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.
***************************************
