Trolley No. 1852 Read Free

might
unburden my mind—and whatever beneficent memories I have left—of
some of the venomous and imponderable images which stalk me ever
still…
    … for however long the earth shall last.
    My relocation to New York
(that denizen-abyss of stridence and foul smells) had been by
necessity and not—I re-emphasize, not —due to the divestment of my
position at Brown, as a professor of mythology and ancient
histories, two years ago. The latter had been the work of this
bungling and greed-induced calamity they are now calling the “Great
Depression,” whose attendant turmoil left no room for teachers of
subjectivities. Only academicians skilled in mathematics, industry,
and the sciences could be retained in such troubled times of bread
lines and twenty-five-percent jobless rates. For the rest of us
(history, literature, the arts) the coffers of higher learning were
closed.
    Instead, I ventured
hither, to this mephitic necropolis of concrete, dirt, and clamour,
in the steadfast hope of ascertaining the whereabouts of my sister
and only sibling, Selina, who’d relocated here some five years ago
for a $14-per-week accounting position with the well-known Monroe
Clothiers chain. She would be twenty (eight now—seven years my
junior) and with her youth had come the zeal of wanderlust. “I
want new horizons, Morgan,” she’d implored five years afore with her over-bright eyes and buoyant enthusiasm.
“ New places to
see and new people to meet, and don’t
worry, I’ll write you every week!” So she
had, for three years, until her unforeboding and quite energetic
missives in the post had dropped off all at once in an eerie
silence. Either Fate or the god Selina believed in but I did not
had seen fit to parallel my sister’s disappearance, nearly to the
day, with my own woeful dismissal from Brown. I took the ten-six,
with no hesitancy whatever, to Penn Station, and have been here
ever since.
    Or at least, in a sense …
    It was in stifled shock
that I first beheld this labyrinthine canyon of crime and leering,
stubbled faces; shock that palsied my gait and numbed my mind—a
seething urban mass of filthily attired bodies of clearly all ancestries save for
the Anglican; bodies that moved shiftily through garbage-heaped
streets pressed on either side by grimy concrete towers so spiring
as to obfuscate the light of day—indeed a noisome Babel of
movement, ill-will, and malodour; of sweat-shined foreheads and
menacing scowls. Squalid ghettoblocks stretched shabbily betwixt
skyscrapers too dizzying to look upward at; and the smell—the
unsurceasing and absolutely maleficent smell —which imbued itself in my
clothes and, I often suspected, my very pores.
This— city —was not
for my sensitive kind, but circumstances offered me little choice.
I scrupled at once to take my place in the human crush so erroneously
named for James II, the Duke of York, lest I be swallowed whole by
its incogitable machinations.
    That Selina had been so swallowed
remained my most teeming fear.
    Degradation after degradation pursued me
posthaste—things I cannot, must not recount. Here squalor and
hatred reigned supreme, for if the flumelike streets proved this
evil urban pustule’s veins, then surely the ignoble masses served
as its blood. I will not say how my first pitiable meals came to my
mouth; nor how oft misfortune nearly left me bloodied and
broken-boned by mongrel hoodlums in nighted alleyways.
    But my bounden duty to
find Selina steeled my perseverance. Amid the stinking crowds of
pick-pockets and fugitives, and amongst cramped, sunless
thoroughfares sided by drear-paned walls zigzagged by clattery iron
fire-escapes, I travailed first to secure 30-cent-per-hour
employment at a reformed scrivenry; and an unutterably pestiferous
“room” on 28 th Street, for a half-dollar a day.
    Time acclimated me to most of my inner
horrors and my loath for what I could only metaphor as the societal
elephantiasis in which I lived. Selina’s rescue,