Public Transport

I know my role, and the others know theirs. We shuffle on stage and we are, if not comfortable, at least expert in our characterizations. We are consistent in our performances, and we never disappoint. All of us, we are naturals. We are on this stage so frequently, we know each other’s moves implicitly, and act accordingly. At once actors and audience, we provide the expected but also honor the illusion of the first time. Since we are an ensemble it is never clear if or when we are being observed individually: Are all eyes on me now, or on one of my fellows, or is the gaze of interest alternately shifting among us? We are equals, but occasionally one of us can be a star, if only for this specific show, or a specific set of moments in the show. It is, even so, a fleeting stardom, for when we leave the stage we are pretty much forgotten. It is something like “Grand Hotel” that we are putting on: People come and go, nothing ever happens. But, of course, it does.

I am about to board the bus, the one I take to work most days of the week, traveling from my home in the northwest sector of the city into the heart of town. A mere public conveyance, yes; but, even more, a moving theater, with all the men and women merely players. There is, really, no more placeless place than an empty municipal bus – featureless seats, bare metal bars, transparent walls, undistinguished materials, so typical and mundane as to be unnoticed – a people-moving tube. But, in another way, it is like any performing venue between shows, ghost light illuminating the emptiness, which comes alive when the actors arrive, move in their rehearsed ways and become the characters we will come to know them as.

Enter, me. The action is already begun. I have my role: I take an empty seat, if possible, or wordlessly show, through  body language and facial expression, my unhappiness at having to share a two-seater with a stranger of dubious pedigree and quite apparent outsized bulk. In other words, he/she (and, sometimes, it is literally he/she) has two-thirds of the bench, I have the remaining third and my legs in the aisle. In this instance, my part is The Uncomfortable Guy, every part of me clenched. But, if I am lucky, or I am taking an earlier or later bus, or there is a school- and city-government-closing holiday, I can get a seat to myself: one indentation for me, the other for my tote, and I keep the sharers at bay, like sandbags holding back a flood. And I pursue my favored role: Observing Guy. With book or writing pad in hand, or just seeming to gaze out the window, I take note of the drama around me: sometimes Pinter, sometimes Mamet, occasionally Becket, rarely Neil Simon; Shakespeare is not in the repertoire. I like to think I am invisible, but of course I am not – I  am a character in my play, and also one in everybody else’s, these overlapping life-plays where the dialogue is the same but the subtexts vary with each viewer. I am seated, positioned to observe – and under the cold, fluorescent white and blue lights, in line-of-sight of the mounted surveillance cameras, on this mobile thrust stage, the Play of Me begins.

Two rows ahead: Is that Sleeping Like the Dead Guy, or, given the crumpled nature of his body and the way his head bangs against the window with every bus bump, simply Dead Guy? But, several stops later, in a miraculous bit of Lazarus rising – his subconscious brain somehow aware of his whereabouts, like a somnolent GPS system – his arm lurches up, pulls the signal cord just in time, the bus halts, on cue he rockets from his seat and arrives at the back door just as it opens … and he is out and gone, sucked into the void like an air passenger through a depressurized hatch … a memorable exit. And, then, forgotten.

Spotlight hits and follows other action and players: the two Geek Girls, standing in the front, looking, it seems, to become good or better friends, trading and agreeing on opinions and biases, finding common ground, heartbreakingly sweet and innocent, as they stumble towards some sort of rapprochement leading to a form of intimacy; the Glaring Guy, who always goes to the very back of the bus, to the farthest corner, and hates; the fast-moving and -talking Twin Women, who look alike, speaking alike, come on the bus together but sit apart; Makeup Lady, who uses her time on the long nonstop express part of the journey to gaze into her compact mirror, work a brush through a palette of pink and “skin tone” cosmetic paints, and redo her face, making herself look gaudy and available, for someone; Drunk Guys, lots of them, fidgety and trying so hard to appear sober that they seem spastic and paranoid; Sightless Guy, a middle-age man who always takes the first seat behind the driver, flips open his cellphone and spends the ride shouting into the receiver, as if the person on the other end is deaf, or that, though he is the sightless one, by speaking loudly he can be seen; in smaller roles, the Day-Laborer Duo, the Dreadlocks Dude, the Father with Precocious Child, the Off-Duty Bus Driver Bumming a Ride. At night, when every ear is blocked by mobile phones or earbuds or giant headsets, and every face is illuminated by personal screens, the lot of us is tired, and those who aren’t are suspect, but none more so than Al Qaeda Guy, who has a cellphone in one hand, a suspicious bag in the other, he seems on edge and makes all the rest of us edgy, too – all of us victims in a post-9/11 world.

Every now and then, our traveling troupe arrives at a major intersection, or a transfer station, where other buses or trains intersect with our path … and, at those points, so many of our cast, featured performers and bit players and chorus, flow out into the wings of the world, and the next bundle of cast members – so many of them looking like stand-ins for those who just left – take their places, and, if they have lines, say them.

As we leave the highway for the inner parts of downtown, there is a strange switch, and it is we who become theatergoers as we look out the big bus windows at the people walking along the streets; they are oblivious to our stares, and so unguarded, in graceful or gangly motion, strutting or stumbling, moving in swirls or keeping their distances, all on missions – are they in the fishbowl, or are we?

And then it is my turn to leave my company of players and join those on the sidewalk. Observing Guy, who may, to others, be Observed Guy, puts away his implements of notation or distraction, rings for his stop, and, whether being watched or being ignored for the better performance of someone else, disembarks. And, from the curb, watches, with a certain sadness, a certain relief, as his placeless-made-placeness playhouse, and its current cast, rumble off, and Observer Guy becomes Just Another Guy on his way to work, and another role and performance, on another stage, until it is time to go home, and another curtain.

Slice of Life

Our one big splurge, no oftener than once a month, is buying a Bake at Home Pizza. For those who are not familiar with the concept, this is a fresh pizza that you take home and bake on your own schedule – sort of like frozen but made on-site and customized for you. We can walk to pick it up, and it is a steep climb back up the hill while carrying the wind-snagging large square box, but it has become a 27-year tradition. About a year ago, our favorite whole-wheat crust changed – that was the first sign.

The owner had become a friend over the years as we chatted over the counter while she assembled our pizza. After so many pizzas, we didn’t have to order, she just automatically made what she knew we wanted. And we were only one of her longtime customers who had the same relationship and familiarity. We also knew her husband, who helped out in the shop, and her nephew, who used to work the counter on Saturdays. Even when we weren’t in the market for a pizza, we would stop in at the shop to say hi and catch up on gossip. That is the beauty and the placeness of local proprietors: getting to know them and having a long-term connection. It is just the sort of thing that is disappearing in our big-box world where, rather, it should be something to cherish.

When the crust first changed, it was explained to us that the company who started the business and made the crusts by hand directly across the street had recently sold its building and that the crusts were now coming from someplace else. Our sense was that production was being outsourced and that the dough was suffering. There was a qualitative drop and the pizza-shop owner was forced into a corner: should she sell pizza inferior to what she had built her business upon, or bail out from the original franchise and find her own dough, so to speak? She chose quality over economy and found a better substitute for the crust, severing what was a three-decades-long connection with her supplier. Besides flying solo, she had to change the trademarked business name on the storefront and stop using the name-imprinted boxes for the pies: first achieved by means of a magic marker, then a sticker, and, finally, new generic pizza boxes. Everything was changing. The old boxes had the baking instructions printed on them, but not the new makeshift ones. The store was getting overwhelmed with customer calls about how to bake the pizzas – since everyone relied on the box top.

Our frequency of pizza purchases had slowed, and it had been a couple of months since our last visit. There were cosmetic changes happening inside the store. An eat-in sit-down area was now carved out of the small space that had been entirely counter – odd for a business called Bake at Home. New tile on the floor, a glass partition on half of the counter, a different signboard on the wall and a new man busy behind the counter. He, it turns out, isn’t related. He is the new owner.

The business has sold, I am told by a young employee who has been kept on. No wonder all the changes. The smiling new owner tells me that he is expanding the business to be a pizza parlor – meaning on-site, bake-on-premises – and he is adding steaks and subs, garlic bread, sandwiches, etc. He is congenial and has a thick accent. I am sure he is eager to succeed. It seems to me that all the things he has mentioned are popular, although they are ubiquitous. In this town, pizza parlors and sub shops are found two or three to a block. It was the unique nature of the original business – of creating a niche instead of just filling a crowded one – that made it sing. And, too, the person whom we identified with the very kind of business that encouraged conversation and company alongside really good pizza was now gone with the winds of change. I got a feeling that this new approach will be standardized, more of a move-’em-in-move-’em-out kind of establishment, and therefore more anonymous and fast-food-like.

To me it is a void already. I feel the loss of a friend and a familiar establishment, a way of doing something a little bit differently, a wonderful pizza to enjoy, plus the ritual of it. An absence of arslocii is a game-changer; we need more placeness, not less.

Harvesting a Home

Everyone makes moves in their lives, and, in a mobile society, changes in their living accommodations. There was, at one point, a period in my life when I made a series of seven moves in eight years – relocations that made me a citizen of four different states, and they weren’t all contiguous. Ultimately, I ended up buying a house in one of them. Well, not really a house – yet.

It was originally a house (built in 1873) turned into an office building nearly a hundred years later, and then turned back into a house once more – by me. Not your typical house, though. Rather, a strange hybrid of a house and an art piece. Arslocii, indeed. As it stood, it was contained space and not much more. Everything that makes it a house of note now is a result of my direct response to its houselessness and the denuded nature of is office-ness: beige walls, beige floors, fluorescent tubes and stark, detail-less spaces. It was so nondescript that I felt a mandate, an imperative, to take it as far from blandness as was possible. Far over to the other side.

Twenty-seven years later, it is as unique and one-off as the nest of an Australian Bowerbird: an assemblage of found objects meant to attract the eye … in his case, of a mate. My mission was to embellish the place to find its soul, or to restore it. In many respects, it was like building a stage set about houseness, or my dream version of what it could be, put into a tangible form – and on the cheap. It progressed naturally, building one project upon another, and finding my own place in the creation of the form. Whatever complex layering resulted, it reflected the multidimensional layerings of me as an artist and a human being. My house and I are one, difficult to separate. But separate we must.

For, after years of unrest and unsettling neighborhood events, a culmination of disillusionment and dissociation, it became clear that this house is not in a good place – not for me anyway. And that there is another location that can potentially create placeness for now and for the future. And it is hundreds of miles from this house. I have found another house there, in this new place, and it is nothing like the one I helped to create here. Nothing at all.

My dilemma now is in trying to salvage what I worked half a lifetime to build, and to attempt to fit it into and onto another house that is so completely different from this one: sort of made from scratch and customized into an artistic assemblage. The only thing the two might have in common is that the new one, although not stripped of detail, has such indistinct or poorly rendered detail that it, too, is open to interpretation. Plus, this second one is much smaller. In the new structure, the struggle will be one of physical matter more so than conceptual matter; bringing forth a challenge of material limitations rather than cognitive ones.

I liken it to building a first prototype of a robot – a kind of manufactured living thing – an endeavor that is successful, but nearly three decades later, it is sadly stuck in its time and limited by its creation date. In other words, stuck in its place. The urge is to make it again, an updated version using some of the same parts and more hindsight. As a second generation, it will have recognizable traits, but it will move beyond the original exercise, becoming a more integrated whole. That is the hope, anyway, for this experimental house-innards transplant process. As I harvest the very seeds that I planted a generation ago, will both patients survive? Will I? Who will end up the monster, the creator or the created?

The doors, the lighting, some walls and even floors are going to find their way to this new home. It is an organ harvest, house to house; taking the essence away from the original and re-creating a revised version. The staging is terrifying, the removal and replacement are difficult to imagine, let alone orchestrate. I think about it every day, this square peg fitting into a smaller hole. Can a cathedral be scaled down to fit within a parish chapel? I have three or four notebooks filled with measurements, ideas, lists and questions. Can placeness result; that is, true placeness? The best of one combined with a better place could achieve the desired end. Wish me luck.

The Road Not Taken

We do not think of roads in pieces but as ongoing lengths – we even refer to them, in stories and songs, as ribbons of highway. It is almost as if, if you kept driving, a road would keep appearing under you, as needed, fabricated out of whole cloth over empty land to ensure your continued travel. When we think of roads in sections, it is usually the landmarks to the roads’ sides that we refer to – seldom (other than potholes or known construction barriers) do we consider the roadway itself. Like electricity when we flick a switch, it’s just there. And, in most places, where one road ends another comes off it. A road does not, it seems, in and of itself, have placeness, though its environment may.

That is why a so-called “road to nowhere” is so jarring, and intriguing. For, by the very nature of its stopping, literally dead in its tracks, it seems to go against “nature,” but also, by its causing us to stop dead in our tracks as well and to demand consideration of the absence of its “roadness,” it creates placeness.

Famous, of course, is the “road to nowhere” that was built to connect to the “bridge to nowhere” envisioned as connecting Ketchikan to Gravina Island, in Alaska, the scandalously wasteful, pork-barrel nature of which may have added fuel to the disenchantment with and ridicule of Sarah Palin as a vice-presidential candidate and voice of right-wing Republicanism (a road that, itself, seems happily to, finally, have gone nowhere, although the trip took longer than the projected 15 minutes).

Regularly, on the way to doing some tasks near Norristown, Pa., we have found ourselves quite suddenly and surprisingly on another such derailed road. You come off an exit from a bridge, rolling down the chute, and then you find yourself facing not the straight lanes you expect but instead a chain-link fence that diverts the road you are on to make a hairpin turn sending you off rather quickly in the opposite direction. But, before you leave the area, you can spy, behind the chain link, the road that might have been: multiple lanes go off a short distance, ending in a jungle of overgrowth – and it is as if one had reached the end of the earth before falling off, or disappearing into the wild. From up above, looking down from an overpass, you can see the abrupt disappearance of highway even more clearly. It … just … stops.

Having had our curiosity piqued by this odd sight – a circumcised highway imprisoned like a white-collar criminal, without any indication why – a little research uncovered the backstory. Apparently, a link was imagined between two routes, to ease commuting, and, given the grand name of Schuylkill Parkway, the work was begun. And then funds ran out, right in midstream. And so, today, stands a monument to the “dream” of interlocking paths to make suburban sprawl even more conveniently sprawling, and an indictment of pouring tens of millions of dollars into a useless folly and not having the sense to spend a little more and give it usefulness. Better to let it be pointless is the logic, it seems. And should it ever come back to life as a project, how wasteful it will have been to let everything crack and crumble, with more millions needed to bring it back up to baseline buildable again.

But, if one rolls down that exit ramp, and instead of making that sharp turn and continuing on in the opposite direction, if one were to pull over and park in what would have been the road’s median – well, it is a whole different place to be. Indeed, it is a place. If no other cars are coming, one has the great, eerie pleasure of walking on a wide, deserted highway, as if all the world were gone but you, as in some Twilight Zone episode. But even better is to walk to and squeeze through the chain link, and you are in another world: A road almost never used that, in very short fashion, ends. Here, and in few other places, the highway can be looked at as a piece, as the way you might see light as particles and not rays if you had the tools to do so. It is wide and clear, but a snippet … and, in some way, sad, in the way something that does not achieve its potential is a sad thing. And, if you step farther into the stunted road, you can almost feel the quiet, and you can yourself feel like a thief, or a time traveler, or someone (Twilight Zone, again) whose time-metabolism is different from those on Earth, and that there might be cars zipping all around you, but you are out of sync with them, and thus unaffected. It feels like a place of unintentional but no less powerful art. Not holy, not spiritual, but insistent, and resonant with arslocii vibes and possibilities.

It is like a movie set and, in fact, the city or county or state could make some money off this white elephant by making it available to filmmakers to use for car-chase and -crash scenes. Sometimes, a motor-vehicle agency puts out parking cones in this space and performs some sort of test or driving contest; it could be the perfect place to teach driver-ed classes. Or to turn into a recreational area – there is plenty of room for basketball and tennis courts. Or make it a performance venue, or show movies outdoors during the summer. Make this thing that goes nowhere be its own destination. Sometimes, nothingness is the perfect place for anythingness, because there are no restrictions, rules or preconceived notions. Sometimes, the place to start is the place where it all stops.