For the millions taking the New York City subway every day it is a humdrum part of their lives, no mystery or poetry to it, no humor or tragedy. But work could not be possible without it. And work is the religion of this city.
Impossible to exist here without the subway no matter how boring it can be during rush hours. You need it to grow a romance or get to a wedding on time, make it to the hospital for a birth, attend a funeral or the Frick. Especially for me living only three months a year with the NYC subway system– the rest of my time in far less savage France–I’m dazzled by its fast flux of stations, subway cars, subway rides, the up and down on escalators and elevators, the crush of subway strangers. I get spit out of it and a taste of grit. It keeps me on a knife-sharp edge of allusion to something sinister– and something great.
Clark Street Station is less than a 10 minute walk from where I am at in Brooklyn Heights, an apartment on Poplar at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge. Less far for other folk, unsteadily more so for unsteady me.
I do a Charlie Chaplin routine down the sidewalk in an ataxic gate swagger and with a pants-load of shit. My legs are slowly becoming like Gumby’s. Climbing and descending stairs will soon require a prayer to St. Jude.
To find the nearest subway station you go down Henry Street to the corner with Clark. The station is the navel of the neighborhood.
Coordinates: from the station the Brooklyn Borough Hall is less than a 10 minute walk west. Montague Street, the main drag of the Heights is three blocks south. It’s the same walk to the Promenade where they have on display the Manhattan skyline in a MoMA panorama.
I’m ambling along looking sharply at this and that, enjoying myself immensely on my way to Clark Street Station. Walk and look, a spy on the loose, a secret agent watcher, the CIA anal compulsive operative. This is my favorite pastime in New York.
This great city is a paradise for an introvert. I can hide here in plain sight. Here I can lay low like Bre’er Rabbit, hide in the throng in the full sunshine morning of an August day. I’m the observing stranger happy that I don’t know anyone around me.
This walk is from the apartment I own—the mortgage company owns– in Brooklyn Heights. It follows down Henry to the IRT where I’ll catch the number 2 train for a 10 minute ride, life in this miniature world is in 10 minute increments.
Subway ride will go roller coasting under the East River. There’s ancient terror in that for someone from Kansas, scene in my head every time of Cecil B.DeMille dashing the towering Red Sea down to drown pharaoh’s men.
I’ll be going one stop only, to Wall Street, my destination. There nearby I’m to have a lunch of a hamburger-helper burger so greasy that blobs of slaughter house run-off trickle down my forearms when I try to push it into my mouth.
Such is ever my occasional lunch with my only friend in town. I do revel in my solitary self confinement. I’ve sentenced myself to it for life.
This is my itinerary should all go well which sometimes it doesn’t. ‘Sometimes’ is a cause for anxiety. Taking the NYC subway is accepting fate like the one seen in a dog’s eyes when being put to sleep. The throwing of dice, the waiting to know.
It gives the decrepit system, crummy and unpleasant, a bit of flair. Using it is like taking one’s savings down to Atlantic City for a night of madcap roulette on a Trump Plaza jimmied wheel.
A person can get mugged down below in the deep, pushed onto the tracks, get a goose or grope from unknown fingers, or simply stand toe-close to the edge of the platform witnessing rats stirring up plague from the third rail. Otherwise you can wait hapless for a train that never comes and when it does find it so full you can’t squeeze in.
No announcement will come to explain the inexplicable. The New York Subway is a form of limbo minus the Catholic Church for explication.
Then too you may be stuck between stations. On hold for so long that you’re facing eternity alone underground even without committing one grievous sin.
One time returning from Chinatown I rode with an old Chinese man who had a large brown bag at his feet. It moved about of its own propelled by an interior life form of indiscriminate nature. The riders stared at it in frightened rapture. The old lady across the aisle prudently pulled her feet up to hook her heels on the edge of her seat.
There’s sex too. The tight banging, swaying, humping of buttocks and loins together, the cars slipping in and out, hither and thither fumbling the riders like beginners in the backseat.
One morning commuting with a mob bunched up obscenely close, an imitation cattle car direction Dachau (but with a return), I was held in a tight embrace between two women, strangers sharing the same metal strap. We three melded into a single form.
We three heads were forced to bend together over the seat below unable to turn. A young man sprawled there deep in slumber. He rode sitting below us his legs akimbo showing a hard on sculpted by the crotch of his mailroom issue cloth trousers. His dick stirred alive like a crab in a sack. It bobbed to the motion of the train, pulsed to whatever the lad dreamed of. The woman to my side caught my eye and smiled kindly.
Also there’s danger. A mad man or woman appears stalking the aisle shouting bad breath into every cowering face. Then there will be a troop of Hispanic or black gang members, lawless teenagers high on hormones and whatever coming through the open doors in a scene from ‘The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.’ For certain that sends frostbite through the car, everyone grows ice cycles in place.
But then sometimes there is one person on board emanating evil. A figure with a malignant presence strong as flies on a child’s ashen corpse. It’s furtive, sweaty, stinking, hands and face constricting in tics. You know a knife attach is one slashing moment away.
On this bright and happy August morning my walk down Henry Street offers little for clandestine study. I’m not even abiding by the New York City rule of ever-careful discretion.
First of August, year 2000. I’m 51, a thought that’s bewildering because I know for a fact I’m actually just seven.
My regret this walk-about is that I left my cane in the apartment. As well I’m neither wearing my panama hat nor smoking one of my dearly beloved Montecristo Coronas which I buy on business trips to Havana and smuggle back. There’s elation for me in being different.
Going by the video rental store I spot the owner on his stool bearded and morose a Beat-poet simulacra who stubbornly famously allows smoking inside and is ticketed for that with ever-higher fines. I pass Noodle Pudding, craziest name in the world for an Italian restaurant. Also a hassle because its stevedore chef from Naples won’t take cards.
Here’s Cranberries, a hole in the wall deli thronged like a Hindu temple for the worship of muffins and tuna sandwiches. The Heights Cinema shows a double bill, ‘My Dog Skip’ and ‘American Psycho.’
My knowledge of my neighborhood is ending, except when I walk here I always cast a glance down Middagh street. Second building from Henry is the FDNY firehouse.
Like many people of my age I grew up when policemen and firemen were heroes. Especially in the allure of fire stations. A pole to slide down! A white doggie with black spots! The immaculate red fire truck is a giant Tonka toy.
And those uniforms too. Exotically shaped helmets like the heads of aliens, like none other, bulky coats and pants, hoses coiled into smiling snakes not at all scary ones. Promises instead of jumping with joy through a silky jet of cold water on a hot day your wet underwear plastered fast to your ass.
For me a quaint firehouse like this one on Middagh is out of a Golden Book, an illustration of one enduring fastness of yesterday where friendly firemen give guided tours to idolizing elementary school kids.
Clark Street Subway Station is very deep. That’s because its tunnel was dug to go far down under the East River making it among the deepest platforms in the system of New York’s 472 subway stations. It’s one of the three that can only be reached by elevator, no stairs and no escalator.
Clark Street Station is 75 feet below street level. Ten stories down.
Three elevators serve to get people down and up. Two are original from when the station was built in 1919. The third elevator was added in the one serious makeover the station’s had, in 1931, although some cosmetic work has been done to it over the years.
This includes the most recent job which has closed it for four long months during which commuters including me needed to find other options.
But just for me it has miraculously reopened this very morning.
One of my French sons works this summer in a Manhattan office as a summer intern. Arriving at the office that morning he heard word that the Clark Street elevators were up and running again. Knowing I had something planned across the river, too rare just like the bloody burger that awaits me, he called the apartment with the news.
Using Clark Street would save about half an hour in travel time and be kind to my uncertain legs.
Subway fear I think is elemental: the subway lies below us, it’s laced together by tunnels that are midnight-dark passages to the unknown. We pretend to be OK with this but really aren’t. We are born with the knowledge there are happenings down below– huge spiders, devils, saber toothed tigers– that we really don’t want to know about.
Twelve blocks deep and five blocks wide at its widest dinky dowdy Brooklyn Heights sleeps sweetly off on its own. Inside a New York too busy to notice it or care. Most of the neighborhood is in stately rows of federal and Italianate buildings, plush private schools, historic churches.
Emblematic of the last is Plymouth Church of The Pilgrims in severely devout red brick on Orange Street. A church from 1847 where Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Dickens and Thackeray spoke. It was also a principal stop on the Underground Railroad.
There’s quiet dignity to this old neighborhood which goes back to original Dutch land owners. Essentially an enclave survivor against most of Brooklyn, much of New York. Out of all the City’s 260 neighborhoods Brooklyn Heights is the 6th wealthiest, median household income is $170,000.
It shows. Street after street lined by old trees, clean stoops and sidewalks, clean people too in quietly clean good clothes.
Definitely this is a BCBG sort of place, ‘bon corps, bon gout’—good body, good taste as the French say. Population count of the Heights is only 23,000 and not rising.
Clark Street Station reflects this. It has but 1.8 million a year turns of the turnstiles. That compares to more than 20.3 million users per year for the Times Square station.
Clark Street’s platform is far far subterranean under the former old Hotel St. George. Once upon a time the St. George was promoted as the largest in the States, even in the world, with 2,632 guest rooms. Also one of New York’s grandest, decorated in high style, Egyptian art deco.
The St. George had a 120 feet long salt water pool. The St. George could host 3,000 for dances, feed seven thousand at a time. The St. George’s central guest tower rose 30 stories, for a little while the tallest building in Brooklyn.
The St. George knew popularity with high society and as a renowned queer cruising realm. It served everyone as long as you were affluent, powerful, or at minimum well put together—a few black people too if you were famous.
Guests included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tennessee Williams (who lived in the hotel for a year). Ernest Hemingway, Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, Presidents FDR, Truman, JFK.
Hotel opened in 1888. The subway station began service first thing after the great war and had a direct entrance up to the lobby.
Time is 11:45 and I’ve arrived at last ready to go down into the hole. My index finger points to the elevator call button. So new it’s barely been pressed, fresh and sweet as this morning hour. Still shiny, maybe relatively germ free.
The doors open onto an empty elevator. Because the station can’t be reached by stairs or escalator the elevators cabins here are big, very big, they can carry 50 people at a go. I’ve been told the ride down from street to platform takes 30 seconds. Dubious.
I stare into a rectangular steel box, no more than a coffin. The cabin floor is large enough for half a dozen couples to dance on cheek to cheek. Only the control panel breaks the monotony of shining surfaces. Doors stay open, inviting, tempting, entrapping.
Two young women enter after me. We wait together the two ignoring me, I ignoring them, for a few programmed minutes. We believe in every nuance of trustworthy mechanics. Now the doors close upon us.
I have elevator fear, mild perhaps although enough to make my asshole pucker. It goes with being something of a freak of nature.
For example there’s the trouble I have with demagnetizing hotel door key swipes. This so common I expect it to happen and when checking into a hotel tell the desk clerk to give me two keys. Often even this serves for no protection and I end forced to return to the irritated desk clerk for yet another key.
But hotel room doors are not elevators. In them is the part of my malediction I find threatening. It comes from being stuck in elevators. I have been, several times, more I presume than most.
I’ve been stuck in elevators in New York City multiple times, also once in Kansas City, Great Bend, Kansas, in Italy, France and the Canary Islands. The best I can do when elevator doors close is to cry silently for ‘mama’ like any soldier at the front.
I’ve asked people about my stigma, electromagnetism some wisely propose, defective karma opine others, while some give me the shifty eye of they who wonder if I am of feeble mind.
These two women, girls to me, ought I to warn them? Leave this cabin now! Too late.
Elevator begins its descent into the hole of doom, referencing a fall into a well, or to my not having a United Mine Workers of America membership, to be heading deep toward a bunker of unspeakable Nazi evil, or just to sexual intercourse.
I drift off to blither thoughts, push neurosis away. The young ladies avoid my glances, mount Rushmore faces turned against me, slight women with negligible breasts.
Can’t help wondering if they are lesbians, since they are wearing no makeup, haven’t combed their hair, avoid me with tight lipped determination, two young women together against everything. They don’t look very healthy to me, sallow. Perhaps too ardent in a shared vegetarianism.
Yes I do sense they might be lovers. They have that encapsulated aspect, alone in a time capsule to be opened only at their deaths. Intimation that they are bitter about my intimate presence in the elevator, ready at any male move to knee my balls or squirt me with mace. I eavesdrop and hear whispered exchanges in French.
France! My home away from home. Therefore I ask in French, speaking it like I do in village-idiot argot, the good American bursting with folksy curiosity, “What part of France are you from?” One of the two, the one who appears more engaged with the world pauses pointedly wanting me to know I speak piss-poor French, answering “Paris” saying it like Harris to grind me down.
I wonder why they are here in this elevator. Not many tourists cross the East River. There must be a warning about that in the Michelin Green Guide book to New York. I hold mute, smiling in a fatherly way. I know for sure they hate theirs.
Part of the allure for me of Brooklyn Heights is the legion of poets, writers, composers that have lived and worked here. Writers have been been attracted to the place for well more than a century. This, along with Greenwich Village, is the city’s preeminent literary neighborhood.
Walt Whitman wrote here his first version of Leaves of Grass. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Miller, Arthur Miller, Hart Crane, Truman Capote, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, Norman Mailer, H.P. Lovecraft, Norman Rosten, Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Paul Auster, W.H. Auden– all lived in Brooklyn Heights.
Composers too, Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten and Leonard Bernstein. Surrealist painter Salvador Dali stayed here as well as Pavel Tchelitchew, who one evening painted the walls of his drab Heights drawing room in a surrealistic mural of hallucinatory colors and shapes.
Is elevator stopped? Difficult to ascertain, what would Dante tell me about this going down in the hole? Does he place me in the Seventh Circle, along with Sodomites and Attila the Hun?
From the moment we began our descent the elevator’s motion has been equivocal, to match the faces of these young women. My own expectations are not jolly.
I am forever curious about people. I feel an urge leaning against my steel wall to acquire the life stories of these two, slumping opposite against theirs. Perhaps they’re lost in the shrouded wilds of Brooklyn. I could help them, play the hero for them, help them to be found.
Most likely they’ve just been to the Promenade to snap photos of the Manhattan skyline, maybe asking another woman to take a photo of them embracing with the Twin Towers for backdrop (the two mightiest phalluses on earth).
Likely they’re just starting their return to the security of their Times Square hotel, to lie together on a standard-issue, scratchy, embroidered coverlet, one matching the curtains and to be found in a 1000-and-one hotel rooms, to whisper on it, make love, to make each other whimper. I must stop because a hard-on here would be inappropriate.
Another moment gone and the spokeswoman for the French side of the elevator cabin tells me to pull the alarm. “Don’t you see. We have stopped!”
OK for her. Yes we have indeed. To be certain I place a palm knowingly on the doors, no detection there of trembling, no buzz of a distant motor, nothing except the lifeless feel of the steel’s slimy menace.
I press the emergency call button. A long wait. I keep my finger on the red. At last a bored voice crackles at us, another occupant in this vault. “What!”
“Elevator isn’t moving.”
“No way. It went into service this morning… And take your finger off that button, jerk!”
“Well it’s not done anything for the past five minutes. Jerk yourself.” “Are trying to be funny! It’s a criminal offence to make a joke about this. Better not get nasty.” “No, we, myself and two women, we’re . . .”
“Wait sec, I’ll check. Yep, OK. Correct, you are not moving.” Interest flickers in the voice. Pause. Crackle.
Quickly another new voice comes on. “Sir? You there? Is everyone OK? . . .”
From then on in a frequency ordained by the New York Transit manual, the one on how to cope with hysteria, the second voice comes back, smooth and reassuring, like a clinical psychiatrist’s as his hour comes to an end.
I say to it, “My legs are going.“ “That would be good, sir. Do that. Take a rest. Everyone there should take a rest. And breath deep. In. Out. Relax. We’ll get you moving very soon. All will be well.” Are they trying to rescue us or hypnotize us.
The more reticent of my companions starts having a panic attack. Hand on her chest, tears on her cheeks, visibly trembling. Girl’s rasping in French, and I’ve never heard that before.
She and her friend watch me in wonder as I sink slowly down my wall a snail in it’s snot on a hot elevator surface. The two follow me.
We three share the cabin floor which today is much cleaner than any other cabin floor in the New York subway system, no chewing gum, cigarette butts, expectorated oyster phlegm, and I’m told sometimes splotches of semen.
I say to the French woman in control, “Maybe you should hold her.”
Time. So far it’s two and a half hours of servitude inside this prison. I’m wondering how much that will squander out of my entire life time.
We three do not speak. I don’t know their names. We avoid staring at each other. Good thing is that no one has yet screamed.
We just sit, sweat, try to control our faces, feces. I believe the oxygen level is dwindling in here.
Intercom is entertainment. Not very good. There isn’t even any elevator Musak. I’d take ‘Love Me Tender’ by Montavani and his orchestra or ‘Born Free’ on a ukulele.
Two and a half hours. Just as I fear the young women will faint, or one of them go into the aura of an epileptic fit, or for them both to go to the far corner to urinate, which I’m near to doing myself, in the distance muffled by the tunnel I detect what is surely the telltale rat-a-tat-tat of a jack hammer.
Someone is killing concrete inch by inch.
Soon I hear a consequential weight land on the roof of the cabin. Boot steps! The roof trapdoor pops up.
The grinning face of a FDNY fireman fills the space. I clap, can’t help myself. Man in the helmet says, “Thank you,” and laughs. The young women look like they’ll soon be complaining to someone who I feel sorry for in advance.
The women go up the ladder first. I’m saying to the fireman, ”Sorry, don’t think I can climb that.” “Not to worry, sir, I’ll get you.”
“We’re down at level three so there’s seven to go. We’ll do just fine.”
And the fellow did do fine too. First coming in to fit me with a harness, next hauling me up through the trap door, then guiding my dead weight up, worthless carcass. He gets me hoisted some 45 feet up and back to the station entrance in a swaying tour of subterranean engineering and Freudian fears.
All the way my fireman jokes, talks baby talk to me, succors me through. He keeps a big consoling paw on me.
“Almost there buddy, you’re doin’ great.”
Once out and into the sunshine of Henry Street there’s no glimpse of my companions in plight. They vanish from sight forever.
I can see only one TV news lady, good- ratings pretty, loitering about, horny cameraman sniffing at her rear. This is not big news. No big deal at all. It’s already been left steaming on the sidewalk.
All I want to do is catch a cab back home to Poplar Street. That’s rarely possible in Brooklyn where no Yellow cabs are allowed to roam. We must use a Russian-mob limo service owned out of a store front in Brighton Beach.
Yellow Cabs are however entitled to let off fare’s picked up in Manhattan and there’s one doing so now, close enough for me to stagger for it with an arm up.
Grudging as hell the cabbie does let me in when I explain I’m just going back to where he himself wants to go, fast tracking back to the Brooklyn Bridge and the snow route to Manhattan.
My fireman too is gone before I can blubber on him about what a wonderful guy he is. Being the kind of man I take him to be, from having been up close to him on that labored climb from out of the hole, I’m sure the guy is chronically thanks and praise shy.
His fire ruck is parked at an angle in front of the cab. Small crowd of the curious point to it, seem to be addressing it. Maybe the truck does come from a Golden Book.
Fire truck I see is from my familiar nearby landmark, Engine House 205, Hook and Ladder 118, Middagh Street station.
A year and a month later, September 11, 2001, this same red truck will answer to a call from the World Trade Center. Eight of the fireman on it die when at 9:59 am the South Tower collapses onto the Marriot Hotel.
They include my smiling, joking, hunk of a rescuer. From the photos of these eight fireman who disappear that day I recognize one. He is Scott Davidson, 33, my Brooklyn Heights rescuer.
Saints may not exist but heroes do. There are 85,000 elevators in the Naked City. This has been the story of one.
