by Gates, Moses
I find the place, ring the bell, and head up the stairs.
“Hey, how’s it going,” Steve greets me with a smile.
Steve’s girlfriend, Molly, is lounging in a chair. She’s a pretty, thin redhead with a cocky edge to her that’s about three parts endearing to one part annoying.
“Oh, so you’re Steve’s new exploring lover,” she says, her tone indicating that she harbors no jealousy and is just trying to needle Steve a bit as he looks sheepishly on. “God, he’s been talking about you for the last week.”
It’s sweet how they interact. They have an easy pleasure in each other’s company that Leigh and I have been missing for a while now. I haven’t mentioned to Steve that I’m married, because I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be married for much longer. It’s not the late nights running around subway tunnels, which have started to happen more and more. Leigh has actually always been encouraging of this—in fact I wonder how much of her encouragement is designed to simply get me out of my comfort zone, out of the easy but unfulfilling place that we’re both in.
After chatting for a bit, Steve and I head over to the East Side of Manhattan. I want to do the station, but I’m also using this mission as an excuse to jump the fence into Gramercy Park. Gramercy Park is the last private park in Manhattan, restricting access to the gated-off green patch at the end of Lexington Avenue to the people who can afford the apartments that surround it—and even then they have to buy a key for $350. When I first passed it, I saw a solitary guy sitting on a bench, smoking a cigar with a very self-satisfied look on his face. It was enough to get me to vow to sit where he was sitting. I tell Steve this is first up on the agenda, but surprisingly he’s not into it.
“You can see everything through the fence,” he says. “I dunno, this seems like the kind of thing I’d only be into if I were really drunk.” Still, he’s a sport and indulges me as we quickly hop the fence and take a lap around the park, where I make sure to sit on the same bench I’d seen Mr. Cigar.
Happy with ourselves, we head down into the nearby active station at 23rd Street. After swiping through the turnstiles I glance over and see Steve pull out a silver flask and surreptitiously take a swig. I’m astonished.
“Dude, what are you doing?” I ask.
“Just having a drink to loosen up a little bit. Hey, you want one?”
I cannot think of a worse idea. “No, man, I don’t want a drink. You’re swigging vodka when we’re about to go running in subway tunnels?”
“Not vodka, bourbon,” Steve answers, looking at me like I might as well have suggested he’s drinking paint thinner.
I can’t believe it. I try to figure out my obligations to this guy if he drunkenly falls on the third rail as we’re strolling down the tunnel. I make up my mind that I’ve got to be responsible, get us to come back and do this another time, but before I have time to argue, the train passes, the platform is clear, and Steve is hustling down the tracks.
It starts off pretty well. The tunnel is four tracks: two local tracks on the outside, and two express tracks on the inside. We’re on the downtown local track. We stick close to the wall, on the opposite side of the track from the third rail, walking at a brisk but controlled pace. After a couple minutes we see the edge of an abandoned platform. And at just that moment we see a train on the opposite local track barreling toward us. We’re not in danger of being hit, but there’s nowhere easy to hide. We reach the abandoned station in a panic, sure we’ve been seen and reported. I immediately want to ditch the mission and bail back to the active station.
“Yeah, that’s probably the best idea,” Steve says. “Let me take a couple pictures and we’ll get out of here.”
“Pictures? We’ve got no time for that,” I say, trying to keep the anxiety out of my voice.
“No, hold on, just a couple.”
Thinking back on our earlier time in Gramercy Park, I realize that while our motivations are similar, our goals are slightly different. I want to go everywhere. Steve wants to photograph everywhere. He opens his backpack and takes out a black circular case, about eight inches in diameter, with two red wires coming out of it. I almost have a heart attack.
“What the fuck is that?” I scream in a whisper.
Steve’s eyes light up. “Hey, I just got this—it works really great with my new camera for lighting photos underground. Basically, I was having problems with shadowing, and . . .” He starts to go on about lumens, ISO settings, apertures, and a lot of other stuff I don’t understand.
I interrupt. “It looks like you just took out a fucking bomb! Please put that away before someone on the next train sees it and they send in the antiterrorism unit.”
All I can think about now is the crazy drunk I’m with who’s going to get me shot. I grab the light and shove it back in the pack. “Come on, it’s stupid to stay here. If we get arrested they’ll delete your pictures anyway. We’ll get good ones next time.”
We leave the abandoned platform on the other side, heading downtown toward the Union Square station. Big mistake. Union Square is an express station, which means it’s a popular station, which means there are people. As we approach we can see the platform around the bend. Unless we think a few dozen upstanding citizens would ignore a couple young men with backpacks covered in soot coming out of the subway tracks, it seems like a pretty bad idea to exit here. We end up hiding in a little nook between the express tracks, about a hundred feet from the station. Steve, instead of planning our next move, decides the first course of business is to take another sip from the flask and roll a cigarette.
“I don’t really smoke too much, but it just feels like I should have a cigarette right now,” he says.
We start going over the pros and cons of heading out here versus going back to 23rd Street. As far as I can tell, the only pro to coming out here is that we’ll have less walking to do. For some reason, though, this pro seems to be terribly important to Steve. Even though we’ve known each other for only a few weeks, we quickly start arguing in that exasperated way that old couples do when they know there’s no hope of changing each other’s mind.
We don’t get to argue for long, though: our decision ends up getting made for us. When we glance behind us at the downtown tracks toward the Union Square station, we see flashlights. They’re coming toward us. We look back down the uptown tracks and see more flashlights. Steve looks at me. He has that glint in his eye that I don’t recognize yet but will come to soon enough. We start to run.
This is a lot different from the careful excursion coming in. The “brisk but controlled” pace goes out the window. We book it down the tunnel, sticking to the middle two express tracks, as late-at-night trains usually run only on the outer, local tracks. Tonight is an exception. We see the lights of a train bearing down on us from the downtown express track; there must be a service change. We hop the third rail, hide, run some more, hop the third rail again, hide from another train, and hope the people with flashlights behind us are routine maintenance workers and not the police.
Finally we see the 23rd Street station come back into view. Normally it’s best to hide, wait for a train, let the platform clear, and then jump back on up, but we don’t have time for this. We scale the short ladder, swing around the red sign, and head toward the exit. A guy dressed in civilian clothes is staring right at us as we do this. I’m sure he’s an undercover cop. But we can’t very well head back onto the tracks, so we do the only other thing we can: pretend like we belong there and walk confidently toward him.
I am sweating bullets as we come up to the guy, ready to have him whip out a pair of handcuffs at any moment. But as we get closer I notice he’s dressed pretty shabbily, even for an undercover cop; it’s obviously just a guy hoping to bed down for the night in an out-of-the-way corner on a not-so-busy platform.
“Oh, thank God, man,” he says to us as we pass him. “I was sure you guys were the police.”
We give him a quick smile and get the hell out of there.
As we exit the station up to Park Avenue South I notice that Steve is limping—badly.
“You twist an ankle or something?” I ask.
“No, it’s my hip,” Steve replies.
“Your hip? How’d you hurt that? Did you bang it on something running?”
Steve hobbles along a bit before he answers. “No, it’s an old injury. It got messed up pretty good and I had to have surgery on it.”
“What’d you do to it?”
“I was climbing in Yosemite and fell and broke it. It’s still not great.”
“How long ago was that?”
“A couple years or so.”
I think to myself that it must have been a heck of a fall if he’s still limping.
FOUR
New York City, December 2005
I’m sitting on a metal chair in an abandoned firehouse across from a power plant in industrial Queens. To get here, I’ve walked from the nearest subway stop, twenty minutes away. The stop is actually in another borough. I have to take the F train to Roosevelt Island, a long, narrow strip of land in the East River, and then walk north and then east across a metal bridge that goes to Queens. It’s subzero weather, which means a subzero-degree walk across the bridge with gusts of wind that would blow me into the water if there wasn’t a guardrail. It’s also pretty close to subzero weather in the abandoned firehouse. There’s no heat, although somehow our utilities total almost $500 a month. Instead, for comfort I have an old blanket and a cat my roommate smuggled back from Mexico. The cat is sweet and likes nothing more than to sit on my lap and drool.
I have just turned thirty years old, and this is my new home. It’s a far cry from the nice-size one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights—complete with heat and 600-thread-count sheets—I have left to Leigh, who is now my soon-to-be ex-wife.
My new job is also a far cry from my old one—which is most of the reason why I’m living in the cheapest place I could find on short notice. After a stint in city government, I quit and got a job at a historic preservation organization on the Upper West Side last summer.
“Yeah, so this isn’t going to work out,” the executive director told me after a month of me rolling my eyes at the depths of her passion for preserving gabled dormers and maintaining the integrity of the cornice walls of the tree-lined side streets of the neighborhood. Luckily I have a backup. I’ve always renewed the tour guide license I got on a whim in the summer of 2001, more out of vanity than anything.
I’m sad, but it’s not really because of the marriage or the job, both of which I suspect I’m ultimately better off without. It’s because I feel like I’ve failed my twenties—like I’ve tried to grow up and blown it, gone through the motions of becoming an adult hoping it would all somehow stick, just to find myself here—shivering, covered in cat drool, thinking about my future as a divorced tour guide.
But I can’t afford to just sit here feeling sorry for myself. I’ve got to get some sleep. Because tomorrow I’m getting up bright and early and spending the next twelve hours convincing everyone just what a great city this is.
• • •
Short on money, pride, and options, a few months earlier I take a trip down to the corner of 50th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, where I meet a gruff gentleman in a University of Wisconsin jacket who introduces himself as Geoffrey.
“Got a license?” he asks.
I say yes.
“You talk to Meyers?” is his next question, meaning Hank Meyers, the person in charge of recruiting new tour guides.
“Yes,” I say again.
“OK, wait out here.”
I’m eager to start work, want to get going, but since there’s not a bus to get on at the moment, I wait. You get paid $10 an hour for waiting, $20 an hour when you’re on the bus.
After a few minutes a blue double-decker tour bus pulls up. A heavyset guy, just short of elderly, slowly makes his way down the stairs. He’s dressed in a blue button-down shirt with the name of the tour company embroidered on the pocket, a string of pearls, red lipstick, and a tattered pair of pink shorts. Otherwise he looks like a fat, balding Art Garfunkel.
“Remember,” he says in a smoker’s rasp, as the tourists descend the stairs, “‘TIPS’ stands for ‘To Insure Proper Service.’ Tourism is a service profession. It’s customary to tip your tour guide and driver.
“The box right there sir,” he says to the tourist currently at the bottom of the stairs, who in no way whatsoever is indicating that he’s currently looking for the place to put a tip. The tourist begrudgingly fetches a dollar from his pocket and throws it in the box.
“Thank you very much. Have a nice trip.” After the tourists leave, he splits up the tips with the driver and steps out of the bus.
“Nat! I need you on the next uptown!” Geoffrey barks at him.
“OK. I’m gonna piss. Back in five,” Nat replies, and slowly waddles down the sidewalk.
“Hey, I can take that bus,” I tell Geoffrey.
Geoffrey looks at me like I have three heads. “C’mere, c’mere,” he says.
I come there.
“You know who that is? That’s Shimlekowski. You know about Shimlekowski?”
Other than his questionable fashion sense, I do not know about Shimlekowski.
“Shimlekowski is one of my best guides.” This is said in such a way as to convey that this is in direct contrast to myself. “He’s been doing this since you were in diapers.”
“So when am I getting on a bus?” I ask.
“Don’t want to be here, go home,” is the answer. Geoffrey gives me a look that says, “Any more questions, idiot?” and goes back to squawking into his radio.
So I wait. After an hour and a half, and several buses have come and gone, I’m richer by $15 but still haven’t gotten to do a tour. Finally a downtown bus comes in and the tour guide on it tells Geoffrey he’s done for the day. There’s nobody else standing on the sidewalk except Geoffrey and me.
He sighs, motions to me, and says, “You, what’s your name? Take that bus on the downtown loop. Wait, listen . . .” He pauses, and looks me in the eye with an expression that indicates he’s getting ready to impart some valuable nugget of double-decker tour-bus guidance.
I pay rapt attention, dedicated to committing this pearl of wisdom to memory.
“Try not to fuck anything up please. Okay?”
After that, I’m on time and earn pretty good tips. Being on time makes Geoffrey happy. Earning tips makes the bus drivers, whom we split them with, happy. This happiness on their part leads to getting on more buses on my part. A lot more. It’s not too long before I’m the guy who gets “I need you on the next uptown” while looking sympathetically at the new recruit standing on the sidewalk.
And to boot, it’s now the holiday season, and the city is packed with tourists. My new life is going around and around and around, doing the same two-and-a-half-hour tour over and over and over, jabbering away in a down jacket and mittens on top of an open-air double-decker tour bus. I sometimes hear actors complain about the grind of doing theater—eight shows a week, six days a week. Please. Try being a tour guide: back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back solo performances, ten to twelve hours straight each day, outside in the rain, snow, or hundred-degree heat, all the while trying to figure out when you’re going to be able to grab five minutes for a sandwich or a bathroom stop at Starbucks. During the busy season, tour guides don’t talk when they’re not working. Laryngitis is a constant hazard, and as there are no sick days, there is no making up the $200 plus tips you’re going to lose to it. Your voice becomes your livelihood, not to be risked on trivial chats or meaningless conversations.
There are advantages to my new life, however. While business is currently hectic due to the holiday season, there are no tourists in January, and there
fore no work. There’s no family I have left in the city now. I absolutely have no obligations—not even to my two cats, whom I’ve also left with Leigh. I’ve got nothing to do and nobody to worry about me. And no reason to say no when Steve asks if I want to go to Paris for two weeks. The only thing Leigh and I had to split in the divorce was our airline miles, and I’ve got just enough to get me across the pond.
I’d been to Paris before: Leigh and I took an impromptu honeymoon there four years ago when airline prices plummeted after September 11. We took walks along the Seine, visited the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, discovered a great little restaurant in an out-of-the-way corner of the XVIe arrondissement, and spent three hours waiting on line to go up the Eiffel Tower. It was a great and perfectly standard honeymoon.
This trip will be very different.
FIVE
Paris, January 2006
Two flights, three trains, a hole in a fence, a slide down a muddy embankment, and a half-mile walk in the dead of night through a series of abandoned train tunnels later, and Steve and I have about five feet left to go to our destination. After a half-hour we’ve talked a lot but still can’t quite bring ourselves to go any farther.
This is because this last five feet involve crawling through a hole in the ground. And entering this aperture is the closest thing to going down Alice’s rabbit hole that you can get in the real world. That hole in the ground will lead to a huge shadow world below Paris—a web of abandoned quarry tunnels dotted with World War II bunkers, ossuaries, unofficial art galleries, and other assorted surprises colloquially known as “the catacombs,” or “catas” for short.
Fifty feet above us will be the Left Bank of Paris. Fifty feet above us, if you want to see a sculpture garden, or a history museum, or a remnant of the French Revolution, you queue up, pay your money, and snap your photos from behind the ropes. Fifty feet above us, if you don’t have a map to these places, you ask for directions.
