Days in the Undertow | 12
so i thought as the subway wobbled on its tracks...and about dishwashing
Introduction
Me again. Coming out a little later than usual. Still truckin’ along, getting used to a new job and adjusting for time I don’t have anymore. Hope all is well out there where you’re at. Thanks for reading as always!! ♡ Luke
Spur Line Hustle
Part 2 of an ongoing series
the spur line comes off the orange line, and goes to Chinatown and 8th, and 8th leads you to the PATCO line going into Bruceland. been a little since i took the spur. comes every 45 min to an hour on the regular orange. its lights are yellow, that’s how you know. it’s a ghost train. comes when it comes, despite the schedule. i got on at broad and north philly. it goes south, passes cecil, girard, then somewhere near fairmount finds its little secret tunnel built just for itself. there’s two active stops along its spur track, rumbling the sidewalks of ridge ave above. but the train passes a few others, completely empty and rundown, tile coming off the walls, the signs faded, graffiti everywhere, the stairwells dark. it doesn’t move fast, either. the spur is a slow dying beast looking for water, an earthworm flailing to find its way back into the soil’s moist cool.
every once in awhile i’d take it, just to take it. not because i really needed to, but because i felt it needed the patronage, or because i needed some place to be alone and moving through the tunnel dark, knowing somehow my life was there between the stops. because it’s when you pass an empty stop, the shattered tiles, the ceiling hung half down, ochre water stains expanding across the floors, that for a moment you forget what you see as you pass back into the dark again, and your reflection hovers over that invisible universe, like a ghost scurrying through a long night on a trip to nowhere. when you arrive again at another stop, rundown like the last one, neglected and lost to time and memories, the stop takes on a different form. now whatever tile have fallen, whatever graffiti have stayed scrawled there like ancient cavern paintings, you find life, a rethinking. the graffiti is of a secret artist, forgotten as the stop is forgotten. and the water streams pouring from the ceiling are like waterfalls, just nature claiming back its own. and where do the cracked stairs go, up into a strange light that will take us all back to somewhere else other than what we’ve wanted, other than the dreams we’ve had since youth of sunshine and green grass that were quickly or not so quickly smothered in rainstorms and bladed through with lightning. in the tunnel, between the passing of your rider ghost and the peopleless stops where nature takes its course, one sees expansion, life cycles, a thousand dead wrinkled flowers replanted in new soil, rewatered, re-rained, the whole wellspring of complications that is pain and beauty in a smudged subway window through where the history of the world lays in burrowed ground.
wasn’t always alone there. Tony sometimes got on same time i did. he’d lived around the city for over twenty years. grew up in harrisburg, around the outskirts of pennsyltucky farm land. near where they fracked, he said. thought the water messed him up since he was a kid, whatever poison they put into the ground to break it all up and get at the gas, leached into his family’s well water. had weird nervous tics, his jaw tweaked every few minutes. hands went numb at random times. and down the side of one leg, too. just feeling a river of tingles all up and down. come to think of it, he wasn’t sure if it was the water that did it, or getting into a dirt bike accident, years ago, and he’d been in the hospital for weeks, drank from a straw so long his lips had swollen to donut shape.
but for the fracking, he’d hear them sometimes drilling or exploding something out there, whatever it was they did. he recalled the big trucks taking their spoils with them out of those wild forest lands, men in construction gear walking alongside the trucks dripping with rain when they were slowed by storms and the mud patches deep with rain water, and the driver needed someone to see what was up ahead. reminded him of the army, he said, soldiers walking beside tanks like in the movies, the nazis come to invade your land, marching through the conquered town with their weapons and hulking vehicles.
vague origin story, but i didn’t ask questions. he lived in a slum lord group home now, one of those places with linoleum tile on the floors in an old row, more hospital than anything, and crusted-over wall patches, weird white fuzzy growths where the plaster cracked, yellow stains across his ceiling. everyone had their own locked room, shared a kitchen and a bathroom. one guy down the hall, he said, worked for a delivery app, bicycle guy. when you talked to him he was all right enough, seemed coherent. but the more you got into it with him the more it was he wanted to talk about people following him, lasers coming through the windows trying to either kill him or get a biological reading of his body, cautious of everyone and everything. couldn’t just have one conversation without him going on about being chased by cars or spies out there listening on his phone, listening through his window. a hellish life, Tony said. he felt bad for the guy, even though he got annoyed at him sometimes, with his tendency to wrap tin foil around everything in order to block the rays he felt invaded him. he’d covered a wall in the common kitchen. one time the microwave had been wrapped like a present, a silver box just sitting there. it was easy to tell who this guy didn’t jive with, who he thought was dangerous, based on what wall or door he’d covered with the stuff. anyone making conflict with him was seen as an agent of another side sent to follow or attack him. their dangerous rays had to be blocked. what was most amazing, Tony said, was all the foil he kept, big rolls of it that sat in the corner of his room like he was a supplier. how’d he earn enough to buy these rolls? nothing else occupied the guy’s space, but for the bike and a cot, and a tiny wobbly end table where he kept his phone and a laptop with a cracked screen.
sad life, Tony said. he told me to think about it. a hard life, i thought. the stress of believing you’re being followed, recorded, monitored at all times. cars that come out of dark alleys. spies after you, all forms, shapes, sizes. agents of an unknown world you can’t prove. one delusion after another. a funhouse mirror, but you’re not looking at yourself in it. you’re the reflection’s embodiment. your essence is nothing but what you think someone else has shown you, and you showing it back to them. an unbeknownst repeater of deception. but a deception that can never be unwound, so wrapped within the passion, the feverish workings of a truth held as real, that cannot be parsed from yourself. part of who you are now as the one who has been deceived and also deceiver. and yet not knowing any of this. cannot be parsed even from the moment you wake to when you sleep. what does one who has lost their way dream? and lost their way without realizing it? for it is not by their own hand that they lose their way. what does a day mean to the one who lives being chased by phantoms?
maybe lost, chased, but no less than anyone else. not alone in it. not as we would like to judge it, somehow outside of this matchstick world within our own. you strike fire to his world, it’ll only radiate to ours. he is the hard-luck poet, feeling out an expression to a reality we live by. takes on the world’s pains, the weight resting squarely in his head, a weight that we all so blithely pass through. for there are secret agents, those that follow us. blasting rays cross our bodies. turn on a smartphone and you know this. a parallel digital world, having its own fate. another life awaits us, fuses like metal across our form. our minds, encapsulated, must suffer two worlds: a digital haunting that covers the entire earth like a spirit hovering over the first darkness.
so i thought as the subway wobbled on its tracks, and i wandered through the lonely darkness of a spur that would make its stops, almost without reason or purpose, few people coming in and out through the doors, and would find its way around again and make the same trip back up and back down. and i sat, feeling the rumble through the slick orange seat, up through my calves and thighs, my gut, my chest, into my shaking hands, as if the train itself possessed me. ▨
Dishwasher (2001-02)
you were always wet
leaning up against the stainless steel
water nozzle spraying back at you
late evening, your shoes
would be caked in the uneaten
bits and scraps of the customers
Frank would pile the clean dishes
on the other side of the machine, big as a bull,
snot running down his turtle nose
from the steam or simply being old
he fought in World War II to find
himself hustling wares to the front of house
cooks yelling at him shit
like he was on a battleground
fire blasting over a ridge
and Keith saw this too
new convert to the faith
always attempting to save the souls
of the ex-cons shoving pizzas into the oven
comparing its heat to hellfire
they’d laugh and he’d pray harder
out back with the scapegoat trash
casting all our sins on it
as he threw it in the dumpster
he was frenetic
refused to grow back his beard
from his former life
he meant well, was worried for everyone
because he believed his visions
lost to drink so long he woke up
his beard, he said
had covered his shame and
he could no longer bare the weight
from noon to early morning, plates glided
across the stainless steel receiving table
room smelling of cleaners and bleach and
below us a stench of rotting dinner scraps
rising from the rubber mats
hosed at the end of a long shift
for me this was a high school gig
for Frank and Keith, livelihood
for the ex-cons, ways to pay for drinks
and avoid jail
placating parole officers and
smoking packs a day, fulfilled
if one waitress glanced their way
taking it to mean something as
they cupped themselves
my gig and their livelihood, but
we ate off the plates
that came back
the calamari barely touched
a sandwich inspected looked all right
no bite marks on its ends
then there was Ed with his crossed eye
staring down an unseen distance
rumored he’d been stabbed with a pencil
he quoted scifi films and smiled like
it was all right, everything we were doing,
teeth jangling, short tan body
no muscle or form
clever mountain, outcast clown
laughing at god knows what
Coming Up…
Next Release: End of December
As always: If you missed anything or can’t find an email, just visit the website to read through the archives.