The Most Important Book I Haven’t Written
Tale of an Alternate Universe
The Philadelphia Subway system. Art unhinged. Like this screenplay.
The Paris Metro is i.e., was) everything the inventors of the technology must have had in mind. Clean stations populated by people who kept to themselves. The trains themselves also clean and shod with rubber wheels that hummed not rattled or clacked on the tracks. You started with a whoosh and you could go anywhere in the city on 35 çentimes with no more than one change as a rule. I turned ten a few days into our new Parisian apartment life, and soon afterwards our parents trusted my slightly older sister and me to go for rides in the subway unsupervised.
There was method in their madness. Less than two weeks after our arrival, we had attended the Bastille Day Parade. DeGaulle was in the parade, standing and surrounded by soldiers protecting him from the next assassination attempt. (There had been several of late by unhappy Algerians.) The crowd at the parade was intense, close at times to tipping into chaos. If we were going to be going out in public as a family, we would always be running a risk of separation. The answer that came to our parents was the Metro. IF one or both of us ever got separated from our parents, our instructions were simple. Find the nearest Metro station and follow the map in the train car home. We always had the price of a subway fare on our persons. Insurance. You could anywhere on the Metro for a single fare.
There were rules, of course. We had to learn how to read the map mounted on every station wall and in every train car. We had to know how to get back to our home stop from anywhere before we could be permitted (not unleashed) to use the Metro. No talking to strangers (except in a dire emergency), which worked well because the French had a like rule about no speaking to Americans, especially American children (Zut!). We were allowed to get off at a stop, go as far as the nearest corner, and take in the sights there. Then back to the apartment in Nouilly before dark and well before dinner. Good way to see some of the most beautiful city in the world, which would have been heaven itself except that it was filled with French people. This was explained to us as proof of God’s sense of humor.
One weekend we all flew to London and experienced the bear primordial legend of the Underground. Impressive if not as comfortable as my belovèd Metro.
My sister and I felt very cosmopolitan after our sojourn in Paris, and when we returned home I became more interested than I had been before in the Lionel train set he had been assembling for me a few pieces at a time in the annual Christmas gifts. (I pitied my sister, whose corresponding gift stream was sterling silver flatware, one sooon, fork, etc per year. Girls. You know.) I laid out my trains in an attic I had all to myself and built a world for them and my slot cars (I was an incipient motorhead years before 8my first vehicle acquisition at 14) to go places in, even if it was only circles and ellipses they made around my Plaster of Paris and cedar twig stands of trees, my tinfoil lakes, tunnels slapped together somehow, my grandstands made of Kleenex boxes, and the cars I assembled with whittled wood and mismatched bits from old model kits. I was moving gradually into the realm of world building, which manifested itself in other ways, but nowhere so concretely and so much under my control as in the train/racecar domain up there in the attic.
Subways didn’t leave my life. Going back and forth to boarding school involves buses and trains many times a year. Had my first illegal beer underneath Union Station in DC, where I was the height of sophistication sipping my illicit brew in a folding chair on an ancient concrete floor. The waitresses pretended I was of age. Must have been the coat and tie, I thought. On the less venal side, I still got to hear the faint haunting train whistles in my dorm room at night. Help through the sometimes sleepless hours of solitude.
My college was in Boston, which meant using their subway on a regular basis, almost as well laid out and definitely cleaner than the rough and tumble subways of Philly and and New York, where occasional tourist trips made clear how easily a person could get in trouble there. Some combination of the subways I had experienced before the age of 20 could be imagined that was truly dangerous and quite other from life as I mostly knew it in a youth that was more rural than citified.
Which is about the time I wound up living, far from affluently, in the City of Brotherly Love. Made one male friend, whose dream was to be a screenwriter if he couldn’t make it as a rock star. He was absolutely a city boy. This is the story of the story we wrote with great enthusiasm over several months and believed we could somehow sell if we got the breaks…
The recordings below are audio-only memoirs, completely unscripted except for the necessary performance by my wife on the second part. Mostly it’s just me talking. No need to listen if it’s boring. But try to make it as far as listening to my wife’s recording. She has a voice made for narration.
It couldn’t have been more than six months after our long, messy draft screenplay was put away for a “resting” period that I began creating the story of the punk writers of South Street. Their technology came from the computer industry I had been working for in my great comeback from late twenties oblivion. Their cultural identity came from South Street and the Punk Monks of Norman Rules, without whom they might never have been born and neither Punk City nor The Boomer Bible written. Sister Gregory, meet St. Nuke. And all aboard the Shuteye Train…
We’ve been at this kind of stuff for a long
long time. It’s called Norman Rules.
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