[cont.]
It was well after three o’clock in the morning as he walked very methodically to the subway, sobering up along the way. The air was crisp, even invigorating, and he could smell bread baking somewhere nearby, even over the smells of garbage. The streets were still lightly littered with people, all looking less sober than he was. Loud laughing and the sound of bottles breaking and horns honking. Cab drivers cursing in languages he didn’t recognize. He really loved living here, loved the energy of the place, like living inside of an electrical circuit. But being poor here was unbelievably hard. So many opportunities and so little income to capitalize on them. He had hoped that the inclusion of his video in Barbara’s movie would jumpstart his career in New York, but everyone thought she had staged it. And her credits were ambiguous so why would they think anything else? She had also edited it so the elegant and lyrical sections were dropped and only the clownish skits remained. He thought he looked stupid and immature in her film. He was trying to talk about the flow of life – how we are not just one thing, but an amalgam of contradictions woven together. The section where he woodenly hits the bottles filled with different amounts of colored water, knocking them over on the second go round; that spilt water with the colors flowing together moved into a section where the water poured over his sculpture, making the parts slowly spin and that spinning segued into him making a metal figure spin like a top across the floor. The continuity was the point, not the individual sections. But it was Barbara’s film and she paid him for the use of his video. It was disappointing but nothing to be done about it. Lori assured him that he actually came out the most sympathetic of the artists. Tommy looked like a degenerate and she looked like a shrew, so a clown was good in comparison. Lori, sweet Lori, always trying to find the silver lining.
He sniffed the tears back and continued down the street, past the piles of stuffed garbage bags by the curb. Sid called them grabage bags. Sid the recycler. Sid made a good supplemental income cleaning up and then reselling found objects. His recycling was like a virus – everyone in the building now collected stuff for Sid, so when Alex walked past a discarded side table, how could he not pick it up? It was scratched with a large, ugly water discoloration on top but otherwise solid. You know, this might actually be good to paint as a prop for the next video. After Barbara’s film came out, he took a break from video, but Sid and Jake kept pestering him to do something they could project behind their band. Something bright and freaky, retro psychedelic. Painting pink paisley on the table would work. So he picked it up and carried it with him down the street. He knew he didn’t have enough cash for a cab. Bushwick was just a few too many miles away on what he had left in his wallet after paying for the drinks. Wow, the table was remarkably heavy – it must be made of real wood. Maybe he would refinish it and sell it to some hipsters or trade it to Sid for part of his rent.
The closest subway station to his train was eleven blocks away from the bar, and once he got there, he had to walk down and up many dark flights of stairs to reach the right platform. Great timing to find the table. Too bad Sid and Jake were away. Any other time he’d just call them to come and get him. But he knew enough to know the table had some value, so down the stairs they went. It was awkward carrying it but he got down the first flight fine. On a wet patch on the second flight, he slipped enough that his pants got tangled on one of the table legs, and he started to fall. He flung the table away, grabbed the rail, twisting his elbow as the table tumbled down the stairs with sharp echoes.
Fuck, he thought, you really need to be more careful. All he needed was a broken leg when he lived on the fifth floor with no elevator. That would make life peachy, now wouldn’t it? He straightened up and walked slowly, deliberately down the stairs to the table. Picking it up again, he checked for damage. The table was intact with an added scratch, nothing serious, but his pants leg was torn, the elbow and one ankle both a bit tender. Lucky nothing broke. But damn, it was his favorite pair of slacks. Oh, well. Down, across and up, he and the table crept along in the nearly empty station. This station was like a urine-soaked Piranesi etching – all of the corridors leading off into nowhere, all in shades of grey and grime, the sound of dripping from the depths of the tunnels. At night it carried a nightmare quality to it, as if the half-forgotten past was hiding among the shadows, ready to reach out and submerge the present in transient piss, bury it under piles of grubby paper. Hondo had loved the subways at night until three guys beat the living crap out of him and even stole his shoes. Afterward, he only took cabs unless Alex was with him: “You are my guide to the underworld.”
Lugging and limping up the final set of stairs reaching the tail end of the platform, Alex expected a long wait. Instead he was instantly enveloped by the loud rattle and screeching brakes of the approaching train. And then silence as the doors opened. Out of the blue, he could clearly hear Tommy intoning the Whitman poem which had frightened the guys who had kidnapped him:
And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn’d to beautiful results,
And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,
And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact,
And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.
This is what they sing at the gates of Heaven, Alex thought, as he dragged the table into the subway car and sat alone with it into Brooklyn.
Return on Monday for the next chapters of Just Like Suicide.
