Atom Winter 2013

ATOM

On The

Cover

D

on Thor Gaspar II is an aspiring artist that creates works in watercolor painting, comedy, film, sound, and photography.

He feels the arts is a way to express one’s self, retain a bit of sanity, and share consciousness. He also runs a podcast named Djent FM for technical musicians.

You’ll find more of his photography in the Immerse section of this magazine.

More of Don’s work can be found at http://mr-mcchibi.deviantart. com/, you can hear his podcast at http://www.facebook.com/Djent.FM and see his film work at http://www.youtube.com/togepi440.

From The

Editors G

reetings, Reader!

You are about to enjoy the 8th issue of Atom Magazine. What started a year and a half ago as a thought experiment has been realized, again and again, into the thing that you now hold in your hands or view on your computer screen. After so long, picking a favorite issue is like picking a favorite child, but in my Sophie’s Choice magazine moment, I would choose this issue‌and it’s upcoming mate (double not fair, I know!). Because the more I examine this Right Brain v. Left Brain theory, especially through editing this magazine, the more I realize that one can not exist without the other. Like peanut butter and jelly, they just go together (and are often difficult to separate).

Atom is certainly a creative process (right brain), but one that is often mostly achieved through language and logic (left brain). I like to think that this issue and the one that will follow in the spring are not actually separate projects but, rather, pieces in conversation. I am so grateful for and to the artists and writers who contributed to this issue for allowing us to intrude on their creative process and for taking the leap to explore something as fluid and weird as the Right Brain. I hope you get as much of a kick out of this issue as I do.

In flowery, emotional, right-brainy gratitude,

Ashleigh

EDITORIAL

Ashleigh R. Hill Brendan G. Nystedt Spencer J. Sands

CONTRIBUTORS Boran Vukajlovic Diane Solomon Erin Brown Erin Fraboni Fordy Shoor Garth von Ahnen

FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER Don T. Gaspar II

Additional ART

ATOM

Ashleigh R. Hill Spencer J. Sands Brendan G. Nystedt Alli Rico Tiago Fioreze Gobagoo Jeromé Kunegis © 2013 Atom Magazine

How to Paint Paintings with Paint by Garth Von Ahnen • Building a Better Cat Tree A Simple Ikea Hack

Leftovers by Gwen Rowland • Speculoos, My Dutch Fiend • Graham’s Crackers Home Made • The Prince and the Pauper

Firearm Follies by Garth Von Ahnen • 8 & Counting Myths and Legends of the Creative Mind by W. Clay

Swim by Boran Vukajlovic • 5 Ways to Beat Creative Block by Erin Brown How to Know if You’re an Artist by Diane Solomon

Just Saying Thanks • BSC

Featured Photographer: Don Thor Gaspar II • Down Low by Fordy Shoor

Fujiko Mine

Arsene Lupin III

Building a Better Cat Tree

T

There are two small, mammalian creatures that sleep in my bed and I like them a lot. I’ve never had cats before, and in fact, growing up, I was what would traditionally be classified as a “dog-person”. But that has all changed because these cats are cute and they do things that are

By Spencer Sands

charming. I was lucky enough to end up adopting a brother and sister duo. Their names are Lupin and Fuji (actually, those are the shortened versions, they are actually named Arsene Lupin III and Fujiko Mine) and they are named for the awesome Japanese series Lupin III.

In an ongoing effort to spoil them, we have bought the standard catnip infused toys that make a lot of noise while I am trying to sleep, but that is not enough. I need to go farther. I need to spoil them like no cat-owner has spoiled their cats before.

I decided to build a cat-tree. Notice I said build and not buy though, much to my surprise, I ended up spending almost as much as it would have cost to just buy the damn thing. But such is life.

My first move was to acquire the requisite building materials. For risers, I went with 16’ of 4’ x’ 4’, which ended up actually being more than I needed. Next, I needed carpet. The amount required for this project ended up being about 40 square feet, which sounds like a ton, but in reality is not that much. I went to a flooring store and asked them for scraps. They very

4x4s getting covered iin carpet nicely gave me two options, go through the dumpster (which was empty) or buy a remnant. A remnant is the left over from an installation that is often too small to really be a lot of good. I went with the latter, and for a partly sum, I walked out with 45 square feet of very nice rug (too nice, actually, but more on that later). The base, the structure that would hold the entire thing, was nothing more than a 4’ x 2’ x 1’’ piece of plywood covered in said carpet. The scratching portion was made from natural fiber rope picked up at the local building supply store. For the platforms, I used a combination of 1/2’’ and 1/4’’ inch plywood, mostly leftovers from other projects. The final piece of the puzzle was a lot of screws and staples.

The tools that were required to build this feline housing project were a chop-saw (meiter-saw), a jigsaw, a screw gun, a hammer, a staple gun, and a box cutter.

Prepping the scratching post

A House unassembled I started by covering the plywood base in carpet. I laid the plywood on the carpet with the carpet upside- down.

I positioned the plywood so that it had about 4’’ of extra carpet on all sides so that I would be able to staple it.

Then, using the box cutter, I carefully cut out the section of carpet I needed, and then affixed it to the plywood using the staple gun. I did the sort of fold that you would do to get the corners of a bed folded before stapling them.

Next up came the posts. I decided to go with one 1’ one,

Carpet inStalled one 2’ one and two 3 1/2’ ones. I simply measured and cut them with the chop-saw and was done. If you don’t have a chop-saw, you could do it by hand (with a hand-saw), or have it cut where ever you bought your lumber. I then repeated the process that I did with the base, cutting and stapling, but I left the ends of the 4’ x 4’ exposed.

On the 2’ for post, I only carpeted about 8’’s on the bottom. Then I took the screw-gun and drilled a 3/8’’ hole about an inch deep right where the carpet ended. I then inserted the end of the rope into said hole and secured it to

Shingles: as much fun to eat as they are good looking

the post with the screw-gun. I then wrapped in around the post over and over again until I got to the top. I repeated the process I used to attach the rope at the bottom to attach it at the top.

Next I attached the posts to the base. 3’’ drywall screws held everything in place. Finally I attached the platforms that I had carpeted in the same fashion as the base. I guess that this would be a good place to talk about the errors in my choice of carpet. I bought a remnant of some very high quality carpet and while I do want my cats to live a life of endless luxury, the thickness of said fancy person carpet made it extremely difficult to shape, cut and fold as I needed it. I did have a little bit of very inexpensive area rug lying around that was infinitely easier to do all of the before mentioned tasks with. If I go have do-overs, I would have used nothing but the cheap stuff.

the jigsaw, screwed together, and carpeted on the inside.

For the exterior, I decided to give it that beach house look and shingle it. While it looks cool, sincerely, I spend more time doing that than just about the entirety of the rest of the build combined. Unless you have a finishing nail gun, I would highly recommend painting the exterior, or maybe stucco if you’re feeling really fancy. Also, they really like ripping the shingles off. For sport. Because they know how hard I worked on it and they are spiteful. Anyway, for the roof, I went with a good olde fashioned towel. I figured they would want to lounge around up there anyway, so why not make it comfortable?

And that is that. It looks pretty good, I built it with my own two hands, and the cats seem to enjoy it. I cannot deny that my cats are spoiled, but at least they are spoiled by way of my own crafting skills.

The crown jewel of my cat tree is the house on the highest level. The house was build simply of plywood, cut with

If You Build it...

they will come

A Simple Ikea Hack

By Brendan Nystedt

B

eing relatively unwealthy, I’m forced to furnish my dwelling with flat-pack furniture from places like Ikea. Although the quality isn’t bad, you start seeing the exact same furniture everywhere from the doctor’s office to that place you went to a party that one time. There’s a high likelihood that you own the same coffee table as I do (the Ikea Lack).

With that in mind, my girlfriend and I set out to add a little uniqueness to something ubiquitous. I’ll be the first to admit the inspiration came from an article she found online but we made it our own. We settled on adding a layer of colorful paper on the tabletop, jazzing up the previously black, Scandinavian table. To find paper, we took a trip to our local specialty paper store. Other things you’ll need include 3M adhesive spray, Mod Podge, a paintbrush and some shellac spray to finish it off.

First, spray your Ikea table with the adhesive spray. Let it sit for a minute until it gets really tacky. We used an empty snack box to make it so we weren’t touching the paper directly. If you have a large piece of paper, it might go on in one piece but the rad pattern we chose ended up needing a seam in the middle. We did our best to line it up before the spray set. While it’s drying, use a hobby knife to cut off the excess paper. I found that angling the blade towards the middle of the table produced the cut that was closest to the edge of the tabletop.

After the spray dries, use the paintbrush to do a coat of Mod Podge. Don’t overload the brush or else you’ll end up with some nasty wrinkles. Wrinkles are inevitable but the less there are, the better the table will look. Once the first coat dries, do another and then once that dries, put a layer of spray shellac to seal out the tackiness of the Mod Podge.

Although we aligned our two pieces of paper perfectly, the drying of the Mod Podge caused the paper to contract further.

There might be ways of avoiding this but there isn’t an obvious solution that springs to mind.

I thought this project would be much more challenging but we were able to get a good end result from very little work. I think pretty much anyone can use these instructions to make their Ikea furniture much more personal.

LEFT-

OVERS

By Gwen Rowland

I

love leftovers. Meals made almost entirely of leftovers are not uncommon in my daily eating. If I’m not eating them then I’m cooking them: preparing enormous batches of food to be made into various meals at a later date. Using up leftover is a skill that homemakers over the years have turned into traditions round the world: think of Mexican refried beans, British Bubble and Squeak, Spanish Omelettes and the ubiquitous Turkey curry over the holidays. Unfortunately the benefits of leftovers often get forgotten, so here are my top six:

Save time

•Eat on the go – a box of something satisfying •Whenever I make something saucy like a curry or soup I always make extra portions to go in freezer bags to make a future hungry me very happy indeed.

•Home made meals can be prepared in about five minutes if leftovers are fried/heated up in a sauce or in the oven. This could be as little as three minutes if you’re a microwave fan. I mean, someone who likes microwaves, not something that blows air around the inside of them. They don’t need to eat...

Save money

•Cook once, recombine as many times as needed.

•Fewer shop trips means less impulse buys when walking round a shop tired and hungry.

•Save food which is about to go off. Food on the turn lasts longer when cooked, so cooking it can transform it from bin fodder to tummy filler.

•When eating out bring a box- portions from restaurants are often too large.

Lose weight

•Encourages you to eat less rather than finishing up. I lost a lot of weight when I let go of needing to finish everything on my plate. Even if it’s just a few teaspoons left when you fell satiated, those remainders can be a nice little snack with a slice of bread. Omelettes were probably invented to use up these very small amounts of leftover food from previous meals.

Save the world

•Packed lunches are much greener than bought ones – less packaging to go to the landfill. There are plenty of excellent re-usable food storage solution, but one of my favourites is a re-used glass jar. It’s airtight, so perfect for transporting soup. Just be careful not to throw your bag around like a football!

•Again, the freezer is my friend. Instead of using tin of pulses, meaning resources being processed and transported, I cook up big batches of beans bought in bulk, then freeze them to be used in exciting ways later.

•Less likely to support big evil corporations in order to stop your stomach growling.

•Create less waste! Habits are extremely powerful. If more and more people get into the habit of maximum food efficiency, there will be less food waste so fewer people will go to bed hungry.

Better tastes

•Flavours come together when ingredients have the chance to get to know each other intimately overnight.

Curry, soups, chilli, risotto, pasta sauces – all are better the next day. Water content reduces in leftovers, resulting in a more intense taste. Think of how tasty fried mashed potatoes become!

Eating becomes an adventure!

Eating leftovers can conjure up images of insipid microwaved slop. NO! Personally, I find it boring to eat the same thing even twice I a row, so I keep parts of meals to make new meals with the same cooked ingredients. The topmost photo demonstrates one way to do this – at various stages of frying vegetables I added different things until I had a load of garlic and onion mushrooms, a vegetable chillie, and some ‘roast’ Mediterranean veg. From these I could make a variety of meals.

Chillie’s options include - rice and chillie, burritos, spicy veg pasta (with a tin of tomatoes added to thin it down), thickened through simmering it makes a spread for sandwiches which is excellent with lettuce, tomatoes and jalapeno peppers. The mushrooms can be eaten on toast; made into a risotto, pasta sauce, bake, or soup; top a jacket potato, salad or pizza nicely, or just eaten on their own straight from the fridge while deciding what the main event will be.

Those Mediterranean vegetables are a perfect addition to a falafel and hummus meal, make a pasta salad or sauce much more interesting, go well with any of the above possibilities...

With a bit of imagination the possibilities are vast. Set yourself a fridge challenge: Base a meal around what’s available.

Using bits of food can result in surprisingly delicious and innovative results – one of my favourite salad dressings is a mix of leftover vinegar from pickled onions with leftover oil from sun dried tomatoes. It’s all about thinking creatively and resourcefully.

H

umankind is pretty great at coming up with ways of destroying itself. Throughout the epochs and ages of our stay on this planet, we’ve come up with ever more ways of causing pain, mayhem, complete obliteration and chaos. Who would have thought that the Dutch would have created the ultimate weapon of mass culinary disaster?

Your first taste of the so-called “cookie butter” seems innocent enough at first. But, it’s all downhill from here, buck-o. So, your friend grabs you a spoon and scoops out an innocuous-looking substance from a glass jar obtained from the local Trader Joe’s. In a flavor explosion that would make Robert Oppenheimer blush, the rich, creamy, starchy ball of deliciousness targets each taste bud and does not relent until your whole mouth surrenders.

Spreadable speculoos is more evil than you could ever truly imagine, wielding the tasty power of unhealthy oil, flour, spices and sugar in a hitherto unforeseen deployment method. It’s literally made out of cookies. In a process similar to how peanut butter gets made, Dutch spiced cookies are ground up and mixed with a few other ingredients to form a paste which can be added to any number of unsuspecting foods in need of some cookie pizazz.

Once weaponized, the speculoos is bottled up and sent to stores around the world, including nations arguably not yet ready to handle such a dangerous and sinister concoction.

Once it invades your home, there’s absolutely no stopping it. You’ll find yourself idly checking the cabinets for something you don’t need just to take a moment to nosh on a spoonful. You’ll gladly bypass healthy snacks just for another taste straight from the jar with a spoon, or, if you’ve got it badly enough, your finger.

If you love yourself and others, boycott speculoos.

Speculoos, My Dutch Fiend

By Brendan Nystedt

Graham’s Crackers, Home-Made

By Brendan Nystedt

I

f you’re an American, you likely grew up with graham crackers. Whether they be remembered fondly on camping trips, as a snack in preschool or eaten with peanut butter, these sweet crackers are a classic. Surprisingly, they’re not that hard to make in your own home. Popularized in the 19th century as a part of Sylvester Graham’s plan to cure “carnal urges” through dietary means, graham crackers are made with a special type of flour that is less refined than your typical all-purpose flour. Even at stores like Whole Foods, graham flour is hard to come by so with this recipe, I’ll include a way to substitute a mixture of APF, wheat germ and wheat bran for graham flour in case you run into the same issue I did when gathering ingredients. This is adapted from a recipe from Food Network’s Alton Brown, who, confusingly uses only metric measurements when writing recipes.

1 cup graham flour (substitute 2/3 cup white flour, 1/3 cup wheat bran and 2 teaspoons wheat germ) 1/4 cup all purpose flour 1/3 cup butter 1/6 cup molasses 1/2 cup brown sugar 3 tablespoons whole milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract 3/4 tablespoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon baking soda a dash of cinnamon Mix the dry ingredients together, then add the butter (I melted it in the microwave ever so slightly in order to make it easier), the milk and the molasses. Mix until the dough becomes thick. Press the dough into a disk and wrap in cling wrap. Place the dough in the fridge for a half-hour.

After the dough has been chilled, place it on a cokie sheet and roll it between some foil until it’s around the right thickness for a graham cracker. Poke the dough with a fork to add the signature dimples and, finally, use a pizza cutter to make the individual crackers. Preheat the oven for 350 degrees. Put the crackers in the oven and bake for around 20 minutes. Be careful or else the crackers will burn quickly! When they’ve cooled, break them up and enjoy with peanut butter or on their own!

The Prince and the Pauper: The Story of Two Very Different Hamburgers

By Spencer Sands

O

ne of my great vices in life is my love of relatively expensive restaurants. Fancy dinning is a wonderful treat and I am (assuming the food is good) to hand over my hard earned moneys a couple of times a month. One of the great dilemmas when it comes to eating out at a nice establishment is trying to decide what to order; questions like, “what is in season?” and “what is the speciality of the house?” abound. I have over the years developed a bit of a system to appraise the quality of seemingly up-scale joints and that is (if they offer one) I order the burger.

What is it about the humble hamburger that is so difficult for people to cook correctly? I hate so much going to backyard barbecues and getting served “burgers” that consist of preformed patties charred to perfection and placed naked on a crappy, store bought bun. By the same token, a restaurants ability to serve a good burger functions nicely as an acid test of the kitchen staffs culinary acumen. It’s a deceptively simple thing to cook; meat, some produce, condiments and a bun. Because of this, too many people fall into the pitfall mentioned above. A boring bun, dry meat, iceberg lettuce, American “cheese” French’s mustard, and Heinz ketchup.

line to grab a bite. Doctors standing with plumbers standing with office workers standing with cops. These kinds of places exemplify the idea of America the melting pot. But enough about their cultural implications, the reason everybody is there is the food. For well under ten bucks you walk away with a burger, fries and a drink. The burgers are typically untampered with, that is to say that they lack a lot of the fancier (and arguably unnecessary) toppings that are seen else where. The exceptions to that universally seem to be bacon and chili. The food is made fast, the fries are crispy, and for your health, I don’t recommend eating like that often. Simply put, I love these places.

Burgers, being the tricky things they are, are not easily fixed by reversing this paradigm. The reverse is true and there are a lot of restaurants who are guilty of dressing their burgers up too much. Aeoles, and designer cheese aren’t going to do much if the core components aren’t well prepared. I often finder burgers in this camp to be more about the auxiliary components than what should be the main player, the meat.

On the other end of the spectrum, fine eating establishments have pushed the boundaries of have a burger can be. Perhaps the biggest difference between a fancy burger and a burger from a fast food place is the quality of ingredients. I don’t mean to sound like a total yuppy, but I like organic, free range, grass-fed beef. A lot. And I like artisan cheeses, and gourmet breads, and fancy cheese, and heirloom tomatoes. I like all of them and I am happy to pay for them. The quality of meat is a pretty big deal for me. Cheap ground chuck is totally awesome and (as a person with a very limited amount of money to spend on anything) I really appreciate it, but there is a big taste difference between that and, oh, say, kobe beef. To compound this, one of the big differences (at least in my experience) between a fast food burger and a restaurant burger is the ability to chose how it is cooked. I like my meat pretty rare and getting to order a burger that is really juicy (and this is another of the challenges in ordering a burger, too many people over cook it, or serve it rare) is a great joy.

But enough about what I dislike, lets talk about what is good. Fast food places have a very important niche that they fill. And I want to clarify that by fast food, I do not mean corporate joints, but instead just affordable, quick, delightfully greasy mom and pop places. I love going to places like this on a weekday around noon. You see kind of person in every kind of job-place uniform standing in

Both of the aforementioned burgers are wonderful in their own way, but, this is where it gets a little philosophically confusion. Can something that cost an order of magnitude more than something else that seemingly shares nothing outside of their base most components truly be called the same thing? Which is the real burger? If you think about it in a historical context, I have to give it to the

fast food. These burgers are cheap, quick and thoroughly tasty food for the working man. On the other hand, approaching my question from the angle of a great enthusiast of the culinary arts, restaurant burgers done correctly can be delightful. They represent the best ingredients served in extremely well designed packages.

I could go back and forth on this all day, so I will end this internal debate by saying simply that I love both, and each is perfect in it’s own way. The way I see it, a burger is a good meat sandwich, with some other things in the mix to make the meat look even better, and that’s a working definition that fits both. I don’t eat either very often, but when I do indulge in either direction, I enjoy them immensely. With that settled, I will illustrate the genesis of my own “perfect” burger.

My first question was what meat to use. Now, my traditionalist tendencies instantly brought me to the conclusion of beef. Beef is the classic burger meat, but that doesn’t mean it is the only option. I have had wonderful turkey, lamb and even ostrich burgers, but the pinnacle of non-beef burger meats is, at least in my mind, bison. I adore bison. It is lean, and very flavorful. Next up was the bun. I do like the good-old-fashion sesame seed bun, but it didn’t seem right for my burger. I do enjoy more up-scale bun options like cibatta and brioche, and that is what I went with. Breads like this offer the eater a nice crunch on the outside and a delightful, slightly chewy texture on the inside. Cheese is huge for me. American serves a purpose but not on this burger. There are a lot of fancier cheeses that I love too, but a lot of times, I feel like they are too strong. For my burger, I took a cue from another sandwich titan, the philly cheese steak. There are a lot of cheese steak cheeses, but provolone is a perennial favorite. It is nice and melty and has a great cheese flavor, but not an over powering one.

In terms of what to put on my burger, mayo is a must.

In fact, it is the only condiment I added, and I didn’t use much. I do love ketchup, but mostly for it’s ability to hide the flavors of things I dislike, and seeing as I want to taste every component in my magnum opus of a hamburger, I would have no room for it. The final piece of my burger was something I added to sate my love of spiciness. I decided to go with a roasted pablano peppers cooked down with some caramelized onions. Nothing too fancy, or too spicy, just a nice way to compliment my choice of meat.

Basically, it was a good burger that I will eat again.

The meat was at the forefront and the other players just served to support its role. And basically, that brings me back to my early conclusion; a burger is a good meat sandwich with other nice things on it that compliment the meat. And burgers of all kinds are wondrous. Dressed up or simple, burgers are awesome.

In This Issue:

AT AT MM Fall 2011

• The Art of the Busk Bingo at 7, Bed at 8

Blu-Ray Blus

The Amazing Invisible Bookshelf Quick Broccoli, Stilton and Walnut Quiche

Coffee Brewer Head to Head •

8 & counting

ATOM

Atom’s editors take a look back at what they’ve done.

T

he first time I ever wrote anything with Brendan and Spencer, my heart was pounding and I felt like I was going to throw up. If you’ve ever met them, you know what an intimidating creative team they are. They’ve been working together for years and have a well-honed sense of each other’s creative capacity. They are fasting talking, loud, blunt and opinionated, they like to argue things out, and they can come up with 20 different ideas on one subject in 5 minutes. It is an intimidating area to step into.

And yet, and yet, the boys are also the kindest, most giving people I’ve ever worked with. They’ll listen to any idea, no matter how vague or silly, and find something great in it to expand upon. What first looked like and felt to me like arguing actually turned out to be an extremely honest and non-judgmental exchange of ideas. It became clear to me, 10 minutes into our first writing session, that Brendan and Spencer are not just a good team, they are the writing team you want to be a part of. Because they love sharing ideas, they love writing, and they love writing as a team. I started working with them almost 3 years ago, writing comedy once a week, and I’ve never looked back.

Three years ago, the three of us were in a writing group with a few friends from high school. Each week we would get together and share what we were working on—essays, sketches, stories, etc.—and then give critiques and suggestions. Pretty quickly these meetings would turn into all of us pitching random sketch ideas and then laughing hysterically.

As other members of the writing group began to fall away, Brendan, Spencer, and I kept meeting and writing and laughing until it was just the three of us, writing sketches and songs once a week. ATOM evolved out of these sessions.

Our “writers room” was, and still is, one of the most accepting, intense creative environments I’ve ever worked in.

Because when you come to the Atom table, you better be ready to explain yourself...in detail. Spencer especially likes to talk things out. Loudly. With creative, descriptive expletives. For a long time. As I said before, at the beginning this felt/looked like an argument. But as I learned, what is actually happening is a sort of test—can your idea stand up if I pull it apart? How much do you actually care about this creative choice? What are all the angles of your idea? Help me to understand your thinking. It can be exhausting, but the ideas that come out of these conversations are strong and sturdy and complete. We suggest and question and add to things and at the end we have what we hope is the best possible version of the idea. It isn’t easy and it certainly isn’t a short process, but it does yield some amazing results (including the thing you are currently holding in your digital hands).

Collaborating is work, especially when no one lives in the same city or time zone, and it can be hard, but it is also so much easier with more than one brain working on things. I am incredibly grateful to call these two crazy guys my writing partners and to share this project with them. Creative projects can often feel like tightrope walking without a net—you are putting one foot in front of another, trying to keep things balanced and moving forward without falling into the abyss. But when you have partners, the net suddenly appears. There are other people helping to keep the balance and insuring that you move forward, no matter what happens. Because at the end of the day, you are all in it together. And that’s half the battle right there.

-Ashleigh

I

don’t have much of an attention span. In fact, I don’t really have any attention span to speak of. I do, however, have lots of ideas for things that I want to do. I want to write and produce plays, paint pictures of birds on skateboards, plant a garden, cook a five course meal, go surfing, and I want to do all of these things all at once. I can’t tell you who many half started scripts there are on my hard drive and I have the third piece of a triptych all laid out to be painted so that it might someday be hung on the wall. I’m a spazz, I get it.

But for almost two years now, my dear friends and I have succeeded in producing something; a magazine.

Every three months, we put together something that I am extremely proud of. More over, every issue, I am more proud of it. We didn’t have a clue when we started, and I would argue we still don’t, but we are, in bold defiance of ourselves, making something cool. And that in itself is cool. We make something, something tangible and something other people can see and respond to. We don’t do it because of all the money we are making (we aren’t), we do it because it is rewarding. We all have a lot on our plate besides this (work, friends, family, boring adult crap), but Atom remains important for us to take the time and work on the next issue. Since Atom started, we have all subsequently moved to different cities, and though we can’t spend our nights in Ashleigh’s mom and dad’s dining room putting the issues together, we still take the time to get on the phone and figure it out.

But enough about everyone else, lets talk about me. This magazine has been the creative outlet that I needed. I am not bored, and, even better, I keep feeling excited about the next issue. Because of Atom, I have built a greenhouse, talked to a presidential candidate, built and operated a submarine, cooked a lot of cool food, watched all five X-Men movies back to back to back to back to back, and gotten to meet a ton of cool people. My favorite thing about Atom is that I don’t seem to be the only one having fun. The people who contribute have been enthusiastic, creative, and excited to see the whole thing come together. I was never a big team sports person, so maybe I am way off base here, but I feel like working on Atom with all these cool people is probably akin to being apart of a team. Admittedly, we don’t get awesome uniforms, but we work, create something cool, and one time, we even bowled together. It was awesome, you should have been there.

I’m not saying that you should run out and start your own magazine. In fact, whatever you do, don’t do that. You can’t compete with us! What I am saying is that having an outlet is huge. Make a thing! It is a wonderful feeling to create something, with your own two hands (and computer), and have a tangible product to see at the end. I have loved, and will continue to love making Atom magazine.

It is often hard and takes a lot of time, but it is worth it every single time. Before I go, I want to thank everyone who has helped us have this awesome experience from the people you write our articles, to the people who have printed our issues, to the people who read them, to our families and friends who support us. Thank you all.

-Spencer

I

t feels like we’ve been doing this magazine forever.

Although we’re just at 8 issues, the repetitive motions of coming up with a theme, asking for contributions and all the rest that goes into each issue feel like second nature. It’s a regular thing now. It’s gotten easier over time but the thing that always shocks me is how much we’ve grown as a magazine.

Looking at the first issue, I feel like we took a lot of risks that have paid off more and more as we’ve conceived and produced each issue.

Working with Spencer came naturally– we’ve been creatively active for more years than I’d like to openly admit.

Ashleigh was a bit of an x-factor at first but she keeps us boys grounded and gives us a unique point of view and isn’t afraid to let us know if something isn’t working or flat out sucks. She is terrific in brainstorming situations and often comes up with ideas when Spencer and I have run dry. She’s the kind of person every creative project needs in order to truly succeed.

I’m particularly proud of our Zine issue. It took a lot of work but we made our own honest-to-goodness zine and photocopied it, just like the real zinesters. I would have liked to silkscreen stuff too but perhaps another time will have to do. The genesis of that particular issue involves going to a zine show and being the outcasts amongst outcasts. We felt like we had a lot in common with the other people at the zine show given that we, too, were in the self-publishing racket. I was extremely excited when I managed to get an interview with Mark Frauenfelder, and, subsequently, a mention on his website Boing Boing.

One thing I’ve learned how to do with Atom is to keep a deadline. It’s really easy to put off projects that you really want to do because of some reason or another. But, it’s important to remember that a deadline is a promise that you make to yourself. Unless there are extenuating circumstances, you should always strive to finish what you start. Atom takes a lot of time and energy (especially when it’s getting close to said deadline) and it is really easy to put off the work. But we’ve kept it going!

Atom has led us in so many different directions. I’ve helped Spencer build a Submarine and a coffee roaster, as well as a magical bookshelf (see past Build sections for these). We’ve gotten up close and personal with honeybees and sampled their delicious honey. I discovered what real honey is supposed to taste like, although my fear of bees remains mostly intact (I’d say it’s a healthy respect for the little guys at this point).

Sometimes I’m too humble about what we’ve done with this thing. In reality, it’s a pretty impressive feat. We’ve accomplished a lot and it’s great to hear from our readers about how much they like each issue. The experience is one that few undertake and, I think, even fewer execute time and time again. Most people would have quit at this point. But here we are, keeping it going for ourselves, for our readers and for our contributors.

-Brendan

Myths & Legends of the creative mind

By W. Clay

I

am one of those creative types. This isn’t a boast, just a statement of fact. And to be honest, creativity is actually more of a curse than a blessing because it often comes, at least in my case, without the needed skills to do the actual “creating.” It also dries up like a stream in summertime when you least expect it (or need it most). But I’ve learned to live with the mulish nature of my creative animal and I go where it takes me (and right now that place is here, writing this article to you, dear reader).

Now, one thing I do have a big problem with, is the public perception of creativity and creative people – not the negative stereotypes, because they are usually true, but the mythical image many have of the so-called “creative” genius and how that genius is fueled. There have been many creative geniuses throughout the history of humanity (and probably prehistory, too, if you count painting bison on cave walls after tricking them into running off of cliffs) and although their creative endeavors have often left us awestruck, their lives have often been destructive, self-indulgent, and brief. Although I am not a genius, I have suffered through many of the same travails as greater men and women, and unlike them, I am still alive. So, here are some fiendish myths I would like to dispel:

1. hol: ns? o c l d A hampio n a s g C Dru fast of k Brea e h T

Drugs and Alcohol do not fuel creativity. Quite the opposite, they are what creative types use when creativity becomes a problem. Now, I understand that many great artists and writers were raging alcoholics and drug addicts, but this was not directly coupled to their creativity. Case in point: Charles Bukowski was a drinker and he wrote about drinking, but getting drunk while reading one of his books will not make you a better writer. Hemingway gripped the bottle with his big hairy man hands and wrote manly stories about manly men who drank manly drinks while doing manly things with manly women. But did he drink and write at the same time? Most likely not. There is a stage of drunkenness I refer to as “Hemingway Drunk” when I am able to look at things I usually take for granted and make terse, shallow observations about them. Fortunately I neglect to write any of them down. Many have tried to fuel the creative flame with booze, but it usually ends up quenching it instead.

Drugs are even worse, especially the hard stuff. Heroin? Forget about it. Want to torpedo a career in art, music, or film? Get hooked. The problem is: when you are high, you might be happy, but you can’t do anything else. If you move, you will puke your guts out. If you aren’t high, then you are coming down and will need to score soon. Try writing a symphony, punk rock anthem, or seminal poem while you’re wondering which dirty alley on the dark side of town you will need to explore to get your next fix. Doesn’t leave much time to milk the creative teat. Yes, Lou Reed wrote songs about heroin and he is still alive and creating something that almost sounds like music, but if you want good examples, think of Sid Vicious, Basquiat, Johnny Thunders and Kurt Cobain, all dead and only romantically so if you are a complete idiot. Or better yet, consider Marianne Faithfull, alive if only technically, a revenant of her former self - croaking her way through standards and forced to use other people’s memories to reconstruct her own memoirs.

Now, while I’ve heard that most of Hollywood performs best while coked-up, Hollywood and creativity usually reside in separate solar systems. Coke will fuck you up, too – like high-class crystal meth: 24+ hours of get up and go, the libido to impregnate half of the San Fernando Valley, a walloping surge of narcissism – then you’re crashing to Earth like a fallen hero. It will consume you in the same way that the so-called creative industries will (which is why so many musicians/actors/directors/producers are users/abusers). And don’t forget about the Speedball - like peanut butter and chocolate, cocaine and heroin make an irresistible combination. It is also an express ticket to the morgue. Notable experts on this include but are not limited to: John Belushi, River Phoenix, Chris Farley, Layne Staley, and the bass player from EMF.

3

Pot isn’t so bad inasmuch as it won’t kill you unless you drive your car into a pole or drown in a river (thanks, Jeff Buckley). But, although it is really nice for winding down after a hard day at work, it seriously blurs the line between “taking the edge off” and “blunting it beyond recognition”. Back when I used to smoke weed more or less constantly, I really couldn’t care less if I created anything and when I did, I either forgot it or forgot where I put it. “Shit, man, I wrote that down somewhere, didn’t I?” Although it can be an impassible fog enshrouding the creative highway, pot is great for nihilism and underachieving without regret; and if you are a purveyor of stoner rock or stoner metal, you’d best start hittin’ the pipe pronto.

Hallucinogens? Think about Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, or Skip Spence, and not as they were in the late ‘60s photos where they had awesome hair, flared velvet trousers and goofy looks on their faces, but when they were obese, hairless, and confused, or grimy, homeless, and spelunking in dumpsters for sustenance. Sure, they probably had adult onset schizophrenia to contend with as well, but rampant consumption of Acid turned their minds into psychedelic coleslaw. And don’t forget about Brian Wilson who went insane while trying to write the greatest collection of pop songs ever, and even playing a piano in a giant sandbox didn’t soothe his fractured mind. My first psychedelic experience? A bad trip on mescaline in New York City. I was on a subway that stopped in the tunnel for 30 minutes. But I was convinced it lasted 30 years. My last psychedelic experience? One of my students slipped acid in my drink at a Christmas party in back in ’99. I spent Christmas eve getting iced down by my Mom while I jerked around convulsively and screamed about spiders and trains. Somehow I neglected to put pen to paper during either ordeal.

Nicotine is a drug, too. And what I can’t figure out is how starving artists manage to afford to smoke. When I was young, and smoking was still cool, we would drive down to Kentucky to pick up cartons for 50 cents on the dollar (which made it cheaper than eating). Now smoking is a luxury that only addicts can truly afford. Plus with pricy vegan meals and microbrews added to the creative diet, we’re getting into trust fund territory. Notwithstanding the whole lung cancer thing (because if you are a smoker you don’t give a rat’s rectum anyway), cigarettes don’t deliver that much bang for the buck. For my money, coffee is a better addiction, and I can’t think of anyone famous who has died from drinking it.

2.

Better to Bur

n out Than F ade Away

Thanks a lot, Neil Young. But let’s take Neil as an example: fat, sassy, breathing, productive, rich. If that is fading away, I’ll take it. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, Brian Jones, Bon Scott, Mozart, Edgar Allan Poe would rather be alive than dead (maybe not Poe, actually).

Jim Morrison did not want to draw his last breath soaking in the bathtub and Elvis and Lenny Bruce would rather not have died on the toilet. Now, would they have tarnished their legacies by creating mediocre material and becoming porcine? Probably. But Morrison actually liked being fat, so he had a lot to live for.

3.

We romanticize those who die young because we are afraid of growing old, and we hate to see reminders of it. We like to imagine ourselves as perpetually 27, like Jimi Hendrix at the height of his brilliance and whisked away to rock star heaven. Nothing wrong with that, but if our brains don’t even mature physically until age 23, why not enjoy the fruits of wisdom as long as we can? What if you are a late bloomer, or slow and fastidious in the creation of your masterpieces? In that case, old age is a comfort. Robert Pollard (Guided by Voices) didn’t hit his stride (or penetrate the public consciousness) until his mid-forties and his (ludicrously high) musical output has actually increased since he hit his sixties. Creativity is in no way bound up with youth, even if we prefer our artists to look young and pretty (or be dead).

Catharsis ≠ Art

Ever been through a painful experience? Ever write about it? Sure, we all did at one time or another, but it isn’t art. Angst might provide fuel for the creative mind, but that pain is ultimately meaningless without a certain level of understanding. It takes real skill to turn that nasty stuff into something that other people want to experience (let alone pay for). Remember the music you listened to or the films you watched that completely echoed your state of mind or encapsulated the way you were feeling? The creators were consciously trying to get into your head and they succeeded because they knew what was going on in theirs. How did the Smiths so perfectly manage to articulate what it was like to be a miserable, misunderstood teenager? Morrissey spent close to a decade figuring it out before he stepped in front of a microphone – his removal from his teenage years provided objective distance. All of that poetry and prose I wrote my sophomore year of college after the traumatic end of my first romantic relationship? Complete garbage. Fortunately, I saved it all on 3.5” floppy discs which will never again see the light of day (hallelujah).

4.

5.

Creativity as a Meal Ticket

Sorry about this, but getting paid to be creative is really tough. Since ideas don’t float around with price tags and UPCs, they are kind of hard to monetize. There are artists with flourishing careers, musicians that actually turn a profit, film directors who get to turn their ideas into multi-million dollar extravaganzas (or frugal, overly verbose snore-fests), Ad-men who commodify ideas for the express purpose of selling more commodities, and writers who sit around all day writing. They are the minority and it took a combination of talent, hard work, and magic for them to get where they are.

Everyone else has a day job – and that isn’t actually a bad thing. Selling ideas for a living is both stressful and at times unfulfilling, and while it doesn’t necessarily lead straight to prostitution (figuratively speaking), it can lead to unfortunate compromises in quality for the sake of quantity. Now, if you get to keep your ideas for yourself, while pulling in a paycheck for washing dishes, pouring drinks, delivering packages, euthanizing kittens, collecting military secrets for the North Koreans, that is in many ways preferable. Although it may lack the acclaim of being a paid artiste, in my experience, keeping the art side and the business side separate is pretty nice (kind of like the McDLT – undoubtedly McDonald’s most creative sandwich). Now, if you truly want and need to get paid for your art, put on some tight pants and start whoring (literally).

Well, this is no myth, sorry to say. Real artists seldom make appointments and they almost never keep them. When your head is so full of ideas, it is impossible to be accountable to the whims and wiles of mere mortals. Ever wonder why clubs often double and triple book shows? It is because a band stands a 50% chance of showing up, and once there, only a 75% chance of actually setting foot on stage. And it is important for the bona fide film artiste to blow off meetings with producers, agents and financial backers (for fear of the opportunity of selling out). A true visionary must be difficult to deal with – that is part of the charm.

This kind of behavior is expected in the creative community, so brace yourself if you plan on being one or dealing with these types. If you are a photographer, be prepared to shoot landscapes if your model doesn’t show up; and if she does, don’t be prepared to take photographs. If you are a director, expect at least half of your cast and crew to bail on you before the cameras start rolling; and if they don’t, make sure to throw a tantrum. If you are a lead singer, learn an instrument in case you have to do an impromptu solo set. If you are a drummer be prepared to jump to a band with a better lead singer. If you are a bass player, you are kind of screwed.

But annoying eccentricity is not universal – there is a silent minority of us who are actually quite responsible and dependable. Some of us like deadlines (even if we occasionally blow them) and being known for “professionalism” (the dreaded p-word). There aren’t a whole lot of myths and legends about conscientious geniuses that took the time to thank their benefactors, rock stars that showed up and played on time and in tune, or film directors that directed their films to completion without incident. These stories are boring and we want our creative types to be as edgy as the content they create.

e

People ar Creative Flaky

In one of the men’s rooms in the Ohio University art building is a snippet of graffiti which says:

.

“Art not Artists”

It made me chuckle the first time I read it, but subconsciously it resonated. The creation is the important thing, not the creator, so why succumb to the clichés of the artistic lifestyle?

Going off the rails might be fun, but it creates nothing – it only leaves behind a train wreck.

Bad Examples

Charlie Parker Jackson Pollock Earnest Hemingway Tony Scott James Dean Sid Vicious Thomas Kincade

Good Examples Sonny Rollins Max Beckmann Stephen King Ridley Scott Marlon Brando Johnny Ramone Bob Ross

SWIMSWIMSWIM SWIM

By Boran Vukajlovic

M

F

or over seven years I have been ready to jump headfirst into the deep waters and swim. Swim to a distant coastline with no ropes to pull me back in, no lighthouses to guide the way; Only the confidence and the will, or else that powerful need to be anywhere else but here.

So I took a running leap, and dove.

The urge to hang left or right, to make for a safe harbor at the onset of this journey is great, but not as great as my repulsion of it.

And so, here I am, out in the open waters, floating. Floating with the other floaters, finding that we’re all eager to hang onto each other for support. Not necessarily hang on to the person closest to us, but until the right person comes up, this will do. Maybe our destination is the same. Maybe we just really click in spite of the destination. But, we all float.

Of the things to contend with, perhaps the most curious is that of not wanting to climb aboard the passing yachts. They too float, steadily and securely, with maps and navigation systems.

They have ports of arrival and ports of destination, precisely plotted paths and opportunities to deviate and very easily find their way back.

When I climb aboard a yacht every part of my being needs to be able to say: “This yacht is mine, I bought it, I own it!”

I still haven’t found my port of destination.

I don’t swim well; Mine technique is poor, stamina worse. I can barely sustain myself above the water while going forward.

Freestyle is a terrific technique for covering a lot of ground quickly and I can do it well enough for a moment before tiring, and to say nothing of being able to sustain the tempo necessary to catch air.

The breaststroke is much more manageable, air easier to replenish and the tempo far easier to sustain. It’s not the speediest of the techniques and it requires a more significant amount of strength to generate propulsion, but it is the most comfortable one pull off. It’s far more forgiving on a novice swimmer looking to get better, and so, while not getting me anywhere fast, I look to it to develop my skills.

Now the backstroke I cannot do. I’ve never bothered with it before because the other two were far more attractive looking when I was learning to swim that I never bothered with the backstroke. When I have tried it, I drifted off course, into other swimmers, out of the lanes. It has to be mastered to survive out here. I need to breathe.

All of them have to be mastered. My body needs to be developed into a powerful tool to complete the crossing, to survive.

The thing about this journey, the destination is ever present but it is not important. The journey’s the thing. The road taken to improve myself, discover who I am, and what I’m capable of, and how far I’m willing to push myself to get further than I’ve gotten, that’s the thing.

I have expectations and goals, the beauty, however, is that there is no way to fail; not that I’ll necessarily get where I’m going now, but that at the end of it all I’ll have gotten somewhere. I’ll have done it on my own terms. I’ll have had a journey with the people and friends I met along the way, and whether in a yacht, a rowboat, or swimming, I’ll have had a wake of an adventure behind me.

5 Ways to Beat I ronically I’m sitting here in front of my computer trying to start this article about how to beat creative block and I have no idea how or where to start.

(3) Every person who’s ever had to write essays in school has come upon the terrible beast known as writer’s block and I’m guessing that moment comes in the wee hours of the morning the night before it’s due. Am I right?

Of course I’m right. The only thing more damaging to a procrastinator’s success than procrastination is creative block and (4, 1) the goal of this article is to lay out what I’ve found to be the five best means of getting over that block (1) in order to help future generations survive those long, long nights. By now I’m sure that you’ve noticed the citations in his article. I’ve included these citations to illustrate where and how I’ve gotten over my writer’s block while working on this article. (4, 1) Hopefully this guide will aide you in all your future creative efforts and/or otherwise help you achieve your means. As you can see, I couldn’t have completed this article without them.

1.Work on something else - When you put down the project that’s giving you trouble and pick up something else you don’t interrupt your flow (1) which allows you keep the first project on the back burner while still being productive.

2. Turn it upside down

-Looking at something from a different prospective can help you see the work you’ve already done with fresh eyes. Once you get away from the stagnation of trying to find what needs to change on something that you’ve all but memorized you’ll be able to see (4) something you didn’t before. For literary endeavors, try reading what you’ve written out loud to yourself to see if listening to it instead of reading it sparks your imagination.

Creative Block

By Erin Brown

3. Keep going anyways! - Sometimes trying to

get the creative juices flowing is like trying to get a dried-out pen to write. If you keep on writing, eventually something good will come out even if the rest of it is shit. This method is best used when you feel as though you’ve got the answer to your quandary right on the tip of your tongue.

4. Take a break

- Taking a break from what you’re working on when you’re experiencing creative block gets your mind off of the problem and helps you clear your thoughts. Once your mind is distracted by something else it allows you to go back to the problem later with a fresh perspective.

- Nothing is precious! If you’ve gone through all the other methods and still haven’t separated yourself from your block, then maybe what you’re doing just isn’t going to work. If this is the case try giving up on what you’ve already started and start fresh with a blank page or canvas. I recommend combining method 4 and 5 for best results.

5. Scrap it!

just saying thanks

By Spencer Sands

Dear Leather JacketI wanted to thank you so much for a number of things. First off, you keep me warm. I know I don’t need you as often as a used to, what with us living in LA now, but when it does get cold, I know I can always count on you. Beyond your intended purpose, I want to thank you for being the adult male equivalent of a security blanket. When I wear you, I feel confident and as close to cool as I ever get. I feel ready for anything when I’m wearing you and I can’t say that about any other piece of clothing that I own. Again, thank you for everything you do for me, you are an amazing jacket.

Your Pal, Spencer

A

s the holiday season has come to an end, I find myself doing what I do religiously after any gift-giving event: writing like a quarterbazillion thank you cards. I think thank you cards are a charming, if not sort of forgotten, art. I know from personal experience that being on the receiving end of one is deeply gratifying and makes the practice of giving gifts all the more worth while. I have written my fair share of cards to the people who have given me gifts, but I got to thinking about the non-human, non-living things that have done things for me over the course of the years. It bothers me that I have never properly thanked them for the things that do for me everyday.

Hey 2000 Honda Civic EXI just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to you for being so great. I really appreciate just about everything about you. From the amazing adventures we’ve been on together, to the simple shelter you offer me all the time, to the non-stop reliability that you have given to me, I say from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Looking at your millage, I realized that you have just about travelled the distance from the earth to the Moon (238,000 miles), and that is amazing. I promise to keep up with your maintenance so that together we can complete the return trip (from the Moon that is). I know that words can never repay your kindness, but I’ll say it anyway—thank you so much.

XOXO, Spencer

Dear BedI don’t say this enough, but I love you. Truly, there are no words to describe the joy you bring me and my aching joints on a nightly basis. I want to point out that it is your teamwork that impresses me so. From the firm sponginess of the memory foam mattress topper, to the coziness of the flannel sheets and pillowcases, to the heavy warmth of the quilt my mother gave us, in tandem, you are a godsend. You are the very definition of comfort, and some of my happiest moments in a given week are reading in you, playing with the cats on you, or snuggling up to me sweetie in you right before we turn out the lights.

Thank you for all the happiness you’ve given me. You’re the best.

Love and Hugs, Spencer

bsc

By Ashleigh Hill

T

wice monthly, my enterprising roommate, Kyla, and I throw the door of our Brooklyn apartment open to host a dinner party for 10-12 people. It is called Backyard Supper Club (BSC) and it is one of my favorite projects. What started as a way to make rent on an apartment that was too good to pass up quickly became a restaurant start-up with the goal of introducing people to vegetarian cooking and bringing friends together from far and wide.

With nearly 6 months of suppers under our belts, we’ve gotten the pre-party prep down to an almost science, but we’ve also both discovered that, more than being prepared, prepping for supper club is a right brain dominant task. It is constant creative problem solving, crowd reading, and energy setting. With this in mind, here is my list of four necessities (or trappings, if you will) to make throwing a dinner party a less daunting, actually fun task.

1) A List.

Yes. First on my list is make a list. The day of the event or, even better, the night before. Write down all the tasks you yourself need to do plus any tiny things you need to remember. It doesn’t have to be full sentences or even entire ideas.

“Toilet paper” is a frequent feature on my pre-BSC list, which reminds me not only to insure that my guests have access to bathroom tissue, but also reminds me to clean my bathroom and put away all the nail polish on the bathroom counter.

“Table” is also one that is on there each and every time we do hold Supper Club. Obviously I’m going to set and decorate a table for a dinner party, but having it on the list not only puts it on my radar but also gives me the satisfaction of eventually crossing it off. Making a list gives you guidance. It gives you a path. It allows you to be flexible and a little relaxed on event day. A list is your friend.

2) Place Cards (and a Seating Chart).

It seems oddly formal to have place cards and a seating chart at a dinner party, but let me tell you, it has become our secret weapon. Because here is the deal—even in a room full of friends, everyone just wants to know where they go. By taking 5 minutes and planning a seating chart and then setting out place cards, you are creating the parameters of your dinner party. You, as the host, are thinking about the flow of conversation and, therefore, the flow of energy at your event.

There’s nothing worse than having a couple sit next to each other in the middle of the table and only talk to one another while everyone else tries to make friends around them. Be thoughtful with your seating chart and then let it do the work for you. I guarantee you it will make the entire evening run so much more smoothly. Plus, no awkward “where do I sit?” shuffle at the beginning of dinner.

3) Music.

Dear god, music. Please have music playing (not too loudly) in the background through the entirety of the dinner party, including during the moments-before-people-arrive scramble. Music literally puts energy into the air and keeps it moving around as people arrive and the evening gets started. It can help keep conversations going as well as fill any lulls in conversation. Whether you are playing it from your iPhone or you are spinning vintage records (we choose the latter at BSC), music is your friend. Give a musically-inclined friend the job of being in charge of the record flip or iPod mixing. People love having a job, especially if it is one they are good at. Helpful hint—pick more upbeat music as people arrive and the meal gets started and then settle into something more mellow as the evening progresses. Music should flow in the same way as the party’s energy—high at the beginning (everyone is excited to be there) and then ebb to a nice close toward the end.

4) An Activity.

Now this is pretty vague and I apologize for that, but here’s the deal—having a dinner party is an event. People carve out time in their schedules, they call a sitter, they put on a nice outfit (we at BSC typically ask for 4th date casual wear). They make an effort. You have to make an effort too, an effort beyond dinner. Yes, you really do. You have to make an effort to entertain them. A beautiful meal is great, but they could make a beautiful meal in their pajamas. They are coming to your house for an experience. And you are there to give it to them. Plan a thing for people to do, whether it is cocktails or a cheese plate sampling or whatever. No one wants to get to your house and then sit twiddling his or her thumbs until the meal is served. At BSC, we color. Yes, that’s right. At a dinner party for grown ups, the activity is coloring. Each time I set the Supper Club table, I cover it with butcher paper for no other reason than I like the aesthetic. One evening in the fall a Supper Club attendee asked if we had any pens or crayons (this person obviously knew Kyla and I all too well, we have crayons coming out of our ears). Coloring implements were produced and everyone happily grabbed a Crayola and went to town, which was a miracle because Kyla and I were a few minutes behind on work and had nothing to fill the time between the guests’ arrival and the first course. Everyone loved it and drew all around their place at the table—comments on the meal, portraits of their neighbor, praise for the BSC, absent-minded doodles. It gave everyone something to occupy the part of their brain that might be nervous about the meal or meeting new people or staying out too late on a Sunday. It literally gave everyone something to do, since none of them were there to help in the kitchen. Butcher paper and crayons are now staples of my table settings. I’ll never go back.

Featured Photographer:

Don Thor Gaspar II

O D

N W

W O

By Fordy Shoor

N

ote to reader: To recover this account, find the third bench on the Bronx bound platform of the #2 train and reach underneath to find a document attached with chewing gum.

Yours truly.

It was the best part of the burrito. When I first got hold of it, I felt my heart hurling like a centrifuge in my chest.

There’s nothing in the world quite like a fit to bust burrito butt, brimming with all the juices that had dribbled down while it was being eaten. I chewed at the tender flour tortilla, picking out little flakes of foil as I went. I ground the filling between my teeth and the rich taste of sour cream and guacamole spread across my taste buds. My eyes rolled back in my head with ecstasy. There really is nothing quite like it. I decided to recall this as a momentous breakfast, placing the moment in an ornate gold frame and hanging it the back of my memory. It’d stay there and I could stare at it next time I had a particularly foul meal.

Those types of memories have become so powerful to me over the years, so vivid. Once I saw the fat little thing peeking out of the garbage can, glaring like a beacon in the fog, I could anticipate it all. Those complex tastes, the dynamic consistency, the smell of the chicken grilling in the restaurant, the background ambience of fuzzy mariachi music and food frying. It had been maybe 7 9 or so years since I’d even been in a restaurant but those tiny details flooded my senses.

By the time I ate the burrito, I didn’t even notice the oversour taste of the cream, the browned avocado or the gristled rot of the meat. I was in that Puerto Rican restaurant in Brooklyn, sitting next to a blown out salsa-only jukebox that balanced on peeling linoleum floors, drinking tamarind soda and eating paper thin tortilla chips, taking the last bite of the best damn burrito I had ever tasted.

As the juice dribbled down my chin, a young man in a suit walked by me and as he passed onto the platform, having held his breath before approaching me, he let it go with a pneumatic force.

This was at the Canal Street Station, probably early in the morning, but not too early as the train frequency had begun to pick up. About an hour later my stomach started grumbling and I decided to relieve myself off the edge of the platform. You know, it tasted amazing going in and it was relieving to have it out and that was all I needed to know. That was maybe five years ago. It was my birthday, I think.

I try to vary my diet as much as I can, usually picking up a candy bar or a bag of chips twice a week from the underground vendors uptown. Sometimes if I feel like treating myself, I get one of those hot, homemade churros the Mexican families sell down at Canal Street and Spanish Harlem. In the Good Book, Tony says that food combining is a great therapeutic treatment for depression and I have personally found it very helpful. So, I usually supplement something I buy with something I’ve found and, let me tell you, it really makes a difference. I haven’t had what you would call a full meal since I came down here in the Summer of 2000 but that’s not to say I haven’t had full-filling meals.

The actual day I went underground is vague to me. I took the last of the change from my pocket and walked through that turnstile. I can remember the feeling of the cool metal of the pole as it turned against my pelvis the moment I walked through. It was quite remarkable. I remember how remarkable it was that, especially through

a long wool coat, I could feel that soothing coldness. I remember it was sweltering outside. It was the middle of July in the hottest, nastiest city I’ve ever taken a breath in.

I’d seen three people faint that day, one of the street folk, a pregnant lady and a burly old construction worker just collapse. That one had heat stroke or, knowing the size of that guy, just a plain stroke. Either way every part of my epidermis (that’s skin, by the way) was slick with sweat and the wool coat wasn’t helping. Yeah, I had on a wool coat in July and I can explain.

I had simply given up. This wasn’t the type of giving up a young child whines over or that of an incapable man trying to fix a car or even a successful suicide victim. This is the type of giving up that most can’t conceive of, a kind that, well, if you could conceive of it, you’d have thrown in the towel long ago. No, this kind of giving up is the big kind. The living suicide. The kind when you don’t even see yourself as worthy of suicide by your own hands.

The kind where, one day, you gain consciousness to find yourself walking down Union Square at 2:00 on a July afternoon wearing boxers, a pair of sneakers and a wool coat. I could see myself as my body walked through a fog.

I thought I couldn’t get any lower until I saw the Metro stop and realized that, in fact, I could. And the first thing I felt after that thought was the icy metal of the turnstile through my wool coat. The further away I get from that day, I remember less and less. Those memories dissipate like steam. My life seems like a vague passage from an obtuse book read long ago; but the hospitable touch of that turnstile remains clear as ever.

Those days never were very eventful. My life here is rich and complex. I’m always meeting new people and trying new things. It’s almost like New York has two cities built just right on top of the other. People are always coming and going. I’ve been told that, at any given time, there are as many people in the subways as there are above ground. And that isn’t counting what you might know as a “homeless” or “hobo”. As far as we’re concerned, none of us are homeless. We’re all New Yorkers. Down here, your standard “hobo” is known as an Amphibian, one who will stay down here but has to come up for air every now and then, usually seasonal. For those who aren’t coming and going, we’ve made our neighborhoods.

Scum seems to originate from the far north tip of the city and it pools down at the south tip. That’s where you find the Junkies or the Killers. Usually both. Anywhere in between you get the usual continuum of Psychies and Brimstoners, but they don’t mean any harm; they just don’t know when to shut their mouths. The Happy Campers are usually family friendly, playing house in a closed off stop or water closet somewhere. Now the Subtrainians tend to live in groups between the supporting walls of the tracks but that’s a noisy, anxious type of living, not for the timid. The Coasters hop on the sides of trains and tend to live in the maintenance cars at the end of each line. As for me, I’m just Jarvis Carville. I have a few camps around, nothing special (four to be exact) but I generally prefer to stay mobile, open to the city and whatever it decides to throw at me.

I try to keep up with the times with some regularity but information usually comes in fits and spurts. I remember a few years ago that something happened up there. I knew it was the fall because it was hot but people were starting to wear jackets at night. Down here, we didn’t think much of it. We’d heard that some of the guys downtown were in trouble. We know a camp near the Cortlandt R, W train

was destroyed and the stop was closed for months. Robert told me some building was demolished or something.

A week or so later, the subways were nearly deserted. It was nice for us until it became like a police state down here. There were SWAT teams with machine guns at every stop and they were patrolling the subways. Most of us were driven out of camps and into hiding for most of the day and, since there were less people, there was less food and less of a chance of us finding it. If it wasn’t for those nice people giving us money and food with kind words we might not have made it. I was confused myself but suddenly everybody was nice for a long while. Soon after though, like a crumple-free cellophane bag, it unfolded back into the same form of the old New York we call home. To this day, we’re still not quite sure what happened but, whatever it is, people don’t seem to want to talk about it when they’re down here. To be honest, most of us who still read didn’t care enough to investigate.

After all, if it’s something up there, there’s nothing we can do about it.

As far as other news, I hear people talk on cars at night and sometimes I thumb through some print. Usually whatever’s left around like papers, coupon books, socialist rags. The book’s I’ve collected over time are by far my favorite thing about my life. I think I used to read a lot but, to be honest, it’s not often I come across a real book. One night some time ago, I was hopping off a train at Canal street and I started to walk to the opposite platform when I saw something glinting in the light, floating down the river between the tracks. I hopped down onto the tracks and felt it for vibration to make sure another train wasn’t coming. You’d be surprised how fast they seem to come when you’re down there. I chased the thing for a few feet as it slipped down the stream. Its letters became clearer to me: Notes...From The Underground by...Fyodor Dost...

Dost...Dostoyevsky. So I read it and it was interesting, but not entertaining. I read it a second time and wondered why the man was so sad. I read it a third time to see if I got an answer. It was good, I guess. But there was only half of it so I don’t know what happened after. The best thing is that it gave me a name for my story: “Notes from the Under-Ground.” Get it?

Over the years, my collection has widened to four Nancy Drew mysteries, five Goosebumps, The Da Vinci Code, A Children’s Guide to Philosophy, Cosmos, Dianetics, a Bible, Gray’s Anatomy, A Webster’s Dictionary, Rainbow Six and of course Notes From The Underground. Oh yeah, and that one about L.A. and it’s a big secret or something.

Um. L.A. Secret? Anyways, I read that but now I use it as a table. The one that is really the crown jewel for me is a brilliant piece of literature that was given to me by a man in a suit. When I first came down here, like I said, I had given up. I spent my days nodding off, drunk on Anti-freeze and siphoned booze from lost bottles and jingling a cup of change. On one such day, I was shaking my cup with my Yankees cap that slouched down below my forehead when a sudden force hit my cup and knocked it down. I snapped upwards and looked around to notice a man in a charcoal pinstripe suit walking away briskly.

“Hey,” I yelled to the man, not quite knowing how I would follow up my proclamation.

The man kept walking, turning his head only slightly as he spoke, his words floating back to me in waves.

“Try reading it, you fucking wastrel. Maybe you’ll grow some bootstraps.”

I looked down to see that he had thrown a book at me. As I bent down to gather up my change, I flipped the thick yet light book over to see foreign words that now are so close to me that it’s difficult to remember what they looked like at first glance. “Unlimited Power: The New Science of Personal Achievement” they read in bold, confident letters. Then I saw the source of the letters below in italics: “by Anthony Robbins”. I folded the tome over and over in my hands until I hopped on the next train and started reading, not stopping until I had folded over the final page.

It was all suddenly clear. My life was in my hands and I was wasting it. All this potential for happiness that I deserved, I had squandered it. So, I quit the antifreeze and started to build my life, one page at a time. It wasn’t until some time later that my life began to change a little more drastically than I had expected.

It was a couple of weeks or months ago when I was on my way back to my Home Base Camp at the 14th St/7th Ave station when a railway preacher stepped into my car between stops. The young Brimstoner recited a monologue about Jesus and how he’s found the way and we’re all blind to the reality of our fates. It’s as though the speech was performed by a high school substitute teacher reading unfamiliar names off of a roll call sheet. The boy looked up as he spoke; whether it was to remember the speech or to receive the divine words from above, we will never know. I can imagine the words were dictated to him by an aloof and preoccupied God and reinterpreted by the preacher. Or maybe his God was enthusiastic and he caught the preacher at a moment of exhaustion. Whatever it is, something feels lost in translation. Maybe he needs to know other people believe in it to help validate meaning for him. Or maybe he just doesn’t care. Maybe he just assumes that by sacrificing something he’s growing meaning for himself, even if it’s a sense of dignity that he gives up. I guess everybody needs to believe something.

When I hopped off the train, I saw a man in a moth eaten suit, a uniform that had once recalled now lost financial prestige. He didn’t approach me, assuming I had nothing to offer him. These White Collar Hobos seem to be breeding like rats down here and, what’s worse, they’re completely unaware of how to survive. These guys don’t seem to understand the social customs, the shaky relationship boundaries between the passengers and us. They approach the people like they’re still a member of their society, playing on the mutual sympathies that no longer exist between the two factions. In a way, they’re still in the early stages of acceptance; once they overcome their shame and fears, they can then learn how to use positive visualization. Until then, they’re just stuck in limbo, scoring all our food and change from underneath our noses.

I walked past the platform, keeping my eyes open for any officials, before I hopped the bars and began to walk down the closed off edge of the platform. I climbed down a ladder and when I jumped down, I felt my foot graze something with a soft, yet rigid frame.

“Hey! Prick! What’s the big idea?!” I heard a voice call out. Looking down, I noticed the long, thinning mane and toothless frown of my acquaintance Corey.

“Jarvis! How’re you doin? If I’da known that was you I would have punched you on the way down” he laughed jovially.

Corey was dressed in his usual fur lined winter coat, pajama bottoms and pink galoshes. He had been down here almost as long as I had and we had grown fond of each other over the years, despite the fact he’s a drug addict.

He was the most relaxed Subtrainian I had ever met. I liked him because, despite all his flaws, he was an honest and upbeat guy, something I’ve found to be a rarity down here. He was surrounded by two other men, one a furry yet frail stuffed animal of a man I recognized as Kendall and the other man I didn’t know.

“Ya couldn’t punch a fly, maaaan!” Kendall yelled. Little specks of spittle flew from the thick curtains of hair drawn over his lips.

“Kendall, nobody can punch a fly.” Corey laughed.

“Not even another fly?” Kendall asked.

“Not without a pair of gloves.” I joked. They all laughed.

“How’ve you been Corey?”

Kendall passed a stained box of wine to Corey who proceeded to take a swig of the liquid as red trickles dripped down his chin.

“Same old, you know. My cold sore’s back, but that always happens whenever it gets cold.” He handed the box to the stranger who eagerly accepted. The man had jet-black hair that had been cut with a knife, giving him a look that the young people spend an entire paycheck to achieve.

His face was nicked from a fresh shave. After a chug, the stranger offered it to me.

“Hey there, what’s your name?”

“We’ve met before. Remember, it’s me, Timmy.” He put the box down and mimed long hair and a beard. As he did so, the image of him appeared to me.

“Timmy? Timmy Timmy? Colorado Timmy?” I asked agog.

“Why did you cut it all off? During winter, too?”

“Fleas, bro, fleas. And lice. I had to get me all new clothes and shit and get those pubes off my face. You want some?”

“Not without making it a potluck. Let me go grab something for us to eat.” I started towards the tracks.

“You got a camp here too? I thought you’re up in the west Bronx?” Timmy inquired.

“I got one around here too. But I had to move the West Bronx one a few years ago.” I chuckled slightly at the memory.

“Where to?” Timmy asked.

way, if you run into any trouble, you only have to abandon some of your stuff. The best thing is that you always know you’ve got somewhere to lay your head. So, you’re never actually homeless...”

I walked for a couple of minutes until I saw the faded graffiti along the wall that signaled my next turn. The phrase proclaimed in bold, dripping letters ‘IT’S A CHINK CONSPIRACY’, a creedo I don’t personally subscribe to, but it serves as a recognizable marker. I veered off the tracks and walked between the pillars to a long, narrow corridor.

Long forgotten, a few of these corridors were built for workers to travel between lines as they built the very first underground subway system. I walked about one hundred feet until I began to feel the wall for a gaping hole in the concrete. I felt the exposed rebar and sandy matter that indicated the entrance to my camp. I walked inside, struck a match and lit the lantern I had sitting on a pile of rubble.

As the room illuminated, rats scurried and I saw my Tony Robbins subway poster affixed to the wall. He smiled at me encouragingly with his powerful set of teeth, welcoming me back home. It had been at least a season since I had been back there. I went over to my stockpile and grabbed a crumpled sack of Doritos.

I heard them talking as I walked back, the words becoming more audible as I approached.

“I’m going down to Wall Street tomorrow. It’s a Friday and they’re usually pretty generous.”

“I haaate dose guys.”

“Yeah, but the food down there is great, bro. Basil and Cheese sandwiches, good booze left around.”

“Just watch out after dark. You know.”

“For sure, bro. The good ones down there know me but the crazies, well, I know how to watch my ass.”

The three had moved closer into the tracks, presumably to avoid discovery. They were sitting in a circle, with Kendall lounging further downward with his increased inebriation.

“I brought you guys something special. Cheeseburger flavor chips from 2002. They don’t even sell them anymore.”

Their eyes lit up at my delicacy and I traded the bag of Doritos for the box of wine, from which I took a sizable nip. They passed around the chips and each took a small handful from the miniature bag. Kendall crammed his into his yellow beard while Corey nibbled with his remaining teeth.

“Dawnt dringk it alllll!” Kendall slurred.

“Washington Heights.”

“Come on, Kendall. You can always get more. Not all of us are Amphibians like you. We can’t come and go as we please.” Corey defended.

“Swanky!” Corey laughed, his pink teeth emotive yet sparse.

“Whasssstoppin’ ya?” Kendall’s under bite jutted forward as he spoke.

“Oh yah, thas right, ya got a buncha tem” Kendal said.

I began to walk along the tracks as their conversation drifted further from my ears.

“You just don’t get it, do you?” Corey shook his head.

“Jar was an innovator. He was the first guy to show me about keeping lotsa different camps around the city. That

“So what brings you down here, Corey? Weren’t you up at 77th before?” I asked.

“Yeah but I had to abandon that one,” he burped and

began to pick at his cold sore, “Renovations. I’d always heard that it’s a little emptier down here. Lord knows why, it’s clean, accessible, lots of foot traffic.”

“You know why it’s so empty down here, bro.” Timmy asserted gravely.

We all stared at him in silent confusion. Corey was stroking his chin in concentration, sometimes sneaking his finger to his lip to massage his herpe. Timmy motioned to me with his stained palm.

“Jarvis, you know. Hell, you’ve been down here since I’ve known you. You know exactly why there are so few of us around here.”

After a minute, I shrugged my shoulders before I took another sip from the box. Corey answered with ambivalence.

“Territory?”

“No, bro. The legend!” Timmy proclaimed to our blank faces before elaborating.

“The thing that lives between the tracks. The thing that makes men disappear.”

“You mean the Rat King? Nobody believes in that anymore. That’s a myth.” Corey scoffed at the very idea.

“They found out it was an escaped bear from the Bronx zoo. It got on the 6 express train at night and followed it all the way down before it got to Hell’s Kitchen and pried the doors open with it’s paws. It smelled food but, well, just like us, it couldn’t pass the turnstiles. It found a couple of homos and ate them. That’s when it got the taste for blood.”

Corey described the situation frankly with complete assurance. I knew it was pure hogwash from the start. If the bear couldn’t pass the turnstile in Chelsea, how could it have gotten onto the train in the first place. Besides, there’s no 6 express train that runs to the Bronx Zoo. As it was, I just let him finish before Kendall responded: “Yer fulla shittt. Issa a rat king. I seen it.”

“You’ve never seen a rat king.” Corey debated.

“Sure I ‘ave. Issa a rat king dat fused wifa a crocodile fromda fawlout uvda Manhattan Project.”

“You idiot. Nothing was built in New York for the Manhattan Project.”

Kendall’s eyes widened in a provocative, beligerant fury.

“Dass uuntru. You...Imma fuck ya...till ya...”

“Till he believes you? I’d love to see that work,” Timmy laughed, “In fact, I’d love to see any of those things you just made up. I’m telling yous guys, it’s nothing like that.”

“Alright then detective smartass, tell us what you think it is.” Corey raised his voice.

“I will. An you know how I know? I seen it,” He paused dramatically before leaning in and inexplicably lowering his voice, “one day, during the winter, I think, I was walking the tracks near Houston street with my friend Cedric. We were looking for some orange cones to make a tent. He

thought he saw some in the distance so he ran ahead of me. I started jogging ahead until I saw him stopped dead in the tracks, staring at something. Before I could get any closer, a low grumbling started up around us. I thought it might be a train until I saw a flash of light cover him and he was gone, just like that. I ran over to where he was and there was nothing but darkness. I never saw Cedric again.”

A chill ran down my spine as I pictured Cedric staring deep into the unknown and the unimaginable horror he might have seen. My logic helped balance me a little. We all sat silently stunned at Timmy’s story.

“I still think it was a bear.” Corey crossed his arms and asserted with great belief.

We soon finished the box of wine and I decided to be on my way. I was going to hop on the Brooklyn bound train to go to my Bushwick camp but it must have been too late to catch one. I felt strange about walking the tracks alone. I was still a little spooked from Timmy’s vivid, if not implausible story. I reminded myself that they were the ravings of a drug addict, a delusional near psychotic.

People always come and go down here, Cedric was no exception. So, I laughed it off and I decided to hoof it downtown to Canal and walk the tracks to Brooklyn.

And yet, the ghostly rumbles from beneath the tracks that had previously soothed me to my core seemed as foreign as ever. They felt how electroshock therapy must feel to a sane man, pricking my feet in incessantly spiteful jolts. Timmy’s experience, though filtered through compromised perception, is a much talked about occurrence. You see, Canal is not a young stop. It is sometimes considered by us to be the beginning of Old New York.

It was where the young railway workers toiled to make the best damn public transportation system America has ever seen. Then it was where bolder men from a different era had endured through the squalor of the 30’s, the pride of the 40’s, the whitewash of the 50’s, the growth of the 60’s, the fall of the 70’s, the rot of the 80’s and the remodel of the 90’s.

My friend Robert believes, all those men’s pain, their suffering is what marks this area. Though a generally logical man, he insists that their souls are still trapped down there somewhere; where exactly, he can never say.

Even though he knows I don’t take much credence in this belief, he tries to prove it to me, nevertheless. He says: “Those souls had to go somewhere, am I right? They sacrificed their lives for this place. And, after all, you can never be sure you’ve had a life if you’ve never hurt a little bit. And it’s all those decades of pain and suffering, powering through despite it all. If that isn’t what soul is, you can feel free to knock me on my ass.”

His logic was sometimes like a rollercoaster but on this night, I quickly found myself feeling every twist and turn in Robert’s train of thought. Since I’ve been down here, people have always been talking about the electricity.

Some say that’s where the souls go when one of us dies, that way they never miss out on anything.

I was halfway to the Houston stop when I heard a low grumbling and bent down to check the tracks. ‘It’s from the track above us’ I told myself. As I walked forward it got louder and then I remembered that there were no tracks above us. My logic was lost in the volts. I stopped and tried to listen but my heart was beating in my ears and my breaths were quick and shallow. A new sound

layered itself over the grumbling drone, something organic but obviously not human. The new hum mounted in volume, as I heard whispers poke through the cacophony, indicating more than just a low-pitched stream of electricity building beneath the tracks. The metal began to twitch and heat up underneath my toes as the sound grew into a loud roar. I hopped off and, just as I did, the sound that had grown to become so unbearable stopped in a surge of abstinence. There was a moment of dead silence where the awareness of my wildly pumping vital signs was restored. Not a second later, a low squeal rang out and a sudden rush of electricity blew out the lights. I froze in the darkness for an instant before a flash of white light exploded ahead of me. Adrenaline shot into the pit of my stomach as I realized Timmy’s vision. I ran, not knowing what I had seen but was damn sure that I had quite possibly seen the same thing as my half-stoned friend did that one night.

2.

I was careening up to the far northwest corner of the city on the stickiest day in recent memory in a packed-to-theinsulation subway train. The smoky soprano of a live trio of flautists hung in the murky air of the subway car until the next stop, at which point they moved onto another line. In my time here, I’ve noticed how it’s on days like this where the only way to escape the heavy air is to ride the climate-controlled trains all day. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out, which is why everybody decides to do it, even the “regular” folk. The worse the heat, the more people flock to the underground. Before you know it, your rolling icebox has become a furnace of tangled limbs and sweat-soaked shirts. It’s funny how in that one moment, we all think the same, up above and down below. On this day, as is typical of the Pelham Bay Park bound 6-train, the crowd thinned out the further north we got and the further north we got, the more desperate and tired the remaining inhabitants looked.

Despite the fact I kept trying to convince myself otherwise, that one terrifying experience in the tunnel was still so clear and yet so surreal to me. I tried my best to use my ration in this case but every possible explanation seemed thin and mismatched. I’d settle on one and, though my brain was satisfied, there was a part, deep down inside that nagged for another one. It was this vague nagging that searched desperately for an explanation, an obscured excuse that always seemed too unfocused to see clearly. Finally, it was this nagging doubt that brought me to the Pelham Bay Park stop to see Renè, the best source of information possible, assuming you have the audacity to reach her.

Renè is the only woman who’d been down here longer than me; that is to say, an MTA employee. She’s been stationed at the same MTA help desk for 22 years, in not the worst part of town but certainly the worse as far as we’re concerned. No matter how far the source, all of the most valuable and, most importantly, accurate information seemed to trickle upstream straight to her little booth.

She is one of the few that is on our side of the tracks and certainly the only one a guy like myself could approach.

Down here, we maintain a consistently shaky relationship with the MTA. They know we’ve lived down here for years but they assume that pushing us out is probably slightly easier than trying to eradicate all the subway rats. So, they turn a blind eye to our existence, conveniently failing to notify their street dwelling superiors to our presence

and falling mute upon any discussion of our whereabouts.

More than that, I think they feel particularly out of place in their own world. I mean, they spend almost as much time down here as we do; the only difference is where they lay their heads at night. In fact, some of the more unlucky ones took their pink slips and ended up down here for good. Nobody understands these similarities in lifestyle better than Renè.

A toughened, sizeable woman, working late nights as her life begins to slowly wind down, she had long since given up hope for what would pass as a normal life up there.

She was a schoolteacher of English in Harlem until she was let go, a month before she was to receive her tenure.

With four kids in elementary school, one in city college and a husband fallen to diabetes, she had no choice but to find the first job she could. I don’t think I have to mention who hired her. As silver etched its way into her dense black hair and arthritis began to develop in her weathered ankles, she only grew stronger in spirit, more prudent.

Like most people, she’s simply trying to survive. Few people could penetrate her outwardly calloused demeanor and, as far as we were concerned, I was the one exception. One day I asked her why she let me in so easily and she told me it was because, like her, I was a peacock (or penguin or otrich) amidst a sea of pigeons, trying to rise above it all despite my inability to fly. So, she gradually became my source for the only information that matters: facts from the underground and facts from above insomuch as they affect the underground.

The city skyline wavered on the horizon of the East River as we crossed the bridge into the Bronx. Wait, let me explain. I may have lead you to believe that I haven’t been above ground in something like 11 years maybe.

It’s just the MTA system I can’t leave, I guess. In actuality, I’ve been above ground. Remember, there’s also Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, and a lot of those tracks are still on stilts. So, I’ve breathed the air. I’ve seen the sun. I felt the Earth’s fresh breeze on my face. But I haven’t gotten much further than that because I was between transfers.

To be honest, it always feels like just the perfect amount of time outside. I guess what I was saying was that you’ve got to enjoy the little things, right? Tony Robbins has mentioned that it’s the best way to keep your spirit up so you can meet your full potential.

The train crowd was dwindling down to elderly Black and Puerto Rican woman with carts and young rambunctious school children, probably returning from school to a home not unlike my own. I used to deal with people just like this in my old job above ground. If you give them an inch, they’ll ask for another inch, if you give them two inches, they’ll ask for their welfare check. They’re not bad people, just victims of circumstance. But then again, so am I, and look how far I’ve gotten. Still, the unmistakable sight of New York’s very own Housing Projects loomed ahead like great chiseled monoliths. Although, I’m told that people are starting to call them “Low Income Housing Units”, a term that the folk down below have co-opted with slight alteration to describe our own home: No Income Housing.

I say call it what you want, it doesn’t change the conditions any.

I know it seems against the laws of physics but I did mention earlier how the scum congeals in all the corners of Rail system. Well, Renè just happens to work in one of these parts. It’s mostly safe until nightfall above ground, in those hours when the trains always seem to dwindle and lag and grow bald of passengers, when the real dan-

gerous folk start to congregate. Nobody quite knows why, whether it’s the seclusion, the relatively cleaner corners or simply the fact that it’s the end of the line serving as a convenient place for those too thoroughly strung-out or aberrant to move decide to crash for the night. I normally only see her in the mornings, near the end of her shift, when there are people around. Passing Rikers Island and watching the rays of the setting sun slowly dissipate for the day, I was understandably anxious. But Renè was the best and, truth be told, I had begun to yearn for her company, even in those little doses.

I must have dozed off into what they call a micronap because Pelham Bay Park was coming up. I still wasn’t sure though. I decided for sure that I hadn’t dreamt that time. At least I thought I hadn’t. It’s hard to tell sometimes because, for years it seems, the only dream I ever remember having is me sitting in a moving subway car. The train started to ease on its breaks as it transitioned into the long crawl that marks the end of any line. The doors opened to the exact air I was talking about earlier as it swept me up in its hospitable arms. There’s nothing like it.

Pelham Bay Park is another one of the above ground platforms and also one of the oldest this far North of Manhattan. They’ve been nice enough to even build quarters to house some of these guys, all funded by the kind folk atop the pavement. Once I reached my directional equilibrium, I turned to the south-east corner of the platform, on the very end of which was stationed a tower and, nestled just above the foundation, protruding slightly, was Renès Help Desk. I walked up to it and was disheartened to find the crosshatched ringlet shutters over the front and the lights completely extinguished. Had I missed her? Whether she was even working tonight was still a mystery to me.

Whether she showed up or I caught the next train back home, I’d still have to wait at least an hour, if not more.

So, I decided, in my typical fashion, to catch a few winks before the sun was completely down, before the bad ones started coming out of the woodwork. So, I curled up in the corner next to Renès booth. Now this time, I actually did fall asleep because I awoke to a big foot kicking me square in my coccyx. The MTA issued steel-toed boot was followed by an equally steely feminine voice, “Sir, sir...” she blurted in a stern cadence, “it’s time to wake up and go somewhere else, sir.”

Within seconds I recognized the voice as belonging to, whom else, but my dear Renè.

“Christ, Renè, it’s only me.” I looked up and smiled despite my mounting agony.

“Why if it isn’t Jarvis Carville. I’m sorry about the boot up your ass. If I’d have known it was you, I would have...”

“Gone for the balls?” I laughed as I rubbed the aching vertebrae of my stubby little tail.

“Now why would I do that? They’re your strongest assets.”

She laughed as she offered her surprisingly slender hands to help me up. I took her dark, soft mitts in my hand and she see-sawed me to my feet. She paused for a moment, holding my gnarled paws in hers as though we were preparing to waltz.

“I really am sorry, Jarvis. It’s just that you usually come at the end of my shift when those commuter trains start back up. I didn’t expect it to be you.”

“Normally I would but this one simply can’t wait.”

I had failed in trying to soften my haste towards her. I could see a waxing gibbous moon reflect off the sea, turning Pelham bay into a great watery lantern. It was now night and I knew I hadn’t much time before the creepers came knocking. She started to unlock the steel shutters of her booth.

“You in trouble, honey?” she asked in a compulsory manner, with a warm tone of genuine concern underlying it.

“Not quite. But others could be. I just want to make sure.

So, that’s why I came to you.”

Renè shuffled over to the other side of her booth and unlocked the small door and muscled her way inside. As she turned around to adjust her seat, her other seat pushed up into the air. She had a posterior that, due to its natural girth, inspired anticipatory confidence in strong men and crushing anxiety in weaker men. But her voice was a naturally soft, high-pitched breeze of a tone. Along with her slender hands and small feet, she gave off the impression of a much smaller woman masquerading inside of her monumentally buxom frame. She would be considered large by white standards but, by God’s standards, she’s just perfect. Though relatively far past the halfway point of her life, she was still stunningly enticing in her own unique way. “’So, what can I do for you, sir’ she spoke in a playful tone that she filtered through her “Help Desk Employee” voice, an absurdly subservient and anglicized cadence intended for neutral ears.

“It’s about the Canal Street stop. Between Bowery and Canal somewhere around where all the lines converge.”

“Oh, you mean the Bermuda Triangle?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

Her eyes widened and she smiled, chuckling slightly.

“You been down here 10 years and you’ve never heard of the Canal Street Bermuda Triangle?”

“Indulge me, beautiful.” I said coyly, all the while catching glances of the digital clock readouts embedded in the depot overhangs.

“It’s what they used to call the point between Canal and Bowery. It started as a joke in the 70’s, around when that old movie about the train hijacking came out. Trains went in but never seemed to come out on time. It just seemed like bad things were always happening down there. Nobody quite knew what the deal was.”

She leaned out of the booth and looked around to see if any of the supervisors were watching. I could smell the sweet perfume that saturated the nape of her neck. Realizing nobody was even out on the tracks, she leaned back in and pulled out a cigarette and a book, ‘Women, Race & Class’ by Angela Davis. I pulled out a stripped pack of matches and lit her cigarette for her.

“You know, Jar, you are more of a gentleman than most of these sorry excuses for men we have up here, mistaking their guns for their dicks all the time.”

Let’s face it, I loved her, in my own way. And it was at that

moment I knew it. But I needed to get a lead out of her soon so I motioned for her to continue.

“So was it a bum track or something like that?”

“I’ll bet they wished that was the problem. In 1974, some jackass actually tried to hijack a train, right at that point on the line, too. Of course, the police met him at the Canal stop. Then in 1975, there were spontaneous explosions underneath the tracks that they later found out was a copycat New York SLA chapter who’d seen the Patty Hearst footage and decided to try their own dumbass hands at terrorism. Then, we got deeper into the 70’s and 80’s, well, I don’t have to tell you what it was like down here then. They always joke about it being cursed.”

She paused for a moment and took another drag from her cigarette as the wisps encircled the pale fluorescent light from inside her booth.

“Does that help?”

“A little.” I paused for a moment as flashes from that night in the tunnel drifted through my mind. “Have you ever heard of any power surges or unusual humming or anything like that?”

“Honey, you’ve got to get a little more specific than that.”

“Howabout flashing white light?”

“Don’t tell me you think you saw Jesus.”

“No, I’m talking about a weird hum, followed by a power surge and then an explosion of white light.”

She froze mid gesture, her cigarette jutting out from her delicate brown fingers as her expression indicated something more, something she didn’t want to recount. After a moment, she recomposed.

“I can’t say.”

“You mean you don’t know or are you saying you are not supposed to tell me?”

She smoked silently and shifted her eyes all around, possibly considering any potential repercussions, should she tell me what she was thinking.

“I could lose my job.”

“Renè, you know me. My word is my bond. Besides, who would I tell that would believe me anyway?”

“Good point.”

“So...what’s the down low?” I asked, seeking a colloquialism in my mounting desperation to catch the train back down to Manhattan. She chuckled slightly.

old but even I know the kids don’t say that anymore.

You’re better than that. Now let’s try it again, like I’m just another person.”

“I’m sorry, Renè. I didn’t mean to pander and I certainly meant no offense. I was just nervous.”

“It’s okay, sweetie. It’s certainly not the first time. Seriously, though, if you tell anybody I said this, they’ll not only kick my ass out of here but they’d kick yours above ground too.”

She stubbed out her cigarette before looking both ways in a purely unconscious motion.

“Okay, so it was around 1997 or 1998 that this happened.

Trains started reporting delays on all northbound and southbound tracks. It became more frequent over time, but slowly enough that people assumed it was just your standard problems. The conductors started talking to their supervisors, all with the same account: they’d be flying through the Lower East Side when their trains would suddenly come to a gradual stop, in the tunnels between Bowery and Canal. All the power would go out, the car lights, the emergency lights, even the tunnel lights. They’d be there for about 10 minutes before everything started up again, like nothing happened.”

I could tell she was finished but I knew there was more to this than I was hearing. I could hear a shuffling in the distance, along the commuter bridge and, though I had a feeling it was just the MTA security, I knew my time was running out. The next southbound train, my only directional choice, was due in another 10 minutes and I couldn’t stand to miss it.

“So, what did they find out?”

“There are limits to even my gossip, Jarvis.”

“Come on, you’ve got to know something.”

“All I know is that there was a maintenance team sent down there in 2002 to figure out the problem but, to the best of my knowledge, they came up with nothing.”

“How do you know that?”

“The old maintenance director for this station was named Peter Olivieri. He was promoted to Electrical Maintenance Director for the whole MTA and he helped lead the crew that went down there that day.”

“And he told you they came up with nothing?”

“No, that’s just what I heard. He must have done something because I hear he was demoted to working in a Train Yard in Queens.”

“Is that where I can find him?”

“I’m going to tell you but I need you to promise me something.”

“I wish I knew. Let me check the directory to see if he’s even still here.”

I placed my palm on top of hers, massaging her rigid knuckles.

She turned around to look for the MTA employee contacts packet. I noticed the shuffling was getting closer and the steps were getting higher in frequency. I turned around and looked out to the platform to see a hooded figure walking towards us, his hands in the sagging pockets of his sweatshirt. This was certainly not an MTA

“Anything.”

“Please, don’t ever say ‘down low’ to me again. I may be

employee. My body froze while my heart began to speed up, secreting perspiration into the palms of my hands.

Renè kept ruffling through the pages of the packet, off-guard mainly because her job was to help strange people that approached her. I could sense something wasn’t right. He was walking mighty fast and mighty direct for a lost passenger. The obscured face of the stranger revealed itself, his emaciated jaw grinding underneath the whitewash of the platform lights. He looked me directly in the eye with wild pupils as he approached, no more than 100 feet away. As he got closer, I could see his pants were dangling off his bony frame and he had a little glint of light in his hand that he had rested just below his hip. I don’t know why I didn’t just listen to my instincts because, after all, I have them to thank for being alive.

His hand now clearly revealed a butterfly knife and, within a split second, the Junkie lunged at me in a slashing motion.

“Renè!” I screamed out.

As the ghastly glint swept right below my nose, I turned my shoulder to him and the blade sliced a bit of stuffing from my parka. In doing so, I had simultaneously, if not incidentally, knocked the knife from his grasp. He pushed me backwards with the force of a jonesing addict and the fury of a reptilian-blooded killer, knocking us both into the booth. My thoracic vertebrae (that’s the middle spine, below the abdominals) was thrust into the metal counter extension with such might that it knocked the wind out of me. Before I could catch my breath, the Junkie decided to deprive me of another when he clasped his steely fingers around my neck.

“Re...Ren..è...help!” I sputtered in fits.

Without notice, I felt a moist jet spray the back of my head from inside the booth, with some of the substance sputtering onto the face of my assailant. I realized Renè had decided to utilize her can of mace. Unfortunately, most of the pepper spray shot into his nostrils and none in his eyes, so he spent the next few seconds sneezing uncontrollably, only slightly incapacitated. This of course, only lasted a few seconds. I pushed him back and, not a second later, he was re-armed with his knife and lunged at me a second time. The blade was inches from my throat when I had begun to consider my life. Sadly, all I could think about was how great that one burrito was.

My train of thought was derailed when a loud explosion rang out from behind me, causing temporary deafness in my right ear. I looked up to see the junkie, wide eyed and stunned as he staggered backwards in jerky steps.

He froze for a moment and stared blankly at me. We sat in silence for a moment as wet blood trickled down his sweatshirt from a small puncture wound in his shoulder.

Without notice, he suddenly burst into a flurry of tears and mucus, with a juvenile look of shock and intense pain plastered across his face. As quickly as he had begun to cry, he turned around and scuttled away, his face in his hands.

I turned around to see Renè looking like a vigilante, gripping a small derringer pistol in her still raised right arm.

By the sound of the blast, I half expected a bazooka to be cradled in her arms.

“You saved my life.”

“It’s a life worth saving, Carville.” She placed the gun down

and dialed the phone, indicating a call to the police. I checked the clock to see I had 3 minutes before departure. The train doors pushed open in unison, indicating readiness to board. I turned back to Renè who was jotting something down on a post-it note.

“I just called the police but, I’m sure you know the likelihood of them getting here before that dirtbag and his friends come back is pretty slim.”

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

“Jarvis, who just saved who’s life here?” She smiled cunningly as she handed me the post it note with the information on it. She had sealed it with a deep crimson kiss on the back.

“I really can’t thank you enough, Renè. You...”

“Don’t you have a train to catch?”

I winked at her and gave one last word of gratitude before I walked briskly to the train. 1 minute until departure.

Even though my ears were still ringing from the pistol shot, I could hear a stampede of feet along the commuter bridge at the other end of the train. I picked up my pace, not quite having reached the train yet when I saw the first of the Junkies and Killers rounding the corner at the other side of the platform. My trot transformed into a full-fledged jog as I approached the first car of the train. I knew I was going to make it. When I reached the southern nose of the car, I almost dove into a closed door. Due to a low volume of passengers, they had closed all the doors except the ones within the cars on the other end. So, I began to sprint to the other side, despite the intense pain in my spine, towards the train and, consequently, toward danger. Roughly half a dozen of the Junkies and Killers were running towards me, glinting weapons clasped firmly in their hands.

“Stand clear of the closing doors, please” the monotonously pleasant pre-recorded voice called out as I was mere feet away from both the door and my potential mortality. I literally dove headfirst in a graceless motion as I felt a spindly hand clutch my ankle. I felt a slice in the sole of my shoe as the door closed on my foot. I wiggled off my shoe and slid my toes inside a split second before the doors closed and the Killers were left clutching at the well-sealed metal door. I sat up, to notice a pruned Puerto Rican y spinster staring at me in shock. As the train lurched forward and gained momentum, we left the Pelham Bay Park depot and I watched the moon glimmer off the bay. To this day, I am so thankful for many things: the use of my feet, my throat, my spine, the moon, the dillinger pistol, the spicy mace-covered half-sliced parka I still own. Mostly though, I’m thankful for Renè, with her small feet and her powerful, fearless and oddly skinny fingers.

3.

Usually I’m pretty practical about knowing when to let things go. Sure, back there in Pelham Bay, when those Psychies almost slit my femoral arteries, not to mention my posterior femoral cutaneous nerve, which by the way, would have hurt and/or killed like a sunovabitch, I was pretty steamed. They had also stolen one half of my favorite pair of shoes and slashed the shoulder of my jacket. But I don’t hold onto anger. I won’t. It comes and goes faster than an Express train for me. Sometimes the

racket it makes can be mighty loud, but it passes nevertheless. Down here, it’s best not to hold onto it because, if you do, you’ll wind up getting either caught under its tracks or swept away in its wake. Besides, it’s proven that the brain will always choose the more positive experience.

So, I’ve got biology on my side there.

But I’ll admit, minutes after my last encounter with the killers, all the appreciation I was feeling for my barely prolonged life faded in sync with the adrenaline and endorphin. Though I was safe in the car, heading out of the Bronx, somehow all I could focus on was my mismatched barefoot and the torn navy veneer of my gutted parka.

The yellowed stuffing poured from the sizeable gash resembling seafoam at the tip of a crashing wave. Well, at least what I remember a wave looking like. I closed my eyes and tried to draw on the power of the Guru to help me reframe my view. I used the image of the waves to help but I couldn’t remember the sounds, the smells or the feel of them. It was like reading through a book written by Jacques Cousteau, seeing the oversaturated blues and greens disassociated from any other senses. Even the image was frozen static in my minds’ eye. I felt a cold breeze chill my barefoot, recognizing the sensation as the subway cars’ air conditioning.

Where the breeze should have saturated me with cooling relief, the sensation only coated me in a sticky resentment that reminded me of the frustration of having lost my shoe to a crack addict. In a vain attempt to shake the thought, I pulled out the note that Renè had given me, it’s façade folded with the casual yet symmetrical attention of a feminine hand. Peeling its front, I saw only the name of the man I was to see and his location: “Peter Olivieri- Jamaica Train Yard: Maintenance, Queens”.

I remembered the moment she gave it to me, thinking the whole time “why doesn’t she just tell me herself”? There was a look I saw in her eye, her most deft attempt at conveying her complete understanding while simultaneously masking something profound, something possibly even she couldn’t truly explicate or comprehend. And it wasn’t so much the potential solution to the mystery of the Canal stop that tugged at me or even the fact that she had lied, it was the reason why she was scared enough to attempt such subterfuge on me that was of true interest.

What said it all was the kiss she left on the note, the red ridges that outlined her full lips like a human screen-print, they all indicated to a good friend a deeper concept than simply enduring affection. The fact that she needed to overcompensate, to reassure her affection to me further solidified the idea that her hands may have been tied tighter than I thought.

Nevertheless, simply according to the nature of my gender, I couldn’t resist the notion of a note “sealed with a kiss”. So, I placed the paper up to my nose and smelled the pasty chemical sweetness of her lipstick and a warm, shivering sensation began to emanate from with inside me. It wasn’t so much a scent of comfort as it was the scent of awe one feels in merely recognizing something benign, something sustained infinitely for nobody’s sake in particular. It was the type of passive reliance one feels for something so simple yet so dependable on a subatomic level. And that something permeated me, lowering my eyelids and raising the sagging corners of my lips with gratification. The climate-controlled breeze on my lone bare ankle began to dissolve all manifestations of my fear.

Suddenly, the previously failed attempt to flood my senses with calm began to successfully monopolize my

minds’ eye, this time with the vivacity of complete immersion. The same curling wave I had pictured before was now brought to life, roaring hypnotically as it spit ocean spray into the air in gusts. The wind curled around my ankles as I felt everything to its fullest. I watched the waves crash for several moments until I began to notice something peculiar about them. The density of the water looked more sporadically opaque, with brief glimpses of obscured objects rolling in the frothy water. Looking closer, I noticed the ever-growing number of objects take shape as the familiar sight of my lost shoe, teasing me with its’ haphazard dance within the waves. As soon as I recognized the identity of the objects in the water, the number of them began to multiply exponentially until the whole ocean was gradually replaced with tide after tide of shoes. Their frayed laces dangled at the crest of each break before they crashed down with the reverberation of hundreds of clambering basketballs.

I realized, before anything, I had to get another pair of shoes. As ever, I am resourceful and almost always have at least one extra of everything I own, a habit tailored for occasions such as the Pelham Bay “relay race” I’d just encountered. As it was, it proved to be a major inconvenience, as my only other pair was at the Washington Heights camp, at least an hour out of my way from the Jamaica Train Yard. I was hoping to catch some winks but stepping on firm ground would prove to be a little more pertinent a cause. So, four transfers and 2 hours later, I had finally reached my 168th street camp. After a dozen or so years down here, I’ve managed to hand select the strongest, most convenient and, naturally, most unobtrusive spots in the city to place my life. Despite all my skill and patience in selection, some still remain as exposed as ever. So, the likelihood of my shoes still remaining in the place I had left them is relatively slim. Naturally, when your home is an entire city, your roommates are bound to borrow some of your things. Once I crawled to my hideaway, I looked for my pairs of replacement shoes but, as my luck had it, they were gone. All that was left was a back-up, back-up pair of molding loafers that was two sizes too big. Like I said, you can’t hold onto anything down here.

Even with a new pair of slips, getting to the Jamaica Train Yard would prove a challenge, a manageable one, but a challenge nonetheless. Security would be without a doubt quite tight and the yard itself is above ground, making any travel by foot nigh impossible. It’s also huge, making the location of my source an unnecessarily difficult task.

All these might as well be anthills compared to my most inescapable obstacle: the fact that no MTA lines actually stopped at Jamaica, making it almost impenetrable as far as I was concerned. Almost...

As you can imagine, there were perks to the relationships I had developed with the MTA employees. You see, all relationships require a certain amount of time in accordance to each level of intimacy, a currency I have in abundance and they have in scarcity. And in a city that seems, since its very origin, to be in a time deficit, the general populace understands the value of a couple spare congenial moments. So, over the years, I’d spend a few minutes chatting with each employee-this is how I met Renè-but none were more receptive than the operators themselves. Generally sour and less than personable, the stigma of drivers tends to stem from a pretty simple concept: loneliness.

These men and women are discouraged from any form of discourse, even in the static, lingering moments during stops. And when they do receive questions, they’re usually of the urbane or flustered nature. Learning this early on, I spent a few minutes each day talking with various

drivers or, rather, listening to them talk. I’d absorb their daily gripes, horror stories, standard inconsiderations and then alter them, reaffirming each one with a positive viewpoint and a sage-like phrase. It was precisely the effect of this action that got me into the Jamaica Train Yard with the ease that I did.

My visualization couldn’t have been charged more positively that day. I was focused with all my thoughts, premeditated with my actions and dangerously accurate in predicting their outcomes. It was exactly this clairvoyant confidence that made me feel like I was finally getting a hold of something real. If it wasn’t for that, I might have just stayed home and taken a nap. As I was saying, I felt compelled to chase this one. It was well worth my time and, apparently, my life.

Having arrived at the Rockefeller Center stop, I passed through the throngs of multi-colored tourists to meet my friend Bailey Garry, an operator who I’d met through Renè. He runs all the maintenance cars, a job that can get pals like me get into tight places, places in the MTA where nobody can get. He’s a rough edged man, one who’s as sharp and cold as a razorblade in the dead of winter one minute as he is warm and gentle the next. If you’ve put in as much time with Garry as I have, he’s pretty decent, though when his words do slice, you know not to take it too personally. Those operators tend to be excitable.

“Jarvis, you old sombitch, how’ve you been!?” he called out to me in a deep, hoarse voice that seemed to cut through the steam and squeals with maximum efficiency.

When I reached his window, he was chuckling jovially with two outstretched hands. I placed mine in between his palms in greeting.

“I’ve been better but every day is a new opportunity,” I smiled back.

“That’s horseshit. You look terrible.” He laughed somewhat infectiously.

“Well, like I said, I’ve been better,” I paused, finding myself becoming quickly irritated, “I was wondering if you could give me some directions.”

“Sure, where you looking to go?”

“Jamaica.”

“Why? You going to catch a flight?” Bailey joked.

“No, I’m looking to go to a train yard.”

His tone shifted from jovial to oddly curious.

“Son, what business do you have in train graveyard?”

“It’s not a train I’m looking for.”

My rendezvous with Renè was making me realize that, whether or not I was onto a hot lead, I should probably offer as little information as possible, even to my friends.

And it wasn’t just for my safety but theirs as well.

“Well,” his eyes darted around nervously then back to a timetable in his operators’ consul. “If somebody was to hop onto the back guardrail of the F service train, I can imagine he’d have no trouble getting to where he wanted to go...”

He now looked me in the eye as he spoke.

“... on one leaving in 7 minutes... two floors down.”

I smiled at him and walked briskly down the steps two levels until I found the train in question. It was a gigantic tarnished beast, at least thirty years old, that was meant to carry all kinds of parts and train cars. I hopped onto the end car when the other servicemen weren’t looking, slipping along the back guardrail to the side of the train flush with the wall. There I was, nearly sandwiched between this wall and the side of a car to avoid any discovery before the train left the depot. Truth be told, I am a bit clausterphobic and could never understand how those Coasters could live their lives like this. I just prayed that nobody had seen me.

Within what felt like hours but was more likely minutes, the train finally started up. I had to quickly yet carefully shimmy my way onto the back platform before I got my back sanded down between the wall and the train’s metal paneling. It had been years since I had done this. The motions pooled deep within my muscles and came back to me like a fluid ballet. It never ceases to be funny when the things you thought you’d lost come back to you.

Minutes later I was secured enough, gripping the safety bar at the back cab, exposed to the elements. I leaned my knees forward and braced myself against the back safety bar with my hands and the backs of my ankles. The blackness of the tunnel and the churning engine absorbed my senses, the sound of which began lulling me back to my mounting exhaustion. My fingers and feet must have held on because I fell asleep for a moment or two. It was at a turn, when occasional streaks of red, blue and white light started passing by me that something strange began to happen. The colors blurred together, turning into white streaks of light and the engine began to gurgle deeply, like thousands of volts of electricity. Suddenly, Timmy appeared in front of me. We were standing in the mythic tunnel, petrified as cracking jolts of electricity crept up around us. The light surged forward and enveloped us with a shrieking spark of energy.

My eyes flew open immediately at the feeling of moisture in the air, the sound of cars honking and the smell of gasoline exhaust. I opened my eyes, terrified by my dream and surprised at my exposure to what proved one of my more exhilarating trips outdoors. It was a muggy summer day, the clouds pregnant with the heavy moisture of humidity. Nevertheless, the rapid speed and my unique position on the train kept a cool breeze on me while I enjoyed what I approximated as a rollercoaster. This was most certainly the first time I had passed 0ver the Queensboro Bridge on the outside of the train. It served as a thick cup of Turkish coffee for my worn nerves and I made mental note of this image for later on, for a particularly dull stretch of life.

The funny thing about my destination was that it was near the site where the first major battle of the Revolutionary war was fought. Well, the Battle of Long Island was actually fought in Brooklyn and was the first battle after the Declaration of Independence. After the Americans lost, the Queens’ soldiers occupied Jamaica in the very spot of the train yard. It was from there that they decided, with infinite mercy, to burn down most of New York City.

How Washington expected to beat the monarchy fighting in Kings and Queens Counties, we’ll never know. Built

by NYC’s first independent subway system, the Jamaica Graveyard is a museum in and of itself. The lot is host to thousands of corroding hulls and relics of a very different

city. It’s where British soldiers staked victory and where American trains go to die.

At some point we went underground and within a few minutes, the brakes scraped together and we slowed down. We went uphill slightly and were spit out at the tail end of what I could only assume was the Jamaica yard.

The trains passed through heavy, green boughs and tree limbs as it lurched forward. Its path was lined by dozens of signaling pillars of red, yellow and green that passed from the sides of my vision before disappearing into the horizon. The smell of train exhaust and welded metal greeted my nostrils as we began to veer off to the left. I swung around the safety bars the get a better look of where we were going. A reflective fleet of trains lay stopped in their tracks ahead of us with a series of buildings off on the opposite end of the yard. This, I supposed, was where I would find Olivieri.

As the train slowed down to a safer speed, I hopped over the guardrails onto the gravel. It was fine like sand and I had trouble walking on it. The chunky stones that lined the subway tracks were the only gravel I had been used to. The train that I was on stopped at the far, back end of the diamond shaped yard, requiring me to walk through a wide expanse before I could get to the buildings. Aside from my sunken footing, I was beginning to feel very uneasy. I felt exposed out there and I hadn’t even made contact with anybody yet. I was beginning to get a feeling that this might not end as well as my last information session. And that one ended with me trading my favorite pair of shoes for my life. To get what I needed, I was going to have to tailor my approach to this exact situation. I’d have to be sharp and on my toes, two qualities that seem easier when you’ve slept more and are wearing shoes that aren’t two sizes too big. As usual, I made the best meal with the ingredients I had.

Arriving at noon, I must have caught the yard on its lunch hour because it was deserted, just what I needed for a clean entrance and exit. Once I passed the rows of trains, I walked across red brick buildings with giant sliding doors. Judging by the rails that went into the structures, I could assume they were hangars. I passed one that was open and stepped inside. I was greeted by a gigantic space filled with rows of train cars illuminated by an entire ceiling of clear glass. It was truly a magnificent thing to see and, though the vastness of the room caused me to perspire a bit, I was surrounded by my old, damaged friends who gave me the comfort of familiarity. I walked through the sparsely occupied hangar until I noticed a hallway at the far northeast corner of the building leading to an extension. The door had the letters Electrical Department printed with the MTA symbol below it.

Opening the door, I found a long hall with more doors.

Walking through it, I looked to the doors for names, finding names with titles, all containing “Electrical” within them. Before I knew it the name had popped into the corner of my eye, stenciled on an adjacent door: Peter Olivieri Chief Electrical Engineer. I took a deep breath and knocked lightly with the knuckle of my index finger. A muffled voice called from within.

“Yeah? Come in.”

Can... can I come in?” I faltered. Off to a bad start.

“Yes. Come. In.” it repeated with thinned patience.

I opened the door to a sparsely lit, brick cave. It looked as though the room had very little remodeling since the

building’s opening for the 1939 Worlds’ Fair Railroad.

Most of the décor was decades old, with industrial bowl lamps hanging from a brown water-stained ceiling. The walls were coated with a whitish film born from years of stagnate cigarette smoke, mildew or both. Three rusting metal fans were situated in various places around the room to insure maximum coverage of its inhabitants. On a particularly muggy day like that one, in a room with no windows to the outside world, I’d imagine the draft was the closest thing to fresh air a man could get.

Olivieri was sitting in an old swivel chair, with a hero sandwich and a Thermos lid full of steaming coffee in front of him. He was a physically large man who I could assume was much more domineering standing than when seated.

His facial features were compacted and pudgy, with a snub nose and round sagging jowls that caused him to look like a balding baby. It was his eyes, however, that opened up his personality to me; they were large, bulging from beneath a prominent brow with a deep hazel color that brought to mind an earthy, proletarian viewpoint.

“What can I do for you, boss?” asked Olivieri, willing to oblige.

I froze and realized, in my haste and exhaustion, that I had forgotten to plan my course of action. Not a moment too soon, he gave me the perfect jumping board for a string of fibs.

“You must be from the Gazette.”

He pointed to the pens jutting out from the pocket of my flannel shirt. “...Yes, I am. I’m here to write the story on...” My brain all but stopped responding to my improvisatory demands. I needed a nap.

“The yard expansion, right?”

“Exactly,” I responded, masking my relief. I had an alibi for the time being assuming he decided not to ask for a press pass or a name even. Already in a reclined position, using his foot, he loosened an old folding chair from its nesting place at the side of his desk and slid it towards me.

“Why don’t you sit down...” he suspended the end of his sentence in place of my name which, judging by his tone and squinting eyes, he expected me to produce.

“Anthony,” I said without thought, “You can call me Tony.”

“Tony, sure.”

We were silent for several moments, which was disarming until I realized he was expecting me to be a reporter.

“So, um, Mr. Olivieri...” I had to think fast because even two year olds were more deceptive than I was at that moment.

“What prompted the...MTA to expand the yard?”

I scribbled furiously on my little sheet of paper as he recounted what I could assume was the blurb for the Gazette. Olivieri seemed a man who was understandably knowledgeable of the inner workings of the department.

He leaned back and sipped thoughtfully from his cup of coffee, appearing polite and obliging despite a moody undercurrent. The more he spoke, the more knowledge I absorbed on the subject, which in turn helped to make my questions more acute and believable. I took advantage

of my apparent position to try to slowly ease into my real questions, hoping that maybe he wouldn’t notice the complete change in tone or, at the very least, make a fuss of it. He seemed just polite enough for me to pull it off.

“And,” I proceeded impetuously, “does that mean that the yard will be receiving any trains from other lines?”

“Nope, it’ll be pretty much the same. There was talk of the M breaking off from the J and Z to be recombined with the F in Manhattan. But it doesn’t look like it’ll be happening until after the expansion.”

“Does that mean that the M would be replacing the V?” “It seems that way.”

“So that means it would no longer go to Chinatown?”

“That’s right.”

“No more stops at Delancey or...?” I was getting so close.

It was almost seamless. “...Or at Chambers or at Fulton or Broad or...” he paused for a moment. “...Or Canal and Bowery?” I asked.

“Yeah...no...hypothetically, nothing below Little Italy. But I don’t know.” His tone grew slightly less composed and more annoyed.

“And theoretically why would they be cutting the M?” “Budgetary, I think. A lot of us are having to submit monthly electrical readings and foot traffic for the trains.

Did you get everything you needed?” he was becoming more impatient, a factor that would work against me with this one.

“You think about it while I go to the john.” And with one quick movement, he was out of the room.

I tried to think of the best possible reason. I needed to.

My livelihood depended on it. If he found me out, I could be arrested or worse exiled. I tried my damndest to think of something but all I could think of, standing on the site of the Battle of Long Island, facing defeat, were Nathanial Hale’s last words. “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” I couldn’t agree more. Except for the part about his country. Mine is probably more like “I only regret that I have but one life to give for something”. I’m still not quite sure what that something is but I’m willing to bet it’s pretty important. I figured I’d come to it later when he walked through the door, causing me to panic. I tried to focus and think where my Good Book would recommend I go from here.

“So,” Olivieri said sitting down with a thud, “What is your boss’ name again? The one from the Gazette who called me this morning about the article?”

“Um, Mr. Robbins.” I faltered and waited for the look of reveal in his eyes. It seemed that I had very surprisingly guessed the name correctly. He took a pen and scribbled something down on a sticky note. Upon replacing his pen in the canister, he pulled out an old straight razor. He held the handle in one hand and rotated it slowly between the joints of his index and middle fingers.

“So, why the Canal and Bowery stops?” he inquired again.

“I thought you might be able to tell me.” I retorted cryptically. Something told me that I may have just barely succeeded with my transition. This was going to work out.

“It depends...um, sorry, I’m sorry I must have forgotten your name.”

“I don’t know. You should probably ask one of the operators from that line. Do you mind if I finish eating my lunch?”

“Jarvis.” I responded absentmindedly.

The sheathed blade stopped moving between his fingers.

Visably, he was attempting to correlate the name he had just heard with that from his memory but couldn’t make a match. He then smirked at me with a muffled guffaw.

“Jarvis. I had a feeling you weren’t from the Gazette. Nice try, dirtbag. By the way, your boss’ name is MRS. Miranda Ellis.”

“Sure. How about the electrical work? Does the budget have room for electrical repairs?”

“Look, I’m sorry. I just need to ask a few questions and then I’ll leave.” I tried to appeal in desperation.

“Look, Tony, this is getting far away from anything I know about. I have to get back to work now.”

“You got in here. That takes balls even if you are a lying piece of shit.” He looked at me with a playful glare as if he were intentionally trying to egg me on. I wasn’t biting.

“Has it been running poorly? Has traffic decreased below the Bowery and Canal stops?”

I was becoming impetuous myself, especially considering the closer I got to the real questions the further he got from answering them. I knew my time was running out so I took a leap.

“Have the trains had any trouble running between the Bowery and Canal stops downtown?”

He paused and looked at me with an intensely furtive glance. The corner of his mouth turned up in a slight grin.

“Stop with the questions and answer one of mine. Why are you so interested in the Bowery and Canal stops?”

I was taken aback at this. Had he figured me out yet, I wondered apprehensively. I realized that I should have waited for when I was sharper, more together, more prepared and with less to lose. It was with that I froze.

“So, after wasting my time, the least you can give me is a real name.”

“Jarvis Carville.”

“Jarvis...Carville. That name sounds familiar. Oh no wait, it LOOKS familiar. Yeah, I can remember seeing it on the front of that cum rag that those bums used to sell for donations. We used to have to trash all the extra copies when I worked electrical down there.”

My teeth ground together slowly. I tried to imagine the creamy beans and cheese of that burrito. Instead I tasted steely blood flavored essence on my tongue.

“Yes, the Below Street Journal. I was the Editor-in-Chief.” I recalled the early mornings I’d spend once a week, clutching the back of express trains to make fast deliveries to the stops. As expected, any member of our community

got a free copy. After all, everybody deserved to be accurately informed, even down here where even truth is fleeting.

“Well, Mr. Hearst, how’s that goin’ for ya?” he said, unscrewing a fifth of whiskey and dribbling some into his coffee.

“If you must know, our press was confiscated when they began renovating the bathrooms.”

He scoffed at this loudly, attempting to further aggravate me, knowing full well he could press charges if I assaulted him. A man smaller than him probably wouldn’t have taken the chance with a complete stranger.

“You bums think you fuckin’ own this town, don’t you?

Who’s money do you think allows you to be down there?

That keeps you with climate controlled cars and benches to sleep on?” he was growing more and more antagonistic with each breath.

“I want to talk about when you worked down there. Who was your boss then?” my tone was calm and reserved, one of the first rules of the Robbins handbook, putting him more at ease.

“His name was George. George Melvin.”

“And where can I find him?”

“Fucked if I know. He disappeared. He could be dead, coulda become a woman, hell, he could have become a rail rat just like you.”

My blood started pumping a little faster. The fact that he was actually getting to me was making me even angrier.

Tony Robbins always suggests flexibility when faced with acrimony. Sometimes you just need to break the cycle and try a different approach.

“How did you feel about your boss?”

“George? Why do you care?”

“Just interested.”

“He was a decent guy, great boss. He gave me this blade on his last day of work. His grandfather used it back when he worked for the Interborough Rapid Transit...”

“Oh yeah, the IRT. The private railroad of New York, the one that had the monopoly for awhile.”

“Well look who learned some stuff. Yeah, he was patching cables paring down wires with these things.” He said, indicating the razor in his chubby digits.

“The wheels were well greased and August Belmont was footing the bills and still they were using shaving razors for tools! That’s dedication. Real sacrifice. And George was the same way. More than anything, he really cared about this city. It was sad to hear he popped like that. He left his wife and two kids and never came back.”

A twinge of sadness grabbed me and disoriented me.

Within moments though, the tension came back to me and I tried to refocus my head.

“Was there something that brought it on?”

“I don’t know. Everybody’s different.”

“Well, you said he gave it to you on his last day of work.

What made him leave his job?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did he begin to lose his mind before he left or after?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

I tried to think back to the Good Book. The Good Book.

The. Good. Book. the good book. When I ran them through my head, the words began to drift from their meaning, the line fragments coming loose to disjoin each letter. For the first time, it wasn’t working for me. He was still evading something.

“Did he get fired?”

“He was asked to step down, yes.”

“What were the circumstances?”

Quite abruptly his tone changed and his eyes floated out from underneath his cove-like brow.

“I don’t have to answer any more of your fuckin questions.”

“You’re right, you don’t. And neither do I. But you could be a decent fellow because this could affect all of us.

“Don’t piss me off. Remember who’s got the control here, buddy. Remember the 2005 MTA strike? We can always do that again. Where would you be then?”

Oliveri grinned with satisfaction, flipping his straight razor back and forth like a butterfly knife. Whether or not it was a calculated, if not comically conspicuous, threat towards me or merely a nervous affectation was still vague. Either way, I hated him suddenly. It burned and scraped and reverberated from within me. I don’t even hate Junkies or even Killers as much as I hated him at that moment.

I needed to remember the good book. The good...just a book. Just a book. Like any other book. Now, it was just me and him. And it wasn’t so much that he threatened me as it was that, for the first time, somebody made me feel trapped by the very entity that housed me. He was using my safety against me.

‘I’ll never get through to him” I thought to myself, ‘He’s just a sad, fat old alcoholic. He goes to his sad little home, regretting his sad little life and hugging his sad fat wife.

They lay in their big bed every night and he kisses her on the eyelids one by one...sadly, of course.’

I leaned in with a look that, judging by his utter surprise, conveyed some level of menace, even if it was just a vagrant foolhardiness to him.

“This could concern all of us. Even you and your goddamned trains! The whole MTA could be spilling power, possibly electrocuting passengers. It could kill people!

Does that even matter to you?!”

He froze with a look on his face as I have never seen on a human being nor do I seek to again. It was a derailment, a complete pile-up of every prickly emotion and the resulting anguish it bore. Fending it back was making him wearier, his composed template of a face aching for

deliverance from the task of concealment. More than fury, which in a man that size is frightening enough, it was slavery, a face that revealed a compulsory and simultaneous allegiance to a shapeless tormentor. I looked down and sighed deeply, noticing the glassy vinyl loafers in place of my fondly recalled sneakers.

He jumped up from his seat as the phone next to his desk rang. He swung around and answered it with short monosyllabic phrases.

I looked next to me and found a stack of paper in an outbox labeled “Dead Files: To be Shredded”. I picked up a couple of pieces for later and began scribbling on the back. I was writing down some of the information I was just told when I noticed he had turned around and was watching me. As soon as I had noticed him, I stuffed the paper into my pocket.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m so sorry for my outburst. I really appreciate all your help. I didn’t mean to lose it like that.

Please don’t call the cops on me.”

“Why do you think you’re still here?”

“Thank you.” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. He smiled back at me with an expression I mistook for genuine compassion.

“No, I mean, why do you think I allowed you to stay here so long? I called them 10 minutes ago.”

When he went to the bathroom, he was really going to call the cops. It was either a few more burning questions or I’d get a pair of Jack Webbs slapped around my wrists. That Son of a bitch had won and he knew it. I had no choice but to scamper out of there as quickly and gracelessly as I could. I’m still not quite sure why he found the need to put an APB out on me for the Metro Cops. That means I’m on their radar and if they find me, they’ll send me somewhere worse than lock-up or possibly rivals any hell any culture has ever subscribed to. And it’s where they send all the others: Staten Island. I’d rather be thrown to the Psychies and Killers with both legs broken. Whatever the punishment, I needed to make haste to get out.

Unfortunately for me, all the buildings were not self-contained. Each brick and mortar office was shaded by only a slight overhang.

I sprinted through the yard in small spurts, feeling like a hyperactive feral creature, always on guard for metro cops or employees. As I walked forward, handfuls of metro police trickled in from the parking areas flanked along the edges of the yard. They ran towards Olivieri’s office. I started to wonder why so many of them showed up just to apprehend a trespassing transient. Given the circumstance and the fact that they were all walking towards Olivieri’s office and away from me, I decided to focus on the task at hand. Darting across the gravel between buildings, I noticed an open utility closet adorned with MTA employee safety clothing. I grabbed a reflective orange vest and another hard-hat to make my escape less conspicuous.

The galley of trains sat in front of me, inching closer as my pace ever-quickened through sheer tension. There were dozens of open ones and, once I reached them, I’d hop on one that was about to depart. I’d be damned if I had to wait it out on a stopped train, given my last experience in Pelham Bay. Once I reached the trains I frantically

walked around each of them to find an open one. It was a very disorienting process. The way they had been parked along parallel tracks, the snakelike cars of the trains created the effect of an erratically arranged maze. As I made my way through, I caught what appeared to be reflections of approaching metro cops in the windows. Due to all the reflective glass, it became hard to know where they were coming from, if at all.

I saw one train whose doors were open and whose engine was obviously grumbling its departure. The doors were beginning to close as I approached in a mounting sprint.

They nearly bit off my fingers as they closed. Looking around frantically, I noticed the bellows between the train’s cars and I hopped into them. I slid between thick bundles of wire vines, nestled tightly between two trains, hoping dearly to avoid my escape un-electrocuted or crushed between cars. We were off and, without making my way out from the tangle, it was hard to tell how far we had gotten before the train stopped with a whiplash.

Worried, I decided to slide out from the thicket of cables to the guardrails along the side.

The train stopped with a halt and a crowd of policemen began to approach in the distance. I knew I had to make a quick decision. Was I going to try to run for the parking lot and risk a world outside of the underground? It seemed my only choice. A honking train approached adjacent to us, coming from the other side of the yard.

Our train was stopped right where the dozens of tracks converge into three. Apparently, the approaching train was given the go ahead in the wake of our train’s halting to apprehend yours’ truly. The approaching train would come within feet of ours, culminating in a large open platform at the end. Before I had even decided to do so, I hopped to the outside of the bars to gain leverage before my leap of faith. The other train chugged toward me with a speed that matched my increasing heart rate. It was coming faster than I expected. Still, it beat Staten Island.

With a rush of adrenaline, my feet and hands were in the air like a leaping tree frog. I snagged the bars with my palms and my loafers, which slipped out from under me almost immediately, myself following in tow. I grasped the rail with my flailing palms, the stupid loafers still dangling on the tips of my toes. The train was going far too fast to stop and, before the gravel promised to grind my feet off, I heaved myself up and let my last pair of shoes drop into oblivion.

I stood panting as I watched the Jamaica Train Yard crawl back into the distance and disappear into a pinhole of light upon clearing the tunnel. I thought the adventure at the train yard would invigorate me; that my discoveries would help revive my soul from the aftermath of Pelham Bay, help counteract my lack of food and rest. With little more clues than the name of a dead man, escaping with even my life felt like a raw deal, an utterly valueless acquisition. I felt empty, like everything I’d known had failed me and with each discovery, I was getting further from the truth. Now, under heightened surveillance, I had no choice but to go into hiding and, for the first time ever, I felt like I was doing the world a favor. I’d have to transfer to another train immediately at the next stop to avoid discovery. I was planning to go to my Coney Island camp to regroup, process the information, and decide if I should keep going.

I sighed and looked down at my bare toes, expecting again to catch a glimpse of my beloved browned sneakers. This time, they were there, only looking very different

than I had come to remember them. Just like that, objects that had become an extension of my soles, with texture somewhere between bunyan sediment and fleshy sandals, they appeared to me anew. For the first time in complete memory, they were firm and matte in texture, their contrasting colors distinct and discernable, their smell sterile yet inviting in its novelty. I turned them over in my hands before placing them back in the gift-wrapped box, the supportive tissue crinkling under their weight. A waxy gift card laid out, signed in an elegant hand. And that was it. I had recalled the birthplace of the pair in a way that made them feel utterly foreign. Though the moment was so visceral I could touch the new rubber, the mother of its conception remained just out of reach, displaced in time along with any other potential clue.

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