This Land Is My Land
He's writing a book about which subway trains not to take.
Chapter 1 goes on about how to distinguish between good and evil.
It is a book about the experiences of a novice rail rider with hints of philosophical meandering.
Chapter 2 is flashback wherein the author gives window into his or her sordid past in graveyards or on freight trains. There is no mention of transvestites or necrophilia in this chapter, so that at its end the reader is questioning what was all that his or her in the graveyards about?
He, the author (herein the rider), addresses the wavering sexuality issue somewhat defensively in chapter 3 by describing how the posture of the person just now getting on the train, seen in the rider's nine o'clock periphery as but a shadow, is tempting him to look up and take a proper gander. When he does so however he finds that the sexy thing he imagined in glancing to be a woman, was in fact a white middle aged businessman in full suited business attire. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but the rider makes note to not invite anymore odd dreams or daytime miscalculations by falling asleep watching Almodovar's more sexual identity adventurous movies, as he had the previous night.
Chapter 4 goes on at some length about how it is possible for a rider to get off a B train at 42nd street Port Authority, intending to go back one stop uptown to hear that amazing violinist, and realize a B somehow became a C or maybe even an A. Was he ever on a B he beseeches to his inner self. A rider thus confused can then start thinking about Far Rockaway and perhaps a communing with the Atlantic Ocean. For those who are able and only those who are able there is a sing a long at the end of this chapter to the tune of, and hopefully too, the words of, This Land is Your Land.
Chapter 5 is a flashback to earlier in the day and is a discourse on the dining options for wayward travelers. The rider after walking Central Park from the seventies to the north end continues on up to one caddy-cornered block from the 125th street station and, lacking temerity, goes in, and then out of Manna, because he can't figure it out, he doesn't know if he should just queue up to the buffet or should he pay first. Even after he intuits that queueing up is probably safe he can't decide if he wants to take out like everyone else seems to be doing or...hell, he can't see any seats so other than take out may not be an option. He then goes back through the door and out into the drizzling rain. Soul food. When I or rather he, the rider, was growing up he called pork chops and mashed potatoes supper, and then sometime later without a lot of fanfare, just going with the flow of the evolving middle class mid sixties sophistication revolution, he started calling it dinner.
Chapter 6 is a continuation of his failed dining experience and we find the rider speaking in an almost grunting fashion to the server at Popeyes Fried Chicken on 125th. One section of the menu is designated for Louisianaists, or something like that. The rider ordered from that section and squinting asked the server what kind of sides they had, afraid that Popeye's in Harlem would be completely different from Popeye's south of Mason-Dixon, with which he was more familiar. But no. So the rider sits down with his fried strips and red beans and rice and biscuit. The calories for this meal were listed on the big main menu as either 980 or 1450 but he did not pursue further what might account for that range.
In this chapter you would also learn about waiting too long to use the bathroom, if indeed you needed to. In this case the bathroom gets highjacked by a woman and her child and then about 4 other people lining up for it and complaining rather aggressively about the wait time. Prior to this the rider had been profiling the various people and had mistakenly categorized them as nice friendly people. He had needed to go and it was free for a long time but he was too casual about it so lost out because he could not see himself waiting with these sore sports, and did not get to relieve himself until miles later, behind some scrubby looking shrubs near the Atlantic Ocean in Far Rockaway, while the gentle cold rain embraced him, moistly.
In the Popeye's there was a disturbance. The chapter seems to be meandering all over the place, the rider begins boring us with tales of near death in Louisiana chicken joints and then almost too coincidentally a young man starts using the F word to one of the servers and also calling her B. He is very loud and acting almost as if the world really is a stage, but one where the audience only listens, too shy all of them to make eye contact. The rider begins musing about how did the B word get changed to B while the F word was still fuck. Would we, he pondered, in this version of the book not written, have to start referring to the B word as—the second letter of the alphabet word? Such philosophical soliloquy’s might could find themselves edited out in the final version because the audience for this work already seemed limited or narrow or thin as a thread.
Lost in thought with thumbs clicking before him, the rider takes that A train all the way back, way back, too far back, 14th street is wrong but he stays on until 23rd where he gets off and reverses to W 4th, and from there catches the F home.
Early reviews--similar in reality (if somewhat more likely) to the rider's handling of the rude Popeye's boy (rider jumps up, punches index finger in the boy's chest, then soccer kicks him across the lower calf, taking him down, knee in the back, bending of the bad boys arm backwards until it pops at the shoulder blade, and for good measure treats thumb of same limb with equal sincerity, but that pop is more of a crack)--question the gratuitous violence and wonder just how wayward would a wayward traveler have to be to consider Wayward Traveler (as the book finally written was to be called) anything but a slightly musical if misguided attempt at subway humor, arriving late and clamorous to the station, a travel guide only if it finds a place on the definitive what not to read this summer list and thus guides the careful reader away from itself.
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