Several quick phone calls confirmed that something very ugly had happened on that train, and that I was being blamed for it. A New York reporter assigned to the Muskie camp warned me to “stay clear of this place . . . they’re really hot about it. They’ve pulled your pass for good.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “That’s one more summer that I have an excuse to avoid. But what happened? Why do they blame me?”
“Jesus Christ!” he said. “That crazy sonofabitch got on the train wearing your press badge and went completely crazy. He drank about ten martinis before the train even got moving, then he started abusing people. He cornered some poor bastard from one of the Washington papers and called him a Greasy Faggot and a Community Buttfucker . . . then he started pushing him around and saying he was going to throw him off the train at the next bridge . . . we couldn’t believe it was happening. He scared one of the network TV guys so badly that he locked himself in one of the lavatories for the rest of the trip.”
“Jesus, I hate to hear this,” I said. “But nobody really thought it was me, did they?”
“Hell, yes, they did,” he replied. “The only people on the train who even know what you look like were me and—and—.” (He mentioned several reporters whose names needn’t be listed here.) “But everybody else just looked at that ID badge he was wearing, and pretty soon the word was all the way back to Muskie’s car that some thug named Thompson from a thing called Rolling Stone was tearing the train apart. They were going to send Rosey Grier up to deal with you, but Dick Stewart [Muskie’s press secretary] said it wouldn’t look good to have a three-hundred-pound bodyguard beating up journalists on the campaign train.”
“That’s typical Muskie-staff thinking,” I said. “They’ve done everything else wrong; why balk at stomping a reporter?”
He laughed. “Actually,” he said, “the rumor was that you’d eaten a lot of LSD and gone wild—that you couldn’t help yourself.”
“What do you mean, me?” I said. “I wasn’t even on that goddamn train. The Muskie people deliberately didn’t wake me up in West Palm Beach. They didn’t like my attitude from the day before. My friend from the University of Florida newspaper said he heard them talking about it down in the lobby when they were checking off the press list and waking up all the others.”
“Yeah, I heard some of that talk,” he said. “Somebody said you seemed very negative.”
“I was,” I said. “That was one of the most degrading political experiences I’ve ever been subjected to.”
“That’s what the Muskie people said about your friend,” he replied. “Abusing reporters is one thing: hell, we’re all used to that—but about halfway to Miami I saw him reach over the bar and grab a whole bottle of gin off the rack. Then he began wandering from car to car, drinking out of the bottle and getting after those poor goddamn girls. That’s when it really got bad.”
“What girls?” I said.
“The ones in those little red, white, and blue hotpants outfits,” he replied. “All those so-called ‘Muskie volunteers’ from Jacksonville Junior College, or whatever . . .”
“You mean the barmaids? The ones with the straw boaters?”
“Yeah,” he said. “The cheerleaders. Well, they went all to goddamn pieces when your friend started manhandling them. Every time he’d come into a car the girls would run out the door at the other end. But every once in a while he’d catch one by an arm or a leg and start yelling stuff like ‘Now I gotcha, you little beauty! Come on over here and sit on poppa’s face!’ ”
“Jesus!” I said. “Why didn’t they just put him off the train?”
“How? You don’t stop a chartered Amtrak train on a main line just because of a drunken passenger. What if Muskie had ordered an emergency stop and we’d been rammed by a freight train? No presidential candidate would risk a thing like that.”
I could see the headlines in every paper from Key West to Seattle:
Muskie Campaign Train Collision Kills 34;
Demo Candidate Blames “Crazy Journalist”
“Anyway,” he said, “we were running late for that big rally at the station in Miami—so the Muskie guys figured it was better to just endure the crazy sonofabitch, rather than cause a violent scene on a train full of bored reporters. Christ, the train was loaded with network TV crews, all of them bitching about how Muskie wasn’t doing anything worth putting on the air . . .” He laughed. “Hell, yes, we all would have loved a big brawl on the train. Personally, I was bored stupid. I didn’t get a quote worth filing out of the whole goddamn trip.” He laughed again. “Actually, Muskie deserved that guy. He was a goddamn nightmare to be trapped on a train with, but at least he wasn’t dull. Nobody was dozing off like they did on Friday. Hell, there was no way to get away from that brute! All you could do was keep moving and hope he wouldn’t get hold of you.”