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Parnassus Underground
by Patrick Flynn
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Every morning at six, I board the Bx 34 bus at its terminus in the North Bronx and ride it to Bainbridge Avenue and 205th Street, where I catch the D train. I ride the D down to 145th Street, in Manhattan, then change trains and levels for the A uptown to 168th. I am on the subway for 50 minutes. Whenever I describe the trip to someone, the response is always, “I don’t know how you do it.” I do it the way a lot of people do it. I read. READ MORE IN THE BOOK - THE SUBWAY CHRONICLES: SCENES FROM LIFE IN NEW YORK. PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY ON AMAZON.COM TODAY!
I have always done my best reading on the subway. Perhaps the roar of the train acts as a kind of white noise, focusing my attention. For 100 minutes a day, I am in subterranean limbo, freed temporarily from all responsibility. Neither here nor there, I read in peace. I picked up the habit of subway reading in high school. I worked in an ice cream shop in Greenwich Village. It was a loose place, staffed by graduate students. Everyone who worked there was teed off about something. Books were the cudgels of long, ringing arguments among the workers. Titles unfamiliar to me were thrown off like beads of sweat. We were paid in cash at the end of each shift, and I would stop at Eighth Street Books in search of some of the titles that had whizzed by me. Some, of course, whizzed too quickly. It turned out not to be The Coming of Plague to Samoa and to this day I confuse Middlemarch and Middletown. I sat on the IRT on the way home to Flatbush Avenue and read Herbert Marcuse and Thomas DeQuincey, The Feminine Mystique and “The Rape of the Lock,” James Baldwin and John Barth. I tried to read Gravity’s Rainbow, which had just come out, but it was too difficult. I read The Golden Notebook because it was the favorite novel of the ice cream store’s night manager, with whom I was smitten. She turned out to be gay, and the book troubling: Anna and Molly spoke in the same oblique fashion as the women on the subway whose conversations I happened to overhear. There was much about women that I didn’t understand, and Doris Lessing wasn’t much help. I read Rimbaud, who was an eye-opener: “Their skulls caked with vague roughness/Like the leprous flowerings of old walls,” he wrote in “The Men Who Sit,” which could have been titled “The Men Who Sleep on the Seats in the Subway Car.” I was really getting ahead of myself. I hadn’t read Animal Farm, but I’d read Down and Out in Paris and London. The Jungle was a mystery to me, but not The Metropolis. My reading was skewed. My understanding of the great edifice of literature was weak, though I was familiar with a few gargoyles here and there. I left New York City for college, but returned in the summer to work as a special officer at Yankee Stadium, which involved breaking up fist-fights and ejecting drunks. The Yankees were the big team in town. The crowds at the ballpark were big, salaries were big; it was the era of Steinbrenner and Jackson and Martin, big personalities. My commute was big, too - an hour and three-quarters each way. Big American books seemed appropriate. I read Moby Dick and All the King’s Men. I tried to read Gravity’s Rainbow again, but it was still too difficult. Not everything I read in that period was American. “The air felt like a warm bath into which hotter water is trickling constantly,” wrote E. M. Foster in A Passage to India, and there was no better description of life on the Number 4 train, which still was not air-conditioned. The graffiti had also gotten out of hand. Most outraging was that these artists were turning up in the downtown galleries. John Ruskin, writing of Whistler in “Fors Clavigera,” foresaw it all: “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Physically, the subway was deteriorating. Breakdowns were constant. I was regularly put off the train in places I would never have dared to go. The stations were gloomy and dangerous-seeming. I was nervous, but I wasn’t alone. Waiting with me on those desolate platforms were the people who lived in those terrible neighborhoods and were just as frightened as I was. Crime preys mostly on its closest neighbors - a basic lesson, I suppose, but it took signal overhaul and malfunctioning doors for me to grasp it. I read The Wretched of the Earth and The Hidden Injuries of Class. Someone had scribbled on a poster in the Utica Avenue station: “The poor you will always have with you. Can we go to a movie?” After college, I lived in Borough Park. I worked at various jobs and tried to write. I rode the F train into the city. Most of the other passengers were either Hispanic or Orthodox Jews. It was part of my grand writing plan to minimize distractions by living among people whose cultures were not my own - exile on a shoestring, in Brooklyn. I read A Movable Feast and then everything I could about that Paris crowd. I scoffed at their idea of exile. One American in Paris – that’s exile. Thirty Americans in Paris, hanging out at the same cafes and bookshops – that’s a package tour. I carped, but secretly I envied. Imagine sitting on the Paris Metro, reading the first edition of The Sun Also Rises or Ulysses. I read literary biographies. I felt a kinship with F. Scott Fitzgerald; he also had trouble getting a handle on the interplay of life and art. He and I were paralyzed by the same questions: Am I living now? Or just preparing to write? Should I be enjoying this or memorizing it? There was, unfortunately, no biography of Thomas Pynchon, so I gave Gravity’s Rainbow another shot, with the expected results. Then I moved to Washington Heights. Now it took me just 20 minutes to get to work. I nearly went berserk. I had no time to read anything. I tried short stories: Saki, de Maupassant, John Cheever. The last depressed me because I thought of long journeys on commuter trains. Cheever’s suburban executives had their problems, but if they wanted to, they could read War and Peace on their way home. I found certain books to be complemented by particular subway lines. Any work concerned with class straggle, from Das Kapital to The Bonfire of the Vanities can be enjoyed on the Lexington Avenue or Seventh Avenue IRT. The Upper East and Upper West Sides are merely a stop or two from the South Bronx; passengers are an intriguing mix of the haves and have-nots. Ragtime, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and other evocations of old New York are best savored on the BMT M, which executes a lazy arc over the Williamsburg Bridge and crosses Brooklyn on an elevated structure that passes, in places, not more than five feet from the tenement windows. It seems possible to reach out and lower a window shade. The gulls race the trains and wheel away as the A crosses Jamaica Bay on its way to the Rockaways; one might look up from Cannery Row, startled by the smell of salt air. A Passage to India, with its pivotal scenes in the Marabar Caves, is appropriate practically everywhere; ditto The Plague, with its rats. Now, traveling to work from the Bronx, I have plenty of time for books. I am tempted every morning, as I have always been, to stay on the train past my stop, forsaking my job for a ride to the end of the line. Those distant destinations are graced with names that are poetry: Stillwell and Pelham Bay, White Plains Road. The Number 7 line ends in Flushing, at a station called Main Street. Would I find clapboard houses there, and a bandshell, and a big statue in the town square of Thornton Wilder? Probably not. Neither do I think it likely that Stillwell is any cheerier a place than Dyre. But then again it doesn’t matter. There are always new places to go, and new books to read while going. The journey is the thing. No smoking, spitting, or carrying an open flame, please.
Patrick Flynn is a writer, teacher, and school administrator who lives in Goshen, New York. His novel, Agnes Among The Gargoyles, is available online from Bosun Books (www.cmonline.com). |