Who was I to think I could say something fresh about underground public transit? Well, the outsider has long had a place in the arts … and in comedy.
I had expected to wind up living in a big city, where I’d have access to frequent symphony concerts and perhaps opera as well. Foreign films, well-stocked bookstores, kindred souls. All the rest. My life journey and my career went another way, but I still wound up as a subway rider, of sorts. I was far from a private jet or even taxi kind of existence.
My introduction to underground transit probably came in a series of big, cartoonish, wildly rendered Subway Riders canvases that received a special exhibit at the Dayton Art Institute sometime in my high school years. I think they were by a hot New York rising star who was visiting Ohio as an artist-in-residence or an arts school guest instructor, though his identity eludes me now. Flash in the pan? Rubes in the sticks?
I wasn’t exactly wowed, but I was intrigued. He wasn’t Rembrandt.
The furthest east I’d been was Pittsburgh. Perhaps the next year my family got to Toronto and Montreal, though I didn’t venture on the subway in either of those cities.
Do families even take such vacations on the road nowadays? We did have our camping gear in the trunk of our red Buick Roadmaster.
~*~
Writing about subways – becoming fascinated by them, their offensive grit, stench, and loud noises included – was about the last thing I would have expected when I graduated from college or even high school. I was a Midwesterner through and through. The closest I had come to what I saw in those Subway Rider paintings was on the City Transit trolleys at rush hour. We definitely weren’t flashing along a dark tunnel or loading by hoards or packed together like sardines.
But people kept telling me I wasn’t destined for my hometown, no matter how loyal I felt. Or was that defensive? The message they conveyed was that I should look to Manhattan or some equivalent opportunity. Even Cincinnati, an hour away, looked sophisticated.
The hippie outbreak, or Revolution of Peace & Love, was still somewhere in the future, though the Beatles were shaking the status quo and skipping around Elvis in what we’d now call the pop culture scene. Culture was, let me emphasize, concerned with things that would raise our vision and intelligence rather than merely mark social norms as in averages, either mainstream or ethnic.
By the time I actually rode a subway train, I was nine months away from earning an urban studies certificate, thanks to my multi-disciplinary college studies. The journalism career that embraced me would instead lead out in the boonies or an equivalent emotional wilderness.
~*~
My book that sprang from those encounters started out short and flashy as its first draft in ’73. Inspired, in part, by Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, I typed away sitting cross-legged before a converted coffee table and my beloved Olivetti Lettra 22 blue typewriter. The very portable one.
Graffiti, wild splashes. This was going to be my wild hippie book, the essence of it all. It had the Midwest – what would emerge as Daffodil – and it had the Big Apple, where so many of the freaks I knew after graduation had grown up. The movement was a confusing clash of youthful excess.
It was too much – way too much, actually.
By the time I distilled it down into what was published as Subway Hitchhikers, it was more of a lacy collage presented in a strobe-light kind of then/now alternation that I came to see was overly ambitious to be effective rather than confusing.
What I did sense was the way big cities draw on the interior landscape, almost like vampires on the innocent. Not that I ever expressed it that openly, but I am now thinking it fit Gotham if only I were usually trying to look at the bright side of life.
Was it even a novel? Short, and perhaps meta-fiction?
Unlike any other.
Jnana's Red Barn 