DOWN LOW: (Part II)

II.

It started several weeks ago. I was on my way back to my Home Base Camp at the 14^th St/7^th Ave station when a railway preacher stepped into my car between stops. The young Brimstoner recited a monologue about Jesus and how he’s found the way and we’re all blind to the reality of our fates. It’s as though the speech was performed by a high school substitute teacher reading unfamiliar names off of a roll call sheet. The boy looked up as he spoke; whether it was to remember the speech or to receive the divine words from above, we will never know. I can imagine the words were dictated to him by an aloof and preoccupied God and reinterpreted by the preacher. Or maybe his God was enthusiastic and he caught the preacher at a moment of exhaustion. Whatever it is, something feels lost in translation. Maybe he needs to know other people believe in it to help validate meaning for him. Or maybe he just doesn’t care. Maybe he just assumes that by sacrificing something he’s growing meaning for himself, even if it’s a sense of dignity that he gives up. I guess everybody needs to believe something.

When I hopped off the train, I saw a man in a moth eaten suit, a uniform that had once recalled now lost financial prestige. He didn’t approach me, assuming I had nothing to offer him. These White Collar Hobos seem to be breeding like rats down here and, what’s worse, they’re completely unaware of how to survive. These guys don’t seem to understand the social customs, the shaky relationship boundaries between the passengers and us. They approach the people like they’re still a member of their society, playing on the mutual sympathies that no longer exist between the two factions. In a way, they’re still in the early stages of acceptance; once they overcome their shame and fears, they can then learn how to use positive visualization. Until then, they’re just stuck in limbo, scoring all our food and change from underneath our noses.

I walked past the platform, keeping my eyes open for any officials, before I hopped the bars and began to walk down the closed off edge of the platform. I climbed down a ladder and when I jumped down, I felt my foot graze something with a soft, yet rigid frame.

“Hey! Prick! What’s the big idea?!” I heard a voice call out. Looking down, I noticed the long, thinning mane and toothless frown of my acquaintance Corey.

“Jarvis! How’re you doin? If I’da known that was you I would have punched you on the way down” he laughed jovially.

Corey was dressed in his usual fur lined winter coat, pajama bottoms and pink galoshes. He had been down here almost as long as I had and we had grown fond of each other over the years, despite the fact he’s a drug addict. He was the most relaxed Subtrainian I had ever met. I liked him because, despite all his flaws, he was an honest and upbeat guy, something I’ve found to be a rarity down here. He was surrounded by two other men, one a furry yet frail stuffed animal of a man I recognized as Kendall and the other man I didn’t know.

“Ya couldn’t punch a fly, maaaan!” Kendall yelled. Little specks of spittle flew from the thick curtains of hair drawn over his lips.

“Kendall, nobody can punch a fly.” Corey laughed.

“Not even another fly?” Kendall asked.

“Not without a pair of gloves.” I joked. They all laughed. “How’ve you been Corey?”

Kendall passed a stained box of wine to Corey who proceeded to take a swig of the liquid as red trickles dripped down his chin.

“Same old, you know. My cold sore’s back, but that always happens whenever it gets cold.” He handed the box to the stranger who eagerly accepted. The man had jet-black hair that had been cut with a knife, giving him a look that the young people spend an entire paycheck to achieve. His face was nicked from a fresh shave. After a chug, the stranger offered it to me.

“Hey there, what’s your name?”

“We’ve met before. Remember, it’s me, Timmy.” He put the box down and mimed long hair and a beard. As he did so, the image of him appeared to me.

“Timmy? Timmy Timmy? Colorado Timmy?” I asked agog. “Why did you cut it all off? During winter, too?”

“Fleas, bro, fleas. And lice. I had to get me all new clothes and shit and get those pubes off my face. You want some?”

“Not without making it a potluck. Let me go grab something for us to eat.” I started towards the tracks.

“You got a camp here too? I thought you’re up in the west Bronx?” Timmy inquired.

“One of them, yeah. I got one around here too.”

“Oh yah, thas right, ya got a buncha tem” Kendal said.

I began to walk along the tracks as their conversation drifted further from my ears.

“Jar was an innovator. He was the first guy to show me about keeping lotsa different camps around the city. That way, if you run into any trouble, you only have to abandon some of your stuff. The best thing is that you always know you’ve got somewhere to lay your head. So, you’re never actually homeless...”

I walked for a couple of minutes until I saw the faded graffiti along the wall that signaled my next turn. The phrase proclaimed in bold, dripping letters ‘IT’S A CHINK CONSPIRACY’, a creedo I don’t personally subscribe to, but it serves as a recognizable marker. I veered off the tracks and walked between the pillars to a long, narrow corridor. Long forgotten, a few of these corridors were built for workers to travel between lines as they built the very first underground subway system. I walked about one hundred feet until I began to feel the wall for a gaping hole in the concrete. I felt the exposed rebar and sandy matter that indicated the entrance to my camp. I walked inside, struck a match and lit the lantern I had sitting on a pile of rubble. As the room illuminated, rats scurried and I saw my Tony Robbins subway poster affixed to the wall. He smiled at me encouragingly with his powerful set of teeth, welcoming me back home. It had been at least a season since I had been back there. I went over to my stockpile and grabbed a crumpled sack of Doritos.

I heard them talking as I walked back, the words becoming more audible as I approached.

“I’m going down to Wall Street tomorrow. It’s a Friday and they’re usually pretty generous.”

“I haaate dose guys.”

“Yeah, but the food down there is great, bro. Basil and Cheese sandwiches, good booze left around.”

“Just watch out after dark. You know.”

“For sure, bro. The good ones down there know me but the crazies, well, I know how to watch my ass.”

The three had moved closer into the tracks, presumably to avoid discovery. They were sitting in a circle, with Kendall lounging further downward with his increased inebriation.

“I brought you guys something special. Cheeseburger flavor chips from 2002. They don’t even sell them anymore.”

Their eyes lit up at my delicacy and I traded the bag of Doritos for the box of wine, from which I took a sizable nip. They passed around the chips and each took a small handful from the miniature bag. Kendall crammed his into his yellow beard while Corey nibbled with his remaining teeth.

“Dawnt dringk it alllll!” Kendall slurred.

“Come on, Kendall. You can always get more. Not all of us are Amphibians like you. We can’t come and go as we please.” Corey defended.

“Whasssstoppin’ ya?” Kendall’s under bite jutted forward as he spoke.

“You just don’t get it, do you?” Corey shook his head.

“So what brings you down here, Corey? Weren’t you up at 77th before?” I asked.

“Yeah but I had to abandon that one,” he burped and began to pick at his cold sore, “Renovations. I’d always heard that it’s a little emptier down here. Lord knows why, it’s clean, accessible, lots of foot traffic.”

“You know why it’s so empty down here, bro.” Timmy asserted gravely.

We all stared at him in silent confusion. Corey was stroking his chin in concentration, sometimes sneaking his finger to his lip to massage his herpe. Timmy motioned to me with his stained palm.

“Jarvis, you know. Hell, you’ve been down here since I’ve known you. You know exactly why there are so few of us around here.”

After a minute, I shrugged my shoulders before I took another sip from the box. Corey answered with ambivalence.

“Territory?”

“No, bro. The legend!” Corey proclaimed to our blank faces before elaborating.

“The thing that lives between the tracks. The thing that makes men disappear.”

“You mean the Rat King? Nobody believes in that anymore. That’s a myth.” Corey scoffed at the very idea. “They found out it was an escaped bear from the Bronx zoo. It got on the 6 express train at night and followed it all the way down before it got to Hell’s Kitchen and pried the doors open with it’s paws. It smelled food but, well, just like us, it couldn’t pass the turnstiles. It found a couple of homos and ate them. That’s when it got the taste for blood.”

Corey described the situation frankly with complete assurance. I knew it was pure hogwash from the start. If the bear couldn’t pass the turnstile in Chelsea, how could it have gotten onto the train in the first place. Besides, there’s no 6 express train that runs to the Bronx Zoo. As it was, I just let him finish before Kendall responded

 “Yer fulla shittt. Issa a rat king. I seen it.”

“You’ve never seen a rat king.” Corey debated.

“Sure I ‘ave. Issa a rat king dat fused wifa a crocodile fromda fawlout uvda Manhattan Project.”

“You idiot. Nothing was built in New York for the Manhattan Project.”

Kendalls eyes widened in a provocative, beligerant fury.

“Dass uuntru. You…Imma fuck ya…till ya…”

“Till he believes you? I’d love to see that work,” Timmy laughed, “In fact, I’d love to see any of those things you just made up. I’m telling yous guys, it’s nothing like that.”

“Alright then detective smartass, tell us what you think it is.” Corey raised his voice.

“I will. An you know how I know? I seen it,” He paused dramatically before leaning in and inexplicably lowering his voice, “one day, during the winter, I think, I was walking the tracks near Houston street with my friend Robbie. We were looking for some orange cones to make a tent. He thought he saw some in the distance so he ran ahead of me. I started jogging ahead until I saw him stopped dead in the tracks, staring at something. Before I could get any closer, a low grumbling started up around us. I thought it might be a train until I saw a flash of light cover him and he was gone, just like that. I ran over to where he was and there was nothing but darkness. I never saw Robbie again.”

A chill ran down my spine as I pictured Robbie staring deep into the unknown and the unimaginable horror he might have seen. We all sat silently stunned at Timmy’s story.

“I still think it was a bear.” Corey crossed his arms and asserted with great belief.

We soon finished the box of wine and I decided to be on my way. I was going to hop on the Brooklyn bound train to go to my Bushwick camp but it must have been too late to catch one. I felt strange about walking the tracks alone. I was still a little spooked from Timmy’s vivid, if not implausible story. I reminded myself that hey were the ravings of a drug addict, a delusional near psychotic. People always come and go down here, Robbie was no exception. So, I laughed it off and I decided to hoof it downtown to Canal and walk the tracks to Brooklyn.

I was halfway to the Houston stop when I heard a low grumbling and bent down to check the tracks. ‘It’s from the track above us’ I told myself. As I walked forward it got louder and then I remembered that there were no tracks above us. I stopped and tried to listen but my heart was beating in my ears. A new sound layered itself over the grumbling drone, something organic but obviously not human. Soon I heard whispers poke through the sound and suddenly, I saw a flash of white light ahead of me. Adrenaline shot into the pit of my stomach as I realized Timmy was absolutely right.

DOWN LOW: (Part 1) A Tale of Intrigue and Vagrancy

I. 

Note to reader: To recover this account, find the third bench on the Bronx bound platform of the #2 train and reach underneath to find a document attached with chewing gum. Yours truly.

It was the best part of the burrito. When I first got hold of it, I felt like my heart was doing a pumping iron in my chest. There’s nothing in the world quite like a fit to bust burrito butt, brimming with all the juices that had dribbled downward during the eating process. I chewed at the tender flour tortilla, picking out little flakes of foil as I went. I ground the filling between my teeth and the rich taste of sour cream and guacamole spread across my taste buds. I rolled my eyes back in my head with ecstasy. There really is nothing quite like it. I decided to note this as a momentous breakfast, placing the moment in an ornate gold frame and hanging it the back of my memory. It’d stay there and I could stare at it next time I had a particularly foul meal.

Those types of memories have become so powerful to me over the years, so vivid. Once I saw it peeking out of the garbage can, glaring like a beacon in the fog, I could anticipate it all. Those complex tastes, the dynamic consistency, the smell of the chicken grilling in the restaurant, the background ambience of fuzzy mariachi music and food frying. It had been seven years since I’d even been in a restaurant but those minute details dashed into my senses.

By the time I ate the burrito, I didn’t even notice the over-sour taste of the cream, the browned avocado or the gristled rot of the meat. I was back in that Puerto Rican restaurant in Brooklyn, drinking tamarind soda and eating delicate tortilla chips, taking the last bite of the best damn burrito I had ever tasted. As the juice dribbled down my chin, a young man in a suit walked by me and as he passed, he let his breath go in a pressurized gust, having held it in before approaching me.

This was at the Canal Street Station, probably early in the morning, but not too early as the train frequency had begun to pick up. About an hour later my stomach started grumbling and I decided to relieve myself off the edge of the platform. It tasted amazing going in and it was relieving to have it out and that was all I needed to know. That was maybe five years ago. It was my birthday, I think.

I try to vary my diet as much as I can, usually picking up a candy bar or a bag of chips twice a week from the underground vendors uptown. Sometimes if I feel like treating myself, I get one of those hot, homemade churros the Mexican families sell down at Canal Street and Spanish Harlem. The Good Book says that food combining is a great therapeutic treatment for depression and I have personally found it very helpful. So, I usually supplement something I buy with something I’ve found and, let me tell you, it really makes a difference. I haven’t had what you would call a full meal since I came down here in the Summer of 2001 but that’s not to say I haven’t had full-filling meals. The actual day I went underground is vague to me. I took the last of the change from my pocket and walked through that turnstile. I can remember the feeling of the cool metal of the pole as it turned against my pelvis the moment I walked through. It was quite remarkable. I remember how remarkable it was that, especially through a long wool coat, I could feel that soothing coldness. I remember it was sweltering outside. It was the middle of July in the hottest, nastiest city I’ve ever taken a breath in. I’d seen three people faint that day, one of the street folk, a pregnant lady and a burly old construction worker just collapse. That one had heat stroke or, knowing the size of that guy, just a plain stroke. Either way every part of my epidermis (that’s skin, by the way) was slick with sweat and the wool coat wasn’t helping. Yeah, I had on a wool coat in July and I can explain. I had simply given up. This wasn’t the type of giving up a young child has or that of an incapable man trying to fix a car or even a successful suicide victim. This is the type of giving up that most can’t conceive of, a kind that, well, if you could conceive of it, you’d have thrown in the towel long ago. No, this kind of giving up is the big kind. The living suicide. The kind when you don’t even see yourself as worthy of suicide by your own hands. The kind where, one day, you gain consciousness to find yourself walking down Union Square at 2:00 on a July afternoon wearing boxers and a wool coat. I could see myself as my body walked through a fog. I thought I couldn’t get any lower until I saw the Metro stop and realized that I could. And the first thing I felt after that thought was the icy metal of the turnstile through my wool coat. The further away I get from that day, I remember less and less. Those memories dissipate like steam. My life seems like a vague passage from an obtuse book read long ago; but the hospitable touch of that turnstile remains clear as ever.

Those days never were very eventful. My life here is rich and complex. I’m always meeting new people and trying new things. It’s almost like New York has two cities built just right on top of the other. People are always coming and going. I’ve been told that, at any given time, there are as many people in the subways as there are above ground. And that isn’t counting what you might know as a “homeless” or “hobo”. As far as we’re concerned, none of us are homeless. We’re all New Yorkers. Down here, your standard “hobo” is known as an Amphibian, one who will stay down here but has to come up for air every now and then, usually seasonal. For those who aren’t coming and going, we’ve made our neighborhoods.

Scum seems to originate from the far north tip of the city and it trickles down to the south tip. That’s where you find the Junkies or the Killers. Usually both. Anywhere in between you get the usual continuum of Psychies and Brimstoners, but they don’t mean any harm; they just don’t know when to shut their mouths. The Happy Campers are usually family friendly, playing house in a closed off stop or water closet somewhere. Now the Subtrainians tend to live in groups between the supporting walls of the tracks but that’s a noisy, anxious type of living, not for the timid. The Coasters hop on the sides of trains and tend to live in the maintenance cars at the end of each line. As for me, I’m just Jarvis Cocker. I have a few camps around, nothing special (four to be exact) but I generally prefer to stay mobile, open to the city and whatever it decides to throws at me.

I try to keep up with the times with some regularity but information usually comes in fits and spurts. I remember a few years ago that something happened up there. I knew it was the fall because it was hot but people were starting to wear jackets at night. Down here, we didn’t think much of it. We’d heard that some of the guys downtown were in trouble. We know a camp near the Cortlandt R, W train was destroyed and the stop was closed for months. Robert told me some building was demolished or something. A week or so later, the subways were nearly deserted. It was nice for us until it became like a police state down here. There were SWAT teams with machine guns at every stop and they were patrolling the subways. Most of us were driven out of camps and into hiding for most of the day and, since there were less people, there was less food and less of a chance of us finding it. If it wasn’t for those nice people giving us money and food with kind words. I was confused myself but suddenly everybody was nice for a long while. Soon after though, like an crumple-free cellophane bag, it unfolded back into the same form of the old New York we call home. To this day, we’re still not quite sure what happened but, whatever it is, people don’t seem to want to talk about it down here.

As far as other news, I hear people talk on cars at night and sometimes I thumb through a paper. Usually whatever’s left around like papers and socialist rags. The one thing I truly love is all the books I have collected. I’ve read a lot but, to be honest, it’s not often I come across a real book. One night some time ago, I was hopping off a train at Canal street and I started to walk to the opposite platform when I saw something glinting in the light, floating down the river between the tracks. I hopped down onto the tracks and felt it for vibration to make sure another train wasn’t coming. You’d be surprised how fast they seem to come when you’re down there. I chased the thing for a few feet as it slipped down the stream. It’s letters became clearer to me: Notes…From The UnderGround by…Fyodor Dost…Dost…Dostoyevsky. So I read it and it was interesting, but not entertaining. I read it a second time and wondered why the man was so sad. I read it a third time to see if I got an answer. It was good, I guess. The best thing is that it gave me a name for my story: “Notes from the Under-Ground.” Get it?

Over the years, my collection has widened to four Nancy Drew mysteries, five Goosebumps, The Da Vinci Code, A Children’s Guide to Philosophy, Cosmos, Dianetics, a Bible, Gray’s Anatomy, Rainbow Six and of course Notes From The Underground. Oh yeah, and that one about L.A. and it’s a big secret or something. Um. L.A. Secret? Anyways, I read that but now I use it as a table. The one that is really the crown jewel for me is a brilliant piece of literature that was given to me by a man in a suit. When I first came down here, like I said, I had given up. I spent my days nodding off, drunk on Anti-freeze and siphoned booze from lost bottles and jingling a cup of change. On one such day, I was shaking my cup with my Yankees cap that slouched down below my forehead when a sudden force hit my cup and knocked it down. I snapped upwards and looked around to notice a man in a charcoal pinstripe suit walking away briskly.

“Hey,” I yelled to the man, not quite knowing how I would follow up my proclamation.

The man kept walking, turning his head only slightly as he spoke, his words floating back to me in waves.

“Try reading it, you fucking wastrel. Maybe you’ll grow some bootstraps.”

I looked down to see that he had thrown a book at me. As I bent down to gather up my change, I flipped the thick yet light book over to see foreign words that now are so close to me that it’s difficult to remember what they looked like at first glance. “Unlimited Power: The New Science of Personal Achievement” they read in bold, confident letters. Then I saw the source of the letters below in italics: “by Anthony Robbins”. I folded the tome over and over in my hands until I hopped on the next train and started reading, not stopping until I had folded over the final page.

It was all suddenly clear. My life was in my hands and I was wasting it. All this potential for happiness that I deserved, I had squandered it. So, I quit the antifreeze and started to build my life, one page at a time.

***************************************