Wednesday, October 9

     Rom finished the container of bad coffee and looked for somewhere to toss it.  He'd have to get a garbage pail.  And a shower curtain, and some pots and pans and silverware.  And something to clean out the refrigerator and stove with.
     The apartment wasn't much: a small bedroom, perhaps 10 feet by 10, equipped with a cheap dresser, an old steel bedframe and crappy mattress, and a combination kitchen/living room that measured 10 by 15.  A red formica-and- chrome table and two mismatched wooden chairs sat under the lone window.  An ancient stained bathtub took up most of the bathroom.  Its attached shower dispensed an uneven stream of mostly lukewarm water, and the sink looked like someone had dyed Easter eggs in it.   None of the walls had been painted in ten years, Rom estimated, and the ceilings were cracked and water-stained.  And all this for $420 a month!
     But he smiled again at serendipity: He had never expected the manager — a canny Cuban woman — to show him up to #15.  And it had taken only a moment to confirm that this was the memory-filled apartment where he had spent his 16th summer with a few of his closest friends.  Immediately upon entering, he'd checked the wall next to the door and found evidence of hundreds of little pockmarks, made by so many stray darts.  A quick look had confirmed the familiar view across the former St. Benedict's Field: Branch Brook Park, and beyond it, the cathedral.  And on the bedroom ceiling, painted over a few times but still prominent, the "Z" he'd carved one night.  Crazy luck.
     But now, as Rom inspected his puffy eye and bruised face in the bathroom mirror, he wondered when he would find something to like about his neighbors.  He must have been crazy to intervene last night!  How easy it would have been for someone to just shoot him, or stab him.   That's what one of them had been yelling:  "Stick him!"
     Well, lesson learned.  While he was here, he would butt out.  He would stay in these little rooms, at once familiar and foreign.  And, despite the unhappy ending his life was now all but guaranteed, he would write anyway.  Perhaps his cautionary tale — "Death by Blowjob," perhaps? — would, after all, serve some purpose.
     As Rom went into the kitchen, a cockroach climbed the wall near the window.  In the next apartment, his neighbors argued in Spanish, and someone or something fell heavily to the floor.  Rom's head wouldn't stop hurting, and he had no aspirin left.  He put on his jacket and looked for his car keys, then remembered that his car had been stolen.
     He went out into the morning drizzle and walked to Park Avenue, to the same bodega he'd visited 20 minutes ago for coffee, and bought aspirin and a bottle of Coke.  Standing outside, he took three and washed them down.  Already he was getting soaked.  He walked into the firehouse and asked the dispatcher, a sturdy- looking hispanic man, for his yellow pages.  The dispatcher, after hearing about the theft, recommended Rent-O-Rama on Bloomfield Avenue.  "This city is Number One in car theft, my friend," he said.  "I say fuck ‘em, get a piece o' shit.  They won't bother."  He smiled sagely, punched up a line on the station phone and pushed it across the desk for Rom to use.

     Rom got out of the cab at the rental agency, a converted gas station near Newark Stadium, and selected a beat-up looking 1979 Datsun 200 SX.  Its odd angularity gave it the look of a Car of the Future as envisioned in the 1950s.  Its paint had long ago dulled to a flat gray; the antenna was bent, and it had no hub caps.  The interior had held up better; despite the worn driver's seat, it seemed comfortable enough, and it had a radio.  Rom put a week's rental on his VISA card and wheeled the spry little car down Bloomfield Avenue.
     He spent the rest of the day trying to write but found more success in napping.  Later that night, as he sat at the small table and looked out across the dark field, a John Lennon birthday tribute on the radio brought a deja vu that all but stopped his heart.  For a moment, during "A Day in the Life" — as the lights of a subway car glided along the edge of the field, and the aroma of chocolate reached him — it was a warm summer night and Rom was 16 and Frankie and Lopy were out getting someone to buy beer for them, and the world was at their feet.  But as Rom took a breath, the moment flew, and its passing left him impoverished.  He went to bed, and the night passed grudgingly.

     At just past 10 a.m. Rom, dressed in khaki slacks, sneakers and a St. Martin's warm-up jacket, walked from his rooms to Park Avenue, then the short block east, past the site of the old White Diamond hamburger place — now just parking space for a gas station — and down the concrete steps to the Inbound platform of the City Subway, where he joined a group of about a dozen commuters.  He gazed down the familiar track, plucking from his memory a few of the thousand times he had skipped down these stairs, stood here, looked down this track.
     The very first thing Rom had ever seen in Roseville was the City Subway.  He was six years old the first time he'd accompanied his father in their big Hudson Hornet  to see "Uncle" Vinnie, who'd bought a home on N. Second Street, near the Boys' Vocational School on Sussex Avenue.   Father and son had motored from Bayonne, up through Jersey City and across Harrison, and once on Orange Street had traveled barely a block when, at a red light, a big gray-and-white Public Service subway car, a contact arm conveying power from an overhead line, rumbled across the street in front of them, bell clanging and horn sounding.  It became the highlight of their regular Saturday visits to Roseville, and Rom's father made sure they didn't leave without spotting a subway car, sometimes parking the Hudson outside the Tung-Sol factory on the way home until one of the big coaches arrived to make its imperious crossing.
      Now Rom heard the familiar clatter, and in a moment Car 9 coasted into the Park Avenue Station, now painted in the colors of New Jersey Transit: white, with diagonal stripes, black, purple and orange, amidships.  Rom boarded and smiled at the driver, a black man with elegant white sideburns, and, noting the figure on the farebox, deposited 85 cents from his handful of change.  The car was half full, and Rom sat in one of the single seats running down the right side as the car smoothly accelerated.  In a moment it passed the site of the old Newark Academy — now reduced to a parking lot for two 14-story public housing buildings — then reached Orange Street, where it paused a moment, then crossed, its clamor unchanged through the years.  Rom had to smile when he looked out his window and noticed, in an auto waiting to cross the tracks, a small boy gazing wide-eyed at the passing behemoth.
     A few people got on at the platform, and as the subway car continued, now sliding down under Sussex Avenue, under Central Avenue, Rom looked around the clean car, savoring the familiar sounds and vibrations.  How many times he and fellow devotee Lopy had ridden in this car!  As boys they'd explored every inch of the line, noting every switchover, every spur line branching off into a streetcar route paved over long ago.  On long summer afternoons they'd bike through the park to Franklin Avenue station, the subway's northern terminus, near the Belleville city line, where the 46-foot cars squealed through a tight turnaround.  After chaining up their bikes the boys would board the subway car for the cooling half-hour ride downtown and back.  The line ran south for two miles, forming the western border of Branch Brook Park, to Orange Street, then a mile-long, below-grade slalom before the tunnel and the last dark mile and a half, a straight shot east under Raymond Boulevard to the platforms and repair shops below Pennsylvania Station.
     Now Car 9 pulled into Norfolk Street, the last "daylight" station, and Rom remembered the night long ago when a small gang of black kids had attacked them here, and how Lopy had been knocked cold and left on the tracks, and how Rom, in a moment of surreal urban melodrama, had flown down the stairs after chasing off his attacker and pulled his friend off the tracks moments before Car 14 clattered around the bend.
     The cars on the No. 7 line were known quantities if not old friends.  Lopez's favorite was Car 25, where he had found a twenty-dollar bill once and a bag of marijuana another time.  Rom's lucky car was No. 10, which played host to a rear- seat handjob from Margie Murray in tenth grade.  Car 20 was the one in which the boys had come out on top in a fight with some guys from St. Lucy's.  Car 7 would always be remembered for the day a young woman had given them a long look up her skirt.  The arrival of  Car 1, the flagship, was always a bonus.  Car 13 was reputed to be bad luck, but the only one the boys ever boycotted was Car 14, after the Norfolk Street station incident.
     Now Car 9 — holding no particular memories but uncounted general ones —  entered the tunnel portal for the last part of its journey, pausing at Warren Street to deposit a dozen or so students.  Rom smiled at the fine Depression-era tile murals on the station walls; he had forgotten about them.  There were more at Washington Street — including a scene of nude boys swimming in the old Morris Canal, whose vacated route the City Subway inherited in 1935 — and at Broad Street, Rom's destination.  But he stayed in his seat and rode the last stretch to Penn Station, where, after clacking over switches — and passing the elusive snow-plow car, snug on its dark spur track — Car 9 pulled into the bright oasis of its home base.   With morning rush over, about half of the 24-car fleet sat on two more tracks flanking a maintenance-bay track.
     Rom took the escalator up to the mezzanine, but instead of going up the stairs to the main concourse like the rest of the passengers, he turned toward the entrance to the Outbound platform.  As he descended he could hear the echoing squeal of a subway car making the tight turnaround loop, and as he reached the platform Car 9 was pulling up for another circuit.
     He smiled again at the driver, paid the special downtown shuttle fare — a quarter — and rode one stop back to Broad Street.  He climbed the stairs into the overcast morning, and as he stood on Raymond Boulevard he noticed the entire Public Service transit terminal was gone.  But pigeons still roosted on the bronze statuary in Military Park, and across Broad Street, McCrory's Five & Ten seemed relatively unchanged, and Rom entered and bought a coffeepot, shower curtain, bedding and other necessities.  His subsequent stroll through the district brought mixed emotions.  The general squalor of Broad and Market streets — once thriving retail thoroughfares, now noisy, dirty avenues of cheap wares — disappointed him, but he found solace at the House O' Weenies on Raymond Boulevard and Halsey, where the hot dogs with sauerkraut tasted as great as ever with orange soda.  Satisfied with his mission, Rom entered the City Subway at Washington Street, and looked up toward the Broad Street station, a block away, where a car was just arriving.  It arrived at Washington Street moments later, but when Rom saw its number — 14! — he chuckled, turned around and made himself comfortable on a bench.  Twelve minutes later Car 9 appeared again, thus earning a spot on Rom's short list.

     After fixing up his rooms, Rom visited the laundromat a few doors past the bodega, then tried to write.  He hadn't made much progress when, at about four, a knock came on the door.  It was a black kid, about 12, named Curtis.  He lived in the building across the street, he said.  He was selling subscriptions to the Newark Star-Ledger, trying to win a computer; he'd just won another contest, and had a new mountain bike.  Did Rom want to see it?
     Rom declined but took a month's subscription anyway, explaining his temporary status.  The kid was cheerful and positive, and it was a nice change.  He liked him.
     Toward supper time Rom drove down to South Orange Avenue, to Holy Sepulcher Cemetery, to visit his parents' graves, a task he'd put off since arriving.  He stood in the rain and cried at the realization that soon he would be joining them in the little plot, decorated with dirty, wind-blown plastic flowers, broken beer bottles and used condoms.
     Tired and depressed, he drove back.  On Park Avenue, as he approached N. Fifth, he saw Curtis the paperboy lean his new bike on the front window of the bodega.  But no sooner had Curtis gone in than two older boys ran up to the bike.  One grabbed it and jumped on and started pedaling, standing up, and the other caught up and hopped onto the seat and held on to his confederate.  Rom slowed the car, looking back in his rear-view mirror as the bicycle and its passengers sped up Park Avenue.  In a moment Curtis ran out of the bodega, yelling, and started after them.  But they'd gotten too much of a head start, and Rom saw Curtis walking back toward the bodega, crying.  Rom drove on, hoping Curtis hadn't recognize him, and turned up N. Fifth Street.
     Now he hated this street, this city.  He hated himself.  Back in his rooms, he opened a bottle of "housewarming" wine he'd bought and sat at the table.  He drank until the wine was gone, with each sip tasting his uselessness.  After a while he moved into the tiny bedroom, fell heavily onto the bed and lay in a torpor for many long minutes before opening his eyes again.  The patched and uneven ceiling, obliquely lit by the small bulb in the next room, became the landscape of his thoughts.  His eyes roamed for a few moments before coming to rest on the spot directly over the bed.
     Slowly, the faded "Z" came into focus.