Why that number? Probably I thought it was safely ridiculous and extreme to get my record into the twenties, yet stopping at only twenty seemed too mechanically round. Adding one more felt plausibly arbitrary, more
realistic
. That was likely all I could stand. Perhaps at twenty-one I’d also attained the symbolic number of adulthood, of maturity. By bringing together
thirteen
and
twenty-one
I’d made
Star Wars
my Bar Mitzvah, a ritual I didn’t have and probably could have used that year. Now I was a man.
By the time I was fifteen, not only had I long since quit boasting about my love of
Star Wars
but it had become privately crucial to have another favorite movie inscribed in its place. I decided Kubrick’s
2001: A
Space Odyssey
was a suitably noble and alienated choice, but that in order to make it official I’d have to see it more times than
Star Wars
. An exhausting proposition, but I went right at it. One day at the Thalia on West Ninety-fifth Street I sat alone through
2001
three times in a row in a nearly empty theater, a commitment of some nine hours. That day I brought along a tape recorder in order to whisper notes on this immersion experience to my friend Eliot—I also taped
Also sprach Zarathustra
all six times. If
Star Wars
was my Bar Mitzvah then
2001
was getting laid, an experience requiring a more persuasive maturity, and one which I more honestly enjoyed, especially fifteen or twenty showings in. Oddly enough, though, I never did completely overwrite
Star Wars
with
2001
. Instead I stuck at precisely twenty-one viewings of the second movie as well, leaving the two in a dead heat. Even that number was only attained years later, at the University Theater in Berkeley, California, two days after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. There was a mild aftershock which rumbled the old theater during the Star Gate sequence, a nice touch.
I’ll never see another film so many times, though I still count. I’ve seen
The Searchers
twelve times—a cheat, since it was partly research. Otherwise, I usually peak out at six or seven viewings, as with
Bringing
Up Baby
and
Three Women
and
Love Streams
and
Vertigo
, all films I believe I love more than either
Star Wars
or
2001
. But that kid who still can’t decide which of the two futuristic epics to let win the struggle for his mortal soul, the kid who left the question hanging, the kid who partly invented himself in the vacuum collision of
Star Wars
and real loss—that kid is me.
Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn
Here’s where I am: in the subway, but not on a train. I’m standing on one platform, gazing at another. Moaning trains roll in, obscuring my view; I wait for them to pass. The far platform, the one I’m inspecting, isn’t lit. The tiles along the abandoned platform’s wall are stained—I mean, more than in some ordinary way—and the stairwells are caged and locked, top and bottom. Nothing’s happening there, and it’s happening round the clock.
I’ve been haunting this place lately, the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station. But the more time I spend, the further it reels from my grasp. And, increasingly, I’m drawing looks from other passengers on the platforms and upstairs, at the station’s mezzanine level. Subway stations—the platforms and stairwells and tunnels, the passages themselves—are sites of deep and willed invisibility. Even the geekiest transit buffs adore the trains, not the stations. By lingering here, I’ve set off miniature alarms in nearby minds, including my own. I’ve allied myself with the malingerers not on their way to somewhere else. My investigation of this place reeks of a futility so deep it shades toward horror.
Undercover transit policemen are trained to watch for “loopers”— that is, riders who switch from one train car to the next at each stop. Loopers are understood to be likely pickpockets, worthy of suspicion. Even before that, though, loopers are guilty of using the subway
wrong
. In truth, every subway rider is an undercover officer in a precinct house of the mind, noticing and cataloguing outré and dissident behavior in his fellows even while cultivating the outward indifference for which New Yorkers are famous, above and below ground. It may only be safe to play at not noticing others because our noticing senses are sharpened to trigger-readiness. Jittery subway shooter Bernhard Goetz once ran for mayor. He may not have been electable, but he had a constituency.
As it happens, I’m also an inveterate looper, though I do it less these days. I’ll still sometimes loop to place myself at the right exit stairwell, to save steps if I’m running late. I’ve looped on the 7 train out to Shea Stadium, searching for a friend headed for the same ballgame. More than anything, though, I looped as a teenager, on night trains, looping as prey would, to skirt trouble. I relate this form of looping to other subterranean habits I learned as a terrified child. For instance, a tic of boarding—I’ll stand at one spot until a train stops, then abruptly veer left- or right-ward, to enter a car other than the one for which I might have appeared to be waiting. This to shake pursuers, of course. Similarly, a nighttime trick of exiting at lonely subway stations: at arrival I’ll stay in my seat until the doors have stood open for a few seconds, then dash from the train. In these tricks my teenager self learned to cash in a small portion of the invisibility that is not only each subway rider’s presumed right but his duty to other passengers, whose irritation and panic rises at each sign of oddness, in exchange for tiny likelihoods of increased safety.
By this law of meticulously observed abnormalities, then, my spying here at Hoyt-Schermerhorn goes noticed, triggers a flutter of disapproval in other inhabitants of the station. This may be deserved. I’m not here for a train. I’ve come seeking something other than a subway ride. What I’m trying to do maybe can’t be done: inhabit and understand the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station as a place. Worse, I’m trying to remember it, to restore it to its home in
time
. There’s no greater perversity, since a subway station is a sinkhole of destroyed and thwarted time. By standing here trying to remember Hoyt-Schermerhorn I’ve only triggered its profoundest resistance: I’m using it wrong.
The origins of New York’s underground trains, like those of the city itself, reflect a bastard convergence of utopian longing and squalid practicality—land grabs, sweetheart deals, lined pockets. The city’s first, thwarted subway was no different: a Jules Verne dream, one instantly snuffed by Tammany Hall, that paradigmatic political machine. The story has the beauty of a Greek myth: a short length of pneumatic subway built in 1869
in secret
beneath Broadway by a gentleman engineer determined to alleviate the choking daylight nightmare of New York’s foot, pig, horse, stagecoach, and surface railway traffic, against the status quo wishes of Tammany’s Boss Tweed, who rolled in troughs of money extorted from trolley and omnibus companies. The tube’s builder, Alfred Ely Beach, ought to be the hero of one of those elegiac novels of Time Travelers in Olde New York—editor of
Scientific American
, architect of American patent law, he was also a health nut and an opera buff, and the man in whose office Edison first demonstrated the phonograph (“Good morning, Sir . . . How do you like the talking box?”). In fifty-eight nights of covert digging Beach’s crew created a 312-foot tunnel, then assembled an elegant wooden, horseshoe-shaped subway car, powered by a giant electric fan. When he unveiled his miracle to the press—in an underground waiting room fitted with curtains, stuffed chairs, painted frescoes, a goldfish fountain and waterfall, grandfather clock, and zircon lamps—his demonstration subway caused a sensation. Tweed, aghast at what had hatched beneath his feet, roused an entrepreneurial assault on Beach’s tunnel, investing his capital—and New York’s immediate future—in elevated lines rather than subways. The life was squeezed from Beach’s dream. His tunnel was rented for wine storage, then forgotten. When in 1912 diggers excavating for the BMT line stumbled unwittingly into Beach’s intact waiting room, his drained fountain and extinguished lamps, his stilled wooden car, they must have felt like intruders on Tut’s tomb.
When you’re a child, everything local is famous. On that principle, Hoyt-Schermerhorn was the most famous subway station in the world. It was the first I knew, and it took years for me to disentangle my primal fascination with its status as a functional ruin, an indifferent home to clockwork chaos, from the fact that it was, in objective measure, an anomalous place. Personal impressions—family stories, and my own—and neighborhood lore swirled in my exaggerated regard. In fact the place was cool and weird beyond my obsession’s parameters, cooler and weirder than most subway stations anyway.
My neighborhood, as I knew it in the 1970s, was an awkwardly gentrifying residential zone. The Hoyt-Schermerhorn station stood at the border of the vibrant mercantile chaos of Fulton Street—once the borough’s poshest shopping and theater boulevard, it had suffered a steep decline, through the fifties and sixties, from Manhattanesque grandeur to ghetto pedestrian mall. Now no less vital in its way, the place was full of chain outlets and sidewalk vendors, many selling African liquorice-root chews and “Muslim” incense and oils alongside discount socks and hats and mittens. The station itself gave testimony to the lost commercial greatness of the area. Like some Manhattan subway stops, though fewer and fewer every year, it housed businesses on its mezzanine level: a magazine shop, a shoeshine stand, a bakery. Most telling and shrouded at once were the series of ruined shop-display windows that lined the long corridor from the Bond Street entrance. Elegant blue-and-yellow tile work labeled them with an enormous “L”—standing for what, exactly? The ruined dressmakers’ dummies and empty display stands behind the cracked glass weren’t saying.
The station was synonymous with crime. A neighborhood legend held that Hoyt-Schermerhorn consistently ranked highest in arrests in the whole transit system. Hoyt and Bond streets made vents from the Fulton Mall area, where purse snatchers and street dealers were likely to flee and be cornered. The station also houses one of the borough’s three transit police substations, a headquarters for subway cops which legislates over a third of Brooklyn’s subway system—so perhaps it was merely that suspects nabbed elsewhere in the system are brought there to register their actual arrest? I’ve never been able to corroborate the legend. The presence of cops and robbers in the same place has a kind of chicken-and-egg quality. Or should it be considered as a Heisenbergian “observer” problem: Do we arrest you because we see you? Would we arrest you as much elsewhere if we were there?
However ridiculous it may seem, it is true that within sight of that police substation my father, his arms laden with luggage for a flight out of JFK, had his pocket picked while waiting on line for a token. And the pay phone in the station was widely understood to have drug-dealers-only status. Maybe it does still. For my own part I was once detained, not arrested, trying to breeze the wrong way through an exit gate, flashing an imaginary bus pass at the token agent, on my way to high school. A cop gave me a ticket and turned me around to go home and get money for a token. I tried to engage my cop in sophistry: How could I be ticketed for a crime that had been prevented? Shouldn’t he let me through to ride the train if I were paying the price for my misdeed? No cigar.
Other peculiarities helped Hoyt-Schermerhorn colonize my dreams. The station featured not only the lively express A train, and its pokey local equivalent, the CC, but also the erratic and desultory GG, a train running a lonely trail through Bedford-Stuyvesant into Queens. The GG—now shortened to the G—was the only subway line in the entire system never to penetrate Manhattan. All roads lead to Rome, but not the GG. Hoyt-Schermerhorn also hosted a quickly abandoned early-eighties transit experiment, “The Train to the Plane”—basically an A train which, for an additional fare, ran an express shot to the airport. For my friends and me, the Train to the Plane was richly comic on several grounds—first of all, because it didn’t actually go to the airport: you took a bus from the end of the line. Second, for its twee and hectoring local-television ad— “Take the train to the plane, take the train to the plane,” etc. And last because the sight of it, rumbling nearly empty into Hoyt-Schermerhorn with the emblem of an airplane in place of its identifying number or letter, suggested a subway train that was fantasizing itself some other, less inglorious and earthbound conveyance.
The Train to the Plane was younger cousin to a more successful freak train, also run through Hoyt-Schermerhorn: the Aqueduct Special, which took horse-racing bettors out to the track on gambling afternoons. It flourished from 1959 to 1981, when it became a casualty of Off-Track Betting, the walk-in storefront gambling establishments that soon dotted the city. The Aqueduct Special made use of Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s strangest feature: its two quiescent tracks and dark spare platform, that parallel ghost—the platform I’d come to gaze at so many years later. As a kid, I took that dark platform for granted. Later, I’d learn how rare it was—though the system contains whole ghost stations, dead to trains, and famously host to homeless populations and vast graffiti masterpieces, no other active station has a ghost platform.
Even if I’d known it, I wasn’t then curious enough to consider how those two unused tracks and that eerie platform spoke, as did the ruined display windows, of the zone’s dwindled splendor, its former place as a hub. Where I lived was self-evidently marginal to Manhattan—who cared that it was once something grander? What got me excited about Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s fourth platform was this: one summer day in 1979 I found a film crew working there, swirling in and out of the station from rows of trucks parked along Schermerhorn Street. Actors costumed as both gang members and as high-school students dressed for prom night worked in a stilled train. The movie, I learned from a bored assistant director standing with a walkie-talkie at one of the subway entrances, was called
The Warriors
. My squalid home turf had been redeemed as picturesque. New Yorkers mostly take film crews for granted as an irritant part of the self-congratulatory burden of living in the World Capital. But I was like a hick in my delight at Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s moment in the sun. I was only afraid that like a vampire or ghost, the station wouldn’t actually be able to be captured in depiction: What were the odds this crappy-looking movie with no movie stars would ever be released? By picking my turf the crew had likely sealed their doom.
I became a regular customer in 1978. That year I began commuting most of the length of Manhattan, a one-hour ride from Brooklyn to 135th Street, to attend Music and Art, a famous public high school. The A train out of Hoyt-Schermerhorn was now my twice-daily passage, to and from. My companion was Lynn Nottage, a kid from the block I grew up on, a street friend. Lynn was from a middle-class black family; I was from a bohemian white one. We had never gone to school together in Brooklyn—Lynn had been at private school—but now were high-school freshmen together, in distant Harlem. Lynn had the challenge of getting to school on time with me as her albatross. Some mornings the sound of her ringing the doorbell was my alarm clock.
We were students not only of Music and Art but of the A train. Our block felt in many ways like an island in a sea of strife, and Hoyt-Schermerhorn was a place where the sea lapped at the island. Lynn and I had a favorite bum who resided in the station’s long passage from the Bond Street entrance, whom Lynn called “Micro-Man,” not for his size but for the way his growling complaints boomed in the echo chamber of the station like a microphone. One day Lynn screamed theatrically: she’d spotted a rat behind the smeared glass of the mezzanine-bakery’s display counter. I quit buying doughnuts there. Downstairs, we’d fit ourselves into jammed cars, child commuters invisible to the horde. The trip took an hour each way, long enough going in for me to copy the entirety of Lynn’s math homework and still read four or five chapters of a paperback. (I’d read another third or so of each day’s book at school, during lunch hour or behind my desk during class, then finish it just as we pulled into Hoyt-Schermerhorn again on the return trip. By this system I read five novels a week for the four years of high school.)
Lynn and I had habits. We stood in a certain spot on the platform, to board the same train every morning (despite an appearance of chaos, the system is regular). Most mornings we rode the same subway car, the conductor’s car. Had we been advised to do this by protective parents? I don’t know. Anyhow, we became spies, on the adults, the office workers, tourists, beggars, and policemen, who’d share segments of our endless trip. We took a special delight in witnessing the bewilderment of riders trapped after Fifty-ninth Street, thinking they’d boarded a local, faces sagging in defeat as the train skipped every station up to 125th, the longest express hop in the system. Also, we spied on our own conductor. The conductor’s wife rode in with him to work—she’d been aboard since somewhere before Hoyt-Schermerhorn—then kissed him goodbye at a stop in the financial district. Two stops later, his girlfriend boarded the train. They’d kiss and moon between stops until she reached her destination. Lynn and I took special pleasure in witnessing this openly, staring like evil Walter Keane kids so the conductor felt the knife-edge of our complicity. Twenty-five years later I’m haunted by that wife.