Trolley No. 1852 (2 page)

Though there was endless
government talk of repealing the fifty-year-old Comstock Act (which
banned the sale of these nefarious devices), he was heedlessly
opposed to such a repeal. Violations were deemed a federal offense
and carried a punishment—quite rightly, in his estimation—of five
years imprisonment and hard labor. After losing so many young men
in the Great War, and then a half-million more souls—oddly, mostly
men—in the ghoulish Spanish Flu Epidemic, what was more ghastly
than
encouraging
lustful hedonists to perpetrate their carnal traffic without
any responsibility whatever? Certainly, America’s strength came
through the hard-work and innovation of its
people,
and circumventing necessary
new births in the interest of bed-play seemed a howling affront to
not only logic but a central morality. By law, these things,
sometimes called “condoms” or, in the vernacular “skins,” were only
to be used by couples properly wedded for either the prevention of
a pre-existing disease or to allow normal sexual congress between
the husband and a wife likely to suffer medical complications in
the event of pregnancy.

The embarrassed customer, after paying for
his package, hurried his bulk toward the exit, but not before the
vociferous proprietor called out, “Don’t you be using those on any
of them harlots out there, man! It’s against the law! And them
dirty women are full up with poxes that dissolve those things!”

The buyer couldn’t have left in any more
haste.

Next, the proprietor turned his scowl to the
stooped writer. “You agree with me, don’t’cha, mister?”

“Indubitably,” he replied and left.

This, he was saddened to prehend, is what
the “cracker barrels” of the good old days had become—unpleasant
and often hostile rants. Confrontations were not his forte. But the
proprietor could not be accused of exaggeration on one count: the
gradually rising number of “harlots” plying their trade on these
once-fine avenues. Back on the street, as the sinking sun commenced
to flame across the roof-pocked horizon, he beheld the rancorous
man’s meaning. Visible at several corners loitered women of the
illest repute, drab-faced and gaudily dressed waifs with hungry
eyes. These pestilent and immoral urchins had grown in number to a
dejecting degree, it seemed. Victims of President Hoover’s economic
failures or simply female loafers looking for easy earnings, he
struggled not to judge. One thin bonneted creature with a vulpine
grin beckoned him with her finger to cross the road. He did not
oblige, of course; then another, brazenly brassiereless and
sashaying in the uncomplimentary look of a Flapper, slowed her gait
as she passed, and asked if he had a dollar for some of her
company.

He assured her he did not.

Where are the constables when you need
them!

As he stood in wait at the corner for
several motors to putter by, he heard a trolley’s bell clanging
several blocks over, and then…

Then…

The moment strangely seized him. He stood
immobile; a fugue seemed to drone in his head, much akin to the mad
flute-pipings of his messenger-demigod Nyarlathotep; and all his
powers of conjecture and mental function stalled in what could only
be called utter aposiopesis…

Barrier
prophylactics,
the words thudded in his
head, and then—

The toll of a distant
trolley bell.
Then—

Prostitutes…

These three images (two visual, one aural)
shivered in his mind and gave root to an unmediated joyousness that
caused him to actually shiver in place.

Why? you may ask.

They
provided the creative lightning bolt so yearned for and so
rare in a writer’s life. These individual images lay in his hands
the
catalyst
he’d
been so desperately struggling for.

And it was in that
irreducible division of a second that Howard Lovecraft had his
story for Mr. Frederick Wilcox and the clandestine periodical known
as
Erotesque.

Within minutes he was back in his chamber,
coffee on and pen in hand, writing his new tale…

TROLLEY NO. 1852

by

Winfield Greene

1.

My name is Morgan Phillips, and I am
recounting this experience in hopes that by doing so I might
unburden my mind—and whatever beneficent memories I have left—of
some of the venomous and imponderable images which stalk me ever
still…

… for however long the earth shall last.

My relocation to New York
(that denizen-abyss of stridence and foul smells) had been by
necessity and not—I re-emphasize,
not
—due to the divestment of my
position at Brown, as a professor of mythology and ancient
histories, two years ago. The latter had been the work of this
bungling and greed-induced calamity they are now calling the “Great
Depression,” whose attendant turmoil left no room for teachers of
subjectivities. Only academicians skilled in mathematics, industry,
and the sciences could be retained in such troubled times of bread
lines and twenty-five-percent jobless rates. For the rest of us
(history, literature, the arts) the coffers of higher learning were
closed.

Instead, I ventured
hither, to this mephitic necropolis of concrete, dirt, and clamour,
in the steadfast hope of ascertaining the whereabouts of my sister
and only sibling, Selina, who’d relocated here some five years ago
for a $14-per-week accounting position with the well-known Monroe
Clothiers chain. She would be twenty (eight now—seven years my
junior) and with her youth had come the zeal of wanderlust. “I
want
new
horizons, Morgan,” she’d implored five
years afore with her over-bright eyes and buoyant enthusiasm.
“
New
places to
see and
new
people to meet, and
don’t
worry,
I’ll write you every week!” So she
had, for three years, until her unforeboding and quite energetic
missives in the post had dropped off all at once in an eerie
silence. Either Fate or the god Selina believed in but I did not
had seen fit to parallel my sister’s disappearance, nearly to the
day, with my own woeful dismissal from Brown. I took the ten-six,
with no hesitancy whatever, to Penn Station, and have been here
ever since.

Or at least, in a
sense
…

It was in stifled shock
that I first beheld this labyrinthine canyon of crime and leering,
stubbled faces; shock that palsied my gait and numbed my mind—a
seething urban
mass
of filthily attired bodies of clearly all ancestries save for
the Anglican; bodies that moved shiftily through garbage-heaped
streets pressed on either side by grimy concrete towers so spiring
as to obfuscate the light of day—indeed a noisome Babel of
movement, ill-will, and malodour; of sweat-shined foreheads and
menacing scowls. Squalid ghettoblocks stretched shabbily betwixt
skyscrapers too dizzying to look upward at; and the smell—the
unsurceasing and absolutely maleficent
smell
—which imbued itself in my
clothes and, I often suspected, my very pores.
This—
city
—was not
for my sensitive kind, but circumstances offered me little choice.
I scrupled at once to take my place in the human
crush
so erroneously
named for James II, the Duke of York, lest I be swallowed whole by
its incogitable machinations.

That
Selina
had been so swallowed
remained my most teeming fear.

Degradation after degradation pursued me
posthaste—things I cannot, must not recount. Here squalor and
hatred reigned supreme, for if the flumelike streets proved this
evil urban pustule’s veins, then surely the ignoble masses served
as its blood. I will not say how my first pitiable meals came to my
mouth; nor how oft misfortune nearly left me bloodied and
broken-boned by mongrel hoodlums in nighted alleyways.

But my bounden duty to
find Selina steeled my perseverance. Amid the stinking crowds of
pick-pockets and fugitives, and amongst cramped, sunless
thoroughfares sided by drear-paned walls zigzagged by clattery iron
fire-escapes, I travailed first to secure 30-cent-per-hour
employment at a reformed scrivenry; and an unutterably pestiferous
“room” on 28
^th
Street, for a half-dollar a day.

Time acclimated me to most of my inner
horrors and my loath for what I could only metaphor as the societal
elephantiasis in which I lived. Selina’s rescue, in the very least
as my strained mind envisioned it, was all that gave me the will to
forge on. I fared well at my new post (a man of erudition? A
university professor?) and rose up the few ladders of advancement
that were extant; whereas I soon was promoted to night-office
manager whose undesirable hours rewarded me with a modest pay
increment. The enterprise, namely Bartleby & Sons, L.T.D.,
occupied the top floor of a rather Dickensian building that
harkened from the middle of the Nineteenth Century, in the lower
“meat-packers” borough. Of course, they’d long-since refitted
materially with modern typing-machines, (chiefly Remington Model
One’s on which I’d grown adroit at Brown) and more recently curious
devices of almost supernatural capability, called Mimeographs. My
status quickly charged me with the overwatch of the night-staff:
all stalwart men and women possessed of acceptable typing skills
and an accurate eye, who’d been discarded from better posts by the
all-pervading economic gloom. It was for the most part elder
holographed documents of financial and governmental importance that
we were charged with transcribing, from seven o’clock in evening to
three-thirty or so in the morn.

As for Selina, however…

It necessitated less than
a week’s time to discern that the illustrious Monroe Clothiers
chain was illustrious no more; the abrupt sign on the front doors
announced that the enterprise had gone on “Holiday” much the same
way as most banking institutions; in a more accurate manner of
speaking: bankrupt, and all employees let go. Worse than that, by
far, however, was my horror in learning that Selina’s apartment
building in the West Side had burned to the ground; though I was
relieved to be informed by the New York Office of Public Safety
that no deaths or injuries had been reported. Next, my forlorn
sojourn through the mephitis piloted me to the local police
precinct’s Missing Persons Bureau. Here, to my abject despair, I
was informed that said bureau was no longer operational due to
budget decreases and the simple unserviceability of such a
function. “You got any idea how many people ‘disappear’ with the
economy the way it is?” my complaint was chastised by a surly
sergeant at the desk. “Well do ya, bub?” Ultimately, of course, I
could comprehend his point; in such dismal economic times, people
moved on to unknown pastures they hoped would be greener but oft
were not.
But Selina would’ve written me
had she elected to relocate,
I knew full
well. The granite-faced sergeant was unkind enough to add an
acerbic statistical datum: “Lots’a women have took to sellin’
thereselfs, ya know. What else they got when there’s no jobs and
bread’s up to a dime’a half-loaf?” Then, another datum: “Oh, and
bub? You do know that the murder and suicide rate’s doubled since
the Crash in ‘29, don’t ya?”

When not tending my duties at the scrivenry,
then, I walked…

Walked, I say, through
every chasm, byway, and alley in vicinity to Selina’s former home
and place of employment; walked through the harrowing and
ill-scented masses—that loathly, dead-faced human sprawl—thrusting
forward my only photograph of Selina to random passersby and
shop-keepers, coppers and vagrants alike, refugees and natural-born
citizens—indeed,
anyone,
with the plea hot in my voice, “Have you seen
this woman?”

None had.

When I’d covered the most
logical geographical propinquities, an absence of alternatives
forced me to proceed in depressingly widening radii. First what
remained of Manhattan, then Queens, the Bronx, then ghastly
Flatbush and the horrendous Brooklyn and its appalling appendage
Red Hook full of leaning tenements and unrestrained hooliganism;
Staten Island and its waves of cretins, then across the blackly
gushing Hudson to Hoboken, Union City, and beyond. All, all to no
avail. In no time, however, I became deft in all modes of travel
(ferries, trolleys, motor-carriages) and during my scouring of the
stolid, grey Brooklyn borough, even traveled in the impossible
underground trains that had commenced in 1904, in particular this
BRT Line; and then the reeking, flesh-packed 9
^th
Avenue Line—these
being deafening, subterrene contraptions they now called the
Subway.

It was all I lived for,
for I had nothing else: my indefatigable certainty that somewhere,
out thither in this once fecund and beauteous Ilse of Manna-hata
that the White Man had paved over with modern horrors called
Progress, below the once-resplendent pristine-blue sky now soiled
by hostile chatter and coal-smoke;
somewhere
amid all of this, Selina
still lived and breathed.

Somewhere.

And though we’re taught in
our youth of the virtue of tenaciousness and faith (indeed, the
very
Godliness
of
it) I found instead of solace a soul-poisoning and ever-cresting
cynicism that more and more graduated to outright nihilism. I
became convinced that Nietzsche’s chief tenet seethed in
undeniablity; that there was no objective basis for truth. Here I
was, standing in the middle of that pestilent, dirty-handed verity;
the summation of all that mankind has risen to in
multiple-millennia of evolvement; yes, yes,
this:
human feces in the open
street; the vomit of vagabonds filling gutters like abscessed
putrid evil rainwater; women so bereft of morality (and men too)
that they’d sell their sex for a half-dollar, a dime, even a
nickel; blood turning brown on unending concrete walls; thugs
beating the maimed and the elderly for pittances in raging
daylight; police turning quickly away from those most in need; one
alley after the next, urine-imbued and clogged like demon-dens with
cadaverously thin addicts puffing blank-eyed on opium or even
injecting narcotics into their bodies through their veins; rats,
rats,
droves
of
them; and the lines and the lines and the lines of the dirty and
the wretched and the sin-stained. Indeed, the pinnacle of mankind’s
knowledge and endeavor for ten-thousand years; this ghastly,
irrevocable
horror.