Groping America V. 1 Riding With The Train Gang Ra Locke -

– The author’s pseudonym. “Ra” evokes the Egyptian sun god, suggesting enlightenment or divine judgment. “Locke” recalls John Locke, the philosopher of personal identity and consciousness. Together, the name implies a narrator who is both godlike (watching everything) and deeply fragmented (locked into a single perspective). No photograph of Ra Locke exists. Some believe “Ra Locke” is a collective pseudonym for a group of ex-convicts; others argue it’s a single woman writing under a male-sounding name to avoid harassment. Section II: The Probable Plot – A Reconstruction from Fragments Based on the title and the known tropes of “train gang” folklore (gleaned from memoirs like You Can’t Win by Jack Black, 1926, and modern accounts like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ’s brief Merry Prankster train episodes), we can reconstruct a likely narrative for Groping America V. 1 .

To ride with the gang, “Locke” must participate in a ritual called “The Groping.” This is not merely theft. According to a single surviving forum post (dated 2004, from a user named @boxcar_ghost), “The Groping” involves blindfolding new members and forcing them to navigate a moving train’s catwalk while other members throw insults, objects, and threats. The purpose is to “grope” the darkness—to learn the train by touch and fear alone.

The unnamed narrator—let’s call him “Locke”—is a discharged veteran or ex-felon in a rust-belt city (Youngstown, OH, or Gary, IN). Broke and dissociated, he wanders into a rail yard. There, he encounters The Train Gang: a mobile, anarchic collective of roughly a dozen individuals who live exclusively on slow-moving freight trains. Their leader is a woman known only as “America”—a scarred, brilliant, predatory figure. Groping America V. 1 Riding With The Train Gang Ra Locke

Volume 1 likely follows the gang as they ride from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest, hopping grainers, boxcars, and coal drags. Along the way, they engage in what they call “groping towns”—brief, violent incursions into small-town America: stealing from big-box stores, sabotaging rail signals, and leaving cryptic graffiti that reads “RA LOCKE WAS HERE.”

This article attempts the first serious literary exegesis of a work that may or may not exist—and in doing so, examines why the very idea of Groping America forces us to confront the ugliest and most compelling impulses of American street literature. The title is a three-part assault on middle-class sensibilities. – The author’s pseudonym

– The verb “groping” is deliberately jarring. It evokes blindness (groping in the dark), violation (sexual groping), and desperate searching (groping for meaning). To “grope America” is to handle its underbelly without permission. It suggests a protagonist who does not merely observe the country but molests it—clumsily, urgently, and without consent from polite society.

In the shadowy world of transgressive fiction—where boundaries are not just pushed but incinerated—certain titles circulate only in whispers. For decades, collectors of outlaw literature have traded rumors of a manuscript that allegedly captures the raw, unfiltered id of America’s freight-hopping underworld. That manuscript is Groping America V. 1: Riding With The Train Gang by the enigmatic Ra Locke. Together, the name implies a narrator who is

Why does the idea of this book persist? Because America itself is a train gang. Loud, dangerous, moving too fast to stop, full of strangers groping for connection in the dark. Ra Locke, whether real or fictional, tapped into something primal: the desire to ride without a ticket, to touch without asking, to see the country not from a safe Amtrak window but from the shaking floor of a stolen ride.