Transportation departments and divisions of motor vehicles had been dissolved and roads crumbled in gross disrepair everywhere but the upscale suburbs. Since the highways had been privatized, mechanics retooled chassis and suspensions to withstand the most punishing conditions. The whole region had come to function like a pock-marked Autobahn. Entrepreneurial garages beefed up tow patrols. Politicians proudly invoked a great tradition of New England’s categorical cartographic indifference by reminding their constituencies that driving is a privilege and if you didn’t already know how to get someplace—from beguiling Berkshires traffic circles to the snarl around Harvard Square—you probably didn’t belong.
It might take a PhD from MIT to follow Mass Ave and Mount Auburn across Cambridge, but of the motorist minority that remained, people who could afford gas at a hundred dollars a gallon, few complained. A capacity to cope automotively was twisted into the Brahmins’ inbred DNA. Ever since the days when an elevated highway had bisected the heart of downtown, drivers had become accustomed to cutthroat merges at inner city onramps, anti-gravity escape velocities at exits, and four-hour commutes from within a tenmile radius. Another thing about auto apartheid: It kept us undesirables in our place. If you flew into the Beast, it was only to wet your beak. The rich preyed on the poor with the same controls as ever—ghetto rentals, extortionate retail, usurious utilities—but now they had honed the getaway. Long distances over ramshackle roadways kept the one-percenters safe in their suburban communities. Pavement conditions, at first harrowing, smoothed the further you got from the city. You took the high road out of the Beast because you had somewhere better to be. For us, the people of the streets, roads were nothing but rubble.
Back in late century 20, the old chief plunderers had given shape to the most ambitious and expensive public works project in the 222 years since their domestic-levy alternative to Mother England’s taxation without representation. They could have at least had a little fun with it—the Pike Gets a Dike, Scrubba-Dub-Hub, the Boss Colostomy—but the hucksters who ran this part of the world at the time, juvenile goofballs of European ancestry, were satisfied with the most insipid of images rendered in primitive and faintly phallocentric nursery rhyme: the Big Dig. It was pretty typical that, sixteen billion dollars later at its not-so-grand opening in 2004, the Central Artery/Tunnel trafficked nothing but trouble: loose joints, egregious leaks, all-out cave-ins. Those imaginative Massholes again adapted, turning service roads and bypasses into main express routes. Between South and North Ends, for instance, they took the Ted Williams (the first tunnel constructed in the Dig debacle and one of the few pieces of the outlandish plan that remained intact) into East Beast and the Callahan back. To get over the Charles on the cable-stayed bridge, they tore across town on Mass Ave, that no-man’s alley where the down-and-out patronized dangerous diversions like Commonwealth Drag Track, Christian Science Jet Ski, and Symphony Hall Paintball. The underground expressway had been exposed for its real public work: a grotto of graf t. In the end, the taxpayer had gotten the shaft, and the substructure was ultimately condemned.
Now, shoe-shiners and sewer workers spoke of the displaced people who had gone down into the abandoned tunnels and carved out a new counterculture, calling the labyrinth in the Beast’s knothole home. Their chief contractor was a mysterious misfit known only as Levis. A Harvard dropout who combined the art of Joseph Beuys, the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, and the Zapatista doctrine of Subcomandante Marcos, Levis had modeled the hive on his B-minus project from a seminar in emergency architecture. He blocked off all the shafts constructed in the 1990s and turned the network into an alternative empire. Along with his wife Jocy and her brother Cray, Levis had formed a subterranean colony fomenting secession. Hundreds of bottom-feeders, indignant over being deprived a fair shake of change on the surface, had gone down under to join the orphaned race. Through sewer grates and exhaust vents, the low thrum of revolution could be heard coming up from beneath the streets. The expatriates called the rogue nation Dig City.
Unlike aboveground efforts at independence, Dig City was built in the establishment’s underbelly, so there were no holistic alternatives to those of the adversary. Solar: nope. Hydro: hardly a trickle. Wind: Let me show you the door. Dig City depended on stolen stores of alternating and direct current from above. Discreet chains of pipe and cable appended to the bases and foundations of the Beast’s skyscrapers provided a vast network of pirated utilities, from electricity and network services to natural gas and plumbing. The mission was similar to that of road rat diplomacy: to appropriate resources when and where they’re needed. It was an entire misfit metropolis on the grift. The culture to which they were counter was made up of the same guys I agitated as a rat, except this time the resistance was directed at the level of their offices and conference rooms instead of simple, street-level pocket fare. What was this siphoning of energy off the back—or, better, bottom—of the staid old Beast if not one massive billfold lift?
Shep concluded his lesson on the sprawling squat built in the sham artery: “You don’t want to go there.” Even if we had, it wouldn’t have been easy. Networked portals sealed the seven tunnel entrances Mass Highway had left behind. To program security, Levis had recruited the infamous hacker Miss Spinks, a legendary boxer’s cross-dressing great-grandson who had made a notorious name for herself by generating the puckish GENDERBENDER virus. From south of the city among the abandoned train tracks and the overgrowthchoked flower exchange to more than a mile away near the sullen, slouching cement works, nobody could get in or out of Dig City without Spinks’s authorization.
Most rats weren’t interested in what lay beneath. After all, there was enough for them to focus on along the X and Y axes. I sometimes sat on the Summer Street railing and daydreamed about the Z. In the smoke-scented dusk of the Beast in springtime, I dangled my two sandbags above the shut-up tunnel mouth and wondered what kids with mothers and fathers made of such wistful perfumes. Some infants stand free on two feet at six months while others dawdle on into their second orbits. Whatever time it takes, not long after upending us with that grand cosmic shift, nature permeates child consciousness with a devious inclination. What just-ambulatory tyke has not recklessly tested the newly-acquired talent, running with ecstatic abandon from parents who first coo, then shout, and finally squawk in the blood-curdling caw of the kraken? I have seen toddlers no older than two outrun mamas and papas on the street. If it’s known as the terrible age, then it has to do with the grown-ups’ terror-stricken response to the fulsomest infant revolt, the first, the ultimate rebellion—final, for when the individual elects to flee protector, then no longer can he or she properly be spoken of as in infancy. Somewhere in the world on a busy sidewalk, right now, such an incubus is on the run from mom and dad. The race has begun!
As I cannot recall crawling, I am pretty certain that a precocious podiatric endowment had rendered me erectus earlier than most, ambulatory soon after, and that I had, perhaps well before a single lap around the sun, adapted this science to the art of sprinting. Whatever the mystery about how I had ended up on the street, there was one thing I knew for certain: A road rat to the core, I had been born scurrying. Although never certain of my exact age, at various junctions throughout my career I had marveled at how I had begun so young and made it so far without ever going anywhere. When, like my fellow rats who were sure they were six, new incisors had pushed out my old front teeth, I had enough sense to say, “How did I ever live this way when I was three?” When hair began growing in all the places that it betides a twelve-year-old, it became: “What was that little boy of six doing daily on these streets?” A lot of my acquiescence could be attributed to Shep, with his sadistic charisma, reigning over the rats in the Nec from one day to the next. He was as feckless as he was offensive and, however obnoxious his behavior, his irrepressible ambition remained infectious. But I knew all the inertia had something to do with me, too, and with my predilection for kinesis.
That fugitive kid wh
o has just discovered flight, the one we left running down the street a minute ago, perhaps ends up giving in. He is caught, coddled, scolded, what have you, and he lets the devious knowledge of his capacity to escape submerge, sublimate itself, and stew into all sorts of murderous, incestual, or otherwise pathological longings until the day he ditches the nest or else drastically acts. Or, outpacing authority, the child escapes and emerges into a city full of strange faces, a world glaring in his eyes with the peril and possibility of the sun reflecting off a car hood on a hot summer day. Not so different from the apron-laced naïf, that child just keeps running. That child is me.
On light-traffic days, when Shep managed operations from his sidewalk optician booth in Back Bay, I would bring him a grinder from the sandwich cart down the street. He scarfed his sandwiches lustily, swallowing shreds of wax paper along with the comestible contents, mayo dripping down his stubbly chin and embellishing the mural of past meals across the front of his coat. He didn’t care. “It’s a symbol of my extraordinary gusto for the regional cuisine,” he said. Shep always articulated big words syllabically for the benefit of the pack. “Ex-tra-or-din—,” he would say, “airy like the wind. Words are soul food for the chicken, which is why I’m always talking and often spitting.” Shep wanted us to use extraordinary words proudly just like he did, although he also had a knack for arresting vernacular, as on the hand-scrawled sign tacked to his stand: “If you’re mean enough to steal from the blind … FUCK YOU!”
One lunch break, in the moment of tranquillity that succeeded his ravenous repast, I asked Shep the big question. “Where did I come from?”
“Aw, Eddie,” he said, “what’s the use in wondering?”
Road rats were a race that went mostly by aliases, and there were so many of us in the Beast that it was futile to try finding out origins. Most knew nothing about the conditions of their orphaning. Few of them cared. It was their daily takes, their stomachs, and their standings with Shep that concerned them. Certainly, there was plenty for us to preoccupy ourselves with between raising the rent and staying out of jail. Still, I had to know. Who were my mother and father? How had they died, if they were dead? Why had they left me in this hard world with so little to recommend me?
Shep laid into me with one of his trademark rants. “It’s like trying to figure out where a coin came from. Someone baits you with it, handing it to you and craftily asking what you think. You say, ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,’ and absent-mindedly pocket the piece…”
Speaking of which, there was a coin. It was my lucky charm, good or bad. I had carried it on me ever since I could remember. I found it at the bottom of my trouser pocket one day like it had always been there. Maybe it was thrown to me as chump change after an escape, or given up by a passing aristocrat when I hadn’t even been panhandling, or it was useless, alien change some cashier had unloaded from the till. Perhaps it had been sewn discretely into my dirty denim by fastidious old Shep so as to erupt from the fabric on precisely the day I needed to discover it.
“…Or you shake it out of the piggy bank and try to make it to the fair to get some trivial figurine for a girl who doesn’t know you exist—only they’re shutting all the booths down, the vendors are condescending, and the tchotchke feels like death in your cold hand…”
It was American, from before the time ten- and twenty-dollar slugs became common currency. It was not the sort of thing I could get anything for, unless on some off-chance I bumped into an eccentric collector, but someone that loaded never made it down to the street to meet a rat like me. He was locked all day in a cubicle high up in a skyscraper talking about money he never saw and brought to a ghastly mansion at night with a warm, perfumed wife and a brood of little monsters who complained about the insufficient crispness of the breakfast cereals in the refectories of the gated schools where they were prepped to take daddy’s place. Worthless, you bet, but all the same I developed a bit of affection for the piece. It had been struck out of a copper which, when rubbed between fingers, could be made to glimmer. The brassy cast made me picture chimneys choking sky with smoke and, behind the hazy horizon, a defeated sun glowing a moment before going out. That was the color of my coin, and I liked it. Every day the finish tarnished anew, and every night I buffed it to a warm, worn shine.
“…Or you fish through a curbside sewer grate for the ticket to enter a wacked-out chocolatier’s nightmare factory: What do you know! an enchanted token…”
How was I supposed to figure out where I had gotten it? On the head was a profile of the guy who had been on the old paper fives when bills were still printed in such low denominations. Lincoln, I think. Around the outside: “IN GOD WE TRUST/LIBERTY/2001.” Tails, there was a reproduction of a columnar structure. It was maybe what the famed, pillared Parthenon once looked like, with a couple of erect figures on the steps and one smack in the center. “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA/E PLURIBUS UNUM/ONE CENT,” plus a minuscule “FG” at the lower right. That was it. The edge was not reeded, but slightly raised to a lip. In an attempt to curb Shep’s contumely, I pressed One Cent into his palm. “Can you guess how many people there are on it?”
Shep rubbed the face under his thumb. “One dumb honky with a stupid-looking beard.”
“A profile on the head, yes. But check tails.”
Shep grimaced, rubbed some more. “Oh yeah. All right. There’s someone teeny sitting between the pillars. Is this worth anything?”
“No, not that I know.”
“Then why are you wasting my time?”
“Can’t you feel it? On the steps? There are two more people standing there.”
He squeezed a little harder. “Naw, Eddie. Those are posts.”
“If they were posts they would be centered, right? While the left one’s just slightly more inward of the third column.”
“You’re fooling yourself, kid. They’re posts. And those trails leading up the steps are chains.”
“Let me see that.”
I squinted through thick lenses. Sure enough, a faint, raised wisp emerged from each of the figures and arced up the steps.
“They’re not chains!” I said. “They’re … I don’t know what they are, but there are three people on the back.”
Deep in the black lagoons of his perennial dark lenses, I could almost see Shep’s eyes ignite with recognition. “Oh, I get it, Eddie.” He beamed a brilliant white smile. “Mommy, daddy, and baby in the cradle.”
“Shut up, Shep.”
That evening, with all the rats gathered for supper, Shep announced, referring to the freshest recruit, “Billy needs a name.” Every rat got a pack alias. It usually consisted of the forename complemented by some kind of qualifier: superlative, alliterative, rhymed, or otherwise ornamental. “And,” Shep said, proposing like a sadistic Magwich what I most feared, “we have to pick a new one for Eddie. ‘Baby’ doesn’t cut it anymore.”
Billy predictably proposed for himself “the Kid.” He thought it was original, and to Shep it had that ring of something you maybe heard before.
In my case, the moniker might not have been intended as a means of persecution. As we all know, there is no insult unless one is taken. Even the cruelest words miss the mark if the target is unmoved. I could have stood almost any slam: Sweaty Eddie, Pretzel Puss, obvious taunts of the four-eyes’ variety, but in my head I had already picked the nightmare name, the tag I was sure I would not be able to live down should my colleagues ever decide to dub me as such. All it took was the kid—I should say Kid—Billy, brimming with pride at his recent induction, burnished by the flush of inclusion, blurting the obvious, inevitable sobriquet. Thus was born a nickname that would, like wet shit in the treads of my too-tight Chuck Taylors, stick. The other rats might have meant it at first affectionately and tossed the name around only briefly. In their mouths, it might have supplied a temporary anaesthetic to eradicate embarrassment and ever after deny the deformity. If I had only had the presence to propose an alternative I might have avoided hum
iliation, but instead I pursed my lips and began to perspire. Self-consciousness was the midwife of my disgrace. When my cheeks flushed red and glasses got all steamed, Billy the Kid smelled blood and turned it into an opportunity for mirth too good to miss. He repeated the dreadful designation. The rest of the pack’s hysterical laughter was adequate to register as unanimous ratification. I knew from the pitch of their reaction that, with relentless hilarity and for many months to come, I would be hailed—“Hey!”—this way—“Eddie Feet!”
There was plenty that preoccupied me as a foundling, but nothing so much as self-consciousness over my terrific trotters, and, in paired inversion, one other thing: the little matter of where they had come from. Over years of amazing exhibitions, all of my obsessive exertion—sitting Indian style, standing pigeon-toed, sporting bell-bottoms that, when I stomped fleetly down the street, tolled far over the toes—had been unable to obscure the exoticism of the extremities. It would not have been so bad if I had merely hated these ungainly ungulae, but as it stood I was a little protective of them, for they must have been bestowed by someone, and that person was half my obsession. Maybe they belonged to a clumsy father who helplessly tripped over them every time he tried to dance, or perhaps to an athletic grandma who as a girl had flopped to an obscure, turn-of-the-century gold in Sydney. They were my only inheritance, and I held onto the hope that someday, somebody—a prince bearing a castaway crystal slipper that could double as a punchbowl—might come along and lay claim to them and me.
By the dimming light of the drafty Nec, a suffocating survival instinct surfaced amid the general wretchedness for one last gasp of gumption: What would be required to reverse the damage of the naming? The irrefutable response: Provide a substitution for the sources of my scandal. The rest of the rats rocked in their chairs and ducked looks under the table, goggling at the objects of ridicule, while I covered my crimson face with my hands. Thus, in the instant following my moment of greatest desolation, there arrived a dram of alacrity which buffeted the traumatic blow. Fingers vertical-blind shading the shame, a glimmer of hope somehow as-yet-unextinguished allowed me to perceive that deliverance resided in those self-same digits, and I resolved to apply myself to the surest method of displaying manual dexterity. It was not want of money, then, that led me to a more immediate involvement with crime, but the conviction that overcoming Billy’s pedestrian insult would require displacing cheap slander with genuine legend.
Fast Eddie, King of the Bees: 1 Page 2
