by Gates, Moses
Fat Joe continues his harangue, insisting the warrant is a screwup. But even if it is, I can’t imagine the cops are going to let a convicted felon who’s done nothing but cause trouble since he got in not make the trip down to Central Booking. After ten minutes or so of this tantrum the cops let me and the girls out of the cells and start typing up our desk appearance tickets. It turns out one of the interns’ moms was supposed to meet her at Grand Central two hours ago and has called her in as missing. I feel like the worst person in the world.
As we’re waiting to get our tickets, the cops lead the others out in handcuffs to be transferred over to Central Booking. There’s something different in all of their demeanors, something that says they know they’ve fought, lost, and don’t have a rematch. Fat Joe wants his cell phone so he can call his boss and tell him he won’t be in the next day, but he’s not yelling for it anymore, more like pleading for it.
“Please, man, this is going to fuck up my job. I can’t fuck up this job, man, you know that!” It turns out Fat Joe got the open-container summons in 2001 and then got arrested for assault before his court date. Nine years later that can of beer is still on his record, probably costing him his job, his parole, and any semblance of any kind of a second chance he’d gotten.
• • •
The gallery—which the organizers dub “The Underbelly Project”—finishes up, although the documentary never ends up getting completed. It hits the papers with a big feature article in The New York Times a few months later. It takes five minutes for the subway aficionados to figure out where it is, slightly longer than that for it to be posted on the Internet, and about twenty-four hours for the cops to start patrolling it. For a couple weeks they station officers in the space to collar whoever’s dumb enough to try to visit.
Surprisingly, the MTA says they won’t paint it over. This might seem to make sense, as the art in the station would be fairly valued well into the six figures, but to the MTA it’s less than worthless: it’s graffiti. The MTA hates graffiti, which first started as a large-scale endeavor on the subway trains, probably more than any other municipal agency in New York. They have a blanket policy of never running a train with graffiti on it, no matter how much it might be needed. If you so much as mention the word “graffiti” to them when you’re trying to get their permission to film or do an interview, even in a completely historical context, they’ll stop talking to you immediately. Officially, for the MTA, graffiti is subject to a sort of Orwellian denial: it certainly doesn’t go on now, and as much as possible, they’d like to pretend that it never even existed in the first place.
But on an unofficial level, I wonder if the project has fans among the higher-ups. On an official tour of a tunnel construction project I once took, one of the people from the MTA said that whenever the higher-ups came down in the tunnels and saw some of the old graffiti, they’d ask her about it, and that she wanted to do some research and write a paper on it.
“They’ll let you publish that?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” she replied. “It would just be an internal thing.”
And I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if the art gallery became an “internal thing” as well. I can easily imagine kids like the two interns I got arrested with asking their MTA-executive dads to take them there some weekend afternoon. It would hardly be unprecedented: public servants often have a bad habit of treating the structures and systems they’re charged with overseeing as their own personal playgrounds. For instance, right before he quit, MTA chairman Jay Walder arranged for an exclusive tour to the top of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge for himself, his wife, his son, and two friends. Fine for him—but the structure doesn’t actually belong to him. It belongs to the public: built with our taxes, operated with our (considerable) tolls. Instead of considering a tour of the bridge as a job perk he could arrange for friends and family, as might be justified in a private building, I would have hoped that Walder would have seen it more his duty to find a way to offer the tour to the people who paid his salary. It’s not like it would even have to be free, like it was for him. Maybe the revenue from giving tours up the bridge could even go toward offsetting the $13 charge we have to pay to cross it.
Our court date’s a few months after the arrest. I end up being the only one who actually gets charged with anything; everyone else’s tickets seem to have somehow disappeared. The filmmaker hires a lawyer for the four of us, although the parents of one of the interns have, from California, hired their own lawyer. I get two days of community service, which I spend at a church in Brooklyn handing out bags of food, the case is dismissed, and my arrest record is supposedly sealed. I’m not surprised. I assumed this outcome, or something similarly benign. I remember how Dreads, arrested on an equivalent class B misdemeanor charge, had assumed a different kind of outcome.
The project ends in some mild graffiti-world drama, with local graffiti writers going over a lot of the pieces. This is something I, the organizers, and pretty much everyone else with any knowledge of the project assumed would eventually happen in some way, shape, or form. I still can’t quite make head or tail of the specifics, but the graffiti world resembles the end of the movie Chinatown at times, and I’ve given up trying to figure out who’s on whose side, who told who else what and when. For my part, I’m happy to get out of the whole thing with two days of community service and a resolution to finally stop doing stuff that might lead to any kind of more in-depth knowledge of New York’s criminal justice system.
THIRTY
Dude, come on, you’ve got to join the club.” This is Shane talking to Steve, who’s back in town for the summer after finishing his first year of grad school in California. We’re hanging out, relaxing after finishing up a few hours at the climbing gym, and Shane is grinning at the fact that he has recently become one-half of the third couple to join the Sex on Bridges club, after me and Sara and a random Estonian couple whose photo I found on the Internet having sex on an arch bridge in Tallinn.
I started the club as a lark, paying ten dollars to register SexonBridges.com and setting up a basic website one insomniatic night. Anyone can join the club by having sex on a bridge, although I decided that charter membership would be reserved for the first people to christen any one particular bridge. Sara and I have snagged the Williamsburg, and now Shane’s picture of him and his girlfriend coupling on top of the Manhattan Bridge is in full view on the “Hall of Fame” page of the site. Steve’s is still missing.
SHANE JOINS THE CLUB. TOP OF THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE.
© Shane Perez
Steve is actually a little upset about this, although he’s trying to hide it. He’s always been the one to push the envelope, using the prospect of other people beating him to places as motivation to overcome laziness and other obstacles and maintain his status as the trailblazer. This has meshed well with my method of motivation, which is to plan out a new adventure and then talk a lot of shit, knowing that this will make Steve come along and provide the final push when I inevitably want to bottle out. We’ve developed a sort of mutual cooperation society disguised as a false competition, one in which we’re happy to each play our roles. But this trend has always ended with Steve being first, or at least an equal member of the accomplishment. He doesn’t like the fact that I, and now Shane, have gotten out in front of him on anything, even something so silly as this.
The issue, though, isn’t that Steve hasn’t been able to get a girl to go up a bridge with him. In contrast, ever since I first came up with the whole idea of having sex on a bridge, date night on these structures has become one of the most popular ways he, Shane, and some other friends of mine have come up with to impress girls. The first time Steve told me he had taken someone up the Williamsburg Bridge on a first date, I was amazed—but then thought back to Chi, the Australian in Rome who’d climbed the obelisk with us, and the American in Paris we’d taken down a hole in a graveyard, and remembered that it’s incredible
what someone (or at least Steve) can get relative strangers to do with a smile and a confident attitude. After using the stairs to go up the bridge, Steve decided to descend via the suspension cables, not realizing that, unlike the Brooklyn Bridge, the Williamsburg has suicide guards covered with chicken wire, making them significantly harder to navigate. He ended up almost killing the poor girl, a complete bridge-climbing novice, whom he had gotten to go up there with him.
“I’m assuming there was no second date,” I said to Steve upon hearing this.
“Yeah,” he replied. “But I don’t think that’s because of the getting-stuck-on-the-cable thing. I think I might have spent too much time talking about how hot her friend was.”
No, the issue is that on this, and every other bridge date night I’ve heard of, there has not been actual sex on the actual top of the bridge. And so Sara and I and the Estonian couple have stayed the only members until Shane and his girlfriend’s tryst on top of the Manhattan.
And I am being absolutely adamant about the criteria for inclusion being fully fulfilled. My problem isn’t the “sex” part: in an effort to make the club inclusive and queer-friendly, the definition of “sex” is simply “If all parties could, in good conscience, say they had gotten laid last night if it had happened in the bedroom, then it counts.” No, it’s the “top” part. There’s hundreds of ways to have sex. But there’s only one definition of “top.” The catwalk under the maintenance room of the Williamsburg Bridge, with its see-through floor 250 feet above the East River? No. A romantic night in the lift room of the Broadway Bridge (not during pigeon season, obviously)? Not a chance. On top of the castle-like towers of the Hell Gate Bridge, accessible only by a rusty spiral staircase? Oh hell no—not only are they not structurally part of the bridge, they’re also shorter than the top of the arch. Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary didn’t reach a nice promontory a few feet lower than the summit of Everest, snap a couple photos, and call it a day. The top is the top is the top is the top. The only caveat I make is that the sex has to take place “where it is possible to have sex relatively safely.” After all, I don’t want anyone killing themselves pursuing membership. There’s no need to climb up one of the twenty-five-foot turrets of the Queensboro Bridge to the dinner platter–size platforms housing a blinking red airline light on top in order to do the deed, for instance.
This obstinacy over “the top” has caused no shortage of arguments with Steve, Shane, and my other bridge-climbing friends. “What do you mean, ‘That doesn’t count’? Whatever, fuck your stupid club, Moses,” I’ve heared more than once. But as I have the password to the website, and in our day and age the Internet is the ultimate arbiter of truth, I hold the keys to the Sex on Bridges club and I am unlocking membership only for the worthy. And despite “Fuck your stupid club,” the applications keep coming. Shane’s is the first one that passes muster.
Steve is against Shane’s inclusion in the club. “You guys didn’t do it on top of the globes,” he tells Shane. “That’s the top.”
I remind Steve about the safety clause. Shane’s grin widens.
“Oh, you’re so full of shit, Moe,” Steve replies. “You’re completely just making this stuff up as you go along.”
I am not making this stuff up as I go along. The criteria for membership are sacrosanct. It’s not my fault if Steve hasn’t fulfilled them correctly and Shane has. Steve and I start to argue.
Shane interrupts after not too long. “Wait. So, Moe, if I have a threesome on the Williamsburg Bridge, does that mean I’m a charter member even if you already did it up there? I mean, it’s still the first threesome, right?” Count on Shane to ask a question like this.
“Shane, you’re already a charter member, remember? You got the Manhattan first.”
“Right, yeah, I know. It’s just that it’d kind of be awesome to have a threesome on a bridge. And then I’d be, like, a double charter member, right?”
“Jesus Christ, Shane, there’s no ‘double charter’ membership, okay?” Somehow this discussion has turned almost Talmudic. “That’s not the point at all.”
But taking a step back, I think that having discussions like this one certainly isn’t the point, either, although I also take a minute to marvel at the exchange: it doesn’t seem like that long ago that I was petrified to scoot around a sign at the end of a subway platform; now I’m arguing about having threesomes on top of suspension bridges. But as I compare Sara’s and my happy afterglow from our night on the Williamsburg Bridge to this inane competition, I feel like I’ve created a monster with my silly little website. It’s true that Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary didn’t reach a nice promontory a few feet lower than the summit of Everest, snap a couple photos, and call it a day. But I’m also pretty sure they didn’t reach the peak and think, “Wow—wait until the Royal Geographic Society learns we totally boned up here!” Somehow, instead of just being happy with the best and most exclusive date night in New York City, we’ve turned this into the world’s dumbest pissing contest.
This competitive edge among us serves its purpose; I don’t think we would have gotten to half the places we did without it. But the disadvantage of having this edge is that it can leak out in wholly inappropriate times. Maybe it’s tough to shake off a cocaine hangover and get out of a warm bed to go in a freezing granite tunnel, or plan a trip to go trespassing in Russia, or scale Notre Dame in the rain, without that sense of competition to fuel you. But for some things—like sex, how and wherever it might take place—enjoying them for their own sake should be motivation enough.
THIRTY-ONE
I first met QX when he came to New York City for a weekend with Marshall, another Australian living in France. Our first night we found ourselves climbing up the Brooklyn Bridge. Relaxing later, we traded the regular stories about arrests, injuries, and close calls.
“One time I was up on a wall, right?” QX says. “Just a regular abandonment, nothing special, but we’re really high up. All of a sudden, a bit of it crumbles and I lose my footing and start to fall. And I just remember thinking, ‘Well, there you go, mate. Had a good run of it. Guess you’re done now,’ before the guy I was with caught me by the back of my shirt.”
QX goes on. “To tell you the truth, though, that’s not really how I’m worried about dying. I’m more worried about getting held up somewhere. If someone was pointing a gun at me, I just know I couldn’t keep my bloody mouth shut. I’d end up taking the piss out of him and probably get shot.”
Trading these kinds of stories is a staple of meeting new explorers. Usually these initial encounters end up with more than a bit of dick swinging. I’ve heard plenty like this, where the person telling them tries to project a sort of roguish, devil-may-care attitude toward life and limb, and I usually just roll my eyes a bit internally and chalk it up to the ubiquitous human tendency to present the person they want to be, not the person they actually are. But with QX, I never question the veracity of such stories for a second. I have not a shadow of a doubt that if he were facing down the demon reincarnation of the Praetorian Guard armed with antitank missiles and laser guns, he’d meet them with a wink and wisecrack. This is the guy I’m planning to climb the Great Pyramid of Cheops with in December of 2010, a month before the country explodes.
I never really meant to try it. It’s been some months since I got arrested at the Red Hook Grain Terminal, over a year since my last trip with Steve to Eastern Europe. It’s been three years since we were arrested on top of Notre Dame, and over five years since we first met and went out the window of the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower onto the abandoned observation deck. I was originally going to take this trip with Sara, but we had broken up a couple months earlier, the different countries and constant travel too much. But still, even solo, I’m not thinking of doing anything too off the beaten path. I’ve been happy to settle into a new job, concentrate on my career, leave running through subway tunnels and such for the very o
ccasional foray. I’ve checked off almost all of the places I’ve wanted to see in New York, with the remaining ones easier to get to through official channels. And I never thought I’d do the traveling that I have, go to the places around the world I’ve been. So in my three weeks of vacation coming up, I’m thinking of a calm trip, one spent backpacking and relaxing, not trying to climb the only remaining ancient wonder of the world. I have friends in Sicily, which seems like a good destination. I figure Tunisia’s just a ferry ride away, and the cheapest way to get from Tunis back home is Air Egypt, which has a stopover in Cairo. A three-hour or three-day stopover is the same price, so I jump at the chance to take in a new city. Then, once again, my mind turns to borders, to what might be possible versus what people say is possible. I get to thinking: “What’s there to do in Cairo?” My first thought is of the pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Cheops was the tallest human-made structure in the world for almost four thousand years. I’m always trying to get to the top. And this would be much more than getting to the highest point in a city. This would be getting to the highest point of an entire era of civilization. I start to wonder if I can climb it. And, to my complete surprise, it turns out that I probably can.
Actually, until fairly recently, anyone could. In fact, they were encouraged to; as Mark Twain famously recollects in The Innocents Abroad, when he visited the pyramids he was “besieged by a rabble of muscular Egyptians and Arabs who wanted the contract of dragging us to the top—all tourists are.” The possibility continued to be there for the fit and adventurous who found themselves in Cairo, until the growing number of tourists started leading to concerns over safety and preservation, and Egypt began putting up the now ubiquitous “Do Not Climb” signs in the mid-1980s. I’m reminded again of how different traveling used to be, how more and more people leads to more and more control, less and less access. Now the pyramids have ropes, fences, guards, and all the other staples of twenty-first-century mass tourism. But that hasn’t stopped some tourists—mostly of the young, male, Japanese, or European variety—from sneaking in and making nocturnal attempts at the ascent.
