The Disappointment Artist (6 page)

This was the year another student, a talented violinist, had been pushed from a train platform, her arm severed and reattached. The incident unnerved us to the extent we were able to maintain it as conscious knowledge, which we couldn’t and didn’t. There were paltry but somehow effective brackets of irony around our sense of the city’s dangers. Lynn and I were soon joined by Jeremy and Adam, other kids from Dean Street, and we all four persistently found crime and chaos amusing. The same incidents that drew hand-wringing from our parents and righteous indignation from the tabloids struck us as merry evidence of the fatuousness of grown-ups. Naturally the world sucked, naturally the authorities blinked. Anything was possible. Graffiti was maybe an art form, certainly a definitive statement as to who had actually grasped the nature of reality as well as the workings of the reeling system around you: not adults, but the kids just a year or three older than you, who were scary but legendary. The entire city was like the school in the Ramones’ movie
Rock
’n’ Roll High School
, or the college in
Animal House
—the dean corrupt and blind, the campus an unpatrolled playground. Our own fear, paradoxically, was more evidence, like the graffiti and the conductor’s affair, of the reckless, wide-open nature of this world. It may have appeared from the outside that Lynn and Jeremy and Adam and I were cowering in this lawless place, but in our minds we romped.

The names of the three limbs of the subway—the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit), the BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit), and the IND (Independent Subway)—are slowly falling from New Yorkers’ common tongue, and the last enamel signs citing the old names will soon be pried off. Slipping into shadow with those names is the tripartite origin of the subway, the fact that each of the three was once a separate and rival corporation. The lines tried to squeeze one another out of business, even as they vied with now-extinct rival forms: streetcars and elevated trains. On this subject, the language of the now-unified system, the official maps and names, has grown mute. But the grammar of the lines and stations themselves, with their overlaps and redundancies, their strange omissions and improvised passageways, still pronounces this history everywhere.

The early subway pioneered in crafty partnership with realtors and developers. Groping for new ridership, owners threw track deep into farmland, anticipating (and creating) neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Jackson Heights. But the IND, which built and operated Hoyt-Schermerhorn, was a latecomer, an interloper. Unlike its older siblings, the IND clung to population zones, working to siphon excess riders from overloaded lines. The city’s destiny wasn’t horizontal now, but vertical, perhaps fractal, a break with the American frontier impulse in favor of something more dense and strange.

The new trains running through Hoyt-Schermerhorn quickly moth-balled both the Schermerhorn trolley and the old Fulton elevated line— but first the station had to be dug. Construction of new stations in a city webbed with infrastructure was a routine marvel: according to Stan Fischler’s
Uptown, Downtown
, tunneling for the IND required, beyond the 22 million cubic yards of rock and earth displaced, and 7 million man-days of labor, the
relocation
of 26 miles of water and gas pipes, 350 miles of electrical wire, and 18 miles of sewage pipes. What’s notable in period photographs, though, is the blithe disinterest in the faces of passersby, even at scenes of workers tunneling beneath a street where both a trolley and an el remain in operation. The Sixth Avenue tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street was an engineering marvel in its day, a dig threaded beneath the Broadway BMT subway and over the Pennsylvania Railroad (now Amtrak) tubes, as well as an even-more-deeply buried water main. “The most difficult piece of subway construction ever attempted,” is almost impossible to keep in mind on an F train as it slides blandly under Herald Square today.

Alfred Kazin, in
A Walker in the City
, wrote:

All those first stations in Brooklyn—Clark, Borough Hall, Hoyt, Nevins, the junction of the East and West side express lines—told me only that I was on the last leg home, though there was always a stirring of my heart at Hoyt, where the grimy subway platform was suddenly enlivened by Abraham and Straus’s windows of ladies’ wear . . .

When a friend directed me to this passage, thinking he’d solved the mystery of those deserted shop windows in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn passage, I at least had a clue. I searched the corporate history of Abraham and Straus—Brooklyn’s dominant department store and a polestar in my childhood constellation of the borough’s tarnished majesty, with its brass fixtures and uniformed elevator operators, and the eighth floor’s mysterious stamp- and coin-collector’s counters. In the A&S annals I found the name of a Fulton Street rival: Frederick Loeser and Company, one of the nation’s largest department stores for almost a century, eventually gobbled up by A&S in a merger. The 1950s were to such stores as the Mesozoic was to the dinosaurs—between 1952 and 1957 New York lost Loeser’s, Namm’s, Wanamaker’s, McCreery’s, and Hearn’s; the names alone are concrete poetry.

I’d nailed my tile-work “L”: Loeser’s created display windows in the new Hoyt-Schermerhorn station to vie with A&S’s famous (at least to Alfred Kazin) windows at Hoyt. Kazin’s windows are visible as bricked-in tile window frames today, but like the smashed and dusty Loeser’s windows of my childhood, they go ignored. Meanwhile, aboveground on Fulton Street, the name Loeser’s has reemerged like an Etch A Sketch filigree on some second-story brickwork, as lost urban names sometimes do.

The abandoned platform was a mystery shallower to penetrate than Loeser’s “L.” The extra track connects the abandoned platform to an abandoned station, three blocks away on Court Street. This spur of misguided development was put out of its misery in 1946, and sat unused until the early sixties, when the MTA realized it had an ideal facility for renting to film and television crews. The empty station and the curve of track running to the ghost platform at Hoyt-Schermerhorn allowed filmmakers to pull trains in and out of two picturesque stations along a nice curved wall, without disturbing regular operations. The nonpareil among the hundreds of movies made on subway property is the subway-hijacking thriller
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
. It was in Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s tunnel that Robert Shaw and his cohorts stripped off fake mustaches and trench coats and, clutching bags of ransom millions, made their hopeless dash for daylight, and it was in Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s tunnel that Shaw, cornered by crusading MTA inspector Walter Matthau, stepped on the third rail and met his doom.

And then there’s
The Warriors
. The film is based on a novel by Sol Yurick, itself based on Xenophon’s
Anabasis
, an account of a band of Greek mercenaries fighting their way home through enemy turf. Yurick translated Xenophon into New York street gangs; his book is a late and rather lofty entry, steeped in the tone of Camus’s
The Stranger
, in the “teen panic” novels of the fifties and sixties. Next, Walter Hill, a director whose paradigm is the Western, turned Yurick’s crisp, relentless book into the definitive image of a New York ruled by territorial gangs, each decorated absurdly and ruling their outposts absolutely.

The movie inspired a wave of theater-lobby riots during its theatrical run. It’s a cult object now, lauded in hip-hop by Puff Daddy and the Wu-Tang Clan, and cherished by New Yorkers my age, we who preen in our old fears—call us the ’77 Blackout Vintage—for mythologizing the crime-ruled New York of the seventies more poignantly, and absurdly, than
Kojak
or
The French Connection
. For, in the film, it is the gang themselves who become the ultimate victims of the city’s chaos. In this New York, even the Warriors wish they’d stayed home. For me, a fifteen-year-old dogging the steps of the crew as they filmed, it was only perfect that a fake gang had occupied Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s fake platform. The film, etching my own image of the city into legend, began its work even before its public life.

Yurick’s book has been reissued again, with a
Warriors
still on the jacket and a long new author’s Introduction, detailing the classical and existentialist roots of the novel. Yurick shares his perplexity that this least ambitious of his books should survive on the back of a movie: “There hasn’t been one film made in the United States that I would consider seeing five times, as many who love the film version of
The Warriors
did.” Years later, I met the wizened Yurick on a train platform, though not the subway. We disembarked together in Providence, Rhode Island, each a guest at the same literary conference, and, unknowingly, companion riders on an Amtrak from New York. Our hosts had failed to meet our train, and as the locals all scattered to their cars, the family members or lovers to their reunions, we were left to discover one another, and our dilemma. Yurick shrugged fatalistically—should we have expected better? He summed his perspective in a sole world-weary suggestion: “Wanna nosh?”

Michael Lesy’s 1973 book,
Wisconsin Death Trip
, is a mosaic of vintage photographs and newspaper accounts of eccentric behavior and spastic violence in turn-of-the-century rural Wisconsin. In a flood of miniature evidence it makes the case that stirring just under the skin of this historical site is mayhem, sexuality, the possibility of despair. The book, a corrective to homilies of a pastoral American countryside, is a catalogue of unaccountable indigenous lust, grief, revenge, and sudden joy.

Poring over old newspaper clippings that mentioned the station, I began to imagine my equivalent to Lesy’s book:
Hoyt-Schermerhorn
Death Trip
. “TWO ARE KILLED BY POLICE IN GUN BATTLE, 1/23/73: Neither of the slain men was immediately identified. But the police said that one of them had been wanted for several bank robberies and for allegedly shooting at policemen last Wednesday night in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Street subway station . . .” “WOMAN HURT IN SUBWAY FALL, 6/19/58: A 55-year-old woman was critically injured yesterday when she fell or jumped in front of a southbound IND express train at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Street station in Brooklyn . . .” “37 HURT IN CRASH OF TWO IND TRAINS, ONE RAMS REAR OF ANOTHER IN DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN DURING EVENING RUSH, 7/18/70: . . . there was a rending of metal at the crash, she said, and then the car tilted. All the lights went out. She said there were sparks and the car filled with smoke. The girl said she was thrown to the floor and, terrified, began screaming . . .” “STRANGER PUSHES WOMAN TO DEATH UNDER A TRAIN, 2/2/75: A 25-year-old woman was thrown to her death in front of an onrushing subway train in Brooklyn yesterday by a man who apparently was a total stranger to her, the police said . . . the incident took place at about 6:15 P.M. in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn IND station, which was crowded with shoppers at the time. According to witnesses, including the motorman, the man suddenly stepped up to the victim, who had her back to him, and pushed her forward in front of the train without saying a word . . .” “400 BOYCOTTING STUDENTS RIOT, HURL BRICKS, BEAT OTHER YOUTHS, 2/18/65: Four hundred boycotting Negro students broke through police barricades outside Board of Education headquarters in Brooklyn yesterday in a brick-throwing, window-breaking riot . . . The disturbances spread over a two-mile area and onto subway trains and stations . . . A group of 60 youths attacked a group of six white students on the Clinton-IND’s GG line . . . They were apprehended at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Station by 15 transit policemen . . .” “300 IN SUBWAY HELP TILT CAR AND RELEASE BOY’S WEDGED FOOT, 9/2/70: A rescue team of subway passengers, hastily organized by three transit policemen, tipped back a 54-ton subway car last night to free an 11-year-old boy whose foot was wedged between the car and the platform at a downtown Brooklyn station . . . The boy . . . was running for an IND A train when his leg was caught between the platform and train at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station.”

Contemplation of the life of a site like Hoyt-Schermerhorn becomes, in the end, tidal. The lapping of human moments forms a pulse or current, like the lapping of trains through the underground tunnels, or like the Doppler-effect fading of the certain memories from the planet, as they’re recalled for the penultimate time, and then the last: When will the last person to have purchased panty hose or a razor at Loeser’s or Namm’s pass from the earth? When will the last of those three hundred who rocked the train car off the boy’s pinned leg, or the last of those four hundred Negro boycotters, be gone?

A white kid raised inside the liberal sentiments of a middle-class family yet living in an area fringed with crime and poverty met a choice. It was possible to identify with and assimilate to the harsher truths of the street, and so toughen, somewhat, to fear. Alternately, a kid could carry his parents’ sensitivities, and standards, with him, out-of-doors. The price was obvious. Most of us, whether we ended in one camp or another, wavered. I was a “good” kid, and a bullied one, yet I recall dozens of moments when I slid briefly across the separation line. Once, on a basketball court, I allowed myself to meld into a crowd of Puerto Rican kids, with whom I’d been playing, as they briefly halted the game to harass and threaten a single Asian man, a gay man, off a neighboring court. I wasn’t violent; the incident hardly was. But the man was the boyfriend of a pal of my mother’s, and I’d been a guest in their elegant town house. When my mother’s friend, a gay man considerably huskier than his young lover, returned to the court with a baseball bat and, bellowing, sent us scurrying from our game, his eyes met mine and I was disgraced, wrenched between concurrent selves.

The moment was precursor to a worse one. This was the summer between high school and college, which is to say the verge of my escape from Brooklyn for the first time. I’ve come to understand how fraught that moment was for me, as I considered or refused to consider what I was involuntarily carrying with me out of my childhood environment. My girlfriend was from upstate New York, but lived in my city, my neighborhood, for that summer before we both embarked to college. She worked nights as a waitress in Manhattan and rode the A train in and out of Hoyt-Schermerhorn. She was frightened, as she perhaps should have been, to walk the several blocks home from that station after eleven, and so I’d promised always to meet her. I often lightly mocked her fear—but that bit of overcompensation, lousy as it sounds, wasn’t my crime.