The Disappointment Artist

by Jonathan Lethem

  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.

  This was the year another student, a talented violinist, had been pushed from a train platform, her arm severed and reattached. The incident unnerved us to the extent we were able to maintain it as conscious knowledge, which we couldn’t and didn’t. There were paltry but somehow effective brackets of irony around our sense of the city’s dangers. Lynn and I were soon joined by Jeremy and Adam, other kids from Dean Street, and we all four persistently found crime and chaos amusing. The same incidents that drew hand-wringing from our parents and righteous indignation from the tabloids struck us as merry evidence of the fatuousness of grown-ups. Naturally the world sucked, naturally the authorities blinked. Anything was possible. Graffiti was maybe an art form, certainly a definitive statement as to who had actually grasped the nature of reality as well as the workings of the reeling system around you: not adults, but the kids just a year or three older than you, who were scary but legendary. The entire city was like the school in the Ramones’ movie Rock ’n’ Roll High School, or the college in Animal House—the dean corrupt and blind, the campus an unpatrolled playground. Our own fear, paradoxically, was more evidence, like the graffiti and the conductor’s affair, of the reckless, wide-open nature of this world. It may have appeared from the outside that Lynn and Jeremy and Adam and I were cowering in this lawless place, but in our minds we romped.

  The names of the three limbs of the subway—the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit), the BMT (Br
ooklyn-Manhattan Transit), and the IND (Independent Subway)—are slowly falling from New Yorkers’ common tongue, and the last enamel signs citing the old names will soon be pried off. Slipping into shadow with those names is the tripartite origin of the subway, the fact that each of the three was once a separate and rival corporation. The lines tried to squeeze one another out of business, even as they vied with now-extinct rival forms: streetcars and elevated trains. On this subject, the language of the now-unified system, the official maps and names, has grown mute. But the grammar of the lines and stations themselves, with their overlaps and redundancies, their strange omissions and improvised passageways, still pronounces this history everywhere.

  The early subway pioneered in crafty partnership with realtors and developers. Groping for new ridership, owners threw track deep into farmland, anticipating (and creating) neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Jackson Heights. But the IND, which built and operated Hoyt-Schermerhorn, was a latecomer, an interloper. Unlike its older siblings, the IND clung to population zones, working to siphon excess riders from overloaded lines. The city’s destiny wasn’t horizontal now, but vertical, perhaps fractal, a break with the American frontier impulse in favor of something more dense and strange.

  The new trains running through Hoyt-Schermerhorn quickly moth-balled both the Schermerhorn trolley and the old Fulton elevated line— but first the station had to be dug. Construction of new stations in a city webbed with infrastructure was a routine marvel: according to Stan Fischler’s Uptown, Downtown, tunneling for the IND required, beyond the 22 million cubic yards of rock and earth displaced, and 7 million man-days of labor, the relocation of 26 miles of water and gas pipes, 350 miles of electrical wire, and 18 miles of sewage pipes. What’s notable in period photographs, though, is the blithe disinterest in the faces of passersby, even at scenes of workers tunneling beneath a street where both a trolley and an el remain in operation. The Sixth Avenue tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street was an engineering marvel in its day, a dig threaded beneath the Broadway BMT subway and over the Pennsylvania Railroad (now Amtrak) tubes, as well as an even-more-deeply buried water main. “The most difficult piece of subway construction ever attempted,” is almost impossible to keep in mind on an F train as it slides blandly under Herald Square today.

  Alfred Kazin, in A Walker in the City, wrote:

  All those first stations in Brooklyn—Clark, Borough Hall, Hoyt, Nevins, the junction of the East and West side express lines—told me only that I was on the last leg home, though there was always a stirring of my heart at Hoyt, where the grimy subway platform was suddenly enlivened by Abraham and Straus’s windows of ladies’ wear . . .

  When a friend directed me to this passage, thinking he’d solved the mystery of those deserted shop windows in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn passage, I at least had a clue. I searched the corporate history of Abraham and Straus—Brooklyn’s dominant department store and a polestar in my childhood constellation of the borough’s tarnished majesty, with its brass fixtures and uniformed elevator operators, and the eighth floor’s mysterious stamp- and coin-collector’s counters. In the A&S annals I found the name of a Fulton Street rival: Frederick Loeser and Company, one of the nation’s largest department stores for almost a century, eventually gobbled up by A&S in a merger. The 1950s were to such stores as the Mesozoic was to the dinosaurs—between 1952 and 1957 New York lost Loeser’s, Namm’s, Wanamaker’s, McCreery’s, and Hearn’s; the names alone are concrete poetry.

  I’d nailed my tile-work “L”: Loeser’s created display windows in the new Hoyt-Schermerhorn station to vie with A&S’s famous (at least to Alfred Kazin) windows at Hoyt. Kazin’s windows are visible as bricked-in tile window frames today, but like the smashed and dusty Loeser’s windows of my childhood, they go ignored. Meanwhile, aboveground on Fulton Street, the name Loeser’s has reemerged like an Etch A Sketch filigree on some second-story brickwork, as lost urban names sometimes do.

  The abandoned platform was a mystery shallower to penetrate than Loeser’s “L.” The extra track connects the abandoned platform to an abandoned station, three blocks away on Court Street. This spur of misguided development was put out of its misery in 1946, and sat unused until the early sixties, when the MTA realized it had an ideal facility for renting to film and television crews. The empty station and the curve of track running to the ghost platform at Hoyt-Schermerhorn allowed filmmakers to pull trains in and out of two picturesque stations along a nice curved wall, without disturbing regular operations. The nonpareil among the hundreds of movies made on subway property is the subway-hijacking thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. It was in Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s tunnel that Robert Shaw and his cohorts stripped off fake mustaches and trench coats and, clutching bags of ransom millions, made their hopeless dash for daylight, and it was in Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s tunnel that Shaw, cornered by crusading MTA inspector Walter Matthau, stepped on the third rail and met his doom.

  And then there’s The Warriors. The film is based on a novel by Sol Yurick, itself based on Xenophon’s Anabasis, an account of a band of Greek mercenaries fighting their way home through enemy turf. Yurick translated Xenophon into New York street gangs; his book is a late and rather lofty entry, steeped in the tone of Camus’s The Stranger, in the “teen panic” novels of the fifties and sixties. Next, Walter Hill, a director whose paradigm is the Western, turned Yurick’s crisp, relentless book into the definitive image of a New York ruled by territorial gangs, each decorated absurdly and ruling their outposts absolutely.

  The movie inspired a wave of theater-lobby riots during its theatrical run. It’s a cult object now, lauded in hip-hop by Puff Daddy and the Wu-Tang Clan, and cherished by New Yorkers my age, we who preen in our old fears—call us the ’77 Blackout Vintage—for mythologizing the crime-ruled New York of the seventies more poignantly, and absurdly, than Kojak or The French Connection. For, in the film, it is the gang themselves who become the ultimate victims of the city’s chaos. In this New York, even the Warriors wish they’d stayed home. For me, a fifteen-year-old dogging the steps of the crew as they filmed, it was only perfect that a fake gang had occupied Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s fake platform. The film, etching my own image of the city into legend, began its work even before its public life.

  Yurick’s book has been reissued again, with a Warriors still on the jacket and a long new author’s Introduction, detailing the classical and existentialist roots of the novel. Yurick shares his perplexity that this least ambitious of his books should survive on the back of a movie: “There hasn’t been one film made in the United States that I would consider seeing five times, as many who love the film version of The Warriors did.” Years later, I met the wizened Yurick on a train platform, though not the subway. We disembarked together in Providence, Rhode Island, each a guest at the same literary conference, and, unknowingly, companion riders on an Amtrak from New York. Our hosts had failed to meet our train, and as the locals all scattered to their cars, the family members or lovers to their reunions, we were left to discover one another, and our dilemma. Yurick shrugged fatalistically—should we have expected better? He summed his perspective in a sole world-weary suggestion: “Wanna nosh?”

  Michael Lesy’s 1973 book, Wisconsin Death Trip, is a mosaic of vintage photographs and newspaper accounts of eccentric behavior and spastic violence in turn-of-the-century rural Wisconsin. In a flood of miniature evidence it makes the case that stirring just under the skin of this historical site is mayhem, sexuality, the possibility of despair. The book, a corrective to homilies of a pastoral American countryside, is a catalogue of unaccountable indigenous lust, grief, revenge, and sudden joy.

  Poring over old newspaper clippings that mentioned the station, I began to imagine my equivalent to Lesy’s book: Hoyt-Schermerhorn Death Trip. “TWO ARE KILLED BY POLICE IN GUN BATTLE, 1/23/73: Neither of the slain men was immediately identified. But the police said that one of them had been wanted for several bank robberies and for allegedly shooting at policemen last Wednesday nigh
t in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Street subway station . . .” “WOMAN HURT IN SUBWAY FALL, 6/19/58: A 55-year-old woman was critically injured yesterday when she fell or jumped in front of a southbound IND express train at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Street station in Brooklyn . . .” “37 HURT IN CRASH OF TWO IND TRAINS, ONE RAMS REAR OF ANOTHER IN DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN DURING EVENING RUSH, 7/18/70: . . . there was a rending of metal at the crash, she said, and then the car tilted. All the lights went out. She said there were sparks and the car filled with smoke. The girl said she was thrown to the floor and, terrified, began screaming . . .” “STRANGER PUSHES WOMAN TO DEATH UNDER A TRAIN, 2/2/75: A 25-year-old woman was thrown to her death in front of an onrushing subway train in Brooklyn yesterday by a man who apparently was a total stranger to her, the police said . . . the incident took place at about 6:15 P.M. in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn IND station, which was crowded with shoppers at the time. According to witnesses, including the motorman, the man suddenly stepped up to the victim, who had her back to him, and pushed her forward in front of the train without saying a word . . .” “400 BOYCOTTING STUDENTS RIOT, HURL BRICKS, BEAT OTHER YOUTHS, 2/18/65: Four hundred boycotting Negro students broke through police barricades outside Board of Education headquarters in Brooklyn yesterday in a brick-throwing, window-breaking riot . . . The disturbances spread over a two-mile area and onto subway trains and stations . . . A group of 60 youths attacked a group of six white students on the Clinton-IND’s GG line . . . They were apprehended at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Station by 15 transit policemen . . .” “300 IN SUBWAY HELP TILT CAR AND RELEASE BOY’S WEDGED FOOT, 9/2/70: A rescue team of subway passengers, hastily organized by three transit policemen, tipped back a 54-ton subway car last night to free an 11-year-old boy whose foot was wedged between the car and the platform at a downtown Brooklyn station . . . The boy . . . was running for an IND A train when his leg was caught between the platform and train at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station.”