By the time they close Late City Final, his hands shake and he wishes nuclear death on the entire Australian race. Images of giant mutant koalas—bald, leathery skin—breathing fire, swaggering through downtown Sydney, biting the heads off tow-headed bastards named Ned and Colin, using that ridiculous iconic opera house as a giant toilet. Alternate histories where the Japanese won the Battle of Midway and went on to purge the species of the Great Australian Blight. Selective plagues magicked up by eugenics masters beneath the Pentagon, sending powerful sickness across the Pacific that will cause a wave of dyspepsia, drowning the Ozzies in an ocean of malarial feces. The only thing dragging him back to reality is the sandpaper quality to the insides of his eyelids and the horrible acidic gurgling in his stomach.
It’s 2.37 in the morning. He’s transmitted the back page of the paper to the printers up in the South Bronx, and fulfilled his modest duty as gatekeeper and junior adjunct warlord for the graphics department of the one of the last newspapers in New York City. And were his masters not drunken sadistic pigs, shipped wholesale from the Pacific Rim with sole intent to tear the American working man apart with their blunt, crooked teeth; he would take pride in that. Instead, he rubs the three day stubble on his head, scratches his bloodshot eyes, throws on his Navy surplus pea coat, and heads for the icy midtown morning.
6th Avenue is a blur of taxis and rickshaws, combing the streets for strays. To the west, tourists sleep happily, cradled in the neon glow of Times Square, where a blind, naked 3 year old child carrying gold chains, a satchel of diamonds and stack of thousand dollar bills would be safe, guarded by a paramilitary tasked to protect tourists, shoot natives, and pose for as many publicity photos as humanly possible. To the south and east, the after hours joints are starting to fill up in some parts, particularly the Koreatown near Herald Square—a name he finds funny, since no Koreans actually live there, just row after row of restaurants, karaoke clubs, barbecue spots, and Japanesque sake bars. He’s half-tempted to hop the N down there, grab some food, squeeze some life from his Saturday night, but the damage he’s done to his stomach is profound. Bulgogi tastes delightful going down. The prospect of it coming back up lacks cachet.
Instead, it’s Jimmy the Egyptian.
Jimmy’s not his real name. By 2.38 in the morning, he’s been working for a solid seventeen hours, and barely remembers his own name, let alone Jimmy’s. He remembers the guy is Egyptian, if only because he curses at the Lebanese hot dog vendor one block down for taking his business, and foams at the mouth when people get them confused. He beats his chest with hairy knuckles and says ‘I’m God-damned Egyptian! That son-of-a-bitch is Lebanese! He sits there listening to God-damned French pop music all day, slinging pork sausages and telling people they’re beef! Look at my sign—what does my sign say? It says ‘Halal Tiger’. You know why?’ And then he spreads his arms proudly towards his cart, meat smoking on the grill, rows of plump brown hot dogs roasting besides minced chicken, a rotating hunk of lamb, and ice box full of sodas. ‘No pork. Only kosher franks, lamb, and chicken.’ It’s a practiced speech. At this time of night, his business is mostly drunks from New Jersey, cab drivers, and midnighters coming from the nearby offices. They know Egyptians like they know particle physics and piloting F-14 fighter jets.
In the nine months he’s worked at the paper, his boss has steadily been shifting more of his workload to the Late City Final edition, a shift that runs 6.30 in the evening to 2.30 am. In the beginning, that was one night a week. Two months later, it was two nights a week. Now it’s four. On top of that, there’s his 10-5 job—coincidentally next door—and the few hours he picks up doing the front door at a dive down on Avenue B, right by Tompkins Square Park. Between that and travel all the way back to the hinterlands of the southwest Bronx, he’s clocking four hours sleep, a night, including the time he’s unconscious on the train. Thursdays are coma days, blissful darkness and silence. But Thursday is a lifetime away, and Jimmy the Egyptian—a fellow midnighter—knows his own. By the third month, he spotted a kindred spirit, the poor shmuck who ate chicken, rice, pita with tahini and hot sauce every night of the week, circles etching deeper and deeper under his eyes. ‘Drink this,’ he said, and offered the hyper-meta-caffeine that passes under many names, in this case, Arabic coffee. The shmuck is hooked, and Jimmy is his number one supplier. He brings an extra thermos. For two bucks a hit, there’s rocket fuel.
So by 2.39, he’s washing down six ibuprofen with a tall paper cup of obnoxiously sweet power-coffee, and heading to the F train. The ibuprofen is for the constant background headache ringing the base of his skull. His doctor insists that the costly MRI he paid for in cash revealed absolutely nothing, and put him on a monster drug that sets his skin on fire and makes him torpid, blurry. As the internet is the Living Metatron, Voice of God, and Knower of All Things, he has learned his headaches can be regulated with caffeine, regular doses of ibuprofen, and drinking gallons of water. Caffeine already being a staple of his diet, this seemed at one point an ideal solution. What he didn’t know then is that self-medicating like that creates a feedback loop. Rebound headaches, they call them, and if he just stops taking the stuff, his headache will come crashing down with a fury the likes of which haven’t been seen since the bombing of Dresden. So he medicates and stays awake, neck stiff from the the constant dull headache. Even better is all the coffee and ibuprofen have stripped his stomach. He’s not sure if it’s an ulcer, but his scatological world has distilled to battery acid and paint thinner, and he can’t hold solid food in his system for more than half an hour before vomiting or shitting half to death. He’s taken to carrying a small pack of disposable babywipes, and buying bottled water at every opportunity. His piss smells like ammonia and his jeans are two sizes too big.
By the time he reaches his bouncing gig, he’s itching to tear off his own skin: too caffeinated to cool out, too exhausted to focus for more than five minutes. He screws up the door count, forgets to ask for ID, drops money, returns incorrect change, frisks sloppily, gropes a titty by mistake, gets into three separate fights that have to be broken up by his boss, and threatens an undercover cop. He ends up sent home, no pay, no promise of being asked back next week. Seven hours til he has to go to his first job.
Walks to the F, screws up, takes it downtown, ends up in Brooklyn before he realizes it, turns around, catches the uptown to West 4th, waits 20 minutes for a local A, and settles into his seat. The rocket fuel’s run it’s course, he feels the throbbing in his teeth and above his eyes. The pain bleeds into his sinuses. By 125th Street, his lids droop, the whole ride one long torture, no comfort in any position he sits in, smell of dried ancient piss, cheap cleaning solution, burnt plastic and ozone curdling in his nostrils. He barely notices the train is empty. Everything gets sort of fuzzy at the edges and his brain is this wonderful blank slate, rocked into nirvana by the cadence of the subway. For a brief perfect twilight moment he thinks ‘Oh thank you, Sleep. You’re coming to get me. You’re finally coming to get me.’
Until he sees the door at the far end of the car—the one very clearly marked as locked—slides open. And he very, very, VERY clearly sees this little toy train with spider legs and a pale baby’s face painted like a geisha, with rouged cheeks and black opal eyes clamber in. Arachnid reaction—total involuntary revulsion at exposure to the absolute alien—kicks in, and he presses himself to the seat, hands gripping the edges until he’s sure his palms are chafed and bleeding. His feet are ironed to the floor and he can’t scream, but he feels like cold water’s been poured down his spine. And the second coherent thought comes through with the clarity of cut glass, ‘This is it. I’ve gone completely insane. I’ve finally let them all break me. I’m done.’ And with it, some sort of distant satisfaction, like release, like release from duty. He figures by the time the train-thing crawls cockraoch-like across the car and reaches him, he will have completely cracked up and will never leave the train, because this is how crazy people end up in the subway: the monsters of life come for you when you are weakest and without any real means of escape, and they consume you. And the unfortunate bastard with the foot-long beard curled up in his own in the corner of the train, sleeping in his feces, mumbling to himself about the wife who left him or the cops who beat him or the bugs under his skin, started here, RIGHT here, and this is it, the Big One that sends you right across the border into his part of town, where there’s no real coming back, not ever.
Until someone shakes him, and he wakes up soaked in sweat, fists balled, terrible panic of being smothered, and is told that it’s the end of the line, that he’s slept all the way to 207th Street and he has to get off so they can take the train in for maintenence, and his watch says it’s almost 4.30 in the morning, and he’s got a few hours to sleep, God-willing. He staggers to the elevator, then the next elevator, makes it to street level, and catches the BX7 bus back to his neighborhood, everything sort of dreamlike. Uptown is quiet. The trip back to his neighborhood is like traveling through an archeological dig: ruined, silent, abandoned. He doesn’t remember the four-story trawl up to his apartment, but he remembers that moment where he almost went over the edge, and the train-spider almost ate him the fuck alive, and that he’s not sure how much longer her can do this.
Just to make rent.
And keep his mind off his wife, a universe away, fighting in Iraq.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
