Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (20 page)

Operating a flat-bottomed scow or barge that possessed no locomotive power, but needed to be towed everywhere by a tugboat, must have seemed, to a junkie, the quintessence of apt passivity. The life of a junkie is austere to begin with, and his scow contained only its load of crushed stone (800 to 1,300 tons) and a small cabin—a wooden shack with a single bed, coal stove, cupboard, chair, and table, at which he could type or shoot up. In New York he spent much less time in literary circles than he had in Paris, but he wrote more seriously, producing his finest work. It was an ideal life for the solitary sort; the problem was that Trocchi could not bear to be alone much, he was feverishly social, a barroom entertainer, always looking to score drugs, and sometimes made anxious by the sight of Manhattan, with no way to get to it, stuck in “a low-slung coffin in the
choppy grey water.” One night he almost lost contact with the tugs and could have easily drifted out to the Atlantic, lost at sea.

Trocchi described the incident vividly in his autobiographical novel,
Cain's Book
, which came out in 1960. He also described picking up a Puerto Rican man and bringing him back to his barge to make love, and hitting on his scowman friend's wife, a beautiful one-legged woman (“She moved her stump between my thighs and pressed her belly close to me,” wrote the ex-pornographer, though in a later conversation with Allen Ginsberg, Trocchi admitted that “I couldn't get a fucking hard-on! Now if I had got a hard-on that night, my whole life maybe would have been changed, and so would hers.”).
Cain's Book
is a work of fragments, purporting to be a novel while taking the avant-garde, self-reflexive position that novels are an exhausted genre. Trocchi, given his fix-dominated, hand-to-mouth existence, could not have written it any other way than in fragments (his editor, Richard Seaver, got him to finish the book by doling out the advance thirty bucks a clip, the amount of a score, in exchange for some new pages), so he made necessity a virtue, building a kind of structure out of memory-pieces and short, tense scenes that had the veracity of diary entries. The best parts remain his descriptions of barge life and his memories of growing up in a boardinghouse in Glasgow, particularly the portrait of his father, a chronically unemployed Italian musician who seems to have “inspired” Trocchi's own congenital idleness.

Again and again, in
Cain's Book
, Trocchi returns to the monotonous, consoling daily routine on the New York waterfront, the slow-moving pace of scow-time, and the life of the “harbor gypsies,” families or social sets who lived in instant villages of nine scows moored together. “Mine was the last scow and I sat aft at my open cabin door and watched the dark west waterfront of Manhattan slide away to the right. I thought of a night a long time ago when I had a girlfriend aboard for a short trip and how at the same kind of midnight we went naked over the end of a long tow, each in the hempen eye of a dockline, screaming sure and mad off Wall Street as the dark waves struck.”

For every such exhilaration, there were four epiphanies of defeat. To work on a scow is to be a loser, Trocchi informs us; most scowmen are old, lazy, washed-up alcoholics, which is why tugboat captains despise them. By the mid-fifties the big cargo ships had already begun the move to New
Jersey, and scows like Trocchi's were left to haul sand and crushed stone, the detritus of a once-vast commerce. A few decades later the barges would become so much bigger that they could no longer be bunched together in floating communities; that whole way of life would be gone. If Ernest Poole celebrates the harbor at its zenith, Alexander Trocchi is the poet of the port in decline. The New York waterfront he describes would be an ideal location for a film noir:

“At 33rd Street is Pier 72. At the waterfront there are few buildings and they are low. The city is in the background. It has diners at its edge, boxcars abandoned and stored, rails amongst grass and gravel, vacant lots. The trucks of moving and storage companies are parked and shunted under the tunnels of an area of broad deserted shadows, useful for murder or rape…. After eight, when the diners close, the dockside streets are fairly deserted. In winter the lights under the elevated roadway shine as in a vast and dingy shed, dimly reflecting its own emptiness.” Never does Trocchi make a historical observation about the comparative fortunes of the New York port: its “emptiness” is seen as a constant, a handy parable for his own exilic disquiet. Yet keeping a barge seems also to have liberated the otherwise self-absorbed Trocchi into a style of observant visual and aural notation, soaked in the attenuated present.

Perhaps heroin should also be given some credit for this perceptual patience. On the other hand, there is nothing more tedious than Trocchi's rants proselytizing for drugs, or his paranoid philosophizing about conformity. “While the mediaeval Church couldn't burn every heretic, it is just possible that the modern state can, even without recourse to the atomic bomb….” If he seems to have had something of a persecution complex, reality sufficiently supported it: local narcs were on his case quickly, tailing and harassing him (mainly because he was pushing as well as using), and eventually he was caught selling drugs to a minor, and had to flee the country before sentence was passed, sticking his friend George Plimpton for the bail money while stealing two of Plimpton's suits.

Back in London, he registered as an addict, received his drugs from the state, and settled down to elder bohemian status, issuing Situationist manifestos such as “Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds,” which called for cultural revolt, sly subversion, and a life of play (he was very big
on
Homo ludens
), helping to organize free universities with R. D. Laing, hanging out at the Edinburgh Poetry Festival with Ginsberg and Burroughs, signing and pocketing advances for sequels to
Cain's Book
, but never writing anything of significance again. Perhaps he'd already said what he had to.

I remember reading
Cain's Book
when it first came out, in 1960, and being drawn to its intimate, truth-telling narrative voice. Though it sputters in the last one-third, and doesn't quite add up to a satisfying whole, I'm amazed on rereading it how sharp and frank the best parts remain, what a fine writer he was in the traditional sense—strong sentences and vivid scene-making—but how irritating the bohemian rants have become. Trocchi's posturing about the hazards of drug addiction betrays more than a little grandiose self-pity, using the excuse of the Great Writer. You can agree that American antidrug laws are idiotic and still hold Trocchi responsible for the waste of his talent, not to mention the damage he brought to others (pimping his young wife, dealing to minors). He would have retorted that the others acted of their own free will.

Today, I put antennae out for the feel of Trocchi in his old waterfront hideout.

Here is the way he described it:

Pier 72 is the one immediately north of the new heliport which lies in the southern end of the basin formed by Piers 72 and 71. The remainder of the basin is used to moor the scows of a stone corporation with quarries at Haverstraw, Tomkin's Cove, and Clinton Point on the Hudson River. Piers 72 and 73 are close together. Nine scows at most are moored there. Looking in from the river you see the gabled ends of two large and dilapidated barns perched on foundations of stones and heavy beams, with a narrow walk around three sides of each. The gable-end of Pier 73 is a landmark from the river because it is painted with red, white, and blue stripes representing American Lines. At the end of Pier 72 there is a small landing stage-set with bollards and cleats of cast iron. A little wooden box painted green is nailed to the gable end of the shed. It houses lists from the dispatcher's office of the crushed stone corporation, lists which pertain to the movements of the scows.

From these lists Trocchi would learn whether he'd have to wait around on his barge all night to be towed somewhere, or was free to go into town and score, probably in the Village or Harlem.

Looking at the same tableau, there are no scows moored in the basin, and no gabled barns, dilapidated or otherwise. Pier 72 no longer exists; the stumps of a few timbers poke their heads up, suggesting the pilings' former outlines. That whole strip of waterfront is presently an orange ditch, while the Department of Transportation's tractors and earthmovers lay the groundwork for the Hudson River Park. The DOT's construction sheds, ocher and red, line the property. To its immediate south is the heliport Trocchi mentions, still in business, offering VIP helicopter tours: it consists of an asphalt landing strip and a rusty olive spud barge, where blue choppers take off and land, generating an astonishingly vehement noise.

The blocks facing the waterfront are taken up mostly by parking lots half-filled with storage trailers, FedEx delivery trucks, Greyhound buses. The train yards, now the repository of ailing or idled subway cars, await their apotheosis as a sports complex. Across the roadway from Pier 76 is the Javits Convention Center. Pier 76, still adorned with American Lines lettering, is now painted a faded battleship gray, and the several-blocks-long aluminum shed has been turned into a pound for cars towed for parking violations.

Two flags, as if contesting the tow pound's jurisdiction, fly from the roof: the Republic's stars-and-stripes and the city's tricolor. This
via dolorosa
for errant motorists, closed Sundays, is grimly surrounded by chain-link fence, with NYPD guards stationed at entry points to make sure any angry driver whose car was kidnapped by civil authorities will think twice about liberating it. Police department tow trucks, painted black-and-white, are parked in the front area. I feel certain Trocchi, with his borderline-paranoid fulminations about the coming police state, would have taken an I-told-you-so satisfaction at the American Lines' metamorphosis.

ENTER HERE TO REDEEM VEHICLES. You go up a ramp and into a hideous bullpen area, with puke-colored linoleum and too-low ceilings and cheap wooden wallboards: it is as though the humiliation of losing half a day and paying a steep fine to retrieve your car were not enough, the city wants you to feel like a criminal for parking in the wrong place. The seven clerical windows at the front (only three of which are manned at any one time) have an oddly whimsical touch: green and red “traffic lights”
above each pane, which signal whether the civil servant is ready to receive you. There is a sign saying that if your car has been “booted” in the towing, you should proceed to the last window. The people in the bullpen awaiting their turn with the bureaucracy speak mostly Spanish to each other, and look philosophical regarding this latest sorrow. If you stay long enough, however, you will hear in English the various raps of people at the clerical windows trying to talk their way out of paying the fine, all quite unsuccessful.

9 EXCURSUS SHIPWORMS

W
ITH THE CLEANUP OF THE RIVERS AROUND NEW YORK CITY, THANKS TO NEW SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANTS AND STRICTER ENFORCEMENTS AGAINST
industrial dumping, and the waterfront's revival for recreational uses, the shipworm, which had been repressed by aquatic pollution, has returned to the harbor to chomp away at piers, causing major damage, and leading to an ugly outbreak of the word “ironic” in the media. New Yorkers, notoriously indifferent to the ecosystem's larger intricacies, can see no explanation for marine borer activity reaching its highest level in a century than that they are being made to suffer for their virtue, as in the cynical adage “No good deed goes unpunished.”

In 1995 the partial collapse of a pier platform underneath the FDR Drive, brought about by marine borer damage, required the temporary closure of that crucial artery. At the moment, one-half of Hudson River Park's $400-million budget is earmarked for repairing rotting piers and foundations. Battery Park City alone recently expended $90 million, using divers and advanced construction technology, to pour a 740-foot-long concrete wall under the water to reinforce a timber wall. Since waterfront work is the most costly type of construction, next to tunnels, it becomes clear why the final bill for repairing marine borer damage could approach a billion dollars, thereby devouring any future municipal surplus.

We must not take the shipworm's depredations personally. This “termite of the sea” or “ocean woodpecker,” as it is sometimes called, has been around always. The oldest fossil shipworms are 60 million years old. Misnamed because of their resemblance to worms, they are actually a species of mollusk related to clams. There are other marine borers in the harbor, such as the gribble, a shrimplike crustacean that gnaws away at the surface of timbers, leaving them with an hourglass shape; but they are a less significant player at present than the shipworm, which burrows from within, making it difficult to assess until too late how much damage has been done.
Teredo navalis
(the pest's scientific name) attaches itself to any available wood, democratically reducing it, whatever its quality or den-sity—soft pine, hard oak, mahogany, or scrap—in time to wet sawdust.