Free Life Goes to the Movies by Peter Selgin Page B

Amsterdam, the Selwyn … pagan cathedrals where, as Dwaine saw it, people went to be delivered from their dull,
pathetic, and often painful lives, and had their prayers answered immediately, if only for an hour and a half. Now half of those grand old theaters
were boarded shut, while the other half showed only porn and slasher flicks.
    “Such a shame,” said Dwaine.
    As the crowds grew ominous and ambulances prowled the streets Dwaine pulled me off the sidewalk and into the arcade of a building where a disused
subway entrance sat blocked by planks, several of which he did in with a swift kick of his boot.
    “After you,” he said, bowing.
    We headed down a flight of stairs, dark and dripping, so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Dwaine lit his cigarette lighter. It
hardly made a dent in the darkness. My legs shook.
    “Don’t be scared,” Dwaine said. “Just pretend you’re in a movie. Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”
    At the bottom of the stairs Dwaine put out the lighter and took a small flashlight from his pocket. He pointed it at a mildew-covered mosaic on the
wall. I saw the bite-sized tiles spelling 42 nd STREET.
    I asked, “How long has this been here?”
    “Since ‘38. It was built as a crossover station just before the Second World War, but was never actually used.”
    “How do you know these things?”
    “Hey, I live here.”
    Though windless the subway tunnel was as cold as the street. I shivered in my surplus pea coat. En route to other places trains roared through the
station. Dwaine looked up and down the platform, then jumped down into the tracks, telling me to do the same and warning me to watch out for the third
rail.
    “They say one of the most efficient ways to commit suicide is to piss on one of them things,” he said as we started walking, headed uptown.
“Seven hundred volts up the urethra, zzzzzap!”
    “I’ll keep it in mind.”
    “Don’t. Nothing’s worse than the smell of fried piss.”
    A train light appeared, highlighting old newspapers and scampering rats. We flattened our backs into a maintenance notch. The train roared by. Dwaine
walked another dozen yards then he stopped. A rusted ladder climbed toward a matrix of pink dusty light. He went up first and I followed him, into a
crawlspace under a grating that lead us on hands and knees into a chamber about eight feet long by six feet wide by five feet deep. There was an old
fruit crate there, so coated with wax drippings it looked like something growing at the bottom of the sea, and a filthy mattress, and a wooden box of
candles—long, tapered ones. We stretched out on the mattress and looked up through the grate at the lights of Times Square, pulsing away like a
heavenly pinball machine, tinting the air with bright circus colors.
    “The Stonehenge of the New Millennium,” said Dwaine, looking up. “Or the asshole of the world, depending on your point of
view.”
    “Is this where you go when you don’t come home?”
    “Maybe. Sometimes.”
    “Don’t you get bored? Don’t you get lonely?”
    “I am lonely, but what’s that got to do with anything?”
    “I mean what do you do down here?”
    “What do I do?”
    “Yeah, what do you do?”
    “Nothing. I don’t do anything, babe. That’s the whole point. You’re not supposed to do anything in a sanctuary, and
that’s just what this place is, a sanctuary. I come here to get away from all the crazies up there.” He pointed up. “To be safe with
the alligators and the sewer rats. Listen.” He cupped a hand over his ear. “Hear that? That’s the OM, the gut-rumble of the New World
Order.” (I listened; I didn’t hear a thing.) “Listen … ” He made the sound for me. And then I heard it: a
steady hum, like the sound a refrigerator makes when it’s on. “They say there’s a Moog synthesizer down here somewhere, right here in
the belly of civilization. They say that it gives off a special frequency designed to calm human nerves.