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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 7 of 7. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by Atticus on August 28, 2004, at 7:51:11
Hungry Pavement, Part 3
by Atticus
Previously: The narrator has learned from a ghost that the sidewalks of New York are royally pissed off at him for spitting a wad of gum on them almost eight months ago. All of their previous attempts to snuff him for this egregious offense have failed, but the ghost warned him, “They don’t give up easy.”
I punched the tape running along the inside wall of my bus, and was greeted by a sing-song double pinging. The nearest stop to my apartment was at 86th Street and First Avenue.Pretty close, I thought, as the rear doors hissed open and I descended the rubber-coated steps, hesitating ever so slightly at the bottom before planting my foot onto the sidewalk.
“Hey buddy, anytime this century,” barked the driver, and I felt my left loafer make solid contact with the concrete as I emerged in the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side. Three short blocks to my apartment at 89th and First, I thought. How bad could that be? Just three fu**ing blocks. No big deal. I’d just walk along the curb in the street, like Fulgencio suggested.
But then I saw the bumper-to-bumper line of cars parallel-parked, and thought about how people tended to put the pedal to the metal heading up First. I’d have to chance the sidewalk. But hell. What could happen in three blocks?
I stepped into a rain puddle tinted fluorescent yellow-green by coolant leaking from one of the cars queued up at the curb. That should help cover my tracks, I thought. I stepped gingerly at first, as if treading through a mine field, then thought that speed was probably a better idea and shifted into a brisk walk.
For the first block of my trek, nothing happened. I moved through the crosswalk, braced, then mounted the curb that led to the next line of concrete squares. One foot. The other foot. One foot. The other foot. Hell, if I couldn’t outsmart a g**damn sidewalk, might as well go check into Bellevue’s psych ward.
I hit the second crosswalk and moved to the edge of the third block. Almost there. Not far at all now. I placed my left shoe onto the last stretch of sidewalk. I could see the entrance to my apartment building. I could almost feel the yellow glow of the lobby lights spilling through the wire-reinforced windows in the front door and down the stoop. Piece of cake.
Then I heard it. A muffled sound, the faint scuff of something rough, something heavy, being dragged against cement.
I edged to within five feet of the bottom of the stone steps leading to refuge. My toe touched the concrete slab at the bottom of the stairs, as lightly as a butterfly landing on a flower.
With a violent thump, the entire section of sidewalk abruptly sank about six inches below the surrounding squares, then rose to its normal position again. Fu**. Fu**. Fu**. Fu**. I’d been played for a sucker all along.
I withdrew my foot and began backing away.
This time two of the slabs sank, then rose, like the keys of a titanic piano being played by gigantic, unseen fingers. As if picking up on my thought, eight of the cement squares started rising and falling rapidly, sending up plumes of pulverized white concrete dust from between the cracks in the sidewalk from the friction of one slab rubbing against the edges of another. A song of angry synthetic stone rang out, a cacophonous recital being performed by a sociopathic virtuoso on my behalf.
I turned to run, and the sidewalk struck a deafening chord, sinking the slabs in front of me and behind me, but leaving my own perch undisturbed. Christ. I had to make a break for it. Sooner or later, the thing would get tired of this game. Beneath my quivering ankles, I could hear the clacking jaws of the Big Apple’s worms playing a light staccato counterpoint to the sidewalk’s heavy, turgid bass.
Time to get the fu** out of here. I turned and leapt over the sunken slab in front of me, teetering for one eternal instant on the lip of the next section of sidewalk before regaining my balance and pistoning my legs forward.
As I approached the corner, slabs rose to a vertical position to my left and directly in front of me, cutting off access to First and the crosswalk. I spun into a hard right up 88th toward Second, running about 100 feet before I realized the sounds had stopped. I turned, then blanched. The sidewalk had grown weary of chords, and a cement glissando worthy of Jerry Lee Lewis raced toward me down the concrete, a tsunami of bone-crushing rock and roll whose final piercing note would be my scream.
I whirled, resumed my panicked flight, attempting to sidle to my left and leap onto one of the parked cars. But the sidewalk was tickling the ivories with exquisite grace this evening, and kept raising the edges of the slabs nearest the curb to send me reeling back onto its mammoth keyboard.
My right toe caught in a crack and I slammed face-down onto the rough surface of the sidewalk, hearing the bridge of my nose snap even above the roaring composition being improvised at my heels. The shoe was stuck. Hopelessly fu**ing stuck. I could feel and taste thick, salty blood from my nostrils as it cascaded down my jaw, finding the opening between my lips and spilling across my tongue.
I wriggled my foot out of the loafer, skittered backwards on my hands and ass, and the performance abruptly ceased. A fine talc of cement dust hung above the section of 88th I’d just raced along like an early-morning mist. Silence.
I struggled to my feet, tried to run again, found myself off balance, then tossed off the other shoe and began a wobbly jog toward the corner ahead, but could only go about 10 feet before I collapsed again, exhausted. The ground around both shoes wriggled like cups of gray pudding being carried on an unsteady serving tray, then two of the worms erupted from the surface, each swallowing one shoe before dropping back into the sidewalk.
A faint flicker of hope sparked, glowed dimly in the cavernous darkness behind my eyes. One last chance. One. Writhing spastically, I shucked off my raincoat, backed away, and waited. But not for long.
Huge yellow teeth slammed shut on the coat like a bear trap, and I used the distraction to leap headlong onto the hood of a silver Honda. The worm shook the coat in its jaws, doglike, apparently puzzled by the absence of meat, then sulkily dragged it into the boggy, rippling pond of sludge from which it had emerged.
I sat, breathing hard, trying to staunch the flow of blood from my nostrils by tilting my head back onto the car’s roof. Fulgencio was right. Should have chucked those shoes and walked home in my socks. I laughed, astounded that I was still alive, that I had beaten the motherfu**ers again. I felt elated, grateful to still be sucking oxygen, giddy with my hard-won victory.
Then a voice screamed from a window somewhere overhead, “Hey, off my car, you g**damned drunken assh**e!”
***
Four months later. I was making out with my new girlfriend, Zoey, an art director at the ad agency, along a shadow-strewn section of Bleeker Street. And then an all-too-familiar shiver, the faintest of vibrations, traveled upward through the leather soles of my shoes.
The sidewalk under my feet took on the consistency of taffy. But by now, I knew what I had to do. I yanked my lips from hers, grabbed her by the shoulders and whirled us both around until she was standing unsteadily where I’d been a second earlier, a puzzled expression creasing her brow.
I threw myself backwards with all my strength just as Zoey, hapless Zoey, sank into the concrete up to her waist.
She threw out her left hand to me, fingers clawing the air, begging for my grip. The worm was up and on her in an instant, its jaws slamming shut with a moist thud around everything but that pitiful outstretched hand, which bounced forward onto the hard pavement around the beast and rolled to a stop at my right Italian loafer.
“Missed again, sh**head,” I hissed at the creature, clambering to my feet. I glanced up and down the street, pulled out my handkerchief, wiped a speck of blood off the tip of my right shoe, then used the cloth to pick up the dismembered hand. I made my way down an alley behind a restaurant. Reaching into a dumpster, I pulled out a newspaper wrapped around some fish heads and tucked the hand inside with them.
Moments after I tossed it back in, I could already hear the rats in the dumpster fighting over it.
I strode rapidly across the sidewalk and stood in the gutter, just beyond the bright circle cast by a streetlight, before turning back to the section of the sidewalk that had just noshed on Zoey. A huge flat smile stretched across the slab. Tiny bits of gristle clung to the immense teeth, still gleaming wetly. I could have sworn I heard a voice – a voice that sounded like gravel being poured from the back of a dump truck – saying with a ghastly chuckle, “You’re OK, kid. I like you. Let’s call it even.”
It had taken a year, but I was finally getting the hang of living in the City. Forget all that crap you read about the post 9/11 camaraderie among the citizens of this island. Once Ground Zero had been transformed from a charnel pit into a construction site, that touchy-feely, we’re-all-in-this-together vibe dissipated like exhaled cigarette smoke in a stiff wind, although most people here would never admit it.
In the absence of a huge, collective crisis, people had mostly returned to their survival-of-the-fittest Darwinian ways. In this town, you could rise to the heights of a skyscraper or sink to the level of the concrete under your feet, where you could justify just about any horrible g**damn thing you did under the heading of “pragmatism.” After all, there really aren’t many things more pragmatic than a sidewalk.
Plenty of room for both total bast**ds and absolute angels in the City. It was a matter of personal choice, really. And I’d made mine.
Because I could still hear the sidewalks’ music. I heard it every day, rippling down octave after octave of a sharp, savage score written in the hot blood and tears spilled onto this 26-mile-long asphalt sacrificial altar by millions who had gone before me.
They say it’s a “helluva town.” Damn straight.
Posted by Jai Narayan on August 28, 2004, at 8:19:45
In reply to fiction ... Hungry Pavement, Part 3, posted by Atticus on August 28, 2004, at 7:51:11
You are right it is in 3 parts. Each one has a totally different tone.
Were they written at 3 separate times?
The 2nd part was the most intriguing.
Okay what an unsual topic...
How did you develope such an unsual theme?
So when you write, characters appear to you in the process?
I have always been in awe of that gift.Thanks for the story...it was told with charm and grace.
Posted by Atticus on August 28, 2004, at 9:16:22
In reply to Re: fiction ... Hungry Pavement, Part 3, posted by Jai Narayan on August 28, 2004, at 8:19:45
Well, I told you my mind and emotions were all over the map when I was writing this. You're right; it was written in three sessions on three separate days. In part one I can see the pure melancholy and existential dread that was so dominant in my way of thinking at the time. And in part three I see me wrestling with my inner demons and ultimately losing; the highly cynical ending with the narrator unapologetically taking the moral low road gives a pretty good idea of what I thought about the human race at the time. But somehow, in between the two, I generated this character, Fulgencio, who has accepted the harsh hand that life dealt him with grace and good humor, and displays immense compassion. Though a ghost, he is, in fact, more alive and more human than the narrator, who has become a monster by the story's end. Some small part of myself that hadn't been warped by the out-of-control illness surfaces in the guise of Fulgencio, only to fade away (as he literally does in the story, although that thought hadn't occurred to me until this very second) when I sat down to write the violent struggle and moral failure that wrap things up. In retrospect, this story is interesting to me as a way of looking back at the way my malfunctioning mind was cycling at the time. If I were to write the story now, I think it would be mostly about Fulgencio as a kind of urban spirit guide. He did seem to come to me pretty much full-blown. I can't explain why I decided to make him Cuban, but how he looked and what had happened to him all came in a flash. I went online to Google up an interesting, non-stereotypical Cuban name, and loved the musicality of "Fulgencio." It suited him; I knew it was the right name the moment I saw it amid a list of Cuban male names. As for the carnivorous sidewalks and the odd relationship of the various "organs" that make up New York City, well, if you're surrounded by this environment your whole life, you start to see it as being a kind of gigantic living organism. At least I do. And now, back to poetry. :) Atticus
Posted by Jai Narayan on August 28, 2004, at 11:04:42
In reply to Re: fiction ... Hungry Pavement, Part 3 » Jai Narayan, posted by Atticus on August 28, 2004, at 9:16:22
Posted by malthus on August 28, 2004, at 13:13:26
In reply to fiction ... Hungry Pavement, Part 3, posted by Atticus on August 28, 2004, at 7:51:11
This was truly worth waiting for and I am so relieved your computer is working so you could post this.
I relished every part of this but especially...
"Four months later. I was making out with my new girlfriend, Zoey, an art director at the ad agency, along a shadow-strewn section of Bleeker Street. And then an all-too-familiar shiver, the faintest of vibrations, traveled upward through the leather soles of my shoes."
You go from what appears to be the climax of the story to the making out part, (usually it's the other way around in real life~ha ha) which for some reason made me laugh out loud and then right back to the climax. (Brilliant!)
After I read this piece (twice) I started thinking about the book "Thinner" by Richard Bach, AKA Steven King ("The Stand" is also wildly crafted like your piece)~~ hope you don't mind being compared to Steven King--I realize he is main-stream but I enjoy him nonetheless. (Please Dr.Bob,it was deliberate not using the double double quotes; when I tried to all this unrelated stuff came up at the bottom of the screen.)
As you said, it would be difficult to adapt it to a play, but I can see it as a "short" film. Here in Philadelphia there is an excellent "Film Festival" and the shorts are always my favorites because succintness seems much more difficult to achieve in film, but much more satisfying (I particularly dislike long "action movies"--they jangle the one nerve I have left sometimes but I can feel this being surreal action, much more inviting.)
The overall intensity of the action in this piece coupled with the comic relief is tremendous. In the part about Zoey I thought about how young girls were sacrificed by the Aztecs, taking them by canoes to the fabled spot of a whirlpool in a nearby lake. They slit their throats so blood flowed into the water. Then they were cast in; and the whirlpool swallowed their bodies to feed the deities. Was this an intentional parallel?
:>)
malthus
Posted by Atticus on August 28, 2004, at 14:03:02
In reply to Re: fiction ... Hungry Pavement, Part 3 » Atticus, posted by malthus on August 28, 2004, at 13:13:26
Hi Malthus,
You are dead on as far as the allusion to the blood sacrifices made by Central and South American peoples like the Mayan, Incas, and Aztecs go. I was thinking of Manhattan as one big paved sacrificial altar, and the protagonist had (correctly) come to the conclusion that he could probably only assuage the sidewalks by actively taking part in their bloodsport, by "descending" (pun and metaphor intended) to their level. His decision is, of course, a moral failure, but he realizes it and is willing to live with it. I think a lot of people do that, unfortunately. He's not the kind of guy I'd want as a friend (Fulgencio, who's dead, is actually more "alive," more compassionate, and more human than the narrator, who has taken the low road and become a monster by the story's end), but then, I'm not even sure such a person would be really capable of having true friends. Told you that piano keys/sidewalk slabs chase sequence would be a bi*ch to stage live. I do think it could be a short film (even the chase scene probably could be done on the cheap with a combination of manually manipulated styrofoam or foam rubber slabs, some evocative music, and some clever lighting and editing). I wish I knew more about film. I've always wanted to make a short movie, though it would probably be the kind of thing built mostly around dialogue and odd, evocative, surreal images, like "Ghost World" (I thought Thora Birch was great in that.) Sort of a magic realists school of thinking piece. Anyway, I'm glad you liked it. It was a lot of fun to do a serialized piece of writing (albeit a very short one) like Dickens used to do. I actually have read Stephen King's "The Stand" (found it in a beach house on the Jersey shore my family had rented one summer and read it in two nights), and I can see the parallels; the science-fictiony parts juxtaposed against the surreal, fantasy parts involving the demon, which makes for a pretty trippy ride. I haven't read it since 1984 or 1985, when I was 13 or 14, so I don't remember a whole lot of the details, but it did feel like a story of two minds sutured together, and I think "Hungry Pavement" has that in common with it. Happy trails (and please place your gum in the proper receptacle) ;) Atticus
Posted by malthus on August 28, 2004, at 15:50:04
In reply to Re: fiction ... Hungry Pavement, Part 3 » malthus, posted by Atticus on August 28, 2004, at 14:03:02
This is the end of the thread.
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