The tunnels repeat forever. Under the city it’s all eyes peeking around corners. It’s men in suits going up and down stairs and maybe following you. People are standing in strange areas, not the right way. Hurrying and making sure to not look at you. Like George Tooker’s subway. Just like it.
This is the first rise of hot manic acid in my soulmeat. I probably wouldn’t feel such anxiety if I hadn’t taken the Chinese speed I brought back from Thailand last year, but I had to get rid of it. Surely, it was going bad. All I can do now is try to slither around trench coat spooks and blankoids, and pray I don’t catch any of their horny eyes on my way back home.
And when my heart is about to collapse like rotted wet cardboard, I find the right set of stairs and rush down them. Jump! The train doors snap shut behind and I’m locked inside a sterilized blaze.
I sit down. I hear something like mumbling. I look and a man is crouched leaning against the corner just next to me. He’s whispering something. Sounds like he’s talking shit about how I blew another opportunity and that I’m a failure. But how would he know that? I only just left the interview. His lips are worming fast and when I try to read them all I make out is: she’s going to leave you this time, you muttonhead.
“Shut the fuck up!” I say, I think out loud.
Everyone is looking at me now. I’ve been up for three days on this rotten speed and my head only truly functions to recognize terror. Terror and suffering are certainly here. This place we’ve built under the city is a pit and I can feel the train shooting straight down.
Lights! People! We hit Union Square and they rush in the car and they all seem to be laughing. Their laughs lick my ear and rake open the flesh of my drum. I huddle up in the corner as much as possible. I close my eyes.
What is in front of you? I ask myself, using the techniques given to me by the great Dr. Zizmor. Touch what’s in front of you and say it out loud if you want beautiful clean mindskin. I close my eyes. I touch. Metal. Cold metal. Plastic. Seat. Derision—no, face.
“Are you OK?” a woman asks me. I have my hand on her face and it looks like she’s had nipples sewn all over it. Like she’s surrogate nipple banking for all of the East Village.
I pull my hand away and stick it safely inside my pocket.
After a few minutes or decades, my sweat goes thick and comes out cord-like from my pores. We’re moving at speeds only achieved by the most deranged of train conductors and time melts away. Maybe he’s on the same shit I’m on. I imagine him up there with steam shooting out his nose and ass. Coke powder covering his face. I imagine him pulling the lever all the way back and snapping it off and laughing as sparks shoot up around him.
At DeKalb, we get stopped. The fluorescent lights are humming so loud I could cry. I take my two last pills, because panic like this only gets worse if you don’t keep moving. You’ll continue to die forever down in the infinite black subterrania of New York if you overthink it. I crunch the pills. When a train stops, speeding ahead through chemicals is the best and only option.
My mind travels—shoots!—up and I can hear the whole whooping city above. It’s swollen with stoma necks; the taste of aspirin labs, which is formaldehyde and dead pig. There are people crushing other people. There are a thousand babies being born. It’s pure animal freedom.
We start up again. The trainman’s operating with devastating efficiency and it’s surely not what I want now. I don’t want to go ahead anymore, now that I’ve seen what’s up there waiting. When I get home, I’ll again have to do my laundry in the sink. I’ll still be in debt. I will have to explain to my fiancée why I blew yet another job this morning. How did this track signal get fixed so quickly? Why is luck so evil? I know when I finally step out of these tunnels, I will not be a writer and I’ll have to continue to work in restaurants and dry cleaners and on construction sites. My dog will bark and Elvis will still be dead.
And then, as my mind full of piss finally flows in one direction and joins the great piss-flow of humanity, I see something. I understand that these moments of jagged breakdown, these shameful, prideful, purely animal moments, are not good and are terrible but they’re perfect because they’re true. This is what we are. Panic and confusion. If my thoughts did not meander and explore to find the panic and confusion, they would be no better than a piano player on a cruise. Pretty. This writing—this writing at the bottom that may never come up and see the light of day—is paranoia and piles of burning toes and heroin trumpets on the roofs of Brooklyn. Brooklyn! It is all the creatures that live and take joy in the glow-light. The ones who after three days on Chinese speed see the devils coming and draw crosses on every jamb and every window. Come in! I dare you!
When we get to my stop at Cortelyou Road and the doors open, I hesitate to get out and climb into the swollen thing. I’ve got pretty comfortable down here.
