By Jack White with Jon Herman
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The Hose
— Excerpt —
“I kept on going into the train station. At the time it was owned by CSX, and it was being used as a maintenance shed. So, they stored these big barrels of grease, and they had kerosene. It was really nasty inside the building. And one of the things they [CSX employees] liked to do was, they liked to wash down their cars at the end of the day. There was like dust or something and they would spray their cars down, and they had this big hose that went out to the parking lot, and it was hooked up to the bottom of the sink in the train station. And unfortunately, the way it was connected, with the hose and the valve, it kept dripping on the floor.
“It was making the floor incredibly wet. For years. So, there were like mushrooms and things growing underneath the floor joists. And the floor joists were rotting. My job was to protect the station and to restore the building.
“So, I would go in there, and I would say, ‘Look, you guys can’t use this hose anymore.’ And they would say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, get out of here.’ And I would go, like, ‘fine, okay.’
“And then I would come back a month later in one of my journeys, and there it would be, the water dripping on the floor, the mushrooms getting bigger, and me just seeing dollars flying out the window, and I’d yell at them again. ‘Please, don’t do this anymore.’
“And they’d go, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’
— End of Excerpt —