The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (5 page)

FEMALE PASSENGER (Ceases cell phone search. Looks around the empty train car, confused.): What kind of story?

L TRAIN: A blackout story. One that involves this guy Justin.

FEMALE PASSENGER: Blackout—you mean he passed out drunk on the train?

L TRAIN: People pass out by the hundreds on the train every day—there’s no story there. I’m talking about an electrical blackout, a power outage.

FEMALE PASSENGER: Okay, sure. Tell me a story.

L TRAIN: So first of all, I run on electricity, understand, so when the power goes out, the trains cease to move. Even if they’re full of passengers, three hundred feet below the East River.

FEMALE PASSENGER: So what happens to all those people?

L TRAIN: Sometimes backup generators power up the system. Other times, passengers have to wait until MTA rescue crews walk them out.

FEMALE PASSENGER: Walk them out
where?

L TRAIN: Through the tunnels on the bench wall. Either to an emergency exit or back to the platform. In some cases, they have to walk directly on the track bed.

FEMALE PASSENGER: Oh wow.

L TRAIN: Yeah. It’s not so pleasant. We get a lot of people who freak out. Some piss their pants, or puke all over the place. One lady stepped on a rat and had to be taken to Bellevue.

FEMALE PASSENGER: Bellevue?

L TRAIN: The mental hospital.
Please do not leave any unattended baggage or personal items on the train. If you see an unattended package, please report it to an MTA employee
.

FEMALE PASSENGER: So where does Justin come in?

L TRAIN: Before moving here from Colorado, he hears all these stories, about evacuations and trains getting stuck under the East River during the rolling blackouts of 2003—not to mention the threat of terrorist attacks—and it really freaks him out. I’m sorry to report that he develops a big problem with me.

FEMALE PASSENGER: What do you mean,
problem?
Like he’s aggrieved with you? Annoyed?

L TRAIN: Hardly. More like he’s terrified.

FEMALE PASSENGER: What, seriously?

L TRAIN: Seriously. I’m talking full-blown panic. He very nearly loses his shit every time he rides. Okay, well, not
every
time. He does fine on short rides through Manhattan, when there are plenty of opportunities to exit the train. But during the four-minute ride beneath the East River he comes close to losing it—or
blowing apart
, to use his words. Actually, it happens right about now, right
here
, in the very depths of this tunnel that’s not only underground, but also underneath a river, the thought of which completely messes with his mind, triggers a serious claustrophobic drowning response. His heart races and he sweats and he has overwhelming feelings of dread, a full-on neurochemical train wreck in his head. Remember when the new prisoners arrive in that movie
The Shawshank Redemption
, and one chubby prisoner breaks down, starts blubbering
I’m not supposed to be here?
That’s how Justin feels in the beginning, as if he’s trapped—imprisoned even—so that when the train stops in the middle of the tunnel, as it does occasionally, it takes every ounce of self-control to keep himself from clutching at people and yelling
I’m not supposed to be here
.

FEMALE PASSENGER: Clutching at people? How would that help anything?

L TRAIN: Lord if I know. Between you and me, it turns out that he’s had these
problems
before. He had a thing with airplanes, wouldn’t fly for years. Aviophobia, they call it. Pathetic, right?

FEMALE PASSENGER: A little bit, yes. And ironic. I mean, he’s all obsessed with motion and interested in this
Moby-Dick
“spiritual descent” stuff, but he’s afraid go down and ride the subway?

L TRAIN: Tell me about it!
This is the First Avenue Station
.

FEMALE PASSENGER: So what ends up happening? I mean, I’m guessing he’ll have to ride the subway regularly at some point.

L TRAIN:
Stand clear of the closing doors, please. The next stop is Third Avenue
. At first he tries to avoid me. Rides his bike everywhere, figures out the bus system. He avoids Manhattan, spends most of his time over in Brooklyn. But he ends up getting a job in Midtown and has to take the train every day. So eventually he has to man up and face his fears.

FEMALE PASSENGER: How does he do it?

L TRAIN: He brings a copy of Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” where Whitman speaks of commuting across the Harlem River, with all the other anonymous passengers, having the same questions, doubts, hopes—the same periods of fear and darkness. He reads it over and over, holds it in his sweaty palms as if it were a close friend’s hand. He likes the way Whitman reaches out across time to the reader, says, “I am with you.”
I am with you
—he finds this comforting. He also memorizes a passage from the “Grand Armada” chapter of
Moby-Dick:

This helps remind him that no matter how wired out the city makes him, or how much mental chaos his brain stirs up, deep down his soul is quiet and still and generally okay. And he meditates, uses breathing techniques. He throws in a yoga technique his stepmother taught him when he was a kid:
nadi shodhana
, alternate nostril breathing. But mostly he just forces himself to do something that scares him, over and over, until the fear finally eases up, little by little.

FEMALE PASSENGER: So he gets better? He’s able to ride?

L TRAIN: Yes. Slowly he gets better. He calms down, surrenders himself to the whole experience. After a few months, he’s not even conscious of it anymore; he can just sit back and relax and enjoy the ride like anyone else. That winter he reads
Anna Karenina
, almost entirely on the subway.
This is Third Avenue. The next stop is Fourteenth Street
.

FEMALE PASSENGER: So he gets over it. What about the other phobias?

L TRAIN: The subway is a watershed for him. Once he gets over me, it transfers to his other fears. He gets so he can fly again, no problem. Eventually he’s flying back and forth to and from Colorado—he even starts to enjoy it, the way he did as a kid.
This is Fourteenth Street. Stand clear of the closing doors, please. The next stop is Sixth Avenue
.

FEMALE PASSENGER: That must feel good. To overcome that sort of thing.

L TRAIN: I don’t want to be overly dramatic here, but when you’re released from that kind of emotional bondage, it feels like a miracle.

FEMALE PASSENGER: So New York is good for him.

L TRAIN: In a lot of ways, yes. We toughen him up.
This is Sixth Avenue. The next and last stop is Eighth Avenue
.

FEMALE PASSENGER: You
heal
him.

L TRAIN: I’m not sure I’d go that far.

FEMALE PASSENGER: But it’s such a happy ending. He literally goes down and faces all his darkness and fears, then emerges as a whole person. It’s a spiritual thing, like Ishmael reborn from death into new life.

L TRAIN: The subway is just the beginning, a threshold. You have to remember that in and of itself, riding the subway is really no big deal. Five million people do it every day.

FEMALE PASSENGER: So you’re saying he runs into other problems?

L TRAIN: I’m sorry to say that yes, yes he does. Problems much bigger than the subway.
This is Eighth Avenue. This is the last stop on this train
.

FEMALE PASSENGER: How’s that even possible?

L TRAIN (Comes to a complete stop, opens doors.): Look, this has been a real picnic, but you need to step clear of the train now.

FEMALE PASSENGER: How about you tell me just one of the problems?

L TRAIN (Doors remain open.):
This is the last stop on this train. Please exit the train
.

FEMALE PASSENGER (Waits, expectantly, but is greeted only by silence. Exits train, disappears into a crowd moving up a stairwell.)

O
ne night after skating the Autumn Bowl, I give my new friend Ted a lift to the subway. Ted’s a ginger whom I’ve never seen smile, and who skates the bowl like someone with a death wish. We have mutual acquaintances back out West—he shared a house in L.A. with an old college buddy of mine. His full name is Ted Erickson, although our mutual friends refer to him as Red Hairickson. But he seems like he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, so I’m not about to call him that.

I drive him through Greenpoint toward the Lorimer stop, where he’ll catch the train to his place in Bushwick.

“Bushwick? That’s pretty far out there, right?”

“Thirty minutes by train. A long haul, but the rent’s cheap.”

“I hear you can still score pretty cheap rents here in Greenpoint.”

“Yeah, but I’d never live in this neighborhood.”

“Why’s that?”

“There was a huge oil spill here back in the fifties. A total catastrophe. All the oil is still underground, trapped in the soil.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. They say benzene vapors still leach up from the ground. Benzene causes leukemia, and this place has one of the highest rates in the country.”

Ted seems, again, sort of permanently aggrieved, so I’m not sure I believe him. If this is true, then why haven’t I heard about it before? Back at home it takes a couple Google searches to corroborate: I’m now living just a few minutes from the site of one of the worst environmental disasters in history.

Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, oil refineries and bulk storage facilities metastasized on the banks of Newtown Creek. Exxon Mobil or its predecessors own the majority. In 1950 a subterranean explosion rocked Greenpoint, blowing manhole covers thirty feet into the sky. The blast was mostly forgotten until 1978, when the Coast Guard discovered a massive oil slick on the East River. The slick turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg for the
largest oil spill of the twentieth century:
further exploration revealed between eighteen and thirty million gallons of petroleum spread across one hundred acres of soil and waterways in northeast Greenpoint.

I find plenty of information in the
Village Voice
and the
New York Times
, but outside the city it never got much coverage, a fact I find baffling considering that the spill was so much bigger than the
Exxon Valdez
accident in the late eighties. Why had no one heard about this? The
Village Voice
reports anecdotal evidence that Polish and Puerto Rican residents of Greenpoint suffer a higher than normal incidence of bone cancer and leukemia, but thus far no major news outlets have flocked to Greenpoint the way they did to Alaska after the
Exxon Valdez
spill. The articles in the
Voice
and elsewhere have a likely explanation: leukemia’s provenance is difficult to trace. There were no oiled otters in Newtown Creek, as there were in the
Exxon Valdez
debacle. Greenpoint’s losing team had no mascot.

In fairness to Exxon, the spill didn’t happen all at once—along with the 1950 explosion, it resulted from decades of seepage and leaky pipes from a number of different companies, including BP and Chevron. But in an era before oil industry hacks took over the government, the Environmental Protection Agency actually went after Exxon. Though Exxon pointed the finger at Paragon Oil, in 1990 the state ordered Exxon Mobil, BP, and Chevron to clean up the site. By 2006 the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation reported that about nine million gallons had been recovered—less than half the total amount spilled up to thirty years ago.

Articles about Newtown Creek link me to other environmental concerns in the neighborhood, including Radiac, a nuclear waste storage facility just a few blocks from my apartment. We’re also three blocks up from a coal-burning electricity plant. But every day more and more people my age and younger are moving in, buying apartments, and getting married and raising children. In 2003 and 2004 everyone’s talking about how much the neighborhood has blown out and gentrified since its late-nineties art-culture apex, but they haven’t seen shit yet: in May 2005 the whole neighborhood is rezoned from commercial to residential, effectively clearing the way for scores of forty-story, Miami Beach–style luxury condominiums all along the waterfront, from the site of the old Domino Sugar factory all the way to the oil-plumed shores of Greenpoint.

A
s planned, Karissa flies in to visit over the holiday weekend. When I pick her up at LaGuardia, I see immediately how much stress she’s been under the past two months, her face broken out in angry blemishes, some of which look like they’ve been worried over in the airplane bathroom.

She buries her face in my chest when I hug her.

“I look horrible,” she says.

“Sweetie, you know I think acne’s sexy on a girl.” It’s true—on certain women a splash of acne across the cheeks is a total turn-on.

“You’re seriously weird, you know that?” she says, looking up at me with overcast eyes.

Back in Brooklyn, we walk around on Bedford, people-watching and checking out all the new boutique stores cropping up in former hardware shops and defunct Polish delis.

“Everyone’s so stylish,” Karissa says, spotting a guy in a slim-fitting gray suit over a pair of chunky vintage high-tops, his hair done in the typical shag: long bangs that flip up on one side, hair down over the ears, collar-length in the back.

“Tell me about it,” I say. “After a while you start to feel assaulted by fashion.”