I look up. An elderly, Chinese woman is leaning over in front of me, holding an array of DVD cases which she fans out like playing cards.

“DBD?” she says again.

There are a few big-budget movies from last summer (“Transformers: Dark of the Moon”, “Captain America: The First Avenger”), an eighties teen classic (“Fast Times at Ridgemont High”), a movie that hasn’t even been released yet (“Battleship”) and something called “Extra-Large Secret Agent”, which judging by my rudimentary understanding of the Cyrillic alphabet is an action-comedy from Kyrgyzstan. I decline, and with a slight bow she moves on to the next passenger.

Another, louder voice can be heard from the back of the car: “Who want double A Powercells? Batteries, yo, two for three!” It is a lanky black man in giant, sparkling sunglasses and a train conductor’s hat, who looks to be the spitting image of Fab 5 Freddy. Behind him he is dragging a plastic milk crate along the floor, filled to the brim with a Dollar Store’s worth of assorted junk. “We got batteries, we got more batteries! We also got Band-Aids! We have blank cassette tapes, people! Only $1 a piece! Anybody hungry, we got popcorn!” The popcorn is packaged in red, white and blue cardboard boxes of the kind sold at Little League concession stands. When he gets a little closer, I see the tops have been opened and resealed with scotch tape.

Among his other, unannounced wares are a battery-operated, light-up yo-yo and a package of Clorox hand wipes, but I seem to be the only one paying close enough attention to notice. The majority of the passengers have their noses in guidebooks, flipping furiously through the pages.

“Now this is what I call a deal, and the police call petit larceny!” says the man with the batteries.

No one laughs. The tourists are in a tizzy, trying to make sense of what they’re seeing out the windows. Their guidebooks assure them that this is the stop they want to go to Central Park, but instead of “59^th Street” like their books claim, the words “Fifth Ave” decorate the wall in mosaic tile.

“I don’t know,” says one woman to her husband and son. “We’re supposed to be getting off at 59^th Street, but this says Fifth Avenue.”

“I think this is the one we want,” says the son.

“But it says ‘Fifth Avenue’,” says the dad.

And on, and on. Some variation of this conversation happens almost every time I ride the train. I have never had occasion to read a New York City guidebook, so I can’t tell if the fault lies with the books themselves or the people reading them. Meanwhile, the DVD lady and the battery guy meet in the center of the car.

“DBD?” says the woman to a passenger.

“Whoa!” said battery guy. “What’s that now? You got The Battleship? Let me see that!” He snatches the case from the woman’s hand and flips it over. The woman bows and holds out a hand. “Five dollar,” she says.

“Five dollars?!” says Battery Guy. “Tell you what. I’ll make you a special offer today.” He rummages through his crate and pulls out two packs of AA batteries, which he stuffs in the woman’s palm. “That’s a six-dollar value right there, for only five dollars! Now that’s what I call a deal, and my doctors call certifiably insane! Whoa!”

The woman looks pleased. She studies the batteries a moment before stuffing them into her jacket pocket and moving on. I look back to see what the family with the guidebook has decided. They are still on the train. Right as the doors are about to close, a man across the car from me says, “You know, this is 59^th Street, if you’re looking for the park.” About ten people dash out of the car just before the doors slide shut, and I wonder why it is we locals always wait to the last second to tell people this.  

5:06, Lexington Ave – 59^th Street: The terminus, at least as far as most Manhattanites are concerned. After this we will plunge beneath the East River and resurface in Queens, which might as well be the other side of the world to hear them speak of it. There is a mass exodus of people transferring to the 4, 5, and 6 trains, which will continue to take them further up the east side of their precious island. A tall, rather beautiful woman in a red cocktail dress, her obsidian hair pulled up in a French twist, is looking confused. She stands near the front of the car, gingerly holding the metal pole between thumb and forefinger, her brow furrowed in the manner of someone who senses that something just isn’t quite right. She eyes the mass of people exiting the train and turns to the couple seated on the bench beside her.

“Is the next stop 68^th Street?” she asks.

“Queens Plaza,” they say.

Her eyes grow wide. The color drains from her face, beginning at the top of her forehead and working its way down to her neck, like a bathtub from which the plug has been pulled. “Queens?!” she cries, and bolts for the exit, just managing to avoid having her bag caught between the sliding doors. I wonder what exactly it is she thinks exists in Queens. I imagine it the way she must, like something from the margins of a sixteenth-century map, full of dragons and sea monsters.

A group of German tourists isn’t so lucky. They have spent the last several minutes consulting their “Entdecken Sie New York!” guidebook and the MTA subway map on the wall of the train, but appear no surer of where they are going than they did five stops ago. Like most people faced with uncertainty they tended towards the status quo, and so at each subsequent stop from the time they boarded, their little group of five began drifting towards the open doors, pulled like iron filings to a magnet, only to stop at the last moment, unwilling to give up the train they knew for the platform they did not. Once I read a story about a man standing at the foot of a mountain when an avalanche knocked a massive boulder loose. The man watched as the boulder came tumbling down the side of the mountain, trying to decide what to do. Unable to determine exactly what path the boulder was taking, the man could not decide whether to run right or left. In the end, he remained in the exact spot where he started, and by the time he realized the boulder was headed directly for him it was too late, and he was crushed to death. I don’t think accidentally finding yourself in Queens is as bad as being crushed to death. The woman in the red cocktail dress might beg to differ.

 
Photo Source: Planet Ware

5:00, 49^th Street:

I have always been fond of the tiling on the walls here, a red glazed brick that sets it apart from every other station I pass on my way home and lets me know I am past the halfway point of my commute. From the back of the car erupts the sound of accordion and dual, strumming guitars. It’s a norteño band, the same one that has played the R train at least once a week since I’ve been riding it. A woman standing near me leans over to her friend and says, “Mariachis!” That’s what I used to think they were too, until someone explained the difference. Few things make me grit my teeth like a subway musician – I’m a reader, after all, and like all readers on the subway, anything that draws us out of our daydream and back into the stuffy, smelly present is to be resented – but I have to admit a soft spot for this particular band, and I’ve come to appreciate the peculiarities of norteño music. There’s a propulsive beat behind it all that reminds me of the old Polish songs I used to hear at the social clubs in Pittsburgh. The band wends its way through the crowd, one of the men removing his cowboy hat midway to solicit donations. As he passes me I smile and politely refuse. Fond or not, I will never give a cent to a subway performer. It is one of the few ironclad rules I live by.

5:02, 57^th Street – Seventh Avenue: An almost-always deserted stop, the metro equivalent of an Old West ghost town. Perhaps there are other times of day when this platform is more bustling, or perhaps it is another train besides the R that gets most of the traffic, but to me it has always felt like an afterthought, a station hastily thrown together to offer one last chance to any west-siders to exit before the train veers east and heads for Queens.

A heavy smell begins to pervade the car, an oily, greasy smell you can feel coating your nostrils and oozing down the back of your throat. Then comes the rustle of paper and plastic, followed by the creak of bending Styrofoam. I crane my neck and see a young woman positioning a food container on her lap. She opens the lid; a mound of buffalo wings glisten golden-red. She takes one daintily between thumb and forefinger, the grease oozing down over her long, acrylic nails until it pools at the ends, dripping down into the container in great, viscous globs. She snatches at the meat with her front teeth, tearing it from the bone like some scavenging animal picking at a carcass. With every bite her lips stain a deeper shade of orange. After devouring three wings she suddenly pauses, blinks and looks down at her hands, studying the grease coating her fingers like someone emerging from a murderous rage wondering how she ended up covered in blood. She looks around the car with the plaintive expression of one who does not have any napkins. Her silent pleas for help go unanswered. Everywhere she looks, the people avert their eyes. She sits frozen like a figure from a medieval fresco – hands aloft, palms upturned, imploring God to deliver her from her sins.

Photo Source: Yummly

4:53, 34^th Street:

A few dozen people exit our car. Amazingly, only three people board. It looks for a moment like we might have a rare, relaxed, well-spaced-out commute for once, but a voice comes over the public address system to tell us our train “is being held in the station momentarily.” Our car is positioned right next to the stairs. Every few seconds that pass, another desperate commuter–seeing our train parked next to the platform, doors open–comes hurtling down the steps and throws him or herself inside before it’s too late. After a minute of this, our car is fuller than when it arrived.

Beneath the stairs, at the far end of the platform, is a set of double doors leading to a utility closet where the MTA stores its trash dumpsters, amongst other things. Down near the floor where the doors meet, I notice a gap has been chewed away. A few seconds later, a rat pokes its head out onto the platform. It sniffs the air and–finding the situation to its liking–squirms out through the hole and scurries off to its left, down a set of stone steps onto the track below. A little later another rat comes scurrying up the steps and squeezes back through the hole into the closet. The pattern repeats itself two more times while we wait. Some people around me begin to speculate and trade rat anecdotes. Few things elicit conversation amongst New Yorkers like a rat sighting.

From further down the platform, an MTA employee appears, pushing a wheeled dumpster ahead of her. When she reaches the double doors, she pauses for a moment, takes a breath, then pounds her fist hard against them, again and again, causing a metallic boom to echo through the station. Finally, she throws the doors open. Next to me, a woman gasps. The floor is covered in rats. Dozens of them. Dozens more rats crawl across the tops of the garbage bags already filling the dumpsters inside. There are even rats crawling up the heating pipes in the corner of the room; one of them slips as we look on and plummets down into the garbage below, thrashing about furiously as it lands. The MTA employee shrieks as she shoves the new dumpster inside and hurriedly slams the doors shut behind her. When they are locked, she slides over a few feet and leans back against the wall, panting. Her face is ashen and she brushes herself off, as if trying to physically rid herself of what she has just seen.

4:58, Times Square: Most visitors consider it the heart of the city. It is a can’t-miss attraction for tourists, yet–other than those who work or have business there–I don’t know of a single resident who will set foot anywhere near 42^nd Street. It is a simulacrum, representing “New York” to billions of people around the world, while paradoxically being in no way representative of the city at large. One could get as much feel for living here by going to Vegas and booking a room at the New York, New York Hotel.

Passenger flow at Times Square station has its own, distinct characteristics. When the doors open, ninety percent of the people on the train filter out. For one brief second your car is almost entirely empty; it resembles the moments directly preceding a tsunami, when the ocean has receded far from shore and you’re left with a barren, eerily calm landscape. Then, the deluge; passengers come pouring in through every door, twice as many as before, sweeping over every square inch of space like a tidal wave wreaking havoc on the coast. If you are unlucky enough to be standing in its path you will be swept up, powerless to stop as you are carried along in its current. From this point on, things will only become more crowded, more uncomfortable until we reach Queens. Tempers fray. People curse, elbow one another, release all the pent-up frustrations of the day. For most, this is the midway point of their commute. So close and yet so far still to go. All around, people are nodding off–heads lolling, eyes drooping like the denizens of some travelling opium den. I thank God it is not summer.

Photo Source: She Knows

Girl: Who was that guy that stopped by the bar last night?

Guy: Who, Marco?

Girl: The guy you were talking to when Kim and I were at the jukebox.

Guy: Yeah, that was Marco. We went to Penn State around the same time.

Girl: Were you guys friends?

Guy: I guess. I mean, we always got along ok and we knew a lot of the same people, so we’d see each other at parties or whatever.

Girl: Does he live in New York now too?

Guy: Yeah, in Brooklyn, why?

Girl: <shrugs> No reason, I was just curious.

Guy: Let me guess – you like him.

Girl: <laughs> He was cute, yeah. So?

Guy: No, it’s just, I knew it right away. He’s very much your type.

Girl: Dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes, you mean?

Guy: That’s it. <laughs>

Girl: Is he Latin, or…?

Guy: He was born in Belize, but he grew up here.

Girl: Well, I Belize I just found my new crush, no pun intended. <laughs>

Guy: What do you mean?

Girl: What?

Guy: What do you mean “no pun intended”?

Girl: It’s just an expression.

Guy: But it doesn’t make any sense.

Girl: Well, I didn’t make it up.

Guy: No, but you used it wrong. You say that when you inadvertently make a pun, like when you use a common expression that just happens to make a pun in the context of what you’re saying.

Girl: That’s what I did!

Guy: No, listen! Ok, say like…say I find out my ancestor used to be a duke, or some sort of English royalty. And I’m telling my friend about it, and I say something like, “Yeah, it’s sort of cool, you know, but it’s not a big deal. It’s not like I’m going to lord it over anyone, no pun intended.” That makes sense, because you use the expression ‘lord it over’ in everyday conversation, but in this case I’m also talking about the fact that I’m descended from an English lord.

Girl: So how is that different from- ?

Guy: What are you talking about?! You used the word ‘Belize’ in place of ‘believe’. If you don’t intend it as a pun then it makes no fucking sense!

Girl: Whatever.

Guy: IT’S NOT WHATEVER!!!

4:51, 28^th Street: The second he steps into the car you can sense it. So much of one’s commute is undertaken in a sort of torpor, the routine so immutable – even the random acts of madness begin to assume a pattern – as to be mechanical. Still, there are certain, rare individuals whose presence is so overpowering it brings all assembled back into the present, fully awake and hyper-conscious. One’s sixth sense is ignited, like a dog’s in the seconds before an earthquake.

At first glimpse he seems seven-feet tall. His hair is piled on top of his head in matted, ratty dreadlocks – the product of time and neglect rather than any intentional grooming – so that it looks as if an oversized pineapple has been balanced on his neck. Some as-yet unnamed style of coat hangs loosely from his shoulders, unbuttoned and cinched about the waist with a nylon cord; think knee-length, wool Chesterfield coat crossed with a duster. Underneath he is bare-chested, wearing only plaid cabana shorts, knee socks and L.L. Bean hiking boots. His eyes are the size of golf balls and protrude from his skull in the manner of a leukemic mouse’s. In his right hand he clutches a garbage bag, filled to capacity and straining under the weight of its load.

It is the very first door through which he enters; almost imperceptibly, everyone else shifts towards the back of the car, leaving him the four front seats all to himself. If he is offended he doesn’t show it. He plops down on one of the benches as if it were his, had been reserved specifically for him. Indeed, I doubt he has ever been forced to stand on the train in his entire life. When he is situated, he places the bag on the floor between his feet and opens it. It is filled with phone books and old newspapers. Idly, he rummages through his collection, now and then taking up a book and leafing through its pages, as if looking to pick up the thread of a story he had been forced to interrupt. I fix my eyes back on my own book, doing everything in my power to remain inconspicuous. Strange mutterings emanate from his direction, an incoherent jumble that sounds to my ears like a cross between some African tribal language and a Pentecostal speaking in tongues. Too afraid to look in his direction, the rest of us shoot each other covert glances, tiny reassurances that we are all in this together. The distance between stops feels like miles. When he immediately gathers up his bag again and exits on 34^th Street there is an audible sigh of relief. Smiles flash throughout the car. For one brief moment, anyway, a kinship has formed.

In using the word “technology,” by the way, I’m referring to our common understanding of it—gadgetry. I’m not a gadget guy. No GPS (I use maps). No iPad; no iPhone; no iAnything. I refer to my cell phone as my “terrorist cell”—you know, one of those pay by the minute jobs you get at 7-11. It’s always off and I only buy minutes about twice a year. Also—and most pertinent here—I almost always write fiction by hand. My row of heavily used composition books stretches across an entire book shelf.

As an instructor of composition (among other societal ills) I often have my students broadly define technology early on in the semester. And yes, I have them do so in a composition book. They usually come up with something like this: “anything that helps us make life easier.” This insight usually casts a pensive shadow upon the otherwise chirpy class. Yes, refrigerators do help make life easier. Yes, it’s nice to have a washer and dryer—life would be much more difficult without them. Yes, Microsoft Word certainly is a nice invention; I wouldn’t want to use one of those clickety-clack typewriters of yore. They are grateful.

However, in practice Millennials can be twitchy and impatient, ready to draw out their ubiquitous smart phones during any thirty second lull. The most popular Millennial maneuver is in-pocket texting, a practice which makes me (and many others in the educational sphere) see some dark shade of pedagogical red. Physically a textaholic might occupy a seat in my classroom, but mentally they are over the social networking rainbow.

Here’s my writerly beef with gadgetry distilled to its essence:  it doesn’t make my writing life easier. Sure, it does help if I’m walking around a city and need to find a restaurant, if I need to call a friend, if I want to bid on a pair of Nike LeBron 9 iD on eBay whilst walking down 19^th and M Street. However, the reason I write by hand has to do with the fact that writing well takes laser-like focus and attention. Gadgetry offers just one more layer of annoying distraction. My landline and HP desktop offer more than enough, thank you kindly.

One of my writing buddies asked me recently: but doesn’t this make your writing inefficient? Perhaps, but when I type up my handwritten work I find myself also tweaking what I wrote. My writing process simply adds one more layer of revision—which never hurts. At any rate, who said writing should be efficient? When I was writing my forthcoming novel, I never thought Today I must pound out 3,000 words. I wrote what I could on a given day—by hand, mostly sitting outside on my patio. Sunlight is good.

NaNoWriMo has positive benefits, but its one negative side effect is devastating: writing should not be measured by quantity alone. A novel is not a sack of rice measured by the pound. In fact, I would say that the NaNoWriMo-ification of writing has to do with the fact that currently there is a bevy of writers in our society, but who is taking the time to read what is actually produced? This is a problem. So, I like to sloooooow down. To parallel the slow food movement, there needs to be a slow writing movement. Turn off the iPhones and focus on the page. I suspect that some writers gadget-up to avoid the shackles of writerly loneliness. Nothing wrong with this—writing is lonely. However, I prefer my writerly loneliness unshaken and unstirred.

Sorry, I can easily froth myself up into a state of curmudgeonly fumigation. I am a crank at heart. Here’s what it comes down to for me: while I benefitted greatly from my five plus years as fiction editor of The Pedestal Magazine, my several years as editor of The Potomac, and my two year stint as series editor of Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2008, 2009, I now feel once again released back into the world of creation (and the sharing of that creation). Thus this entry.

If I had my druthers, I’d pretty much want to sit in a quiet room and write. And then write some more. I have more novel, story, poem, and essay ideas than I know what to do with. I’ll bring some of them to light here. Blogging—or whatever one might call this—is a good way to make sense of it all (ultimately, I am grateful for the internet as a means to reach a few extra sets of eyes). More importantly, you won’t have to read my chicken scratch. It’s illegible.

Photo Source: Pencil Talk

It’s a refreshingly honest (and vaguely menacing) twist on a familiar pitch. Previously, when I had encountered these kids (not these two kids specifically, but two like them; there is a veritable army of kids selling candy on the subway) they had always claimed to be from the Boys Club, selling candy to raise money for their basketball team’s uniforms. I don’t know anyone who believed this story, and apparently neither did the kids, so they have seemingly decided to come clean and play on the public’s appreciation for honesty and entrepreneurialism.

“All candy is a dollar,” continued the tall kid. “All I have available are peanut M&Ms and Welch’s fruit snacks.” The selection is unchanging and utterly baffling. Peanut M&Ms are understandable, though I would hazard the plain variety would sell even better. Welch’s fruit snacks, on the other hand, seem like a guaranteed loser, a denizen of a veritable confectionery ghetto that includes Ring Pops, Fun Dip and Circus Peanuts, among others. The obvious explanation is that these are the only two types of candy these kids are able to purchase in bulk. I wonder briefly where it comes from. Is it the same company our school used to raise money for our class trip? If so, why not go with Reese’s peanut butter cups or Snickers bars? Is there some foreclosed-upon warehouse out in Long Island City where a consignment of peanut M&Ms and Welch’s fruit snacks was abandoned mid-shipment? I’ve often wondered what treasures lie hidden behind those miles of corrugated iron doors.

With the preamble out of the way, both kids begin making their rounds. As usual, I politely decline. A balding man in a flannel smoking jacket looks up from his paper momentarily, then quickly does a double-take and digs a dollar out of his pocket for some M&Ms. It is the only sale of the day, at least in our car. The tall kid pockets the money and meets his partner by the doors in the middle. As they wait for the next stop, he stoops down to tie his shoe. He is wearing $200 custom Air Jordans.

4:47, Union Square: A lot of activity here; half the car exits while an equal number board to take their places. Above ground, directly over our heads, sits a bronze George Washington astride a horse. There’s quite a lot of history memorialized in Union Square, but most people who visit it these days are either buying vegetables at the Greenmarket or skateboarding or smoking pot or just sitting around wasting time the way kids do. Union Square was the first part of New York City I can remember visiting, years ago, but though I ride the train beneath it every day it seems an eternity since I’ve gone upstairs. It always struck me that the types of people I saw hanging out on the square were never the people I encountered on the train. The two groups seemed completely disparate, as if they existed in different worlds.

One of the last people to enter the train is a young girl. She stops just inside the doors, right next to where I’m sitting. Instead of grabbing the handrail and leaning back against the doors after they close, she turns sideways and leans against the bars on the side of my seat, her dark, waist-length hair spilling down into my face. Though I avoid conflict by nature, this is a situation that cannot go unaddressed, not only for its brazenness but because it is in no way extraordinary. The subway is where one may witness the straining of what Edgar Rice Burroughs called the “thin veneer of civilization”. As I’ve mentioned previously, all the incidental contact caused by being in such close proximity to so many people in such confined quarters lends – in many people’s minds – an implied permission to dispense with common courtesy. Whether it is arrogance or some sort of defense mechanism, it still holds true that the more New Yorkers you crowd together in a space, the greater lengths each will go to in order to deny the existence of the others. So it was I found my face buried in a stranger’s hair. After several huffs of displeasure, I matter-of-factly raised my arm and rested it on top of the bar, jabbing an elbow deep in the young woman’s spine in the process. The latter started and began to turn around, but apprising herself of the situation, thought better of it and repositioned herself at a more respectable distance. For another day at least, anarchy is averted.

Photo Source: Urban Omnibus

Not working didn’t warm him to other folks on welfare; in fact, even though he was receiving food stamps for the first time in his life, he was perfecting his Archie Bunker routine. That Dad and the country were skidding downhill together was a fact worth noting and blaming on women’s rights, civil rights, or some other kind of progress or change. Later when fortune’s wheel handed my father the late nineties boom economy and its Y2K-scare bonuses for experts in old computer languages, I’d see a happy father quite removed from this impoverished act from early in the decade.

His Archie Bunkerism of the early 1990s was also a defense mechanism to returning to West Philly, and being surrounded by poor blacks. During the summer, his car was stolen, and of course, he couldn’t afford any theft insurance at the time. This was his crème-colored ’83 Buick, which now looked more like a dirty whitish car with some rust spots. Luckily, the police found the car abandoned in Mantua, one of the poorest pockets of West Philly, and the country for that matter. The trunk lock had been broken, and my father’s camping equipment was stolen, but he was lucky to get the vehicle back. The car was one of the few things of value my father owned.

He also found walking past the young black guys out on his corner somewhat harrowing. They didn’t greet his smile with warmth; rather, they wore grim expressions or ignored him or maybe he even felt they were laughing at the fat old white guy sauntering past. This racial animosity seems far less common today, and of course, we can only describe what is felt, not what is intended or real. But in L.A., they keep the poor blacks separate, away from the coast, so sure, my father wasn’t used to the East Coast ethnic animosity after ten years of California cool. And as with Archie Bunker, the racial tension can seem all the greater if you’re down on the bottom rung, competing for the table-scrap employment thrown from the more well-to-do.

So Dad and Julie certainly weren’t a match made in heaven, although it was another example of how my father often gravitated toward women he would struggle with. He didn’t necessarily like or respect the ones that wouldn’t call him on his bullshit. Somehow, Julie was the perfect match for this period of his life, but by the end of the summer, their mutual antagonism wore each other down, the pool closed for the fall, and they went their separate ways. My father still didn’t have a job or a definite buyer, so he moved out of the summer sublet at 40^th and Pine, and into his Pine Street house for the third and last stay in his primary residence in University City.

***

And then, out of options, he tried desperately to create a buyer in the middle of a recession, but houses weren’t selling for what they should; in fact, nothing much was selling at all. There were a couple shadier investors who were talking about my father doing owner-backed financing on an 85K sell price. That sounded all well and good save for the fact that the owner would need to have good credit to get that kind of deal approved. I believe my father’s first asking price for the house was fair market value of around 115,000 dollars. But as the weather turned, and all of my father’s leads dried up, and his cash—my cash—slowly dissipated, he was forced to sell it for 65 grand in a straight cash deal. The buyer was Alan Stern, a local real estate developer, and from his perspective, he probably thought he was doing my father a favor. Favor or no, this was close to a “short sale” before the phrase was plastered all over our country’s headlines and lawn signs. A lowball for a quick sale is what a man accepts when he has no other options.

Years later, I remember my father comparing himself to the “Alan Sterns of the world,” men who make the prudent financial moves throughout their lives, and wind up with a tidy nest egg to show for it at the end. If my father had held onto the property until his passing, even if he did little or no repair work, he probably would own a house worth roughly $300,000. Plus, even with the mortgage from the original sale, he could have profited on rent over the next decade. But my father was my father. He lived in the moment and was resistant to staying in Philly and working. He just wanted out of the deal. I think he felt like he had to sell it so he could pay off the cash loans to friends. He would have paid the credit card debts if he could have, but the loans he owed people in California, plus the money he owed me, were the debts that ate at his conscience.

That fall, when he was able to return the money to me after selling his house, I was  relieved. This was my first experience with supporting a parent financially, and although the loan was repaid within six months of the borrowing, this sort of financial entanglement with my father made me nervous. Occasionally, throughout the nineties, I would give cash or write a check as a present, but I’d never loan him a significant amount of money again. He just didn’t seem like a reliable credit risk.

After he received the cash from the sale of the property, my father was happy. He moved into a discounted studio apartment owned by the local Catholic Church, and he was on easy street until the dough ran out. So rather than do the practical thing and look for work, he did what he wanted to. He strolled downtown to center city AA meetings (not so dour as the West Philly ones), sang loudly and poorly in church choir, wrote his occasional poems and journals, breathed the fall air, and enjoyed his life.

He’d bounce into Borders Bookshop to come visit me after his walk from University City to his AA meeting. Both walking and AA gave him a real lift, and it showed in his expectant smile. A few bucks in his pocket, he was living in the moment, reading, writing and seeing his son almost everyday.

You’d never know how close he was to economic calamity, and it bothered me more than him. In fact, being in the same city as my financially devastated father was both harrowing and depressing for me. I was thinking of the inevitable future, when unless he found a job, his bank account would return to nil, and he wouldn’t own a property to bail himself out.

Borders was my first job after college, and I was earning $6.25 per hour, less than I had earned at my summer job during college. I had taken the job in July, and loved the chance to be around books and “read for free” as much as possible. I was already dreaming of writing my own stuff, but my cramped room in my mother’s apartment was just too claustrophobic for me to get much done. By the winter, I devised my plan, my escape from two-parent living. I decided to head back six hours north, back to my alma mater, and enroll in the Master’s in Liberal Studies Program. I’d take two courses. One was called Workshopping the Novel, and the other simulated an introductory law-school course. The latter was my alibi, something to tell the folks, but the writing course excited me.

When I broke the news to my father, I played up the practicality of taking the courses, and exploring my career interests. I don’t remember him being visibly upset with my decision to leave Philadelphia, but it did seem to affect his own plan. He’d come back to town with some idealized version of father and son catching up on all they missed during his decade in Southern California—all that couldn’t be covered by regular phone calls. But now, son was ditching. The stolen car incident had revitalized his negative views of West Philly, and when he looked outside he saw garbage strewn across the streets, and open displays of fresh and stale dog shit on the sidewalks. This was well before real estate began to soar in University City, and I’d feel priced out of my own neighborhood, so my father’s lasting impression was of West Philly in its most negative light. I think it reminded him of the seventies, and all the drugs he had done, and now he saw that period as wasted time. Because he was sober now, and he just didn’t feel comfortable in this neighborhood he associated with his 1970s—growing your own and contact highs and the occasional pot plant left in the window and forgotten about. The house was sold, the woman was gone, the son was headed back north, and so my father was ready for the next plan B.

“Summer, 1991: Broke and Back in Philly” is an excerpt from a rough draft of The Book of Jay, a memoir by Alex Kudera with journal selections from his father, the poet Jay Roberts. It’s a work in progress that will consist of intertwining memories of each writer’s father. If you would like a complimentary copy of the collected poems of Jay Roberts, find “Alex Kudera” on facebook to arrange for delivery of such.

Photo Source: Cornerstone Properties

4:39, Canal Street: As the doors slide open, the mournful strains of an erhu can be heard far off in the distance. On the wall outside, beneath a row of Chinese characters made of multi-colored tiles, someone has written “Obama is the Manchurian candidate”. Our car disgorges a handful of passengers, after which the driver announces that we are being held in the station momentarily. A woman drifts into the rear of the car; she appears painfully frail, as if constructed from matchsticks and rubber cement. An uneducated guess puts her in her late forties, but it is hard to know for sure. Her hair is prematurely gray and stringy, seeming both brittle and greasy at once. Her face is pinched and crisscrossed with deep wrinkles. An audible groan emanates from the other passengers. This woman is not a stranger to any of us; indeed, she has become something of a fixture on the R train. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” she says, “I am an out-of-work mother caring for a young daughter with multiple sclerosis. Because of my daughter’s illness I am unable to leave her to find a job. I do not have the means to afford a babysitter or nurse to take care of her. If you could please spare even a nickel or dime so that we can afford to eat.” One by one, as the woman dodders forward waving a 7-11 coffee cup ahead of her, I see the rest of the passengers checking out, mentally erasing her from existence. New Yorkers can be a hard-hearted bunch, it’s true, but I have yet to see anyone so consistently and uniformly shunned as this woman. I wonder if she is a known quantity, her story already revealed to be fiction. Either way, the others’ reticence is what prevented me from giving any of my own money in the beginning, until finally it became habit, as second nature to me as cracking my knuckles. Perhaps this is an unending cycle in which she’s trapped, where any new potential donor becomes infected by the cynicism of those around them. Why then, I wonder, does she keep coming back evening after evening? By the time she reaches the front of the car, her cup predictably empty, the doors have already closed. She will be making the trip with us to Prince Street.

4:41, Prince Street: They pile on, their arms loaded down with shopping bags – H&M, Aeropostale, Abercrombie & Fitch. They’ve travelled halfway across the country to shop at the same stores they have in their local suburban mall complex. They are mostly women, in groups of threes and fours. They talk loudly, much too loudly for the train. I detect a panoply of accents and languages – Midwestern, Deep South, Swedish, Cantonese, Russian, German. The ones I understand recount the things they have seen that day, embellishing the good and the bad, imbuing the most mundane incidents with an almost mythical air. This is why they came to New York, after all, to be amazed. Just as I have never heard a person express disappointment in the Eiffel Tower or Roman Coliseum, I have never heard New York described in anything but glowing terms by tourists. They praise its “energy” and “vibrancy”, apparently referring to the fact that there are a lot of people who seem in a hurry to get somewhere. The irony is that if they were to look around their train car, they would notice all of us New Yorkers slumped over in our seats, nodding off or staring vacantly at the floor or out the window. New York might be called the “city that never sleeps”, but I can tell you that it’s not for want of trying. Everywhere one looks, one sees an exhausted, bedraggled people. They speak longingly of getting away, leaving the city behind if only for a day or two, just to be able to relax. What people here really want at the end of a long day is to be able to turn off. Which is why tourists – loud, obtrusive, bright-eyed – are so universally disliked. “I just love Soho!” says a woman in a University of Indiana sweatshirt, her bags smacking against my knee in rhythm with the movements of the train, like a metronome. I sigh, wondering exactly when was the moment I stopped being one of them and became one of us.

Photo by AZY_NYC / Flickr

So when he came back to Philly, he was broke and anchored in credit-card debt. The happy Dad from my graduation soon turned into the father who needed a loan from his son. Somehow despite spending most of my savings on college, I had a couple thousand to lend him over the summer, just to get by until he sold his house. If I’m not mistaken, it was most of what I had left in the bank, and I was terrified to lend it to him even though I knew the sale was coming. That was his last chance, the home he hadn’t lived in for a decade that might still bail him out, delay the inevitable, or cushion the fall. My Dad’s plan was that he’d sell the house, pay off as much debt as he could—to his friends before the corporations—and then live off the remaining funds. That the plan was only temporary, and that the leftover money wouldn’t last more than a year or two, didn’t seem to bother him. This was my father living in the present, appropriating the AA mantra to elide his financial responsibility—one day at a time.

Of course, he did have one option—he could have stayed in Philly, settled for a job beneath him, and used that money to pay the low mortgage and live in the house again. But ten years in California had spoiled my father, and after only a couple months in Philly, he realized right away that he didn’t want to stay there.

University City has always had its nice people and nice blocks, and some of us describe it as a multicultural oasis in a city of income inequalities and racial divisions, but from my father’s returning perspective, West Philly was the bottom compared to Marina Del Rey. It was hot and humid, and black and poor. Dog shit and trash on the sidewalk pavement’s broken cement was common back then, and summer was nasty, brutish and long.

Unlike the movie-industry AA my father had sobered up in nine years earlier, the AA clubs in Philadelphia were full of downtrodden blue-collar or no-collar men—sad stories from the mean streets of West Philly and such. It was depressing. As he would tell me that summer, “I never would have gotten sober if I had first joined AA in Philadelphia.” And although my father had been a Philadelphian for nearly fifteen years previously, by 1991, he felt alien to this city and its habits, chief of which was hostility toward all those appearing as outsiders. In 1991, he felt like a man who didn’t belong.

But he had to stay in town until he could sell the house and arrange his next situation, so my father wound up in a tiny sublet apartment at 40^th and Pine, where he squeezed all of his boxes into a few small rooms, and set up shop in the first floor rear. His realtor, an old family friend, and the same one trying to sell his house, let him have the place for $300 per month. Unlike California, West Philly still offered a few bargains. And my father, perhaps from being flat broke in the late seventies or maybe due to childhood poverty, knew how to get by on a shoe-string budget.

I’d visit my oversized Pa in this undersized apartment, and see an obese man who looked tired and old in his tank-top tee and sweat pants. I’d ask about his work prospects. He’d ignore the topic or worse, deflect it to my own job prospects. Despite his unwillingness to confront his own financial situation, and take a shit job, my father wanted to get me excited about chasing the same soul-draining corporate buck he was running away from.

But at the time, I didn’t want to work. I was burnt out from undergrad, and I wanted to write. Yeah, I know, and I hated the idea of looking someone in the eye, particularly my father’s eyes, and saying with a straight face, “I want to be a writer.” So there we were, two unemployed guys with the same romantic ambition—to become writers! Father and son the same. What a cliché.

So I know my Dad was disappointed in me, in my lack of enthusiasm for the “recent college grad needed for entry-level position” type ad you see all over the newspaper help wanteds.  But there he was, a living fatherly example of avoiding work as often as possible, and he had the nerve to push it on me. I’m not sure if he was entertaining ideas of living off my salary permanently—if I was ever lucky enough to earn one—but because I had already loaned him the two grand, it felt like this was an option he was considering. And that was scary. I was 22, a college grad, free of obligation for the first time in my life, at least for a few months until the student loans started up, and my Dad’s overwhelming presence was back in my life, and seemingly fixated on a permanent handout.

Photo Source: uwishunu.com

Disheartening though it is, there are decided practical advantages to having the entire platform to oneself. There are still seats to be had so far from Midtown, and the experienced commuter knows exactly where to stand to have the best chance at nabbing one. The turnstiles at City Hall are located almost dead in the center of the platform, so I swing a left and walk all the way up to the far end, where the first car will eventually stop. As a rule, tourists tend to congregate near the turnstiles while waiting for a train, as there are few things more forbidding to the neophyte than the remote, shadowy corners of a New York subway stop. For all its history and renown, the New York subway system is–without a doubt–the dirtiest, ugliest, most decrepit metro system I have ever encountered. It has all the elegance of a Third-World sewer, the ambiance of a Detroit back-alley, and the structural integrity of an old Soviet apartment block. In 2009, the ceiling of the 181^st St. station collapsed from deterioration. Everywhere one looks, one encounters cracks in the walls of the tunnels, rusting support beams and flaking paint. Garbage is strewn across the tracks and many of the platforms, giving rise to the current boom in the rat population the city is trying so desperately to combat.

Point being, the ends of the platform are where these hallmarks of decay reach their zenith, and therefore are avoided by the casual train rider. On this occasion I stake out my usual spot, directly in front of the second-to-last support beam. This will line me up exactly with the second set of doors on the R train. When I’m positioned just so, I reach into my bag and pull out the book I’m reading. Other regulars start filtering in now; I can feel their eyes as they glance towards my spot, confirming that it’s taken before settling for a less-prestigious place farther down the platform. One woman, blond and in her thirties, has become particularly aggressive of late. I see her coming out of the corner of my eye and instinctively dig in my heels and bury my face deeper in my book. A titanic struggle of wills ensues in which not a single word is spoken, a subtle progression of movements and body language resembling some exotic form of Japanese theater. It is a scene completely typical of New York, even as it runs counter to the (accurate) stereotype of the loud, obnoxious, outspoken New Yorker. It begins with the blond woman fixing me with a death-glare as she approaches down the platform. I respond by keeping my eyes glued to my book, going so far as to turn a page before I’ve even finished reading what was on the previous one, just to drive home how unconcerned I am with everything else happening around me. The blond woman stops in front of the third support beam, one over from me, and crosses her arms. She gazes down the tracks to see if the train is coming, huffs with feigned impatience, then looks in my direction once more. I counter by lowering my book and looking down the tracks myself, past the woman’s head, as if to say, “If there is anyone else in my vicinity, they are of so little consequence that I do not notice them.”

Now the blond woman raises the stakes. She puts her hands in her jacket pockets and begins pacing in circles, from the edge of the platform back to the wall, like a caged jungle cat that smells blood. After completing a few laps, she comes to rest just a few feet to my right, essentially defying any attempt to ignore her presence. My response is to remove a tissue from my coat and blow my nose as loudly and wetly as possible. She does not demur, and in fact inches even closer, crossing well over the boundaries of polite separation and impinging on my terrain. To check her progress, I take one step forward and to the right, leaving her no room to pass in front of or behind me without circling out around the support beam.

From off in the distance comes the screeching of metal on metal. A flickering orange spot on the tunnel wall grows longer and brighter, until finally the headlights of the next R train blaze into view around the corner. Realizing she has lost, the blond woman looks around and scrambles frantically to her left, then back to her right, before eventually settling on the no-man’s land between the third and fourth support beams. Stepping right up to the edge of the platform, I set a wide stance and square my shoulders; my position is safe. Several people jostle behind me for second place. The irony, as the train squeals to a stop in front of us, is that there are at least two-dozen empty seats on the lead car and everyone will be able to sit down. Still, one never knows–every day is different, after all–and as I settle into one of the prime seats right next to the doors, I am content that for the time being my domain remains successfully defended. It is one of the small victories that make living in this city bearable. As the familiar “bing-bong” sounds over the intercom and the doors slide shut, I prepare to zone-out for the next forty minutes.

Photo Source: 8 Asians

In modern times, of course, cynicism is synonymous with jadedness; the cynic views the world primarily through a negative, skeptical lens, generally disbelieving the sincerity or goodness in human actions. It is a neat historical – or perhaps better to say linguistic – irony that few things have contributed more to the average New Yorker’s cynicism than the panhandler.

It is a widely held belief throughout the rest of the country that New Yorkers are a rude, impatient, ill-mannered bunch, hyper-aggressive and devoid of a certain charitableness considered endemic to small-town America. Like most clichés, it is a small truth that ignores and acts to obscure an even larger truth, one that takes into account the broader perspective. I can still remember my shock after moving to New York, the first time I visited our neighborhood grocery store. Walking down an aisle so narrow I could grab products off the shelves on both sides simultaneously, I encountered a woman – middle-aged, Spanish, wearing a frowzy overcoat – coming the other way. She was studying the shelf to my left in deep concentration, drifting forward in a sort of daze. I moved off to the right and turned sideways to let her pass, but not noticing me she failed to reciprocate; our shoulders collided and we stumbled a bit as we finally squeezed past one another. “Oh, excuse me, sorry!” I blurted automatically, because that is what one does in the Midwest, even though I had not been the one at fault. The woman, however, said nothing and continued down the aisle as if nothing had happened. My initial bafflement turned to incredulousness, and finally, annoyance. The entitlement she displayed, pushing past me as if I weren’t even there – negating my existence with a single gesture – left me fuming for the rest of the day.

After a few months of living in the city, however, I began to notice a subtle change in my behavior. The single most important thing you need to know to understand New York is this – there are a lot of people and very little space. About 8.5 million people, roughly, living on only 305 square miles of land. Being pushed together in this way, forced to live on top of one another, accounts for many of the quirks New Yorkers display. With such a premium put on space, businesses here tend to shrink. The next time you visit your local, suburban Target, imagine cutting the room directly down the middle and discarding one half. Now imagine moving all the shoppers into the remaining half and tripling their numbers, and you have a pretty good idea what shopping in a New York Target store is like. The same holds true for all other businesses – much less space, many more people. Meaning a lot of jostling, bumping and colliding. After a few months of constant apologizing and politely deferring to others it occurred to me that I would never get anything done if I didn’t start accepting the fact that some contact with others was a necessary evil. And so, I stopped saying “excuse me”. It wasn’t that I had grown ruder, just that I had entered into an implicit contract with my fellow New Yorkers – there is no room to move, we are going to bump into each other, neither of us is at fault, and so there is nothing to forgive. It becomes just another inevitable part of living in the city, neither good nor bad, but simply a fact of life.

The same phenomenon is at work with panhandlers. There are simply too many in too confined a space for the average New Yorker not to be in constant contact with them. And so they fade into the background, just another feature of the cityscape to be navigated, like bike messengers or taxis or the giant puddles on every street corner after a hard rain. One of the quickest ways to discern whether a person is a tourist or a local New Yorker is whether or not they stop to engage with a panhandler, and especially if they give the panhandler money. Similar to the unspoken agreement about jostling one another, New Yorkers seem to have an agreement with panhandlers whereby the latter are free to make their pitch and the former are free to ignore it, allowing the latter to make their living off the aforementioned tourists or the occasional local impressed enough or loaded down with enough change that they feel compelled to part with a coin or two. Unlike the stories I’ve heard from other cities, like San Francisco, where beggars are aggressive and can often become threatening, panhandlers in New York typically take being snubbed in stride – fortunate, because New Yorkers tend to disavow the very presence of a panhandler when being solicited. A man in a tattered coat huddled on the corner, cup in hand, who calls out, “Excuse me, sir,” to a passing New Yorker is about as likely to receive an acknowledgment as a lamppost or garbage bin. This has led to the perception in other parts of the country that New Yorkers are particularly unfeeling or self-centered. Again, there are some grains of truth in this, but the complete picture is more complicated. New Yorkers are cynical towards panhandlers because over the years their suspicions have been borne out; they have become inured to apparent suffering because so much of that suffering has been revealed to be a ruse.

There’s a gradual process to burning out. I’ve seen the change in myself. In the beginning, you try to give to everyone – a few coins, maybe a dollar. Better to give in case the person really needs it than to refuse just because you’re unsure. Soon, though, it becomes too much. You commute to work and back each day. Every city block, every subway car, every train platform, there’s another person asking for help. Even if it was only a few cents, you couldn’t possibly give to everyone. So you start making decisions, give to this person, but not this one. Sometimes there’s a reason for your choice – this person has two small kids, and you have a soft spot for children; this person plays the violin beautifully and you want to reward her talent. Sometimes it’s completely arbitrary, a spur of the moment decision to either dig into your pocket or keep your nose buried in the book you’re reading. Then the stories start coming out; you hear them from a friend or on the local news. The kids selling candy for their basketball team are actually buying designer clothes. The beardy college students shilling for a children’s charity actually work for a third-party agency keeping up to ninety percent of all donations. Even the homeless Vietnam vet on Times Square turns out to be just some guy with a bad knee who bought a few medals at a flea market and is now pulling in six figures a year playing on people’s patriotism. Before you know it, you’ve given up. You shut down and limit your caring to those closest to you, your friends and family.

New York is built on grift. From Wall Street bankers scamming pension funds into investing in built-to-fail mortgage backed securities, to the NYPD fixing tickets for friends and relatives; from phony landlords holding open houses on apartments to collect application fees, to bodegas acting as fronts for everything from immigrant smuggling to drug selling operations, everyone is in on the action. All any of us regular folks can do is keep our heads down, our mouths shut, and our money firmly in our wallets. Better to turn a blind eye to suffering than become another victim. Suspect everyone and assume the worst – a Cynic’s motto if ever there was one.

Photo Source: Common Bond Association

At 59^th and Lexington the car emptied out, as it does every morning, leaving only a couple dozen of us to continue the trek downtown. As the handful of people who board the train at this juncture got on, I heard the woman loudly warning them, in a thick Staten Island accent, to be careful where they sat. On the seat next to her, which had been occupied moments ago by her purse, there was now a puddle of mysterious brown liquid. The train pulled away, making the liquid swirl around in a vaguely circular motion, never quite gathering enough momentum to overflow its banks and spill onto the floor. The woman stared off into the middle-distance, grinning vacantly, clutching her purse on her lap. After a moment she blinked, as if startled awake, undid the clasp on her purse and reached inside. When she brought her hand out she was clutching a Starbucks coffee cup, its sides streaked brown and wet. Tiny drops of coffee collected along the bottom rim, falling to the floor when they grew too heavy.  “They don’t tell you these things when you get it,” she said to a young Latino guy in a yellow flannel, the only person other than me sitting within twenty feet of her. “Absolutely,” he said, in a way that suggested he was well aware she was nuts, but was nonetheless very cute and wearing black nylons. “Did you ever get up really early?” she said. “Y…yeah?” said the Latino guy, his brow furrowed. “WHAT?!” she screamed. He, apparently reassessing his prior calculations, remained silent and turned to stare off down the car.

Pulling into Times Square, the woman rose and made her way towards the doors, reminding me – with her frozen expression and rigid movements – of a mechanical cuckoo as the clock strikes noon. Halfway there she paused and took a packet of tissues from her coat pocket. Removing the plastic wrapper, she tossed the entire stack onto the puddle. “Fixed!” she said brightly, as the doors slid open. Stepping off the train, she made a beeline for the nearest trashcan and dropped her purse inside, contents and all, before climbing the stairs to the street, out of view. As the train pulled away, two men on the platform rushed towards the trashcan and grabbed a hold of the purse, pulling at it and snarling like two dogs fighting over a steak.

Photo Source: Apollo Kidz

Problem is, New York doesn’t care about your ideas. Your ideas have no built-in market, and nobody knows who you are. For all the talk about looking for “the next big thing”, no executive –  be it publishing, music, or film – wants an unknown entity. What they want is a facsimile of the last “big thing”, only younger and cheaper and preferably better looking. They don’t need you, because there are a million other kids here who are just like you. You will go to each other’s readings and DJ nights and open-mic sessions, drink shitty beer and bottom-shelf liquor, and generally have a wonderful time as long as your bank account holds out. There is no time limit, no expiration date. There are sixty-year-old drunks slurring their way through ‘More Than a Feeling’ at their local pub’s karaoke night right now who still believe their big break is right around the corner.

I’m lucky in the sense that I moved to New York for a job – an actual job, in an office, with a regular paycheck every other week and benefits. Therefore, I never had any illusions about what to expect when I got here. I wake up five days a week and take the R train to Lower Manhattan. I walk into an office, sit down behind a desk and work a nine-hour shift. Then, in the evening, I take the R train back out to Queens. I eat dinner, put my daughter to bed, and finally, when all the other minor chores of the day are done, I sit down for an hour to write. Not any different, really, from what I used to do in Pittsburgh, except I’m being paid a whole lot more. I write because I enjoy it, because sitting down in front of a blank screen to craft a story is a terrifying and exhilarating experience, and the joy felt when the final period has been placed at the end of the final sentence is more than commensurate to the challenge. I will never make a living from writing, and that’s okay. I have been lucky enough to be published, a thrilling and rewarding experience. No one will remember my name, and that’s just fine.

New York is a desperate city. It’s palpable, walking down the street. Everyone is trying to be noticed, yet going to the greatest lengths possible to ignore everyone else they pass. It is a city where ten-thousand people live crushed together on a single block, yet no one knows their neighbors. It is a city of perpetual delusion, where a paralegal in a Downtown law firm is not a paralegal but an “aspiring actress/model”, and the guy who just poured your vodka tonic is not a bartender but a “poet” who just happens to tend bar a few times a week to pay the bills. It is a way-station on the path to something better. It is a city of expats, a fleeting, transient, temporary city. Everyone who moved here just a few years ago already speaks incessantly of getting out, someday. And yet they stay on, chasing some indefinable dream, wanting in vain to be adored in a city that cares for no one. It is a minnow trap, Narcissus’s pool, into which we all stare dreamily seeing a self that exists only in our minds. It is a prison without walls. And, for now anyway, it is home.

 
Photo by Daniel Schwen

Usually I get the Navy Dream once or twice a year, but lately it’s coming a lot more fast and furious. I know the reason why. I think Hunter Thompson simply called it The Fear, that feeling of utter dread all writers get when they face that blank screen or empty page. If you write, you already know what I’m talking about: there’s a tightness in your throat from the pressure of having to sit down to work on a project. You wonder if today will be the day nothing comes out. When you’re writing for a deadline, multiply that pressure by ten.

And if you happen to be writing a sequel for a deadline, well, just go ahead and multiply it by a hundred. Take it from me: I’m working on a sequel right now, and it might be the most terrifying writing project I’ve ever taken on.

Now this might sound strange, but I’ll say it anyway: I think that terror is a good thing.

Today I’m on the road, driving along a two-lane blacktop called Highway 13, heading north into the upper reaches of Wisconsin. The radio only has two kinds of stations: new country, and old country. I’m on sabbatical — which is academic-speak for being temporarily unemployed — and I’m out here researching my novel Apostle Islands, which will be the follow-up to Nazareth, North Dakota, published by Atticus Books. Nazareth, North Dakota was the story of the young Messiah as he grows up on the rural prairie of North Dakota beginning in the 1980s. That book ends when the Messiah character walks out into the desert (in this case, the Badlands) to challenge Satan for forty days and nights. So, Apostle Islands starts there and takes us all the way to the end of the New Testament story. The sequel takes its name from the lonely chain of islands off the north coast of Wisconsin in Lake Superior. Which is where I’m heading right now, in a Toyota Camry packed with the essentials: camping gear, laptop, cooler, and a good stash of Nutter Butters.

When I tell my writer friends about the sequel, they all seem impressed. Honestly, it almost feels embarrassing to say out loud, “I’m writing a sequel,” because some people might actually hear, “My writing is so good it requires two books.” I hope they don’t. A sequel is a pretty rare thing in literary fiction, I guess: unless you’re writing a big series about wizards or zombies or mystery-solving housewives, fiction usually doesn’t get a sequel. Which might explain the Navy Dream last night. (At least I was sleeping alone this time, in my cozy hiker tent in an off-the-map state park. Trust me, when you wake up from the Navy Dream and you’re sleeping next to someone else, you have a lot of explaining to do.)

Like most writers, deep inside I know my fears are mostly unfounded. We all have deadlines, and we know that we’ll probably meet them one way or another. But in the meantime, we fret about it on a daily basis. Writers, you know the drill: you wake up, turn on the computer, and take your sweet time making coffee, checking e-mail, cleaning the sink. Anything but actually sitting down in front of that screen and facing judgment. Usually that fear passes: we start with a few words or a couple of good sentences, and then we feel things start to roll.

But there are those rare days when nothing comes out. There are those frightening times when the research gets more interesting than the actual writing. And we’re scared to death that it’ll be a while until things start rolling again.

I’m having a heck of a time out here on the road getting material for Apostle Islands, but I’m also learning that writing a sequel is hard work. When you get that first book published, you’re so happy just to have it in the bookstore and the library. But when you are presented with the opportunity to continue the story in a sequel, you want this one to be your Moby Dick, your White Album. When you are given the opportunity to write a sequel, you want the second part to be even better than the first. You want to impress the people who gave you this opportunity in the first place: the publisher, for one, as well as the nice people who read the first book. All sequels are judged as an extension of the original story, and that’s something the author can’t control. But that doesn’t mean we don’t worry about it on a daily basis.

For my part, I’m out here putting together the sequel in the same way I put together Nazareth, North Dakota. I’m sitting in diners listening to folks talk, I’m taking pictures of street corners and hunting down weird artifacts. I’m soaking in all the cool details about the place. In putting together Naz, I found all this legwork really does translate to the writing — maybe not directly, but by some kind of weird osmosis, it builds the story. It makes the writing part a whole lot easier; I don’t think I could do it otherwise. When you’re on the road, it can be whole lot of fun exploring a place for the first time. Library research is important, but there’s no substitute for experiencing a place first-hand. Plus, you get to eat a whole lot of Nutter Butters by the campfire.

Right now I’m about halfway through the first draft of Apostle Islands, and I have to say I absolutely love the writing so far. Old characters are mixing with new ones and the story is taking me to new places. The sequel is slated for a Summer 2012 release, and if I think logically, I know I’ll meet my deadline with room to spare. But as all writers know, our fears don’t care too much about logic. The good news is, we also know that fear is the same thing that drives us to create something great. We use fear as motivation. We can never really tell if the project we’re working on will be our White Album — other folks will decide that — but any writer will tell you that the unique feeling of being surprised by your own writing is worth all the agonizing fear churned up in a hundred Navy Dreams. With this draft of Apostle Islands, I’m still excited by the story as it slowly unravels in my dusty brain, and that lets me know that this is going to be something I’ll be proud of in the end. I’m not worried yet about what other folks will think: after all, Revolver and Meet the Beatles were kick-ass pieces of art, too.

Tonight I’m camping out on the real Apostle Islands, and I can’t wait. As I get closer it’s hard to stay under the speed limit on this back road. If you’ve been up in these parts, then you know how beautiful and lonely this place is. I’ll be off the radar for a while, which can be the best thing for a writer. Tonight I’ll set up my little tent the same way I have been for the last week, on my way out here; I’ll pump up the old air mattress and put the coffee pot on the fire. And when I lie down to sleep, I know I just might wake up in the middle of the night again with that same Navy Dream. But that’s a good thing. It’s a sign I’m getting closer to turning the corner on this story. And when I deliver that finished draft to my publisher, it’ll be more than worth it.

About the Author
Tommy Zurhellen was born in New York City. His debut novel, Nazareth, North Dakota, was released by Atticus Books in Summer 2011. The sequel, Apostle Islands, is slated for an August 2012 release. Learn more about Tommy, Nazareth and his research at tommyzurhellen.com.

Photos by Tommy Zurhellen

“This shirt’s better than a dating service,” my friend Carrie used to say. Carrie’s “Marry Me” t-shirt was tight and lime green. She wore it on layovers and never paid for drinks. “You’d be amazed what people will do for free plane tickets,” she’d say.

I’m amazed what people will do for love.

When I finally ask Danny to marry me, it comes almost out of nowhere. We’d gone out to eat at a restaurant called the Red Star. The Red Star is half restaurant, half train station. The décor is circus kitsch. Above the bar, there are two huge papier-mâché sculptures. The sculptures are two bulbous tightrope walkers, a man and a woman. The walkers are balanced overhead on chubby tiptoe, perched like fat birds on their tightrope, toddling there, against the odds of gravity, against any good sense.

“I have healthcare.” This is how I propose, over a plate of potato skins and some peel-and-eat shrimp. “I have flight benefits.”

Danny hates to fly, but he still says yes.

“That was the nicest thing anyone has ever asked me,” Danny says later.

“That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever asked,” I say.

We don’t tell my mother or our friends. We don’t call Danny’s kind and lovely parents. That weekend, we cash in the last of his savings bonds, buy two simple rings at The Clark Building in Pittsburgh, and fly to Las Vegas for free, first class.

How I know Danny loves me: he said yes, even though both of us had at one point sworn off marriage. And he’s not complaining about the flight, even though he’s gripping his armrests and sweating so much a flight attendant thinks he might be having a heart attack.

“We’re getting married,” I say.

“That explains things,” she says, and brings us a bottle of champagne and an extra airsickness bag, just in case.

“Close your eyes,” I say to Danny. “I’ll wake you when we get there.”

“There’s no way I’m sleeping like this,” he says.

As much as Danny’s miserable, I love it up here. After years of working flights like this one, I can sleep better on an airplane than I can at home. Some flight attendants I worked with used to take home recordings of jet engines and play them as white noise so they could sleep on the ground. Danny’s more like most people, who think, rightfully so, that flying isn’t natural. But I’m with the little old lady who, on a flight to Kansas City once, in the middle of a bad bout of turbulence, threw her arms up and yelled, “They should charge extra for this!”

The flight from Pittsburgh to Vegas, with a stop in Atlanta, takes about six and a half hours. When the plane finally starts to descend, I nudge Danny, who’s closed his eyes despite himself. I say, “Look. It’s beautiful. Trust me.”

***

It’s around midnight, Vegas time. Flying into Vegas at night is a magical thing. At first there’s only desert, one long stretch of black, and then there’s light. The signs that make up the Vegas skyline appear and the whole place looks like luck, something invented to sell on TV. On one end of the strip, there’s a sphinx and a pyramid. Farther down, there’s the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge, King Arthur’s castle and a pirate ship. Vegas looks like the world tossed in a Yahtzee cup. It looks like a jumbled Atlantis rising out of the sea. It looks like the inside of a madman’s snow globe.

“The whole damn place is a dream,” my father who loved and believed in Vegas used to say.

“I don’t need to go to Paris,” a passenger told me once. “I can visit the Eiffel Tower right here, where people speak English.”

“Everything’s fake,” another passenger said, “but it’s nicer than the real thing.”

I’d wanted to get married in Key West. Key West is literary and romantic. Hemingway had a house there. The descendants of his cats live there still. Tennessee Williams wrote “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the La Concha Hotel. Key West has beautiful sunsets. People get married barefoot on the beach, with the sun breaking open like an egg.

Key West would have been a perfect place for Danny and me to get married. It also seemed more legitimate than Vegas. Vegas is the place where drunk celebrities get married and divorced in 48 hours or less. Vegas is, like my passenger said, fake, which meant getting married in Vegas might be fake, too.

But Vegas it is, because we’re broke. Vegas is cheap and uncomplicated. “It doesn’t matter where we go,” Danny says. “We’re not the kind of people who care about those things.”

And I think: we. Even though I was the one to suggest all this, I feel fear bubble up. Marriage, and all the possible disasters that can come with it, still seems terrifying. I can’t name one couple who calls themselves we that liked, let alone loved, each other. Nearly every married couple I know is on their way to divorce or permanent misery. Most we couples talk to each other like Day Planners. “It’s Tuesday. Don’t forget to take out the trash.” “The dry cleaners closes at 8.” “You didn’t forget to buy milk, did you?” “I penciled you in for sex a week from Friday.”

“You’re right,” I say to Danny, and I put the pictures of sunset weddings and my copy of The Sun Also Rises away. We’re not those people. “Isn’t it pretty to think so,” Hemingway’s Lady Brett echoes back.

***

In Vegas, we get a room for $30 a night at Circus/Circus. The hotel is one giant Big Top. The Red Star’s papier-mâché trapeze artists feel like foreshadowing. Here there are real trapeze artists. There are mimes and clowns. The concierge is dressed like a circus barker. Being inside Circus/Circus is like being trapped inside a Fellini film. It’s like being stuck in a giant pinball machine.

When the writers Tess Gallagher and Ray Carver got married in Nevada’s Heart of Reno Chapel, Carver called it a “high tack affair.” After the ceremony, Tess went on a three-day winning streak at roulette.

“It’s perfect,” I say to Danny as we stand in line to check in.

“What?” he says. The bells from the slot machines, the circus music, the crowds – everything except the mimes – drowns everything out.

Upstairs in our room, the mattress sags. There are cigarette burns in one pillowcase. A Styrofoam take-out container is moldering under the bed.

“It’s not the honeymoon suite,” I say.

“Shut up and kiss me,” Danny says, and runs at me full on, knocking me onto the bed that creaks and bows and threatens to snap under our weight.

***

Later, we hire a cab driver to take us for a tour of wedding chapels. The cabbie, a middle-aged woman in a bedazzled tank top, says she’ll look out for us. “A nice couple like you,” she says. “I’ll get you a big discount.”

We drive down the Strip. Howie Mandel is playing the Tropicana. Sinbad is at the MGM. The cabbie seems nice at first. Then she starts talking.

“You picked the perfect place to get married. Vegas is the most romantic place on earth,” she says. “Just look at that.” She points to a blonde man and woman on the sidewalk. They are both very tan and dressed in matching white polo shirts. They’re holding hands. They look like an ad for a timeshare.

“Now there’s a nice couple,” she says.

She says, “Not like all these white girls with the black men.”

She says, “And those Mexicans. They’re everywhere. They’re taking over. Just look around.”

She says, “We should shoot them all.”

I feel sick. We get out of the cab at the next chapel and walk what seems miles back to the hotel. The heat is unbelievable, well over a hundred degrees. Danny’s sweating, dry heat or not. I feel my tongue swelling. I feel dizzy.

“Fucking psychotic,” Danny says about the cab driver.

“I think I might throw up,” I say.

But it’s more than the cabbie, more than the heat. The whole place seems off, wrong, an illusion. In the hotel lobby, a mime is stuck in an invisible box. A woman dressed in flammable Lycra is eating fire. Blindfolded trapeze artists swing overhead and throw themselves at each other. Trust is one thing. The huge net under the high wires is another. Families with children are everywhere. None of them look happy. Most of the children are crying.

I am having a child. I am getting married. All of this is making me sick.

Just off to our right, a couple and their young son are checking in. The son has his own suitcase, a Thomas the Train roller-board. He’s whacking it back and forth against a marble pillar. His mother’s saying, loud enough for me to hear it over the big-top noise, “Stop it, Tommy.”

I think Tommy, Thomas. Cute.

“Tommy, I mean it,” the mother is saying. Her voice is flat as cardboard. She’s wearing sunglasses, celebrity-style frames, black plastic with rhinestone lion heads at the temples.

The husband is dragging another suitcase. This one’s huge, big enough to store a body in. The check-in line’s moving, an old movie reel, but the husband stops for a second because the bag’s toppled over. He’s struggling to right it. He doesn’t see the girl at the desk who motions him down. He doesn’t hear her say, “next.”

The wife hears.

The wife’s wearing boots, high heels, black, shiny, sturdy.

She kicks once, hard, to get him moving.

The husband barely flinches. He drags the suitcase up to the desk. Tommy drags his Thomas bag too. Tommy’s crying. The girl behind the desk gives him a sucker. “Stop it, Tommy,” the mother says, and Tommy goes on crying.

People get married and have children and do unbelievable, hideous things to each other.

Danny’s red-faced, his shirt soaked. He’s flopped into a chair. I bring him a bottle of water I buy from the front desk cooler for five dollars. I say, “Maybe we should go home.” He gulps the water down in one long chug. I watch his Adam’s apple move up and down beneath the soft skin of his throat. “We came all this way,” he says when he finally comes up for air.

***

That night, when Danny falls asleep, I flip through channels. I watch reruns of “The X Files,” where the poster in Fox Mulder’s office never changes. It’s a picture of a flying saucer coming in for a landing in some suburb. There are trees and well-groomed lawns and pretty little houses with families inside. The poster says, “I Want to Believe.”

***

We get married the next night at The Special Memory Wedding Chapel on the Strip. It’s an all-white building with a gazebo and a bell tower and a flashing neon sign that advertises drive-through wedding service. We opt for the regular walk down the aisle. If we had the money, we could be married by an impersonator called Elvis the Pelvis Himselvis. Grandpa Munster could give me away. We could get commemorative t-shirts with our faces and the words “Making Special Memories Together” on them.

As it is, Danny wears his own plain white t-shirt. He pins a rose on the pocket. I wear a lilac dress I ordered from the Spiegel catalogue. I carry the tiny bouquet that comes with our Bargain Memory package. We are married by a tall Unitarian minister who looks like he plays a Unitarian minister on TV. He talks about love being patient and kind. He talks about how some marriages work and some don’t. He shrugs, then talks about honesty and trust. His $50 suggested tip is mandatory and included on our bill.

On the wedding video, I blink a lot. I blink when I’m nervous. I look like someone squirted vinegar in my eyes. Danny’s face is shiny. His cheeks are red. He smiles and beams. The only time I stop blinking and he stops beaming is when we kiss. In that moment, preserved forever on tape in case we ever doubt it, we both look calm and certain, sure of the world and our place in it.

In his poem “Late Fragment,” Ray Carver asked and answered the two biggest questions of his life. Did he get what he wanted? Yes, he said. And what was it he wanted?

“To call myself beloved. / To feel myself beloved on this earth.”

The poem was dedicated, as all his late poems were, to his second wife Tess, the poet, the woman he married in Nevada in that high-tack affair.

“You have to remember what matters,” Danny says. “We matter. This,” and he gestures at the air between us, connecting us, like it’s an artery, a lifeline.

In our Special Memory Chapel video, when we turn to leave, our one witness, the chapel receptionist, is clapping. She’s bored. She’s probably done this all day. She claps, slow and polite. She claps like an audience that’s happy the show’s finally over. The clapping bounces off the walls of the empty chapel. The neon drive-through sign flashes overhead. Off to the right, there’s a gift shop with t-shirts and postcards and Special Memory refrigerator magnets shaped like doves.
Right before the camera pans out, Danny does a cheer. He kicks his left leg. He hoots and punches the air. The camera zooms in and it’s just the two of us. I lean into him and we walk off together like that. It looks perfect. It looks like forever.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lori Jakiela is the author of the memoir Miss New York Has Everything (Hatchette, 2006), and three poetry chapbooks. Her full-length poetry collection–Spot the Terrorist!–is forthcoming from Word Tech. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, KGB BarLit, and elsewhere.

Photo Sources
Key West Sunset, TrolleyBlogs.com
Circus/Circus, Wikipedia
Paris, Las Vegas, InnovationsInNewspapers
Airplane, Photo Dictionary