was so nice". Baldy and I made a fortune that season. We were pooling those tips. And we got a really good laugh as we counted them out on his bed in the dorm.

Every morning in New Orleans from then on we stopped by Marie Laveau's REAL mausoleum...not the tourist trap they take the tourists by in St. Louis One. We'd go early before reporting at the station for the trip home after beignets and coffee and after stopping for a muffuletta from Central Grocery for the trip home. He said if we left Madame Laveau 11 cents, a dime and a penny, on her monument and asked nicely the Voodoo queen could keep me from getting bumped off the crew. I wasn't supposed to be able to hold that job past the summer. I was brand new remember? Well Baldy must have known something because I held that job for over two years. Up until someone with BIG time transferred to LA from Florida. Damn gators (as we called the Florida transfers in LA). But I lasted long enough to get my name.

The Friday side crew...Baldy, Big Joe, Skillet Man, PeeWee, Bugaloo, Brotherman, Spot, Wounded Knee and all the rest. They called me Baby Sister. A little later after I collected some seniority, worked on other crews, and it looked like I was going to last it changed. I was still Baby Sister on the Sunset but other places named me other things. My last name is "House". I became known as TwoStory. Two Story House. You might be able to guess why. On the road they've been known to say "House? You heard her talk? That woman has a least two stories for everything." How many new hires did I work with and train over the years that followed? Hundreds...maybe thousands. They didn't all last past the summer. Some didn't last long enough for anyone to remember their "real" names let alone long enough to get a road name. But as Baldy liked to say to me "Baby sister...don't take it too hard. Monkey's can't do this job you know. Their tails get in the way."