The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld

by Justin Hocking

  This helps remind him that no matter how wired out the city makes him, or how much mental chaos his brain stirs up, deep down his soul is quiet and still and generally okay. And he meditates, uses breathing techniques. He throws in a yoga technique his stepmother taught him when he was a kid: nadi shodhana, alternate nostril breathing. But mostly he just forces himself to do something that scares him, over and over, until the fear finally eases up, little by little.

  FEMALE PASSENGER: So he gets better? He’s able to ride?

  L TRAIN: Yes. Slowly he gets better. He calms down, surrenders himself to the whole experience. After a few months, he’s not even conscious of it anymore; he can just sit back and relax and enjoy the ride like anyone else. That winter he reads Anna Karenina, almost entirely on the subway. This is Third Avenue. The next stop is Fourteenth Street.

  FEMALE PASSENGER: So he gets over it. What about the other phobias?

  L TRAIN: The subway is a watershed for him. Once he gets over me, it transfers to his other fears. He gets so he can fly again, no problem. Eventually he’s flying back and forth to and from Colorado—he even starts to enjoy it, the way he did as a kid. This is Fourteenth Street. Stand clear of the closing doors, please. The next stop is Sixth Avenue.

  FEMALE PASSENGER: That must feel good. To overcome that sort of thing.

  L TRAIN: I don’t want to be overly dramatic here, but when you’re released from that kind of emotional bondage, it feels like a miracle.

  FEMALE PASSENGER: So New York is good for him.

  L TRAIN: In a lot of ways, yes. We toughen him up. This is Sixth Avenue. The next and last stop is Eighth Avenue.

  FEMALE PASSENGER: You heal him.

  L TRAIN: I’m not sure I’d go that far.

  FEMALE PASSENGER: But it’s such a happy ending. He literally goes down and faces all his darkness and fears, then emerges as a whole person. It’s a spiritual thing, like Ishmael reborn from death into new life.

  L TRAIN: The subway is just the beginning, a threshold. You have to remember that in and of itself, riding the subway is really no big deal. Five million people do it every day.

  FEMALE PASSENGER: So you’re saying he runs into other problems?

  L TRAIN: I’m sorry to say that yes, yes he does. Problems much bigger than the subway. This is Eighth Avenue. This is the last stop on this train.

  FEMALE PASSENGER: How’s that even possible?

  L TRAIN (Comes to a complete stop, opens doors.): Look, this has been a real picnic, but you need to step clear of the train now.

  FEMALE PASSENGER: How about you tell me just one of the problems?

  L TRAIN (Doors remain open.): This is the last stop on this train. Please exit the train.

  FEMALE PASSENGER (Waits, expectantly, but is greeted only by silence. Exits train, disappears into a crowd moving up a stairwell.)

  RED HAIRICKSON

  One night after skating the Autumn Bowl, I give my new friend Ted a lift to the subway. Ted’s a ginger whom I’ve never seen smile, and who skates the bowl like someone with a death wish. We have mutual acquaintances back out West—he shared a house in L.A. with an old college buddy of mine. His full name is Ted Erickson, although our mutual friends refer to him as Red Hairickson. But he seems like he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, so I’m not about to call him that.

  I drive him through Greenpoint toward the Lorimer stop, where he’ll catch the train to his place in Bushwick.

  “Bushwick? That’s pretty far out there, right?”

  “Thirty minutes by train. A long haul, but the rent’s cheap.”

  “I hear you can still score pretty cheap rents here in Greenpoint.”

  “Yeah, but I’d never live in this neighborhood.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “There was a huge oil spill here back in the fifties. A total catastrophe. All the oil is still underground, trapped in the soil.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. They say benzene vapors still leach up from the ground. Benzene causes leukemia, and this place has one of the highest rates in the country.”

  Ted seems, again, sort of permanently aggrieved, so I’m not sure I believe him. If this is true, then why haven’t I heard about it before? Back at home it takes a couple Google searches to corroborate: I’m now living just a few minutes from the site of one of the worst environmental disasters in history.

  Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, oil refineries and bulk storage facilities metastasized on the banks of Newtown Creek. Exxon Mobil or its predecessors own the majority. In 1950 a subterranean explosion rocked Greenpoint, blowing manhole covers thirty feet into the sky. The blast was mostly forgotten until 1978, when the Coast Guard discovered a massive oil slick on the East River. The slick turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg for the largest oil spill of the twentieth century: further exploration revealed between eighteen and thirty million gallons of petroleum spread across one hundred acres of soil and waterways in northeast Greenpoint.

  I find plenty of information in the Village Voice and the New York Times, but outside the city it never got much coverage, a fact I find baffling considering that the spill was so much bigger than the Exxon Valdez accident in the late eighties. Why had no one heard about this? The Village Voice reports anecdotal evidence that Polish and Puerto Rican residents of Greenpoint suffer a higher than normal incidence of bone cancer and leukemia, but thus far no major news outlets have flocked to Greenpoint the way they did to Alaska after the Exxon Valdez spill. The articles in the Voice and elsewhere have a likely explanation: leukemia’s provenance is difficult to trace. There were no oiled otters in Newtown Creek, as there were in the Exxon Valdez debacle. Greenpoint’s losing team had no mascot.

  In fairness to Exxon, the spill didn’t happen all at once—along with the 1950 explosion, it resulted from decades of seepage and leaky pipes from a number of different companies, including BP and Chevron. But in an era before oil industry hacks took over the government, the Environmental Protection Agency actually went after Exxon. Though Exxon pointed the finger at Paragon Oil, in 1990 the state ordered Exxon Mobil, BP, and Chevron to clean up the site. By 2006 the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation reported that about nine million gallons had been recovered—less than half the total amount spilled up to thirty years ago.

  Articles about Newtown Creek link me to other environmental concerns in the neighborhood, including Radiac, a nuclear waste storage facility just a few blocks from my apartment. We’re also three blocks up from a coal-burning electricity plant. But every day more and more people my age and younger are moving in, buying apartments, and getting married and raising children. In 2003 and 2004 everyone’s talking about how much the neighborhood has blown out and gentrified since its late-nineties art-culture apex, but they haven’t seen shit yet: in May 2005 the whole neighborhood is rezoned from commercial to residential, effectively clearing the way for scores of forty-story, Miami Beach–style luxury condominiums all along the waterfront, from the site of the old Domino Sugar factory all the way to the oil-plumed shores of Greenpoint.

  HAPPY THANKSGIVING

  As planned, Karissa flies in to visit over the holiday weekend. When I pick her up at LaGuardia, I see immediately how much stress she’s been under the past two months, her face broken out in angry blemishes, some of which look like they’ve been worried over in the airplane bathroom.

  She buries her face in my chest when I hug her.

  “I look horrible,” she says.

  “Sweetie, you know I think acne’s sexy on a girl.” It’s true—on certain women a splash of acne across the cheeks is a total turn-on.

  “You’re seriously weird, you know that?” she says, looking up at me with overcast eyes.

  Back in Brooklyn, we walk around on Bedford, people-watching and checking out all the new boutique stores cropping up in former hardware shops and defunct Polish delis.

  “Everyone’s so stylish,” Karissa says, spotting a guy in a slim-fit
ting gray suit over a pair of chunky vintage high-tops, his hair done in the typical shag: long bangs that flip up on one side, hair down over the ears, collar-length in the back.

  “Tell me about it,” I say. “After a while you start to feel assaulted by fashion.”

  We stop at Brooklyn Industries, where Karissa admires an army-green winter coat with a faux fur hood. She really loves it, but her credit card is maxed—as is mine—and she’s trying to save everything for the big move.

  She wants to spend the rest of the night in my apartment, where no one can see her face, but I convince her to meet up with some friends at Pete’s Candy Store, a bar located in a former confectionary shop.

  We have some beers and listen to a folksinger from Ohio until about eight thirty, when my friend Jocko shows up. He’s a big part of the reason I’m in New York; he helped me get the book contract with Soft Skull Press. He’d grown up in Colorado too, near Rocky Mountain National Park. Learning to skate up in the mountains features prominently in his memoir The Answer Is Never. He also makes an aptly titled zine called Elk.

  When I introduce him to Karissa, he asks what part of the state she’s from.

  “I live in the thrilling metropolis that is Fort Collins,” she says.

  “Fort Collins? I used to skate a vert ramp there back in the eighties,” Jocko says.

  “I skate in Fort Collins right now, in the—what is it that we’re calling this era? The zeros?”

  “A Colorado girl who skates. I could totally hug you right now.”

  “Well, why don’t you?” Karissa says.

  Jocko gives her a big bear hug, which genuinely thrills Karissa. It’s something I love about her, the way she truly appreciates people, her authentic warmth. There’s absolutely no pretense to her, a rare thing in this neck of Brooklyn.

  The next day Karissa and I drive up to the Berkshires for Thanksgiving dinner with my mother’s best friend and her family. We have a big kosher meal, and it’s a little awkward, spending the holidays with someone else’s family. Karissa hardly says a word.

  After dinner, we finally get out for a walk, alone.

  We slump around in the November drizzle, shuffling through fallen leaves, our hoods pulled up. I reach over to hold her hand, but she pulls away.

  “I don’t think I belong here,” she says.

  “They’re old family friends,” I say. “They’re happy to have us.”

  “I’m talking about here. New York. That city; this whole coast.”

  “You can belong wherever you want.”

  “Maybe. The problem is you don’t think I belong here, either.”

  There’s a long pause. I look down at the sodden earth beneath my feet, unable to lift my eyes out of the mud and dead leaves to face Karissa.

  “You don’t want me to move here, do you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Don’t lie. You don’t want me to come. I can feel it.”

  I finally look up. Her face seems hollowed out beneath her hood, two Rorschach semicircles of mascara beneath her eyes. I’m just as lost in these dark woods as she is; the only thing I know now is how to step on a city-bound train, regardless of how truly awful and alone it feels.

  “I love you, but it doesn’t seem like you’re ready to move anytime soon, and I don’t know how to make this work long distance. It just seems like we’re at different places—”

  “No,” she says, cutting me off. “We’re not at different places in our lives. You’re in this fucking place, and I’m nowhere.”

  It’s silent on our drive back to the city, save for the sound of rain lashing the windshield. The next two days are equally silent and awkward, until it’s time for her to fly home. She goes on a shopping spree a couple hours before I take her to the airport.

  She returns wearing the Brooklyn Industries army-green coat, the hood pulled up to cover her face.

  I put my arms around her and she hugs me back weakly.

  “I figured screw it,” she says. “I might as well spend the money on something.”

  We get in my truck and she shows me the cookie she’d bought for herself at a bagel shop—a big sugar cookie with a smiley face made from yellow icing. It’s quite possibly the saddest thing I’ve ever seen considering that she is, at the moment, weeping. Just before I drop her off at LaGuardia, she looks at me one last time.

  “You know, you talk about loving everyone all the time like you’re some sort of enlightened being,” she says. “But the only reason you love anyone is to make yourself feel better.”

  SAMSARA

  The next few weeks I spend as much time as possible skating the Autumn Bowl, trying to numb out the pain and guilt over Karissa. Sometimes I skate well and the sessions are transcendent, and I feel like I’m exactly where I need to be. Other times we’re just a bunch of dudes carving circles inside a big brick cave on a Saturday night—moving really fast, straining ourselves, risking serious bodily harm from moment to moment, but never really getting anywhere.

  ON THE PERILS OF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN AND ADULT-ONSET DIABETES

  My breakup with Karissa is theoretical at first; we continue talking on the phone almost daily, even after five or six months, when the weather finally warms up. This makes it difficult for either of us to move forward, but the one bright spot of summer is that I finally have time to learn how to surf.

  It starts out on Long Island, where I spend Memorial Day weekend at Kyle Grodin’s beach house. Career-free and on the back side of thirty, Grodin spends his days surfing, skateboarding, and rock climbing; he’s independently wealthy1 and has what seems to me like the perfect life. His place is a rustic and comfortable Cape Cod with split cedar shingles, but it has a spooky, Great Expectations vibe to it. His father passed away when Kyle was still young, and then his mom died before he turned thirty. He was adopted, so losing his parents was doubly traumatic. He keeps up the house like a dusty museum, the living room lined in loud, seventies-era orange wallpaper with the words peace and love spelled out in silver foil. An old piano sits near the front entrance, covered with unused sheet music and knick knacks; the built-in bookshelves in the hallway are still filled with all his parents’ old books.

  That first night at his house, Grodin leads me into a spare bedroom off the kitchen, a place cluttered with more books belonging to his father, who was also a writer.

  “This is the room where my dad died,” Kyle says. “I thought since you’re a writer, you might like to sleep in here,” he says, his macabre sense of humor cranked all the way up.

  While I’m getting ready for bed, I realize I forgot my contact lens solution. Kyle takes me upstairs, to his bathroom, where he still keeps some of his parents’ personal effects, including several boxes of saline. “Here,” Kyle says, handing me a bottle of Opti-Free with a 1995 price tag, “use all you want.”

  Fortunately, Kyle doesn’t live alone. He shares the house with his fiancée, Anka, and a couple roommates, including a self-admitted boozehound named Scott Dio. I bump into Scott down in the kitchen, just before he heads out to the bars.

  “Do you like my vest?” he asks, pointing both index fingers at the khaki, multi-mesh-pocketed affair.

  “It’s great,” I say. “What is it, a fishing vest?”

  “No sir. This here is a beer vest.” Without further explanation, he invites me out for drinks, then calls me a pussy when I decline.

  “What are you going to do, hang around here with my tubby roommate?” Scott says, motioning upstairs, toward Kyle’s room.

  “Actually, I’m just going to bed.”

  “Okay, good night, sleep tight. You pussy.”

  Later, when Kyle comes down for a nighttime snack—half a box of Honey Nut Cheerios—I bring up my conversation with Scott.

  “Pay no attention to that fat ass,” Kyle says, mouth full of cereal. “He still owes me two months’ rent. I’m about to kick him out of this dirty flophouse.”

  On our way to the skatepark the next afternoon, we battle
the notorious Hamptons traffic. Fueled by refined sugar and caffeine, Grodin explodes into constant fits of road rage; they abate only during moments when he ogles young, well-heeled Manhattanite tourists, like the Uggs boot—wearing teenager who jaywalks in front of us on her way to the East Hampton Häagen-Dazs.

  “You know what I’d do with that girl right there?” he says.

  “Oh Jesus, Grodin. She’s like fifteen.”

  “Yeah, she is a little old for my tastes. But I’d still like to buy her a nice big chocolate ice cream cake,” he says, checking out her ass in the rear view.

  “Let me guess what you’d do with it.” In Kyle’s favorite fantasy tableau, he violates the object of his affections with various dessert items—cherry cobblers, upside-down pineapple cakes, all manner of fresh fruit, entire tubs of cake frosting, Hostess Ding Dongs.

  “Oh yeah,” he says, “I’d cram that whole cake right up her crack.”

  I bury my face in my hands, a little nauseated even though I’ve been hearing about his perverted dessert fantasies for years. It’s all just talk, of course, except for his love of sweets. He could easily devour an entire ice cream cake in a couple sittings, just like I’ve witnessed him eat a whole pumpkin pie, or a half dozen doughnuts, or two packages of jelly-filled Dutch cookies dipped in dark chocolate. The next morning, at a Kiwanis club community pancake feed in Amagansett, he eats seventeen flapjacks.

  “I think I could do five more,” he says, relishing his last pancake. “But I want to skate later.”

  “What this place needs is a vomitorium,” I say, feeling bloated even after my relatively meager seven pancakes.

  “I feel great,” he says, rubbing and slapping his distended, deeply suntanned belly. It looks like a twenty-pound Thanksgiving turkey, lavishly basted and oven-browned. “This is actually an improvement on the breakfast I ate yesterday. Half a box of Fruity Pebbles, half a pound of peanut M&M’s, and a two-liter bottle of Pepsi.”