Tuesday, November 2, 2010

My first time in hell.



I could tell you where it is, but I won't.

Admittedly it's part elitism, the relishing of insider knowledge on this matter only hours after its publicity, this solved mystery. But that's a fraction, a sliver. A significantly larger portion is out of concern. For you. For your safety. I have gone ahead; I don't think you should follow. I accomplished it with 3 other large grown men and even then our hearts were fluttering at times. We had to run briefly, slightly out of fear, mostly out of self-preservation. But the largest segment of the pie chart, the commanding majority: if you do want to find it, why spoil all the fun?

Most of you won't go. You can't. Not unless you're in New York City in the next week, maybe two. Past then and there may not be much left that's recognizable anyway. It'll be covered over, either with more graffiti or whitewashed by an embarrassed MTA. Eaten again by the City. And you'd have to be really dedicated to want to actually do this. Honestly, you'd have to be more than a little crazy.

My 11 day absence from New York ended in the early hours of Monday morning. If The New York Times
had run the story at any time in that previous week and a half, I never would have known what I was missing. But there it sat, on the front page of the November 1st edition. A feature article describing "The Underbelly Project," a year-and-a-half-long workshop by major and emerging street artists conducted in a long-abandoned subway station somewhere in the five boroughs. The culmination was not an opening to the general public. That will never happen in the proper sense. Rather it was an invitation to only a handful of reporters in the world to cover the exhibit in an article, on the condition of anonymity for the artists' true names and also for the location of the exhibit.

Clearly I had to see it. Mainly for the street art itself, but exponentially more for it being held in an abandoned subway station, and that it was a giant, impossibly-tempting secret. A mystery built of sugar.

I turned my head to Kate, my friend beside me at work.
"You saw this right?"
"Yes
. Looks amazing."
"We have to figure out where this is. I have to go."
She gave one of her signature pensive pauses, punctuated by a plotting smirk. "We can do that."

We rattled off the places we knew it could not be; eliminating three of the boroughs instantly. We used the other clues (the station's general size, its proximity to an occasionally reworked line) to narrow it down. Six minutes later she had her hunch. A quick search later that pulled up some images from this likely candidate station confirmed it. We looked at a photo from the slide show, an arresting piece proclaiming "WE OWN THE NIGHT" at the dead end of a track dugout, ringed by concentric rafters above. Then one from an older photo set of this likely station: it was the same dead end from the same perspective, here totally bare. It was the same photo, taken seven years earlier. One more search and she had years-old directions, admittedly vague, on how to get into this ghost station. In under 10 minutes I was set.

I texted my friends from California who were staying with me that week and set a time. 1:30am that night. A bit delayed, closer to 3, we got off the subway and crossed to the opposite side of the tracks for a better view to scout from. Encouraged by seeing an opening matching the directions, we crossed back over, then walked to the end of the platform, walked past the Do Not Enter sign and along the thin ledge of platform used only by workers and trespassers. This time of the morning we were safe from another train passing so soon and we ducked into the opening. A graffiti piece of a large Mayan-looking deity, mouth agape, lay just inside the opening. Not in the directions, but clearly where we needed to be.

We walked around several slanted aisles, each empty, or filled with discarded equipment, bottles. No stairs, no second hidden door. Embarrassed and perplexed, retracing through several times with little of anything to see I thought we had to give up. The only clue was another piece. 4 foot high letters, but the message was far too theatrical to be it. Right?

We looked up to wooden rafters and a barely visible cement ceiling some 30 feet above us. Our eyes traced that back down to see two extremely thin cords descending from the wooden banister, the one on the right making its way down to a loop at the bottom. For a foothold. Convinced this had to be the location and the means to get there, I turned back to the words on the wall. "Get Up. Get God." J______ went first.

Halfway up, "Fuck, fuck, it's breaking. It broke." A false alarm. He sturdied himself with the concrete ledge and used the still-holding rope for the last bit. He shone the flashlight. "This is definitely it. I see 'em."

My hands were already on the cord, my foot in the loop. I made it most of the way up to the concrete ledge that was the last boosting spot to the abandoned platform above, when the cord snapped. I fell back the twelve feet, twisting in mid-air to land on my side rather than with my back, which my camera was strapped to. Almost instantly after landing, before knowing that my jeans were widely torn or that my knee was bleeding, I assured them "I'm fine. I'm getting up there. I'm getting up." With a boost and more reliance on the equally flimsy thin metal pipes along the active line's tunnel than I wanted, I was on the ledge. Seconds later I was over the criss-crossed wooden banister. C______ came up as well while S______ kept lookout.

We wandered around mesmerized, I with the only camera snapping as many photos as I could. We navigated both the platform ledges and the drop-offs to the lower track-level six feet down in total darkness. After the initial shock and relief faded, something we weren't expecting became apparent. I saw them during the fractional flashes of my camera light, but had to switch to the play mode to read the tiny words on the viewfinder. That's how I learned we were being threatened.
The article stops short of the turn of the screw. Perhaps intentionally. The exhibit was not pristine when we came across it that early morning, as it appeared in the Times. The antique wooden table and chairs with a dinner set for two described by the writer was destroyed, a pile of wooden shards, except for one of the chairs which stood 40 feet away alone in an abyss. The look of a watchman's chair vacant, temporarily. About half of the works had been defaced, simple tags of static, intentionally ugly tags over complex works. Dogs pissing on every hydrant they pass. “GET OUT!”...."Fuck You, Fuck You" .... “Y'all Don’t Belong.....No No No No No”.... “The Tunnels Are OURS.” Words of anger, but ambiguously like those of a woken cyclops. One muttering in disbelief. Still debating how best to respond.
They were tags by the squatters of Hell Hou$e, their apparent chosen name for the station, furious that their turf had been breached, commercialized by whom they view as privileged, pompous outsiders. If such bile for the artists, what view of us? Something like groupies rather than guerrilla aficionados.

As arresting as the spotlight before me was, briefly illuminating scrawled threats, letting them come into existence, my mind was possessed by what our spot beam wasn’t showing. The other 330 degrees of world shrouded behind me, beside me. I kept half-expecting my camera flash to capture a figure lumbering towards me. Lumbering if I was lucky, rushing if I was not.

Down the sunken track dugout to the far side, still 15 feet from its end, my tiny miner’s light arched upon it. Upon him.
“Go. GO. Gogogogogo.”

I was briskly hurrying after saying the second, but J______ and C______ didn’t follow me until after I was done, when their lights had come across him as well. A man motionless on his side, an uncoiling fetal position, sleeping. But he did not stir with J______’s shocked yell and we never heard him afterwards. We regrouped at the opposite end, around a corner.

“It’s fine. Listen.... it’s fine. Just keep our distance, make it clear we're not trying to disturb him or anyone else.” In retrospect, absurd. The second we’d crossed the “Do Not Enter” sign back at the functioning station platform, we were intruding, disturbing him. Them. Trespassing, both on MTA property and inside Hell Hou$e, but only the latter really troubled me. (Y'all Don’t Belong..... No No No No No)

We carried on. About seven pieces later, J______ announced our warning call. “The spot has a minute left in it.”
I’d led us up but I wouldn’t keep us there without it. I photographed a few more pieces before returning to the path of our initial dugout, marked at the end by an American flag by Faile with a zig-zag pattern instead of stripes. We followed that track back to the middle and broke for the wooden banister. Five minutes of hesitant footholds, of easing down the others as they repelled, and frantic inhales of woken dust, inches of soot, and we were reassembled. Just in time for a train to rush past feet from us. We scurried around a corner, momentarily leaving our bags at the base. I doubled back to grab the gear and after hearing the line of cars pull away farther into the coming morning, we emerged back onto the ledge, then onto the public platform. The light, our first aside from the handhelds in over an hour, revealed our new layers of filth. We were covered in stagnancy, in time turned to soot, ash, and dirt.

The article came out yesterday morning. In this age of the instancy, I knew I wasn't the only asshole to figure out where it was. What surprised me was that there wasn't NYPD or MTA already waiting on the platform, blocking any possible access. What shocked me was that our hour up there wasn't filled with other groupies, other guerrilla tourists. That in all of New York City, for a full hour plus it was only us, the art, the art's backlash, the sleeping squatter we saw and any others that we didn't. That we spent an hour alone in the Underbelly. In Hell. Probably for the best that no one else tried to come up there too. Because the tunnels are theirs. And we don't belong. No no no no no no.




(post-script 11.11.10) The NYPD and MTA began sealing this up the following day. I actually suspect that the pile of wooden planks that we walked by in the alcove was a set of makeshift ladders that they had disassembled earlier that day, immediately after the article hit the public. Other people did manage to sneak in, but only a handful, and the only other pictures that I've seen were taken with a cell phone camera. A far larger number of people tried to break in and were either detained or arrested. But if you're moronic enough to attempt to break into a public transport station in New York City while wearing a keffiyeh over your face, you really have that arrest coming:

Monday, November 1, 2010

From where the palm tree grows.


Dear Cuba,


I found you.


It took some time, but you came. We had caught glimpses of you before. You were the children playing baseball in a grass lot with a massive visage of Che keeping watch. I heard your symphony sung by birds in the Parque Central; then a six piece band playing "El Cuarto de Tula", three singers coalescing into one voice. Yours.

On our first day here, you were a storm cloud in the
Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón . A four minute onslaught of pounding rain, to warn us, a display of what our week could be like if you wanted it to be. You weren't the constant unexpected sunshine that followed for the rest of the trip though. That was beautiful but inescapable, sometimes sweltering. You were that fleeting flirtation in the waning afternoon.

Dear Cuba. I saw you this morning. The procession of uniformed children tossing flowers in the river, out to sea to honor Camilo Cienfuegos. But you weren't the children; you were the many-varied petals. You were what prompted smiles to bloom on their faces. And because their innocent elation was infectious, to spread on mine.


A week chasing you left me with a blister on the ball of my foot that I felt when I rested, paused in my pursuit of you. I looked at it for the first time this morning and saw it was a perfectly-formed crimson heart. You wanted to remind me that love must involve some pain, a struggle. That only someone you love so deeply can reach you in that way. But the pain is our hurdle; it fades. Tested and torn muscles rebuild stronger. Proven capable of bearing the greater weight of our future.


Dear Cuba. You were the woman that welcomed me and my friend into her family's home, and you were her fourteen-year-old cousin there. You asserted your strength, defiance, sovereignty, determination, independence, as others around acquiesced, settled, sold themselves. But you were also that girl's potential. The belief that the next generation that idolizes you will build on all of those virtues. Will manage to reach farther still.

But tonight I saw you clearest, and tonight I understood. You started with a four piece band; three guitars and percussion on an apple box. Not the one of the farmer, but of the filmmaker. The percussionist leaned back with casual artistry. I was impressed; taken aback. "Viva Stevie Wonder" was scribbled on the walls of the courtyard, the white temporal chalk on dark rojo.

You were in the third row as the bands made the air around us tremble. You had a string of flowers falling from your hair. I couldn't help but sneak looks at your dimples, your singing along to songs I'd never dreamed. I didn't walk over to talk to you. Not because I was nervous, but because I couldn't express myself with the passion that I wanted. Not a passion that I felt for you in that instant, but that I felt was required for this country. Something my second semester Spanish never covered.


Dear Cuba. I could have kept talking to the Swiss girls. They were beautiful, but had no passion. They assessed attraction by arithmetic, reduced conversation to a quantity and I needed, need, passion on instinct. I preferred to keep vigil to the night around me, to join in the chorus with those around. With you. The words a mystery but the emotion an impossible clarity.


Dear Cuba. Years of longing and months of planning to come meet you are forever passed. In your history, you were mythology become reality. And now that we've met, you're myth turned flesh, and back again to legend. My lesson that you come from dreams, and to dream you shall return.


Dear Cuba.

We fell in love tonight. I hope you remember in the morning.



(originally written October 30, 2010)

Of a revolution, two.


I walked around the back of the police car before it pulled away. Abdel and Pilar were now both inside, if not free then at least together. He had squeezed into the center of the cramped backseat, next to the teenage prostitute whose flirtation and pleading at me through the car window had quickly jerked into confusion and fear seconds earlier. Ricardo, myself, and the car that had just rolled off with its human cargo inside were each older than the policia especializada officer that we were speaking to, the one that had started the confrontation. The one that had shifted the tenor of that Havana afternoon.


I type these words for you now rather than later. With an ending as unsurprising as this, why bother building to it?


Two hours earlier I was at my leftist best. If there is a second coming of Joseph McCarthy, a Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, or someone (God help us) nuttier that succeeds in resurrecting HUAC, my morning in Havana's Museo de la Revalucion was probably enough to get me blacklisted. Or exiled. Three stories of the Communist government's time capsule to posterity, complete with a giant park for relics of war vehicles. The typewriter Fidel Castro used to write "History Will Absolve Me," his brother Raul's combat boots, Che Guevara's rifle and beret, the yacht they used in the unsuccessful Granma uprising, Fidel's tank he commanded in the Bay of Pigs affair, the wreckage of the American B-2 shot down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a memorial flame to the dead that fought for the Revolution. Everything the embargo is in place to keep Americans from seeing, from spending their money on. But certainly no more offensive than the Ronald Reagan Library, and with about as much propaganda.

With our last sight-seeing stop during our 3 days in Havana complete, Ricardo and I walked across the street to one the countless all-purpose tiendas that heavily pepper the city. An amalgam of rum, laundry detergent, beauty products, candy, toilet paper, toothpaste, hot food, and beer for sale; we came in desperate want of the latter two. Neither a free table nor another tourist inside confirmed that we'd made the right choice. Our food was ordered, our bottles of Cristal beer were already sweating from the omnipresent humidity, and each of us looked around for some small vacancy coupled with eye contact as an invitation to sit. Ricardo managed first, and I walked around to the table's other vacant seat, next to a chain-smoking man named Abdel. A table behind me opened four minutes later. A few more minutes of indecision on where to eat, a few more Spanish captions to Revolutionary photos I could have laboriously translated, either of us going to the bathroom again before leaving the museum, and I could be sure Claudia would have seen her parents before she went to sleep tonight. Actually, any of those things and I wouldn't even know who Claudia was.


Instead it was the four of us. Abdel and Pilar with their red and black cans of Bucanero Fuerte, Ricardo and I our green bottles of Cristal. We were each ready for our next round before the food finally arrived. Somehow the smoke of unfiltered cigarettes wasn't a bother, somehow I stumbled through a description of my tattoo in Spanish when asked by Pilar. An hour of good conversation, if difficult to hear with the rowdy neighbors and TV blaring early 90s salsa music videos. When Abdel went to speak to some other friends outside, Pilar told Ricardo and I about their 16 years of marriage, their youngest child a 2 year-old daughter named Claudia.


I greeted Abdel's return with "Claudia?"

"Si, Claudia," his proud smile unobscured by the nub of a cigarette between his lips. He immediately reached for his wallet and a poorly developed dark photo of her. Barrettes, one purple and one green at the bottom of arching side braids, giving her backlit head the look of a trophy to match her paternal identity as one. Conversation switched back to our upcoming trip to Trinidad, the city that every Cuban we'd met urged us to visit, a decision that greatly pleased the couple. Soon we were invited to join them for more drinks at an African-Cuban club, a generosity and an opportunity for something so off the tourist radar we could not pass up. We'd spent days with strangers trying to coax us to one tourist trap or another, their salesman routine as stale as it was transparent. No different than my experience in India, Thailand, Egypt, Prague, Rome, Amsterdam. Experienced backpackers recognize the chasm between bullshit and sincerity, and we knew that Abdel and Pilar were on the right side of that divide.

It took merely the width of the street to get in trouble. As we got to the opposite sidewalk, the very existence of our unlikely foursome of two very dark-skinned Cubanos, a Peruvian-Canadian with a mohawk, and 6'4" white guy in preppy shorts and laceless Chuck Taylors was all it took for Abdel and Pilar to be detained by a member of Havana's Special Police. Their response to every question I managed to translate mentally pulled my stomach lower. Pilar did not have her identification. Abdel's identification was worn, peeling, its picture admittedly sketchy-looking. Minutes of radio conversation passed between the young officer and his superiors before he allowed us to speak the calm words that would eventually set them free.


Ricardo calmed down a frustrated, indignant Abdel as my rudimentary Spanish helped the officer see my explanation for what it was: innocence... the truth. Ricardo's far more fluent corroboration of who we were and where we were headed was the lynchpin that set us all on our way. We walked again, apologizing to Abdel and Pilar profusely for causing them trouble. Pilar's response, a sincere assurance that it wasn't us, made me more disconcerted. It replaced my guilt with sympathy as she explained how they are constantly stopped for identification without proper cause. That their quite obvious African-Cuban heritage forces them to endure constant suspicion.
We shook it. We assured them that the afternoon would be great. How Ricardo and I were really looking forward to this club, which according to Abdel would not be a long walk.... which was correct.

"Alto, identificacion."
Ricardo and I looked at one another then down at the officer behind the steering wheel who was speaking to Abdel. The words "no" and "fuck" are universal, as is exasperation. The officer looked at me long enough to acknowledge each of those three things from me but immediately went back to Abdel. Identical routine but this officer was more decorated than the first, I would guess just old enough to pre-date the Revolution, and clearly far less open to negotiations.
Ricardo busied himself with the officer's partner, Pilar with trying to wave down the first officer who initially stopped us less than a block earlier. I found myself looking around at those looking at me. The doormen at the expensive hotel we were in front of, the uniformed military guards at the museum's outdoor exhibition, the German tourists walking by. And the wide-eyed movement in the backseat of the police car; the officers' prior arrest. At fifteen too young for her profession, her insistent flirtation too much for both of those. Her presence really only served to disquiet me further, not just for obvious reasons, but also as an indication that this officer was not one to merely warn.

The first officer's arrival cleared up nothing, instead only prompting his superior to frisk Abdel and then cuff him, catalyzing furious shouting. He made eye contact with Ricardo and I as he was placed into the back of the car. He cut off our frantic apologies with a yell only partially directed at us: "This is the shit because of Fidel."


Pilar was next to him in the car just a few seconds later, choosing her husband over her own freedom. I stumbled another explanation to the officer.
"No, no, no problema con nosotros..... Estan muy, muy simpaticos."
"Bien... estan muy simpaticos." He shrugged as he slouched into the driver's seat and turned his attention to the ignition and the sidestreet ahead.
Too ashamed and guilty to attempt for eye contact with Abdel, I turned in disbelief and exhaustion to the girl beside him. Earlier she showed her own arrest was an annoyance and a joke, but the terror in her eyes confirmed that his was now more. I wondered if a younger, faded her was in a wallet somewhere in the city. The car drove away.

Ricardo's conversation with the first officer was almost over by the time I could focus on it.
"They did nothing wrong-"
"Where are you from?"
"Canada."
"Canada. And there you can just speak against the government and get away with it?"
The irony answered the question for us. It took patience and restraint to keep both of us from pointing back at the Museo de la Revolucion and declaring: "They did."


I type these words in a casa particular, just after sundown, hours after I watched the police car turn the corner and Abdel and Pilar shrink away. I'm going to save this draft and place the file, like the others I have started in Cuba thus far, in a subfolder of a subfolder of an innocuously named folder on my desktop. A precaution I've never taken before in my traveling. Unless the absolute worst happens in customs leaving Cuba, they should be safe there.
I type these words grateful that it wasn't me the officer asked the above question to; that I wasn't forced to lie about my nationality to a specialized police officer in a Communist dictatorship or be placed in the back of that already capacity squad car, an American caught with those in suspicion of being against the government.
I type these words hoping that Abdel and Pilar are okay. That once everyone in that car has calmed down and had their backgrounds run, that everything will check out. That Claudia will have her mother and father with her to kiss her goodnight. If not tonight then certainly tomorrow, and many after that.

I type these words with weight of uncertainty; at times the worst oppressor of all.


(***All of the above conversation took place in Spanish, but I translated the more detailed dialogue into English to make it easier to follow.)