Dave Kindred - Leave Out the Tragic Parts: A Grandfathers Search for a Boy Lost to Addiction

T his is a story about a boy I knew from the week of his birth and a young man I never knew at all. The boy was my grandson, Jared Glenn Kindred, and the young man was Goblin. That was Jareds road name, Goblin. He lived on the street until he learned to hop freight trains and then he lived on the road. He was one of those wanderers whose lives are a mystery and a bafflement, an undoable jigsaw puzzle. To find the light in that darkness, the storyteller goes in search of those who knew Jared who became Goblin. The storyteller who is also the grandfather then writes it truly. He writes it with tears and compassion and laughter. He writes that every time he talked to Jared who became Goblin he ended the conversation saying, Love you, boy, and every time the grandson said, Love you too.

Jared was born December 8, 1988, delivered three minutes before his brother, Jacob, fraternal twins, one weighing five pounds, the other five pounds, one ounce. The week before Christmas, I saw the boys in a braided-twig basket, Jared on the left, Jacob on the right. My wife, Cheryl, lifted them out of the basket and placed them in my hands. They stretched from my palms to halfway up my forearms. I wanted to remember how tiny they were. To me, at last, the birth of a child was amazing, a miracle, twice a miracle, Jared and Jacob. To see them was to remember the birth of my son, their father, Jeff. I remembered my wife in labor for hours, begging me to rub her back and, every time I rubbed her back, screaming, Dont touch me!

At the birth of our son I was twenty-two and knew nothing. My memory of his birth is a blur of school, job, marriage, the babys coming, the screaming, and then we went back to work. Cheryl was a day-shift nurse. I was a sportswriter working days, nights, and weekends because, when youre young and hungry and tireless, all you want to do is work and get to where you want to be. Where I wanted to be was not in a labor room with the screaming. I wanted to be out making the future happen. I was a kid myself, and I didnt know the future was happening in that labor room, our son being born.

Then, suddenly, I was forty-seven years old. And our son was a father, and he knew what was happening even if I never knew. Jeff held the twins in his arms and called them Jake and Jed, my country boys. He looked into the camera, and Id never seen a prouder dad. Had I ever held our son in my arms and had a picture made? I could search in drawers and boxes and maybe Id find a picture, but that wouldnt count, because it would mean I didnt remember and the picture must not have meant much to me when it was taken.

I made a fool of myself in love with the grandsons, and I figured I did that because I didnt do it for my son and here was a second chance. Maybe I could show love now and my son would notice and be happy that Im his dad loving his boys the way I never loved him. Or maybe it would remind him how much he resented the absence of that love. Who knows? Were all guessing. My guess is my son saw in my love of the grandsons a love he never saw for him and somewhere in him there is a mournful bell tolling for the absence of his fathers love and that bell never goes quiet.

So Im the storyteller writing this book about Jared who became Goblin. In every book like this, where the storyteller is lost in the dark and looking for the light, people hearing the story want to know how a fathers son and a grandfathers grandson goes to live on the street, where he drinks and finds a way to hop trains across America, where he drinks more. People hearing the story want to know how it happened and why, and the best the storyteller can do is to do what he does, which is find those who knew him, the road dogs who traveled with Goblin, and listen to what they say and how they say it.

Jareds journey put him in a small circle of twenty-first-century hoboes who call themselves travelin kids. A buddy of his called their world an underbelly of America that most people dont even know exists. They get where theyre going by any means available. They walk, they hitchhike, they ride the dog (a Greyhound bus). Most often, they clamber onto freight trains, which is illegal, dangerous, and, once done, apparently irresistible. In five years, Jared rode trains twenty-five thousand miles.

A line tracing Jareds travels moves through Virginia and the Carolinas into Florida and along the Gulf. It runs to California and back, up to Tennessee, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before turning north to Vermont and south through Massachusetts to New York. He called from Richmond and San Diego, from Boston, Chicago, and Ocala. He loved New Orleans. He paraded in the French Quarter and drank on a Mississippi River wharf by the Caf du Monde. There he sang with a crew he named the Scurvy Bastards, raggedy-ass mischief-makers who in another time might have been prankster pirates coming ashore from the Caribbean. He called to say hi or to chatter about his latest adventure.