Runaway Train
Clay Chastain thinks we mock him.
If only it were that simple. Ten years ago, while Union Station rotted and the “civic leaders” trying to save the landmark looked lame-ass at best, Chastain seemed like a hero. Relentlessly driving his petitions, he stood outside grocery stores and forced everyday people to care about the city’s gigantic monument to failure. Unable to ignore an increasingly aroused rabble, the city’s politicians, businessmen, philanthropists and busybodies — an amorphous collective Chastain referred to as the establishment — eventually figured out how to return the building to glory. But these rocket scientists flunked when they installed the laughable Science City as an alleged tourist attraction. Chastain, who’s always thought the train station ought to be a train station, remains right about one thing: “There’s nobody in there. It has no soul. It has no pulse. It has no life. It has no people.”
If Clay’d had his way, JoCo commuters might pour into the station every hour. Gondolas might float to the Liberty Memorial, too. His proposals have always been wacky, but you have to give the guy credit for thinking big. And for having convinced — or harangued — a few thousand Sunfresh shoppers that his ideas were at least worth considering on election day.
Confirming his self-proclaimed status as an agitator who posed a serious threat, “the establishment” repeatedly fought Chastain’s efforts in court. Over the years, though, Chastain’s transit initiatives have created his own legacy of failure. Voters have always rejected his ideas, reducing him to fodder for Lee Judge’s lazy cartoons and Hearne Christopher Jr.’s vacuous columns in The Kansas City Star. Moreover, it’s bizarre (and insulting) when a guy who left town for Tennessee keeps visiting just long enough to put questions on Kansas City ballots. It’s not that Chastain has bad ideas — hell, we’d like to see street cars running from 75th Street to the River Market, an east-west light-rail line going out to the stadiums, and sexy, electric-hybrid Bus Rapid Transit cars zooming south from the Northland.
The problem is that he’s lost touch with reality. Here’s just one piece of evidence: If voters approve his proposal on November 4, Chastain says it would be up to the Area Transportation Authority to carry out the order — and to truly understand how jacked-up the ATA is, just read Casey Logan’s story (“Busted!”) on page 15.
The truth is, you can’t sit on the other side of Chastain’s monotone barking, can’t weather the glare from his furious eyeballs for long, before you start to feel very sad about what’s become of him. It’s tortured him into madness, this Kansas City transit problem.
Ask Chastain why he keeps putting proposals on ballots even though he promised he’d stop, and you get a sense of his existential delusions. “The establishment here was not solving this problem,” he fumes. “If they had solved the problem, Clay Chastain would not be here. I would not exist. I only exist because the establishment hasn’t solved this transit dilemma.”
Additionally, he exhibits symptoms of paranoia. “I like to see beauty in design — and when I don’t see it, it upsets me. When I know we could do better. Incompetence upsets me. I’m an idealist. That’s how I design. That’s why I don’t let anybody influence my designs — because they’d be contaminated if I did.”
He’s become increasingly hostile: “I can’t stand the ruling class that runs this town. I can’t stand them, and it’s mutual.”
Yet he’s unable to understand why the business community won’t work with him: “I don’t know why. Why don’t you ask them? Why don’t you ask them why they couldn’t support this? Why they couldn’t compromise and put some rail in the ATA plan like I asked them to do. [He’s speaking loudly now.] Just put a rail line in, and we can compromise….These same good ol’ boys that I’ve been fighting for the last decade don’t want rail in this town. You go ask them why they don’t want a hub at Union Station. Is it because they don’t want the poor people mixing down there in that lily-white Science City exhibit?”
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Chastain on the fact that he sounds paranoid and delusional: “I am somewhat. Who wouldn’t be? Do you think I’m a robot? Do you think I don’t feel? Do you think I’m some sort of superhuman who can just slough all this stuff off and walk around with a phony attitude like, CEOh, it doesn’t bother me at all’? But if I could ever get one of those guys behind the scenes, I’d stick my knife in his back…. I come into town to be respectful of people, and I get treated disrespectfully, and I get mocked. When I come to town, I call people, I set up appointments, I drive all the way out here, I try to be a fair-minded, respectful person just presenting an idea, and I get treated like this. People wonder why sometimes I don’t come off very engaging and warm and I’m hostile and I’m too intense. It’s true, but you’d be, too, if you’d been treated like I have for ten years.”
Chastain on his own disordered personality: “I can’t win by myself, especially when the self is Clay Chastain. That’s a hell of a lot to overcome. It frustrates me that my personality has gotten in the way of my vision. I got out of control, wild, started doing all kinds of things — I was like an animal that had been bitten, and I was biting back. Gnashing back. Gnawing and gnashing and whatever I could think of to upset [the establishment] and mock them and ridicule their plans. My wife said, CEYou’re acting like they are. You’re arrogant, you’re full of yourself, you think that you know the solutions to everything — you’re becoming more like they are.’ That hit me between the eyes, because I don’t want to be like they are. Every bone in my body doesn’t want to be like they are. But I was becoming like they were because I was in the ring with this animal for ten years and I was taking on the characteristics of this animal. They fight me this way, knock me all around the ring, I get up all bloody, but by gosh I’m going to hit him in the nuts.”
Chastain on his own demons: “I’m not perfect, and I’ve got problems, and I’m working on myself. When my wife took me, I was a rogue, and wild and everything, and she’s helped me. And my minister’s helped me. But when I get in this situation, where I [encounter] this kind of an attitude [of disrespect], it brings up that old feeling, which I want to get away from. It brings up that old feeling of, I’m fighting people who are treating me disrespectfully, they’re doing things behind the scenes, they’re using their power to undermine my plans and to mock me and to make me look like a buffoon…. I know a lot of people have a problem with me, and I have a problem with myself a lot of times. How’d you like to live in my shoes? I’ve got all kinds of things that have happened to me, and different things when I was young that formed me, and I’ve got to work with that and deal with that. And most of the time, I’m all right. But when I get in this atmosphere here, this negative, nasty, hateful, unfriendly, disrespectful atmosphere, it brings up all of those bad old feelings. And I can’t help it. I’ll have to go home, and no telling how many weeks I’ll have to work on myself, because I’ve let myself, in this conversation, fall back into that old Clay Chastain. Because I get in this atmosphere, and they push my buttons.”
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But Chastain’s doing some shoving, too. By his own admission, Question 3 isn’t just an exciting transit plan — it’s also a vengeful attempt to win in a town where people have mocked him. And because it’s on the November 4 ballot, good citizens all over town have no choice but to consider it in all seriousness. We agree with Chastain about one thing: Our bus system is humiliating. But here’s what’s also embarrassing: the fact that we have to keep living in Clay Chastain’s head.
