Looming here on the banks of the Harlem River as it spills its poisoned guts into the Atlantic, these warehouses comprise the defunct Greenpoint Terminal Markets, a once-vibrant center of naval industry. Our destination was originally one of the largest nautical rope factories in the world.1 Months later, after I get a job in Midtown, I sometimes ride my bike to work along the waterfront in east Manhattan, right below Bellevue Hospital, where, from the other side of the river, this whole area has a severely decayed, third world look to it, like Beirut in the 1980s or San Francisco in shambles after the Great Earthquake.
Grodin and I enter the building through a creaky metal door that we have to heave open with both hands. The passage leads into a dismal stairwell littered with broken beer bottles, bricks, piles of soot. Then down a couple uneven steps into a shadowy open-air corridor with rusty fire escapes spiraling up into the dark between sixty-foot brick walls. Above us, a thin slash of starless sky; straight ahead, a narrow porthole onto Manhattan’s vertical sea of lights.
The muffled rush of urethane wheels circumnavigating the bowl reaches us from down the corridor, a sound like an old roller coaster coming off its rails. We enter another doorway, then find ourselves in a cavernous brick warehouse with fifty-foot-high ceilings. A stairway leads up to the deck, and there it is: an immaculate wooden bowl, sheeted with a fresh layer of Russian birch plywood, like the hull of a well-crafted ship. Amoeba-shaped, it fills up every square foot in the huge space, one section transitioning right up an extant concrete wall, which allows skaters to traverse the bowl’s boundaries and actually ride the old building itself. And everyone’s whipping around at supersonic velocities, carving and grinding to a sound track of eighties punk rock—Iggy Pop and the Stooges, the Dead Kennedys—so fast that it feels like they’re generating some invisible form of energy, like frenzied atoms in a particle collider.
I take a few warm-up spins and then pop out onto the deep-end deck, where Grodin introduces me to his friend Andy Kessler. Andy’s a compact guy with coal-black hair and a beak of a nose. Tan, weathered skin. As East Coast as they come. He looks to be in his forties, but there’s something youthful about him: he rocks a black sleeveless T-shirt, Levi’s, and low-top Keds; his slick-backed hair has a little curl in the front, like Danny Zuko from Grease.
Grodin tells Andy that I just moved from Colorado.
Andy grins, shakes my hand. “Welcome to town,” he says. “Now get out of my town.” He breaks into a friendly cackle, then drops in and rolls around the bowl, riding an oversized skateboard with a sharp, surfboard-like nose. His back hunched slightly like a surfer in a barrel, he powers through corners with his elbow crooked in front of his face, shielding his eyes from invisible sea spray. He’s pretty ancient by skateboarding standards, and doesn’t really do any tricks beside deliberate frontside grinds, but he has this classic style, honestly one of the best I’ve seen in my twenty-plus years of skateboarding. I later learn that he’s been skating since the early seventies, longer than anyone else in the city, longer than many of us in the room have been alive, and that in terms of skateboarding, New York City really is his town.
Grodin and I skate for hours, until just about everyone, including Kessler, clears out. After he’s gone, Grodin tells me more about him, how he’s a living legend in the skateboard world, a founding member of the Soul Artists of Zoo York, the seventies-era skate crew that was New York City’s equivalent of Dogtown and the Z-Boys in Santa Monica. And how, during the late eighties and early nineties, Andy disappeared onto the New York streets, having traded skateboarding for heroin. But that’s all history; he’s been sober for over a decade and is completely religious about going to NA meetings and riding his skateboard.
Kyle Grodin is something of a junkie himself—but his drug of choice is sugar. Before we met at my house he’d picked up a two-liter bottle of soda and a couple Snickers bars from the local bodega. Between runs he chugs Coke straight from the bottle or forces down a candy bar. The more he gorges, the harder and more guerrilla-like his skateboarding becomes. To say he skates like a guerrilla is an understatement, considering the way he sweats out his T-shirts, how he has to double up on socks to keep them from turning to sweaty mush, or the way he sometimes blows a trick out mid air, pitches his skateboard across the room, and howls like a primate. But the comparison isn’t entirely fair. He looks more like a seminimble circus performer getting shot out of a cannon; he can do shit that no one else can do—like fully inverted handplants over four feet of sheer vertical on the concrete wall—and he does it all while going a million miles an hour, a crazed grin on his face.
The other thing about Grodin is that once he gets a session started, he never wants to quit. Whereas for me skateboarding is an obsession, for Kyle it’s a borderline mania. If I had it in me to skate all night, he’d stay there with me, skating and sweating and grunting until dawn. But by one o’clock I’m ready to go home and get some sleep, at which Grodin voices his obvious disappointment.
“Home? Already?” he says, panting, dripping.
“Grodin, we’ve been skating five hours straight.”
“So? I’m just getting warmed up,” he says, then mops his face with his already-soaked T-shirt.
“I can see that. And I’m afraid you might blow a fucking gasket.”
“Are you kidding? I already blew all my gaskets back in the nineties.”
“Look, you can stay all night if you want,” I say, “but I’m going home.”
Not one to skate by himself, Grodin helps me close down the warehouse, cut the lights. We shuffle our way out the murky corridor, then roll back home through half-lit Brooklyn streets.
1 In Moby-Dick Melville discusses a possible reason for the demise of the American rope industry: “Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and I will add (since there is an aesthetic in all things), is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp.” So to add to the Autumn Bowl’s gritty mystique is the fact that the place was once used for producing not only rope, but an especially ugly rope.
THE WHITE DEATH
In the posthumous afterword to the poet Charles Olson’s book Call Me Ishmael, the writer Merton Sealts describes visiting Olson in his tiny Greenwich Village office, where Olson was holed up, surrounded by old, heavily annotated copies of Moby-Dick, while he was finishing his doctoral dissertation on Melville. Sealts offered him a draft of one of his own essays on Melville. Olson—a great bear of a man—sat reading it, smoking his pipe, nodding in approval.
“Well,” Olson said, “I see … that … THE WHITE DEATH … has descended … upon YOU … too.”
THE WHITE DEATH. n—1: Simo Häyhä, a Finnish sniper in the Winter War, nicknamed “White Death” by the Soviet Army 2: a slang term used to describe incurable diseases such as tuberculosis or AIDS 3: great white shark (vernacular) 4: an all-consuming obsession with the novel Moby-Dick and the life of Herman Melville
I contracted my own White Death back in graduate school, when I was first assigned Moby-Dick, and had to wake up at five or six in the morning to swim its immense dark waters.
In a typically droll essay, David Sedaris details how he had to force himself to get through Moby-Dick by not taking a bath until he finished. I loved Moby-Dick from the beginning, but I can sympathize with Sedaris. Melville’s language is often brilliant, pulse-quickening, Shakespearean—the deeper midnight of the insatiable maw. His intensity and worldly wisdom are apparent, but so is his insecurity about his lack of secondary education, a fact of his upbringing that he often tries to cloak with vainglorious prose or rampant alliteration: mingling their mumblings with his own mastications. You sometimes feel embarrassed for him, the way you do for historical interpreters or people in costume at a Renaissance fair. Or, like many Moby-Dick readers, you simply give up on him about half way through, exasperated by long-winded tangent
s about the minutiae of whaling.
Not one to give up easily, though, I made it through Moby-Dick.
It’s a book about constant movement—about the relentless pursuit of passions—to which I can seriously relate.
I became obsessed with a book about obsession.
Searching for critical work on Melville, a couple grad school friends and I ventured down to the fiction and literary criticism sections in the basement of the Colorado State University library. The library was flooded during a torrential rainstorm the previous year, copies of my favorites like The Odyssey and To the Lighthouse and The Shipping News tossed around and taking on muddy water, little paper vessels foundering in a storm. Though all the drowned books had been restored via irradiation, the basement still had a faint mineral smell of floodwater.
After browsing a few stodgy critical anthologies, I discovered a title called Melville’s Moby-Dick: An American Nekyia by Jungian analyst Edward F. Edinger. I’d always been fascinated by Carl Jung’s theories—with the fact that he accepted and honored spiritual experience whereas Freud denied it. In An American Nekyia, Edinger proposes the very Jungian interpretation that all the characters in Moby-Dick constitute one unified entity, that each individual crew member is actually a different splintered archetype within the psyche of the main character—a spiritual seeker named Ishmael.
As proof, Edinger quotes from passages like the following:
They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all, though it was put together of contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltlessness, all varieties were welded into oneness.
The word Nekyia derives from the title of the eleventh book of The Odyssey, wherein Odysseus descends into the underworld to commune with the dead. According to Edinger, Moby-Dick is the quintessential American Nekyia—a metaphorical “night sea journey” through despair and meaninglessness, symbolizing the dark passages that we all embark on during our development as individuals and as a society. In Jungian theory, most spiritual journeys begin with a kind of universal descent into the underworld, where we come face to face with our own darkness, weaknesses, and fears—our shadow. So Moby-Dick can be read as Ishmael’s confrontation with his dark side in the form of Ahab, just as most of us wrestle daily with our own dark moods and impulses, and our country reckons with its imperialistic shadow side. The clash turns bloody and violent, and Ahab’s resentful pursuit of the white whale brings down the entire ship. Only Ishmael is reborn through the wreckage; having assimilated his shadow after this deep psychic battle, he floats upward through a spiraling whirlpool. In Jungian terms, this circular current is a mandala, an ancient symbol of wholeness and individuation.
I liked this spin on Melville’s tale—especially because a more literal analysis of Moby-Dick tends toward the melodramatic and purely tragic. The Jungian interpretation allows for darkness and shadows and tragedy, but ultimately points toward the light.
This is where it began: my own White Death, a syndrome characterized by obsessive thoughts about Moby-Dick and Herman Melville, the collecting of old volumes of the novel and the schlepping around of one or more of these volumes at almost all times, and constant talk of Moby-Dick—its brilliance and relevance to contemporary life—to anyone who’ll listen.
These early symptoms are mild compared to what manifests as the disease progresses.
GOING UNDER
In many ways, New York is perfect for someone with my peripatetic obsessions, my need to move. It’s a city where everything and everyone are in constant motion, flux—via trains, helicopters, bicycles, skateboards, taxis, strollers, horses. Even in movie theaters you can feel the subway rumble and pitch beneath your feet. The weather’s always changing; buildings are always rising up and coming down; everyone’s trying to get somewhere else—from Brooklyn to Manhattan, from Manhattan back to Brooklyn, from entry level to management, understudy to lead, assistant to editor.
The problem for me is that, having grown up in the West, I’ve always been in control of my movement, the pilot of my own vehicle. But in New York, you’re at the mercy of forces larger than yourself, both dark and light; you have to resign yourself to being a passenger.
My third night in the city, a friend invites me to an art opening near Union Square. I’d visited the city plenty of times as a tourist, but this is my first subway ride under the East River into Manhattan, and about halfway through it dawns on me that not only am I now living in New York City—New York Fucking City—but I’m also trapped three hundred feet below a polluted river—so deep that my eardrums pop—hurtling along at top speeds, with no way to stop what I’ve put into motion, to slam on the brakes and eject myself from this whole noisy, grimy, two-thousand-miles-from-home ride onto which I’ve willingly hitched myself. Suddenly my heart is a pipe bomb inside the suitcase of my chest, threatening to blow apart not just my body but also this entire train car and all the two hundred strangers who are about to witness me completely blow apart. I’ve been told that it will take me a few months to get used to the city, that these kinds of freak-outs are normal, but this does not feel normal, not at all.
The train ride mercifully takes only a few minutes, and then I’m released through sliding double doors, through silver turnstiles and dirty-tiled corridors and up a staircase back into open air. But “open air” is maybe not the right term for Union Square—not for someone from Colorado, who despite spending months in the woods, hiking without a compass or map through vast evergreen forests where people can and do become hopelessly disoriented—some of them even perishing in the cold, cold woods—now feels, perhaps for the first time in his adult life, utterly lost, abandoned by what he has heretofore considered a keen sense of direction.
TIMING
Just before I’d left for New York, Karissa’s father lost his job at Hewlett-Packard, even though he’d been management-level for over twenty years. Her mother was having emotional problems, and then her grandmother passed away, and in the midst of all this chaos, Karissa had to move back home to finish her last year of college and try to save up enough money to follow me out East.
We talk for hours every night, cell phone pressed against my head for so long that I worry I might develop cauliflower ear.
Our conversations develop a predictable trajectory. First, I tell her all about whatever amazing New York City thing I witnessed that day: some new street art, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Autumn Bowl, the collection of medieval art at the Cloisters. Then, sensing her jealousy and longing, I apologize, try to downplay what I’ve seen, tell her how much the subway freaks me out.
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better. You only hate the subway ride beneath the East River.”
“I would say that in general, the subway makes me very nervous. It’s growing into a problem, actually.”
“You think you have problems? At least you don’t have a boyfriend who moved to New York.”
“You’re moving out here soon, too.”
“Right. Just as soon as I save up three thousand dollars. Working at a sandwich shop.”
I remind her that she’s flying in for Thanksgiving, that we’ll talk then. That we’ll work things out.
“All right then, good times,” she says.
AN OLD FRIEND
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
∼ HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
One night my roommates and I visit a bar just down the street from our apartment, a newish, comfortable place with wood-paneled wa
lls that approximate a Swedish sauna—a quasi-Scandinavian aesthetic that’s popular in Brooklyn and maybe has something to do with Ikea. We’re standing around talking, drinking Pilsner Urquells, when someone taps me on the shoulder.
He’s a tall guy with dark curly hair, and it takes a minute to place him, but then it all comes swimming back—it’s Asa Ellis. The two of us worked together at a skateboarding/snowboarding camp on Mount Hood, Oregon, nearly six years ago. Before making the move out from Colorado, I’d heard from a mutual friend that Asa was in the city, doing well, writing for the Village Voice, so bumping into him isn’t a complete surprise, but it’s a nice coincidence that warms the part of my heart that’s ambivalent about my move to New York. Like me, Asa grew up in the West—in his case Los Angeles, in a bohemian canyon enclave above Santa Monica. His parents were proto-hippies who gave Asa freedom to roam around the beach, surf all day, sleep in the sun, and hang out with budding pro surfers. He eventually moved to New York to study creative writing at the New School; he ended up writing for the Voice and occasionally the New York Times, and generally has the city dialed. But with his blue eyes and broad shoulders and beatific smile, there’s something very laid back and West Coast about him.
Asa and I exchange numbers, and then a couple weeks later he invites me over for dinner at his studio apartment, in an ocean-blue building above a Park Slope hardware store. Just back from a surf trip to Ecuador, he’s in well-worn huaraches, shorts, and an ancient T-shirt with tiny holes all over the shoulders, the look of someone stranded happily on a deserted island. Thick shoulders and ropy arms—it’s apparent he’s spent a hell of lot of time in the ocean. His place is cozy, with uneven hardwood floors, partially exposed brick walls, a couple cats lounging around on thrift store furniture, a record player and a substantial vinyl collection. And a stack of surfboards near his bed.
The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld Page 2