Entry 9
By Steven Paul Lansky
©2005 All Rights Reserved

"Leaving NYC on the NJ Train"

Keep your head down, I told myself. Somehow I managed to get on a train leaving New York City. Penn Station was a nightmare. I had sat in a waiting area for the Long Island Railroad trying to read, watching people and wishing like hell I had brought the laptop computer. This one suit across from me was Abe Fortas. No, not old enough. But, I was sure he was working on the case. What case? I wasn’t sure. But, he was on it. That much I knew. He had the briefcase and graying temples, heavy leather brogans. The man running the station, or this part, was great, but I knew he wouldn’t help me. The fuckers at the Algonquin hotel had stolen my ticket. I had managed, by using my name, to get the information desk to give me my reservation number. I was sure if I reported the ticket stolen, the red lettering, the blue carbons, yes, if I had told the officer in the station, talked at length to him, I’d end up in jail, arrested or worse, trapped in a hospital. I knew the theme of places like this. Keep your head down. I had a brown paper bag with Ranier cherries to keep me focused. Save them for the ride. So, this space with many blue, chrome escalators, and stairs, and flashing lights, and electric boards, and advertising and shops, and people of all worldly origins. I was terrified. Keep your head down. So, I had a reservation number, but I didn’t have the credit card anymore. I’d cut it in half with the Algonquin’s scissors right there at the desk, to tell them they had stolen my clip-on sunglasses and my train ticket from the dry-cleaning. I was so fucking angry, and I had given up on them, and gotten in a cab to Penn Station so early, but I didn’t know where I could idle in Manhattan. In the cab I could smell grilled kielbasa, onions, sauerkraut and mustard. Yellow mustard, and I was in a yellow cab, but out the window the fragrance, the odor, it wafted, it waved, and it seemed the driver followed that greasy yellow smell. I thought of Chief Inspector Dreyfus, and how Clouseau would follow a smell like that, like telling a cabby, follow that man with the moustache and the mustard and in the cartoon the trenchcoat cinched tight at the waist and the wafting smell lines would come in over the glass of the open car window, into the back seat. And I imagined the smell was the thief, the scent of sausage was the criminal who had stolen my clip-ons and my train ticket, it had to be the smell. Then it was gone, the trail was cold and the cab pulled up at Penn Station. I hadn’t been sleeping much and finding a place to sit down was hard. And if I fell asleep, I could be robbed. I had my pack, my aging brown rucksack. Troubled. Keep your head down. Fluorescent lights, tile floors, wooden seats. I sat for three hours, or was it two, or one, or half an hour, or twenty minutes, no just ten. Time dashed and flashed and vanished like the scent of a criminal, or did it drag like the hand around the clock, ticking once a year.

The train I was reserved on would have gone north into New York and eventually cut across Pennsylvania on its way to Chicago, even crossing northern Ohio, through Cleveland. It was abundantly clear to me that I was not going to make the Chicago train and now that I had missed it it would be several days to make the right connections, and I might as well go to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., but realizing that, and recognizing that I was now totally fucked without a destination, or a ticket had me in a generally increasing panic. I had become dysfunctional. I started shouting at the world that I was a Freddie (The name of the band I played harmonica with in Cincinnati and an acronym for some kind of light on the caboose of a train.) thinking that I could get on a caboose, or somehow hop my way out of this jam. I kicked the door of a commuter train. I stood in the darkening afternoon, gray sky, drizzle on corridor of train tracks with big sterile concrete and glass station that had a closed in bridge over the tracks and afraid of parking lots and people and everything. Keeping my head down had only let me finish the cherries. They had been ripe and delicious. They are only available for a short period each summer coming from a remote region. Yellow and light red, plump, juicy and flavorful and abundant and reasonable at a fruit stand across the wide New York street from Penn Station. I thought of my cycling friend Po with whom I ate them summers in Loveland, Ohio when we rode our sport bicycles. Even for a moment at the fruit stand, I had thought of how my brother had started his career delivering and warehousing produce in San Francisco.

Then I did something really dumb and I just randomly got on a commuter train. I sat with my head down and watched a girl reading a hardback novel out of the corner of my eye. As she got up to leave, I shot a remark, “Want to go for coffee sometime?” She ignored me. I was surely near Princeton. Then the train emptied. I stayed on. Soon the train stopped completely on a siding. I looked around and paced through car after car. I was alone and there was no way to open the sliding doors. No conductor, no nothing. The silver train wasn’t at a station. Just stopped for the night on a siding. So, I looked at the dashboard of switches and knobs in the in between space where the conductor could do something if he was there, and he wasn’t there. But, without a key it was hopeless. After trying to open the emergency exit without result, just pulling some kind of gasket away from a window, I found a sliding window and slid it open. This aluminum edge cut my finger as I climbed out and dropped to the tracks below after tossing my pack down. A scary drop, onto hands and knees on cinders. Plunk. I hiked across the tracks and stood there as it grew dark and misty. I could see overpasses, and wires and dark concrete brown gray walls and lights and creosote rail ties stretching away into the night. I thought of why I had ventured to New York City and for a moment realized part of me was resigned to the comfort of being by the tracks again. Several times in my life I’ve gone to the tracks, this time I sighed with pain. This was not where I wanted to be.

This is the hard part, telling you what happened next, because I’m sure I don’t understand it, and I cannot believe it, but it has happened before, and likely will happen again. Yes, we’re talking fate with a capital F. I stood there. On the tracks waiting. I thought about hiding, or walking. But, as you may remember my boots were all torn up from all the hiking in Manhattan and they were twenty-year-old boots. These heavy Vibram sole boots were hurting my blistered, sore, tired, aching, miserable feet. NO. Walking was out. Walk down the tracks? How far? To the next station? Then what? NO. I stood by the tracks and along came a big ole passenger train with light blazing, horn loud and long. And the thing just stopped right in front of me. I stood. Yeah. I stopped a passenger train in New Jersey. I thought about walking to the conductor and asking to get on. Too afraid. So, I stood. Then behind me I heard a motor, and saw some lights out of the corner of my eye. There was a Jeep like vehicle with the lights on top. Amtrak police. Two big ones with bellies and hams for hands. I was sure that they were Native American. How and why I knew this, I am not sure. I am sure now that I might be wrong. They approached cautiously and seemed afraid of me. I looked at their worn black boots. They asked my name, put their hands on me and asked me if I was OK and did I want to step on the tracks and what was I doing out here and was I trying to hurt myself. I told them only my name and then I said I was a Federal investigator and I said, “Miranda.” They snapped the cuffs on my wrists and said we’re not going to hurt you Steven, we want to help you and I had heard it all before. I knew I wasn’t going to jail, but to the hospital and I was furious because I hate the hospital. It was going to be a rough rough ride. How would I get home? But, to these fucks, these smelly, burly, swarthy men I was just a nut on the tracks, a wacko with fears to be dumped into the system. They went through my pockets and my wallet for ID and played with their computers and yakked on their radios. They had me, and they were sure keeping me. I would once again face the shrink. No train ride for the literate graduate student who had all but finished his thesis. No access to the great books on his reading list. Far from home, computer and laptop, yes, I was to embark upon a new lesson in keeping my head down. But, I don’t want to keep my head down, I thought. No, I wasn’t honest about being a Federal investigator and I think the reason I said it was cause I didn’t believe in the current US Federal Government, and I did believe that a new revolution was in the air. I thought that because there were big time eastern feds invading Cincinnati because of race riots, I’d just investigate New Jersey. It doesn’t make much sense now that I write it down. Rolled full of frustration, difficulty with this new fangled medication, and just overwhelmed with a great sense that no fucking cops or medical professionals were trying to help me. No, they were trying to control me and I went one hundred per cent paranoid and keeping my head down was all I could manage. All I needed was sleep, medication, to be home, a little help dealing with those stupid fuckers at the Algonquin. Could you get me on the right train, please? It would be weeks before that would happen. We whisked along a gravel path then were up on a freeway, off at a ramp, into a driveway. They walked me into a crisis center with lights and sterile smells, like ammonia clean floors, fluorescent lamps. (Too many.) Soon I was strapped to a gurney after a questioning session that seemed frighteningly brief where I said, “Miranda.” The police said he said that before, maybe something about his Miranda rights, or something, and then the nurse said we’ll take care of him and I prayed, and waited and tried to say something. I don’t remember when I started talking, but it was after I was strapped down. In restraints. I’m not saying what they did was wrong, or right, but it seems to always happen that way to me. I’m a big man and they get worried about me, and instead of locking me in a cell, they take me to the not so normal place. I didn’t know where I was. I think they told me then, it was Trenton, New Jersey. I hadn’t gotten far, but at least I was out of New York.

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