Donald O’Donovan

Night Train

The first draft of Night Train was written on 23 yellow legal pads while the author was homeless in the streets of LA. The manuscript was later transcribed and rewritten on a laptop after he reached a safe haven.

The laughter of the world collapsing, the laughter of those who live beneath the streets.

                                                                                                                                Jean Cocteau

Night Train

(1)

          I was doing my laundry in the men’s room of the all-night movie and who do I run into but Jack. Little Jack, Jack with the red hat. Tony’s Jack. It was Friday or Saturday, last week. I’m wringing out my socks in the sink and in he walks. Jack was thrashed. His clothes were ragged and dirty and his red hat was full of stickers. He’d been sleeping out with the coyotes. And no Tony.

          I put my things in a plastic garbage bag and we went back out, sat down and shared a bag of stale popcorn. We managed to catch a few winks, and in the morning, over coffee at Grand Central Market, he told me the story. Or he tried to tell it. The quality woman...the mansion in Brentwood. The words came out of him helter-skelter, like the song of a bird, a bird beaten down by a storm, a bird that had swallowed a poisoned worm. They were working the crowd in front of Bullocks Wilshire. Tony was sitting on his regular bus bench. Then the quality woman from Brentwood, she got her hooks into the big handsome guy. She kidnapped him. She adopted him.

          I first met Jack and Tony several months before that on Fifth Street. It was raining. Jack was a pipsqueak with a sinister black widow’s peak, slyly conning black eyes and a pirate’s toothy grin. Tony was six feet tall, well built, graceful on his feet, with huge hands. He was strangely silent.

          “Tony, this is—what’s your name?”

          “Jerzy. Jerzy Mulvaney.”

          “Jerzy, this is Tony. Tony, this is Jerzy.”

          We stood under a liquor store awning to get out of the drizzle. The owner came out and told us to move on. We ended up at Clifton’s. We had enough for coffee. It was Jack who did all the talking.

          “Do you know who this is?” Jack asked me. He kept plucking at my sleeve.

          “Yeah, sure, he’s Tony.”

          “He’s Tony, yeah, but Tony who? Do you know who this is? This is Tony Canzoneri. He fought Jake LaMotta in the Garden.”

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