I still go to the movies alone, all the time. In the absenting of self which results—so different from the quality of solitude at my writing desk—this seems to me as near as I come in my life to any reverent or worshipful or meditational practice. That’s not to say it isn’t also indulgent, with a frisson of guilt, of stolen privilege, every time. I’m acutely conscious of this joyous guilt in the fact that when as a solitary moviegoer I take a break to go to the bathroom I can return to another part of the theater and watch from a different seat. I first discovered this thrill during my Star Wars summer, and it’s one which never diminishes. The rupture of the spectator’s contract with perspective feels as transgressive as wife-swapping.
The function or dysfunction of my Star Wars obsession was paradoxical. I was using the movie as a place to hide, sure. That’s obvious. At the same time, this activity of hiding inside the Loew’s Astor Plaza, and inside my private, deeper-than-yours, deeper-than-anyone’s communion with the film itself, was something I boasted widely about. By building my lamebrain World Record for screenings (fat chance, I learned later) I was teaching myself to package my own craving for solitude, and my own obsessive tendencies, as something to be admired. You can’t join me inside this box where I hide, I was saying, but you sure can praise the box. You’re permitted to marvel at me for going inside.
What I was hiding from is easy, though. My parents had separated a couple of years earlier. Then my mother had begun having seizures, been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and had had the first of two surgeries. The summer of Star Wars she was five or six months from the second, unsuccessful surgery, and a year from dying.
I took my brother, and he stayed through it twice. We may have done that together more than once—neither of us clearly remembers. I took a girl, on a quasi-date: Alissa, the sister of my best friend, Joel. I took my mother. I tried to take my grandmother.
That same summer I once followed Alissa to a ballet class at Carnegie Hall and hung around the studio, expressing a polite curiosity which was cover for another, less polite curiosity. The instructor was misled or chose to misunderstand—a thirteen-year-old boy willing to set foot inside a ballet studio was a commodity, a raw material. I was offered free classes, and the teacher called my house and strong-armed my parents. I remember vividly my mother’s pleasure in refusing on my behalf—I was too much of a coward—and how strongly she fastened on the fact that my visit had had nothing to do with any interest in ballet. For years this seemed to me an inexplicable cruelty in my mother toward the ballet teacher. Later I understood that in those first years of adolescence I was giving off a lot of signals to my parents that I might be gay. I was a delicate, obedient, and bookish kid, a constant teacher’s pet. Earlier that year my father had questioned me regarding a series of distended cartoon noses I’d drawn in ballpoint on my loose-leaf binder—they had come out looking a lot like penises. And my proclaimed favorite Star Wars character was the tweaking English robot, C-3PO.
I did and do find C-3PO sexy. It’s as if a strand of DNA from Fritz Lang’s fetishized girl robot in Metropolis has carried forward to the bland world of Star Wars. Also, whereas Carrie Fisher’s robes went to her ankles, C-3PO is obviously naked, and ashamed of it.
Alissa thought the movie was okay (my overstated claims generally cued a compensating shrug in others) and that was our last date, if it was a date. We’re friends now.
I don’t know how much of an effort it was for my mother to travel by subway to a movie theater in Manhattan by the summer of ’77, but I do know it was unusual, and that she was certainly doing it to oblige me. It might have been one of our last ventures out together, before it was impossible for her. I remember fussing over rituals inside the theater, showing her my favorite seat, and straining not to watch her watch it throughout, not to hang on her every reaction. Afterward she too found the movie just okay. It wasn’t her kind of thing, but she could understand why I liked it so much. Those were pretty close to her exact words. Maybe with her characteristic Queens hard-boiled tone: I see why you like it, kiddo. Then, in a turn I find painful to relate, she left me there to watch it a second time, and took the subway home alone. What a heartbreaking rehearsal! I was saying, in effect: Come and see my future, post-mom self. Enact with me your parting from it. Here’s the world of cinema and stories and obsessive identification I’m using to survive your going—now go. How generous of her to play in this masquerade, if she knew.
I spent a certain amount of time that year trying hopelessly to distract my grandmother from the coming loss of her only child—it would mostly wreck her—by pushing my new enthusiasms at her. For instance she and I had a recurrent argument about rock and roll, one which it now strikes me was probably a faint echo, for her, of struggles over my mother’s dropping out of Queens College in favor of a Greenwich Village beatnik-folk lifestyle. I worked to find a hit song she couldn’t quibble with, and thought I’d found one in Wings’ “Mull of Kintyre,” which is really just a strummy faux–Irish folk song. I played it for her at top volume and she grimaced, her displeasure not at the music but at the apparent trump card I’d played. Then, on the fade, Paul McCartney gave out a kind of whoop-whoop holler and my grandmother seized on this, with relish: “You hear that? He had to go and scream. It wasn’t good enough just to sing, he had to scream like an animal!” Her will was too much for me. So when she resisted being dragged to Star Wars I probably didn’t mind, being uninterested in having her trample on my secret sand castle. She and I were ultimately in a kind of argument about whether or not our family was a site of tragedy, and I probably sensed I was on the losing end of that one.
My father lived in a commune for part of that summer, though my mother’s illness sometimes drew him back into the house. There was a man in the commune—call him George Lucas—whose married life, which included two young children, was coming apart. George Lucas was the person I knew who’d seen Star Wars the most times, apart from me, and we had a ritualized bond over it. He’d ask me how many times I’d seen the film and I’d report, like an emissary with good news from the front. George Lucas had a copy of the soundtrack and we’d sit in the commune’s living room and play it on the stereo, which I seem to remember being somewhat unpopular with the commune’s larger membership. George Lucas, who played piano and had some classical training, would always proclaim that the score was really pretty good symphonic composition—he’d also play me Gustav Holst’s Planets Suite as a kind of primer, and to show me how the Death Star theme came from Holst’s Jupiter—and I would dutifully parrot this for my friends, with great severity: John Williams’s score was really pretty good symphonic composition.
The movie itself, right: of course, I must have enjoyed it immensely the first few times. That’s what I least recall. Instead I recall now how as I memorized scenes I fought my impatience, and yet fought not to know I was fighting impatience—all that mattered were the winnowed satisfactions of crucial moments occurring once again, like stations of the cross: “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope,” “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” “If you strike me down, I’ll become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,” and the dunk shot of Luke’s missiles entering the Death Star’s duct. I hated, absolutely, the scene in the Death Star’s sewers. I hated Han Solo and Princess Leia’s flirtation, after a while, feeling I was being manipulated, that it was too mannered and rote: of course they’re grumbling now, that’s how it always goes. I hated the triumphalist ceremony at the end, though the spiffing-up of the robots was a consolation, a necessary relief. I think I came to hate a lot of the film, but I couldn’t permit myself to know it. I even came, within a year or so, to hate the fact that I’d seen the movie twenty-one times.
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 197
0s, 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?
The Disappointment Artist Page 5