You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
As they skirted New York City, they texted me this, not just to update their progress in traveling south but also knowing the memories it would trigger.
Back in my early days after college, this was in my circuit, even though Interstate 86 was still in the future.
The clock’s winding down on my offer of a free ride on my novel, Subway Visions. Who knows when, if ever, you’ll have another opportunity on such a deal.
The surrealistic story presents an adventurous ride in its flashes through underground culture. Some of it even erupts into verbal graffiti.
It’s one of five novels I’m making to you for free during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale, which ends just a few hours from now on January First. Remember, the ebook comes in the digital platform of your choice.
Step aboard promptly, then, before the door closes. There are good reasons I see these mass transit rails as an urban amusement park. Check out the ebook and you’ll discover why.
For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.
Some things are timeless, and subway trains and their tunnels and elevated lines are that for me. They do get my imagination rolling.
That’s how I came to write Subway Visions, my surrealistic novel of adventurous rides through underground culture. Some of it even erupts into verbal graffiti.
The ebook is one of five novels I’m making available for FREE during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale. You can obtain yours in the digital platform of your choice.
Think of this as my Christmas present to you. Now, get rolling and enjoy the trip!
For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.
Damn Cassia! She even tore apart my first published novel, Subway Hitchhikers.
A lot had happened in the nearly three decades since the book was first published – and even more since it was first conceived in 1973. Gee, that’s more than a half a century.
As I came back to the story after the release of What’s Left, my first task was to bring the tale more in line with the rest of the series, starting with the name of the lead character. Kenzie was an advance over the hippie-era Duma Luma, which rather echoed Wavy Gravy of Woodstock renown. His earlier legacy of being a lama reincarnated in Iowa was also downplayed if not entirely erased. Besides, there had been reports of such things actually happening since my book was first published. I have no idea how they turned out, either.
Another big job involved changing the original structure of short present-tense chapters flashing against past-tense ones, like subway trains passing in opposite directions. It was a creative touch but quickly confused the reader. A more conventional chronological-order storyline took its place.
That was accompanied by a new plot based on Kenzie’s monthly trips down to Manhattan to study with his Tibetan Buddhist guru in a tenement on the Lower East Side. That development added a handful of other devotees to the characters and realigned any who had previously existed.
Some of the Tibetan details now reflected tales I had heard from a more recent friend who was studying to become a Buddhist nun. Never mind that her experiences came decades after his or that there might not have been a Rinpoche residing anywhere near the Big Apple. Rival yogis, however, were plentiful.
Tibetans by the early 21st century? Our favorite dining option in Manchester, New Hampshire, was a Nepali restaurant that featured momos, a steamed dumpling staple in Tibet, too. The owners and staff were quite honored when an authentic Buddhist Rinpoche dropped in and approved of their dishes.
My, I have lived in a changing world. When’s the last time you even saw a subway token, by the way?
The freewheeling hippie-era fantasies of my book were soon followed by some creepy downsides. Hitchhiking out on the open road had turned sinister. Subway surfers, seeking the thrill of riding atop the cars in the tunnels and on the elevated lines above the street, were being decapitated and worse or worse by immovable objects in their trajectory. And the onset of homelessness during the Reagan years created whole villages surviving underground, as Jennifer Toth reported in her book The Mole People: Life in the tunnels under New York City, which was published just four years after my novel.
In addition, Long Island Newsday had assigned a columnist, Jim Dwyer, to its new subways beat, leading to a nonfiction book, Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York Subways, which came out only a year after mine. Now that’s some tough competition. No wonder I didn’t hear from him after sending him a comp copy for review when my book came off the press.
By that time, though, I was living an hour-plus north of Boston and entering a time of my life when I’d be riding its MBTA trains about once a week – perhaps a thousand fares one way and back with girlfriends and later family on my visits. Familiarity with underground mass transit hasn’t lessened my fascination.
Still, since Subway Hitchhikers had been about hippies, I had to admit they had largely fallen into disrepute or self-denial. But that’s not how the book stands now, something that’s reflected in its current title, Subway Visions; Along the tubes to nirvana.
As for today? Here I was, with my fascination with subway systems, asking my favorite lifeguard about her experiences in Boston during her freshman year of college. She must have been taking the cute little cars of the Green Line, right?
Instead, she emphatically told me how disgusting they are, miserable on hot days and packed at peak hours – and, especially, the fellow passenger, an utter stranger, who puked on her feet in sandals.
I didn’t dare show her my book after that.
I’ve long been fascinated by major metropolises, or at least the concept of a downtown as a pulsing power center buzzing with fashionable activity. My hometown, while a thriving city at the time, never struck me as “big.” As for glitz? Forget it.
In the list I’ve assembled, each of the cities has at least one professional baseball team, and today also an NFL team, not that sports were a big factor for me. Great symphony orchestras and art museums, however, definitely were. And later, I came to see subway systems as another measure; the majority of the cities here have them.
All but one of these locations is somewhere I’ve been more than once, and we’re not even counting connecting flights at the airport. While I’ve resided inside only one of these hubs, I’ve lived within the gravitational orb of another seven.
That said, here goes, presented more or less in the order in which I experienced them.
I realize how much the experience of most of these places is based on walking. Pedestrian-friendly was a key element separating them from others.
Honorable mentions: Worcester, Saint Louis, Toronto, Philadelphia, Montreal, Detroit, Providence.
As you’ve probably noticed in other posts here this year, I’ve been trying to recall some of the authors and books having an influence on the earliest drafts and later revisions of my novels. As I’m writing this, most of my personal library is still in storage – or other volumes, purged long ago to make room on my shelves for more – and my journals under wraps during the house renovations. I’m having to rely on memory, faulty though it may be.
Look, I don’t want these posts to be about some poor neglected novelist blah-blah-blah, but rather as one account of surviving in a writer’s life, maybe as a bit of advice or even encouragement for the next generation or two.
That said, I can state that my subway project sprang from Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America as its model. Think short, playful, imaginative with an image slash idea as its central character, like a children’s story for Woodstock reaching young adulthood. William R. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch also cast a spell as a free-floating state of mind.
For me, hitchhiking in subway tunnels was a fantasy symbolizing the hippie experience as I encountered it during my time living in upstate New York. You know, underground with urban roots yet flourishing out in the countryside where you could stick out your thumb and go about anywhere. Yes, though I didn’t fully comprehend it then, that Woodstock crowd was mostly from New York City and its suburbs.
The symbol even implied a degree of freeloading rather than responsibility.
While awaiting publication, the manuscript kept growing from its 1973 first draft, typed while sitting cross-legged at my beloved Olivetti 32 typewriter, through a revision shortly after that and probably another in 1976 before I packed up for the Pacific Northwest, where yet more would be added to the text with quite a backstory in addition to a superstructure out in the foothills somewhere north of Gotham.
This was well beyond the initial Brautigan flash. What I had was, in fact, unwieldy, and nodding toward Brautigan’s other fiction and a lot more. Unlike me, he kept most of his volumes short.
And then, somewhere before reaching my sabbatical in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills in 1986, the manuscript was greatly slimmed down, leaving many pages of outtakes I couldn’t trash outright. There was enough to create more novels, or so my inner trash picker insisted.
We’ll look at those as they took shape during my furious year of keyboarding on my new personal computer, however primitive the machine and process appear now.
In that sabbatical, I must say I was highly disciplined, keyboarding for four hours or so before taking a break, eating, even napping, and then returning to the work until two or so in the early morning. I had lived my adult life up to this point awaiting this moment, if it was far from what I had envisioned. Suburbs? Without a wife or soulmate? Heartbroken, in fact?
What drives an artist, anyway?
Beyond the yellow BMW 1600 oil-burning coup I was bopping around in – the one that was older than any of the women I was seeing.
A great deal of material and energy was there to be released, and I sensed this was my make-it-or-lose-it moment. As you’ll see.
Baltimore even had its own subway line under construction, reaching all the way out to where I was encamped.
Not that I would be there when it opened.
~*~
My first hick outpost, the one upstate, wasn’t as small as it seemed. Yes, it was a backwater, but the core was more populous than six of the places I would subsequently live in, if you didn’t count the university students in what I would dub Daffodil.
What my first actual job in journalism did have, though, was proximity to New York City, a mere 3½- to four-hour drive away. Despite the distance, the connection was vital, even vibrant. All of my new friends were from the Big Apple, and many of them were Jewish, as my college girlfriend was, even though she had by now oozed away from my presence, off on what I saw as troubling new places. At least none of them were Jonestown.
Starting with a summer internship before my senior year of college and picking up again after my graduation, a time of great emotional upheaval, exploration, and redirection. As I said, this was in the high hippie outbreak.
I presented the image that flashed before me, the gandy dancer who could have been a hitchhiker, but I should also acknowledge a freaky cartoon a housemate had created and handed me, with a face at a sewer grate mumbling “Duma luma, duma luma.” Those were the two prompts for the manuscript, seriously.
~*~
The inspiration also came from my first jaunts into New York City while living upstate, and later to the west in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania. Most of my buds and girlfriends had been from the City, as they called it. My early experiences turned into fascination during a period of great personal upheaval and growth for me.
Hippies seemed to be trying to go in two directions at once: back to the big city while hitchhiking out in the sticks. The original version was, in fact, published as Subway Hitchhikers in 1990 – the worst bookselling season in the memory of many publishers, thanks to the first Iraq war.
As I’ve ready described, in the 17 years between the first draft and the story’s first publication, the manuscript underwent a considerable metamorphosis as I moved across the continent in my day job. While living in the desert of Washington state, I even picked up a 1915 engineering book on the building of the New York subway system while browsing in a very small, small-town bookstore. (How did it ever land there?) Much of my expanding text was backstory on the central character, while the urban transit episodes shifted into something akin to an appendix. The result was an unwieldy epic. But I kept the outtakes, which took on their own life later.
Sardi’s in Manhattan?
A legendary bartender, being quoted in his retirement story in the New York Times, was amazed.
I have always been shocked by prices in the City, but for once it doesn’t seem so far out of line. Not that I go out that often.
The label does have a range of applications, from residents of the six-state New England region or Connecticut in particular to a Manhattan professional baseball team to anyone north of Dixie (often prefaced with “damn”) to anyone from the USA who lands in a foreign country.
Along with the shortened “Yank.” Or its many uses as an adjective.
The word’s origins, though, are contested.
None of these quite convince me, but I feel Scottish, Swedish, and even Persian roots are even less likely.
Decades have passed since I’ve been in any part of New York City. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, though, most of my buds were from there or nearby, so I wound up staying in all five boroughs. And I was reintroduced in the mid-80s as well.
I became fascinated with the transit rails and even imagined what I cast as Subway Hitchhikers, their psychedelic underground adventures now available in my novel Subway Visions.
Oh, the history! The city has certainly undergone a wild ride in the years since, some of them admittedly terrifying.
As improbable as my hitchhikers seemed at the time, reality has since produced several parallel developments.
The first was the Mole People, the homeless who created villages in the tunnels starting in the Reagan era.
The second was the Subway Surfers, daredevil youths who would ride the tops of the trains or more recently, hang from the sides.
I thought they had faded from the scene, but a spate of recent fatalities is proving otherwise.
As for the adrenaline rush? Or is it testosterone?
Maybe someone will be able to describe it to the rest of us. I’m not sure I’d want to see the movie version, sedate as I’ve become now.
My first awareness of the Mad Men television series, about a decade ago now, came in my daughters’ outraged question – “Was there really that much sexual abuse in the workplace back then? They’re making that up, aren’t they?”
They were incredulous at the blatant sexism and racism of the time I grew up in, even after I confirmed it was there.
What they described was confirmed and more in my recent binge viewing of the series. Let’s just say I was quickly emotionally engaged in the show.
Growing up in the Midwest, I was repeatedly told I belonged in New York rather than in my hometown. Advertising was, in fact, one of the career paths I was considering, and like journalism and publishing in general, Manhattan was still the center of the universe.
Watching the presentations reminded me, to some extent, of the first offices I worked in, even in Ohio. And Don Draper, the advertising creative director at the core of the story (I started to say “heart” but he is rather heartless), reminded me of some of my livelier bosses as well as a kind of ideal of what I was aspiring to or perhaps was being groomed for, at least before the hippie influence kicked in.
Yes, there was cigarette smoking everywhere, and liquor – and functioning alcoholics. (Should I say “functioning alcoholics who smoked”? Or is that too redundant?)
There were also some incredible secretaries, who were far more than typists. The best held the office together, far more than the corner office they reported to.
Let’s just say that the workplace changed drastically in the years since, in part through the digital revolution.
~*~
The show also hit close to home through the father of my best friend in high school, who was a vice president in a boutique advertising agency, one titled with the initials of the three of the partners’ surnames. Not that he was anything like the ad men in the show. Through him, though, I learned of the intricacies of billing, production challenges, deadline crunches, marketing analysis, and purchasing print, broadcast, billboard, and direct mail access – things that were touched lightly on, if at all, in the plots but still a factor.
And during college and the first year after, I was exposed to families that could well have mingled with the Drapers – executives, attorneys, and politicians, plus their wives and children of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
~*~
My daughters were swept up in the show’s fashion mindfulness of the ‘50s and early ‘60s but unhappy with the styles as the chronology moved on in the final seasons. We can argue there.
My biggest criticism is of the cheap shots taken at hippies, falling into stereotypes rather than the more carefully crafted type studies up to that point. In doing so, the writers and producers lost an opportunity to more sharply critique the cynical, superficial world Draper and his colleagues inhabited. The tone of these segments, quite simply, was out of line with the rest of the production.
Even so, I was devastated by the final episode.
Could that have actually been me? Thank God, I escaped.
Jnana's Red Barn 