Can I See Your I. D.? (2 page)

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Authors: Chris Barton

BOOK: Can I See Your I. D.?
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The switches aren't a problem—no problem at all. You've got them down. In the past two and a half hours, you've made all eighty stops on time, with only five more to go on this round trip. Then you get to do it again.
North of the 168th Street station, there's a downgrade and a speed limit of twenty mph. You've got your train under that, but you pick up speed on the decline, and by the time you see the red signal warning that you're going too fast, it's too late. The emergency brake system kicks in, and the train—
your
train, all 360 tons of it—groans to a halt.
Now what? Ordinarily, a motorman would get out of the cab, go down onto the tracks, reach under the train to manually reset the brake, and be on his way.
The problem is, you're missing a key piece of equipment: a flashlight. And while there's some light down in the tunnel, it's not enough to suit you. Without some serious illumination, there's just no way you're going to get down there and feel around and risk getting yourself fried by those 625 volts coursing through the third rail. No. Way.
Instead, you radio in to the tower and tell them you can't get the brake to reset. “I'm in BIE,” you say. “Send me out an RCI.” Brakes in emergency. Road car inspector. You read about them in a book.
After what seems like forever stuck there just south of 175th Street, an inspector comes through the tunnel, resets the brake, and you're off again. Soon, you limp back into the 207th Street station, where a dispatcher and supervisor are waiting for you.
Standard procedure says that when a motorman breaks the speed limit, he gets taken downtown to get tested for drugs and booze. Gotta keep the subway safe, you know.
The T.A. supervisor gets back on the A with you for the forty-five-minute ride back to headquarters on Jay Street in Brooklyn. Along the way, you've got a lot to think about. The thing you think about the most is this: You really, really don't want to go in there.
So you don't. You emerge from the Jay Street station, up the stairs and onto the street. But instead of making the short walk to T.A. headquarters, you tell the supervisor, “You know what? I don't think I want to take this test.”
“You could lose your job,” he says. “Just take the test. If you weren't drinking, then it's nothing to worry about.”
“It's a little more than that,” you reply. And then you're gone.
Not on foot. Not on a bus. Not in a taxi.
You go right back down into the Jay Street station, and you're on a train in nothing flat. How else are you gonna get home?
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
KERON THOMAS
was tracked down and arrested two days after his escapade on the A train, which made national headlines. “[W]hat Mr. Thomas did is monumental,” wrote one newspaper columnist. “Reprehensible, to be sure, but decidedly awesome, bodacious.” He was sentenced to three years' probation and for a while continued hoping to become a (legitimate) train operator. But, he says, those hours at the helm of the A train got the subway bug out of his system. Today, he does make his living in the transportation business—but by driving a truck, not a train.
NAVY SURGEON?
FERDINAND WALDO DEMARA JR.
TUESDAY, MARCH 13, 1951
SAINT JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA
Less than a week ago, you were known by the Brothers of Christian Instruction as Brother John Payne, and they knew you to have been Cecil Boyce Hamann before you entered their order.
But that was before those ungrateful so-and-sos passed you over for a plum role at the new Catholic college that you practically founded for them. So on March 10 you left them and Alfred, Maine, behind. For that matter, so did their car, which you took for your trip down to Boston.
In those 100 miles, you became Dr. Joseph Cyr—that's the name you checked in under at your hotel. And after turning right back around, driving past Alfred and the rest of Maine up north to Saint John, that's also the name that you've just used to score a commission into the Royal Canadian Navy.
You're now a surgeon lieutenant in the second year of the Korean War. You're also Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., high school dropout from Lawrence, Massachusetts.
SPRING 1951
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA
Even traveled directly, it's quite a ways from Lawrence to the Stadacona naval base in Halifax. But you, Demara—ever since you left home after your junior year at Central Catholic High School to try your hand at a monk's life, you've never traveled directly. In the thirteen years since, you've never stuck to the accepted path or the proper channels.
And why would you? Your father did things the “right” way—he worked hard, built a buisness, got a nice house. And look what it got him: He lost the business during the Depression, moved your family from Prospect Hill to South Lawrence, and took a job as a movie theater projectionist.
Your big sister did things the right way too. Got married at St. Patrick's Cathedral to an Ivy Leaguer, a Brown University man. Became a nurse. She died of a head injury three years ago, when she was just twentynine. So much for the rewards of the right way.
So the road that has led you to Stadacona has been one of your own design and choosing, a road paved by an impatient desire to have others recognize the greatness you've seen in yourself all the while. Along the way, your vehicles of choice have been new names and identities. At first, the church created them for you—here, you were Frater Mary Jerome; there, Brother John Berchmans—but eventually you began to borrow others'. Most recently, of course, it was the identity of your good friend, young Dr. Cyr.
You weren't hurting anybody. In fact, really, you've always been out to help, to share your impressive talents and energy and intellect with the world. But clashing with abbots, downing barrels of beer, going AWOL from the U.S. Army, and faking suicide to get out of the U.S. Navy made it a bit difficult to bestow those gifts as Fred Demara. So you took to borrowing birth certificates and academic credentials and writing letters of recommendation for yourself on official stationery you'd swiped.
Each new guise gave you a new opportunity to help people. They also allowed you to learn a lot about how big institutions work. You've seen the church, the military, hospitals, and universities from the inside. You've seen their big shots up close, and frankly, you're not impressed. You've sat through their unpronounceable theology courses and read through their boring law textbooks, and one thing's for sure: They're no better than a C student from Central Catholic.
You know just how to play them:
1. There's always plenty of power to be grabbed in one of those institutions, so long as you don't step on the toes of someone who's already got a little power of his own.
2. If anyone questions you, don't defend—attack; put the burden of proof on him.
3. Flattery and deference will get you everywhere.
This particular moment offers a pristine example of that last point. See, before volunteering for duty, you had no time to cram for your new role as Navy doctor, no opportunity to stuff your head with information gleaned from medical textbooks. You're equipped only with the details dropped last winter by the real—and completely unsuspecting—Dr. Cyr in his casual conversations with you. That, and your own good sense.
Here at the base, your duties include handling sick call each morning. Several thousand miles from the front, you expect the action to be relatively light, but you could still use a little help. So you mentioned to your superior officer that you've been asked to take on a side project—putting together a do-it-yourself medical guide for the doctorless fellows at an isolated lumber camp out in British Columbia. Would he like to help?
Would he? And how. Like it does every time, buttering up an expert by asking for his opinion worked like a charm. Your superior ran with the project, practically took the whole thing out of your hands, and did it himself.
And now he presents you with a booklet guaranteed to get someone with zero medical training up to speed on treating the everyday injuries and ailments they might encounter around a bunch of loggers—or sailors.
Between that booklet and your access to an ample supply of antibiotics, you're all set.
JULY 1951
PACIFIC OCEAN
Well, here's a situation that the lumber camp guide doesn't cover, and for which penicillin is no help at all.
You're the medical officer on the HMCS
Cayuga
, a destroyer making her way from Hawaii to Guam en route to her second tour of duty in Korea. You're days away from your destination, and someone needs a rotten tooth pulled.
And it's not just anyone. It's the captain himself.
You arrive at his cabin late in this summer day to have a look, and it's obvious that the old man is suffering. It's also obvious that he expects Doc Cyr to be able to do something about it.
While you get your bearings, you ask him a few questions. Turns out, Captain Plomer was scheduled to get the tooth yanked before the
Cayuga
went to sea, but he was too busy, it wasn't bothering him much, etc., etc. That's good to know—it means he bears responsibility for the situation, which means he should be willing to cut you some slack as you figure out how best to handle it.
You have him open his mouth, and you peer inside. Teeth look a lot alike, and they sure are close together, but this one back here seems to be the one that's troubling the old man—you think.
You tell Captain Plomer, quite correctly, that you did not learn a thing about dentistry in medical school. You can pull the bad tooth, but not until morning. At the moment, you can give him some pills for the pain, but you need some time to prepare if you're going to do this right.
It's a long night back in your cabin. In all the medical books on board—and you've looked, and looked, and looked—there's next to nothing about pulling teeth. What little you find, you read over and over. And you wonder what will happen to you if, out here in the middle of the Pacific, you botch this procedure on the man who runs the
Cayuga
. If ever there was a time when you needed a drink . . .
Morning comes, ready or not, and the captain wants you down in his day cabin now. He wants to get this over with, and as much as you do too, you haven't managed to work up much enthusiasm for it. Still, you grab your bag, go over in your head what needs to happen, and head down to your makeshift dentist's office.
And when you get there . . . everything goes like a dream. With an audience watching through the ammunition chute overhead, you stick a needle full of Novocain into the old man's gums. What's the right amount? You don't know, but you're inclined to err on the side of freezing half his face. Once he's good and numb, you take what appears to be the right tool, grab hold of what appears to be the right tooth, give it a pull, and become a hero.
The tooth is out, the captain is happy, and you feel like there's nothing Doc Cyr can't handle.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1951
KOREA BAY
And as it turns out, the
Cayuga
's medical officer doesn't see a whole lot more action than a doctor back at Stadacona does. There are bruises, cuts, and steam burns, but those can be handled just as easily by your assistant, Petty Officer Hotchin.
Your main jobs on the ship are keeping an eye out for morale problems and, not entirely unrelated, dispensing the rum rations. As the so-called “morale officer,” you make the rounds in your dress whites, .45 automatic pistol (an unusual piece of equipment for a surgeon) strapped to your side, chatting up seamen on the lower decks and fellow officers up above.
Between your smiles and jokes, you don't mind talking about yourself one bit, and you easily deal with potentially dicey questions about your background. Such as: How is it that a fellow with the French Canadian name of Cyr, who originally hails from the French Canadian province of Quebec, has such a thick Massachusetts accent?
Why, that's simple, you tell them: You were educated in Boston. Lucky for you, nobody expects Doc Cyr to speak French, other than a couple of Quebecois boys in the kitchen, and who'll pay them any mind? You're both an officer and a doctor, and while you yourself aren't impressed by men's titles and degrees, you know that others are easily awed by those things.
As for the
Cayuga
's role during these September days, the ship is supporting South Korean guerrillas during their raids on the western coast. The
Cayuga
rides the waves at a safe distance while shelling targets on the mainland. When you do see the sorts of injuries a lumber-camp manual might not cover, they're typically among the Koreans after one of their raids.

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