Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  “Are you insane?” Maggie huffed. “You’re going to the Velvet Underground?”

  “I thought I’d go after my morning class. I’m free the rest of the day,” I said.

  “Do you know anything about the VU? Anything?”

  “Don’t know much,” I said. “That’s why I have you.”

  “Well, let me tell you, Nick. The Velvet Underground is the place everyone who’s no one goes. I mean everyone. Well, except Mingus, who prefers roosting in our building,” she said.

  “You mean the prophet Ezekiel,” I corrected.

  “Yes, his high holy prophetness.” She paused as if unable to wrap her intelligence around that strange development. “It’s been used by the homeless for a long time. For years. But since the GD and the end of so much train service, vacating so many tunnels and stations, the Velvet’s population has skyrocketed. It’s got the highest murder rate in the city. People go down there and are never heard from again. Or their corpses float up on the shore of the Hudson River, or some other spot.”

  “Yes, well, that sounds bad. But what can you tell me specifically?”

  There was some unusual electronic noise, as if Maggie were working on machinery.

  “The information is confusing and contradictory. I see that much of its reputation stems from one source called VU.com, which other sources then nabbed like it was free candy. The Velvet Underground, apparently, occupies the spaces made up of connected unused train platforms and tunnels, and older tunnels unused for decades. And, as you know, Nick, there is a great many of those, resulting in an entire city beneath the City. As best as I can ascertain, it’s a sinister, lawless place filled with the denizens of the deep, Nick. Denizens!”

  “How many people live down there?” I said.

  “No source seems to know for certain.”

  “I’ve got to go down there and find this Tanzer. I’ll make my way Uptown after class this morning.”

  Having finished my breakfast, I placed the bowl and cup in the sink, and collected what materials I needed for the class.

  A weird strangled mechanical noise poured out of the speakers as if Maggie were choking on my disobedience.

  “I’m strongly advising against you doing this thing,” Maggie said in the voice of an old woman who’d smoked two packs a day of unfiltered cigarettes for too many years. “There’s a communications block between the Velvet Underground and the surface. I don’t know how that could possibly happen, but so it is. I won’t be able to communicate with you when you’re down there. If you should need my help, you’ll be up the creek. Don’t do it, Nick. Please.”

  “I’ve got to,” I said.

  A moment passed. Again the sound of electronic whirring rained from the speakers.

  “Then forget you,” Maggie said hoarsely with a finality not to be denied. “If you’re determined to put your life in danger against my considered advice, in a place where I cannot reach you, then I’m off to Paree to play with Gary. Don’t be surprised if I never return.”

  Maggie had never been that definitive before.

  “Okay,” she said. “Not forever. But don’t expect to hear from me until tomorrow.”

  With that declaration, static surged from the speakers. A whooshing sound followed as if a poltergeist had left the room at breakneck speed. A virtual tantrum. Okay. No problem. Screw her. I was alone. I could handle that.

  I worked my way into Manhattan and taught the five students enrolled in my class called The End Times According to the Religions of the World. When class was over, I made my way from the Village to Grand Central Station on foot.

  Pre-GD, my walk up Sixth Avenue was bliss. Watching the changing neighborhoods, observing the endless parade of humanity, enjoying the smells, the food, the colors, the oddball characters one would encounter—for this people treasured New York City.

  But no more.

  The Great Debacle had transformed the Big Apple into the Little Prune, a dangerous, colorless, odorless, helpless mess. Now the streets offered little more than the occasional hot dog vendor—as people still had to eat—and he was always packing. People still lived and worked in New York, but the City had lost its sheen, its buoyancy, its life force. And with our AI technology gone awry, we all began to walk and bike once again. That seemed a good thing; perhaps a certain degree of civility would return.

  On my walk up Sixth Avenue to Madison to Grand Central, not one three-card monte game tantalized me, no one selling faux Rolex watches approached me, no deranged fanatic wishing to convert me to the temple of this god or that demon tempted me. Only deserted buildings where businesses of every imaginable type once sold anything the heart desired. I passed a shop advertising Zap Lazar Pistols at a quite reasonable price. Though hardly a fan of any weaponry, a voice inside suggested I purchase one as a safety measure, which I did. I placed it into a pocket and forgot about it.

  I entered the vast hall of Grand Central Station. Where throngs had once hustled to catch trains running just about everywhere, where the aroma of food, coffee and ambition filled the air, I was met instead by a tepid and enervated crowd milling around, looking aimless. With no difficulty I negotiated my way through, found Track 42, took a breath, and prepared to enter. Before I could pull the door leading to the track, my phone pinged loudly. I removed it from my pocket and was met by an image of Marlene Dietrich still bearing the three Hebrew letters spelling truth on her forehead. At the bottom of the photo in large, bold-faced letters read the words, Don’t do it, Nick. Please.

  But I did it.

  ***

  I returned the phone to my pocket and pulled open the door to Track 42. I entered upon a clammy and silent space that smelled of the past. Esther had instructed me to walk to the end of the long walkway where I would find a narrow black ladder leading onto the track. No light illumined my way, and I walked down like a blind man, my eyes adjusting. At the end was the black ladder. I lowered myself onto the idle tracks, and, using the flashlight from my phone, I sought the entrance Esther had promised would be nearby. But the pin light from my phone did not reveal the entryway. I looked in an increasingly widening arc, but saw nothing that resembled a doorway down.

  “Would you move out of my way?” a voice behind me whispered sharply. I nearly jumped out of my shoes. I moved as fast as a cat on fire. Then, cautiously, I turned to see a silhouette as it rushed past me. I aimed my light at the shadow’s back as it stopped in front of me and leaned down. He yanked up a door that just a moment before I’d been standing on. A dim light rose from the opening, and I heard vague noises below. Cautiously, the shadow stepped down into that faint light and disappeared. The door clanged behind him, and once again I stood in darkness.

  Two can have at this, I thought, aiming the light at my feet, and saw a shadowy door handle. I bent and pulled. With little effort it yielded, exposing a narrow circular staircase beckoning me into a pallid, smoky world.

  From my own research and from Maggie I had learned that the VU consisted of abandoned subway stations, which were all of them. Many of those underground spaces were quite large, as they had served as the intersection of several train lines, replete with shops of various kinds. There were some forty-eight of these station complexes spread throughout all the boroughs, save Staten Island. A good bit of space with which to build a vast criminal underground.

  I climbed down the sixteen steps and at the bottom of the staircase attempted to get my bearings. At that instant, I missed Maggie more than I thought possible.

  On the wall in front of me hung a sign that read, Welcome to The Velvet Underground. On the right of these words was the painting of a giant banana, peeled halfway, a replica of the Andy Warhol art that graced the Velvet Underground’s first album. Someone’s got a sense of humor, I thought.

  What did I expect? The gates of Hell, perhaps? Giants ready to crush the life out of me? The end of civilization as I mi
ght have liked to have known it?

  But two minutes on, life and limb remained secure, and nothing that lay before me matched my mildest imaginings.

  It wasn’t the Ritz. The musty smell of old basement, of air insufficiently circulated, permeated the place. Sparse overhead lighting created a shadowy ambiance. Nonetheless, an unmistakable warmth filled the tunnel. That was peculiar. The tunnel was dark and dingy and apparently endless, running two ways, but it wasn’t desperate. I did not behold a crime-infested, Wild West anarchy. No world of zombies. No gang of semi-human, bent-over mole people those of us living aboveground believed formed the Underground’s lifeblood.

  Instead, the Velvet Underground had a cozy, even familiar feel to it. Almost like a small town in the Midwest. Maybe not the best-kept small town, but nonetheless a place that projected a sense of intimacy. The very air projected the feeling that we were all part of a dream, under the rules of a dream reality. Objects seemed far away; then suddenly they’d close in. Time seemed to stretch and shrink. Yeah, here was a world that, in part at least, seemed in soft focus—like velvet.

  As my eyes grew accustomed to the murky light, I could make out vague signs of civilization: signage directing one to different locations, Beethoven’s Ninth filling the air, strong food aromas, maybe falafel, and the complete absence of angry noises of the mob one might expect in a reputed hellhole.

  Before me sat a wide screen. When I came within a few feet of it, it lit up and the words VU Cover Band filled the screen. After a moment the words faded, and four anemic, lifeless figures appeared. Then the figures morphed. One transformed into a pretty good replica of Aretha Franklin and the other three a backup band. Aretha looked directly at me and said, “I welcome you to the Velvet Underground, Dick.” Then she began to sing, “I Say a Little Prayer.”

  At times even I felt the need for a bit of the old spiritual palliative, even if the gift was given by a virtual singer who kind of got my name right. Surely this was one of those times.

  Before I could move on, Aretha still serenading, echoes traveling up and down, a drone the size of a cigar box flew in front of my face. Hovering like an obese and noisy hummingbird, the thing hissed. On a small screen, a fuzzy woman wearing an olive-green beret stared at me unblinking.

  “Officer Christine Lanton,” said the face, a badge now filling the screen. “What are you doing here?” A perfunctory and confident question, Officer Lanton made the sort of polite query one might expect from a cop on the streets of London.

  I told her I was looking for someone, not ready to give up the name.

  “You have the password?” she asked.

  I recalled immediately what Esther had told me. “Palindrome,” I said.

  “Anything else?”

  “Madam, I’m Adam,” I replied.

  “Good enough,” she said, looking me over one more time, the drone sinking to my knees and then rising again to my face. “That will be fifty dollars,” the voice said.

  I looked at the drone and asked, “How do I pay?”

  “Your UniPay app will suffice.”

  I withdrew my device and opened the app. I pressed it to the screen, a bit too hard at first. The drone rocked slightly.

  “Not so close,” Officer Lanton said.

  I pulled the phone back and a bright light flashed.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You might try that place down to the left.”

  And the drone rose nearly to the ceiling, around twenty feet, wobbled a bit, righted itself and flew off.

  To my left, some fifty yards down, I saw a green-and-white sign that in the distance resembled the formerly ubiquitous sign for Starbucks. Once upon a time in Manhattan, Starbucks proliferated like radioactive mushrooms, one on nearly every corner, always a long line. The last Starbucks aboveground closed around a year earlier. Who in New York City could afford a triple caramel macchiato anymore? Or even want one?

  As this spot came recommended by the local constabulary, I walked in that direction. But the walk once again became a strange, disorienting passage. The ground tilted this way and that, and at one point I had to lean against the wall for balance. The few people who approached me from the opposite direction turned their heads toward me as if in slow motion. Then, as soon as they passed by, they seemed to speed up and disappear.

  Closer on, I observed that this shop wasn’t exactly a Starbucks. In place of the familiar innocent longhaired mermaid was a longhaired woman with large bare breasts. And in the outer circle of the sign, in place of the familiar words Starbucks Coffee, read the words Outtaluck Café. To my knowledge, this coffeehouse had not yet achieved franchise status aboveground. But here it stood, located beneath Track 42 of Grand Central Station.

  With every hair on the back of my head bowing furiously to the Lord above and my beating heart protesting, I pulled open the door and entered.

  My word.

  A gallery of manly types filled the room. Crammed into all corners, big men, little men, bald men, hairy men, tattooed men, hairy-chested men, all dressed in bright colors, sitting in quiet conversation. Japanese flute music conveyed a mellow and meditative mood. A photograph of the Kobliner Rebbe, long beard and mysterious smile, looked sagely down upon the men with his hypnotic eyes, beneath, in Hebrew, the words The King Messiah Forever. Men were playing backgammon, chess, checkers, poker, pinochle, mah-jongg, cribbage. Some sat alone, vaping. The general air of familiarity filling the room suggested this was a regular haunt. Were I to encounter this cohort in the heart of Midtown pre-GD, I’d have thought I’d stumbled upon a reunion of the Village People preparing to break into a rendition of “YMCA.” Just a little perspicacity showed me that my first encounter with the civilization of the Velvet Underground was not a gathering of murderous mole people, but a gang hanging out at a gay coffee bar. Fitting enough, I thought.

  I bellied up to the bar.

  “Whaddaya want?” asked the bald, large-necked and bearded fellow behind the counter. Tattoos ran up his bare arm and onto his neck.

  “Just some information, please.”

  “You want information, you gotta buy.” He allowed the impact to sink in by humming a few bars of something indistinguishable while he wiped down the counter. “So whaddaya want?”

  Looking at the menu on the wall behind him, I said, “I’ll have a decaf skim latte.”

  “Nope. No espresso,” he said.

  “Then why is it on the menu?” I asked.

  “People expect it to be there,” he said. “We haven’t had espresso beans since before two Christmases ago.”

  “You have drip decaf?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Mint tea?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then what do you have?”

  He reached below the bar and brought up a jar of Maxwell House that looked like it had been around since the 1950s. He clunked it on the counter, then stared at me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Maxwell House it is, then. You don’t have soymilk?”

  He reached once more below the counter and produced a jar of powdered creamer. “Here you go,” he said.

  “Not much of a stock,” I said.

  “You come back and visit us sometime, maybe you bring a case of soymilk and some nice espresso beans. Till then it’s Maxwell House and powdered shit. When you’re lucky. You want tall or grande?”

  I ordered the grande with powdered shit. He took a paper cup from a pile of them, filled it with water, put it in a microwave oven and pressed some buttons. When the bell rang, he took it out, put in a teaspoon of instant coffee and a spoon of white powder, and handed it to me.

  I thought better of asking for stevia.

  “Ya want a cookie with that?”

  “I’d rather not,” I said.

  “You want info, you want a cookie,” he said.

  “What do you have?”<
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  And for the third time he reached below and came up with a bag of what appeared to be chocolate chip cookies. “How many you want?”

  “One?”

  “Minimum’s three.”

  “Three, then.”

  He shoved a mitt into the bag and took out three unpleasant-looking round things with brown dots throughout, which he dropped onto a paper plate. Next to the plate he put a thin napkin.

  “That’ll be forty-five bucks,” he said as if it were the most natural thing in the world to charge a king’s ransom.

  I produced my phone again and slid it over to him on the bar in the hope I’d be compensated in the future.

  “Cash only,” he said.

  I reached into my pocket and produced a fifty. I said, “Receipt, please.”

  He looked as if I’d insulted his mother. He let the bill lie untouched. Feeling not a little intimidated I proffered another five. He put both bills into a cash register built circa 1955. He handed me a handwritten receipt, which I shoved into my pants.

  “Man’s gotta make a living,” he said, running a cloth over the bar in preparation for whoever else with a dollar—many dollars, actually—the wind might blow in. “Ain’t none of these ingrates helping me pay the rent.”

  He pointed to the many manly men playing manly games.

  “These bozos’re just a bunch of chiselers needing a place to kill an afternoon. Every afternoon, really.” He tossed the towel over his shoulder and asked, “Now, buddy, I’m all yours. What can I tell ya?”

  “I’m looking for Wolfman Tanzer,” I said, sipping brown swill already grown lukewarm.

  “You mean Shelley Tanzer?”

  “I heard he went by the name Wolfman down here.”

  “Nah. Nobody calls him that except maybe some new guy fresh down from the Upstairs like you. Down here he’s Shelley. Shelley does my taxes. Wolfman don’t do taxes.”