Sunrise with Seamonsters (44 page)

4:21—Smoker warned (smoking is forbidden in the subway, even on ramps and stairs).

4:24—Panicky shout from another cop. There's a woman with a gun downstairs on the platform. Officer Burgois gives chase, finds the woman. She is drunk and has a toy pistol. Woman warned.

4:26—"Which way to the Flushing Line?"

4:29—"How do I transfer here?"

4:30—"Is this the way to 23rd street?"

4:37—"
Donde es Quins Plaza?
"

4:43—"Where is the 'A' train?"
As Officer Burgois answers this question, a group of people gather around him. There are four more requests for directions. It occurs to me that, as all maps have been vandalized, the lost souls need very detailed directions.

4:59—
Radio Call:
There is an injured passenger at a certain token booth—a gash on her ankle. Officer Burgois lets another cop attend to it.

5:02—"Where ees the Shuffle?" asks a boy carrying an open can of beer. "Over there," Officer Burgois says, "And dispose of that can. I'm watching you."

5:10—
Radio Call:
A man whose wallet has been stolen is at the Transit Police Cubicle on the Times Square concourse. Officer Burgois steps in to observe.
Man: What am I going to do? Officer: The Officer-in-charge will take down the information.
Man: Are you going to catch him? Officer: We'll prosecute if you can identify him.
Man: I only saw his back. Officer: That's too bad.
Man: He was tall, thin, and black. I had twenty-two dollars in that wallet.
Officer: You can kiss your money goodbye. Even if we caught him he'd say, 'This is my money.'
Man: This is the first time anything like this has ever happened to me.

5:17—Seeing Officer Burgois, a member of the public says, "There's two kids on the train downstairs snatching bags—go get them!" Officer Burgois runs and finds the boys hanging over the gate between the trains, the favorite spot for snatching bags from passengers on the platform. Officer Burgois apprehends them. The boys, named Troy and Sam, are from the Bronx. They can't remember when they were born; they seem to be about fourteen or fifteen. They deny they were snatching bags. Each boy has about $35 in his pocket. They are sullen but not at all afraid. Officer Burgois gives them a Y.D. form and says, "If I catch you again, your mother's going to pick you up from the station..."

5:28—"Hey, officer, how do I get to...?"

At this point I stopped writing. I could see that it would be repetitious—and so it was, dreary questions, petty crime and obstinate sneaks. But no one bit Officer Burgois. He has been doing this every hour of every working day for twelve and a half years, and will go on doing it, or something very much like it, for the rest of his working life.

It costs $25 or more to go by taxi from Midtown to Kennedy Airport. For $5 it is possible to go by subway, on "The JFK Express" and the forty minutes is the same or less than a taxi. But it is rumored that this service will soon be withdrawn, because so few people use it. If that happens, there is another option—the express on the "A" line to Howard Beach, which takes under an hour and costs seventy-five cents.

There are ducks at Howard Beach, and herons farther on at Jamaica Bay, and odd watery vistas all the way from Broad Channel to Far Rockaway. The train travels on a causeway past sleepy fishing villages and woodframe houses, and it's all ducks and geese until the train reaches the far side of the bay, where the dingier bungalows and the housing projects begin. Then, roughly at Frank Avenue station, the Atlantic Ocean pounds past jetties of black rocks, not far from the tracks; and at Mott Avenue is the sprawling two-storey town of Far Rockaway, with its main street and its slap-happy architecture and its ruins. It looks like its sister-cities in Ohio and Rhode Island, with just enough trees to hide its dullness, and though part of it is in a state of decay it looks small enough to save.

That was a pleasant afternoon, when I took the train to the Rockaways. I spent this freezing week in December doing little else except riding the subway. Each morning I decided on a general direction, and then I set off, sometimes sprinting to the end of the line and making my way back slowly; or else stopping along the way and varying my route back. I went from Midtown to Jamaica Estates in Queens, and returned via Coney Island. There are white Beluga whales at the Aquarium at Coney Island, and Amazonian electric eels that produce six hundred and fifty volts (the Congo River electric catfish is punier at three hundred and fifty volts), and the African lungfish which drowns if held underwater but can live four years out of water. There are drunks and transvestites and troglodytes in the rest of out-of-season Coney, and the whole place looks as if it has been insured and burned. Though it is on Rockaway Inlet, it is a world away from Rockaway Park. It is also the terminus for six lines.

Never mind the dirt, ignore the graffiti—you can get anywhere you want in New York this way. There are two hundred and thirty route miles on the system—twice as many as the Paris Metro. The trains run all night—in London they shut down at quarter to midnight. New York's one-price token-system is the fairest and most sensible in the world; London's multi-fare structure is clumsy, ridiculous and a wasteful sop to the unions; Japan's, while just as complicated, is run by computers which spit tickets at you and then belch out your change. The Moscow Metro has grandiose chandeliers to light some stations, but the New York subway has hopeful signs, like the one at 96th and 7th Ave: "New Tunnel lighting is being installed at this area as part of a Major Rehabilitation Program. Completion is expected in the summer of 1980." They were over a year later in finishing, but at least they recognized the problem. In most of the world's subway trains, the driver's cab occupies the whole of the front of the first car. But on the New York system you can stand at the front of the train and watch the rats hurrying aside as the train careers towards the black tilting tunnel and the gleaming tracks.

The trains are always the same, but the stations differ, usually reflecting what is above-ground: Spring Street is raffish, Forest Hills smacks of refinement, Livonia Avenue on the LL looks bombed. People aspire to Bay Ridge and say they wouldn't be caught dead in East Harlem—though others are. Fort Hamilton turns into the amazing Verrazano Bridge and the "One" into a ferry landing. By the time I had reached 241st Street on the "2" I thought I had gotten to somewhere near Buffalo, but returning on the "5" and dropping slowly through the Bronx to Lexington Avenue and then to Lower Manhattan and across on the "4" to Flatbush, I had a sense of unrelieved desolation.

No one speaks on the subway except to the person on his immediate right or left, and only then if they are very old friends or else married. Avoiding the stranger's gaze is what the subway passenger does best: there is not much eye-contact below-ground. Most passengers sit bolt upright, with fixed expressions, ready for anything. A look of alertness prevails. As a New York City subway passenger you are J. Alfred Prufrock—you "prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." Few people look relaxed or off-guard. Those new to the subway have the strangest expressions, like my English friend, who told me there was only one way to survive the subway: "You have to look as if you're the one with the meat cleaver. You have to go in with your eyes flashing."

In order to appear inconspicuous on the subway, many people read. Usually they read the
Daily News—
and a few read
Nowy Dziennik
which is the same thing; the
Times
is less popular, because it takes two hands to read it. But the Bible is very popular, along with religious tracts and the Holy Koran and Spanish copies of
The Watchtower;
lots of boys study for their Bar-Mitzvah on the "F" line in Queens. I saw
The Bragg Toxicless Diet
on the "B" and
La Pratique du Français Parlé
on the "RR". All over the system, riders read lawbooks—
The Interpretation of Contracts, The Law of Torts, Maritime Law.
The study of law is a subway preoccupation, and it is especially odd to see all these lawbooks in this lawless atmosphere—the law student sitting on the vandalized train. The police officers on the vandalized train create the same impression of incongruity. When I first saw the police they looked mournful to me, but after I got to know them I realized that most of them are not mournful at all, just dead-tired and overworked and doing a thankless job.

Not long ago, the
Daily News
ran a series about the subway called "The Doomsday Express". It was about all the spectacular catastrophes that are possible on the New York system—crashes and nuclear disasters and floods with heavy casualties. "Doomsday" has a curious appeal to a proud and vaguely religious ego. One of the conceits of modern man is his thinking that the world will end with a big bang. It is a kind of hopeful boast, really, the idea that it will take destruction on a vast scale for us to be wiped out.

It is easy to frighten people with catastrophes—much harder to convince them that decay and trivial-seeming deterioration can be inexorable. The New York subway system is wearing out, and parts of it are worn out; all of it looks threadbare. No city can survive without people to run it, and the class divisions which have distinct geographical centers in New York make the subway all the more necessary.

There is a strong political commitment to the subway, particularly among down-market Democrats. But only money can save it. To this end there is a plan afoot called "The Five-Year Capital Program" of $7.2
billion. It is the largest amount of money ever spent in a non-federal program and will involve fixing cars and buses, retiling and cleaning and lighting stations, restoring maps, windows and signs, repairing tracks and bridges—all the day-to-day things which, because they have been ignored, have given the subway a bad case of arteriosclerosis. It remains to be seen whether this program is instituted. If it isn't, New York will come even closer to looking like dear old Calcutta. There will be no big bang.

Anyway, I am a supporter of the Whimper Theory—the more so after my experience of the subway. "I pity you," people said when I told them what I was going to do. But I ended up admiring the handiwork of the system and hating the people who misused it, the way you hate kids who tear the branches off saplings. Most people who live in New York act as if they own it—it makes some people respectful and others it turns into slobs; and that is how they treat the subway.

The subway is buried and unspectacular-looking. Its worst aspects are not its crime or its dangers, but the cloudy fears it inspires, and its dirt and delay. It ought to be fixed, and very soon, because its slow death has made New York uglier and more inconvenient, and if it is not restored to health the future will be much nastier for us all.

When I was asked to speak at the Library of Congress, I was told that my "honorarium" would come from the Gertrude Clarke Whittal Fund. At once, I knew what my subject must be.

In some of my short stories, and in several novels—
The Family Arsenal
and
Picture Palace,
in particular—I dealt directly with patrons and recipients. The idea of patronage has always fascinated me, perhaps the more because I have never received a grant or won a fellowship. (I realize that in saying this I risk sounding patronizing about patronage.) Of course, I have benefited from other kinds of patronage—it would be hard to find anyone on earth who can claim that he has not been touched in some way by the busy attentions of a philanthropoid. Were you going to except the farmers in rural Mozambique? But they owe their political independence to the Frelimo guerrilla movement, which was aided by the Mozambique Institute, which was partially funded by the Ford Foundation. This is to say nothing of the poor peasants of Puno in Peru, patronized by the Frente Departmental de Campesinos de Puno, whose bank balance was entirely the generosity of the International Development Foundation, the Rabb Charitable Foundation and, ultimately, those inexhaustible patrons, the gentlemen of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose inscribed motto (it is on the building in Langley, Virginia) states, "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (St
John, 8:32).

(Biblical quotations are commonplace among patrons and their critics. Professor Robert Merton of Columbia University described what he called "The Matthew Syndrome" in philanthropy. His text was Matthew, 25:29—"For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that he hath." If I had to choose a text from the Bible, I would choose
Amos
3:3—"Can two walk together except they be agreed?")

Art and money, artist and patron, are wonderfully seen, hand in hand, in the story about Charles Sackville, the Sixth Earl of Dorset. Sackville was a great patron, a great host at his house, Knole, and a friend of Dryden, Pope, Prior, and even our own William Penn. He was in other
ways a typically rakish figure of the Restoration court of Charles II, which is to say another lover of Nell Gwyn. He was very rich. Lord Rochester said that Sackville could get away with anything—and that was praise indeed, since we have no record of Rochester having been caught with his pants down, and as his biographer mentions in surpassing detail, they were often down.

Alexander Pope wrote Sackville's epitaph:

Dorset, the grace of courts, the Muse's pride,
Patron of the arts, and judge of Nature, died.
The scourge of pride, though sanctified or great,
Of fops in learning, and of knaves in state, etc.

One evening, Sackville was with a group of illustrious friends at Knole House. To entertain them in front of the fire, Sackville suggested that they all write "impromptus"—a few brilliant lines apiece—and that John Dryden, who had probably ceased to be Poet Laureate at this point, should act as judge. The guests took pens and paper and put their minds to the task, each hoping to win with his own piece. The papers were collected and given to Dryden, who carefully examined each entry. He then announced Sackville as the winner. This was not so surprising—Sackville, as well as being a patron, was also a considerable poet.