Subway Hitchhikers

By Jnana Hodson

Subway Hitchhikers is the story of a youth who has no inkling he's a Tibetan reincarnated into his middle-class family in Iowa. What he knows is that he doesn't quite fit in where he's landed. In his confusion and hunger to uncover his innate identity and purpose, he ventures alone eastward, first to college in Indiana and then on to the East Coast itself, where he descends step by step into surrealistic subterranean realms at the zenith of the psychedelic outburst of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Along the way, each stage of his journey is furthered by daring comrades and colorful lovers, each one advancing his vision and direction. At last, in the clash of the meditative silence he discovers in his rural dwelling and the chaotic ruckus of massed humanity he encounters in his urban adventures, he sees and hears another world that points him toward true home. It's nothing he would have imagined, but nevertheless fulfilling. With the underground in all its forms as a theme, Subway Hitchhikers is a Mixmaster of ideas, images, jokes, philosophy, and playful nonsense drawn from deep yearnings and inspiration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jnana Hodson
• Release date: Jan 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311130679

Jnana Hodson

It’s been a while since I’ve been known by my Hawaiian shirts and tennis shoes, at least in summer. Winters in New England are another matter.For four decades, my career in daily journalism paid the bills while I wrote poetry and fiction on the side. More than a thousand of those works have appeared in literary journals around the globe.My name, bestowed on me when I dwelled in a yoga ashram in the early ‘70s, is usually pronounced “Jah-nah,” a Sanskrit word that becomes “gnosis” in Greek and “knowing” in English. After two decades of residing in a small coastal city near both the Atlantic shoreline and the White Mountains northeast of Boston, the time's come to downsize. These days I'm centered in a remote fishing village with an active arts scene on an island in Maine. From our window we can even watch the occasional traffic in neighboring New Brunswick or lobster boats making their rounds.My wife and two daughters have prompted more of my novels than they’d ever imagine, mostly through their questions about my past and their translations of contemporary social culture and tech advances for a geezer like me. Rest assured, they’re not like any of my fictional characters, apart from being geniuses in the kitchen.Other than that, I'm hard to pigeonhole -- and so is my writing.

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SUBWAY HITCHHIKERS

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A novel by Jnana Hodson

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Published by Jnana Hodson at Smashwords

copyright 2014 Jnana Hodson

paperback edition published at Fithian Press, 1990, copyright by the author

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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Track One: Kun-Shi

Track Two: Goin' Down the Line

About the Author and More

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for Iris

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TRACK ONE: KUN-SHI

How strange to be gone in a minute!

Ted Berrigan

A Final Sonnet (lxxxviii)

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T-Rex Rides Again

Once more, the downtime drags on. Nobody but the homeless or a con artist could get a charge out of being stuck on hold quite like this. A big city shouts with places to be, people to corner, deals to cut, action to catch. Until the wheels roll in, though, the whole bag of fireworks gets shelved. Each person in the station is suspended in motion. Once a token drops into the turnstile, a poor fish is stranded. This loop of waiting throws an unpredictable intermission into each rider's life. It's an annoyance that metropolitan tenants accept with few signs of emotion. Until the train comes, they're trapped. Seconds tick into minutes. A traveler can do little else but squint toward the convergence of track and hope a ride will materialize in the next inhalation or skip of the heartbeat, but it doesn't. Some, however, pace the platform, circle back to the wall with its Business Week and United Airlines billboards and out again to the very edge of the cement, where they stop to eagle eye the fatal high-voltage Third Rail and its billowing tabloid pages. Gaze up again, hoping for distant headlights, but that apparition remains unmet. The Transit Authority's underground stations seem to be little more than a dilation of buzzing fluorescent lights and ceramic tile between gaping, forbidden caverns; to wait in the dampness there often feels like being rolled up inside a cigar, with a match at one end and the gullet at another. The jittery sweat out continues. A man reads The Wall Street Journal nervously, flicking the pages each time he thinks he hears a faint commotion. A mother bends over to comfort her child. Two teenagers conspire. At last, a faint yellowing of the bend in that vacuous shaft or a slight rumble in the distance raises eyebrows all around the sojourner. In the waiting at breezy stations on the system's elevated steel expanses, meanwhile, this stall presents variations, even though the anxiety remains identical; up there, in time, the lead car's headlamps appear in a haze of shimmering daylight or above nighttime traffic on the streets below.

Wherever, when that match is finally struck, its roar approaches to ignite a thick fuse. There's a spray of blue sparks, a knife-grinder's screech, and a rush of oily wind as an eight- or even ten-car train slams into the station. With a thump and a sigh, the hissing beast arches, whines, and finally slithers alongside the slab. Its wagons jolt, squeak, and then loll backward three inches before the doors retract, unleashing a mad horde. The conductor's blurred announcement bottoms out in the shuffle. Whatever he's supposedly naming is no more definitive than a mere station or debark if you dare would be.

At the far end of the platform, our rider dashes to the first oversized coffin. Inside, he spins a quarter rotation and is relieved. He is lucky. No one has taken his desired position. He will stand at the very front of the carriage, right next to the driver's booth. Between the headlights, a slammer faces out on the rails. With his face pressed against its glass, he will observe much of what the engineer, too, views along the line. His fascination arises, in part, from his being alien to this setting; had he grown up with this transit system as a part of his environment, he would no doubt take it for granted. But he was reared in a flat land that bills itself A Place To Grow, which may be true for corn and hogs but proves troublesome for aspiring artists such as himself. There were no subway systems for him in Iowa. Nor had he found any in Daffodil, Indiana, where he ventured to college. Now that he dwells in birch-covered mountains, however, he has new friends who know their way around the Big Apple, and they gladly introduce him to the subway network running beneath the agglomerated culture and power. He had never anticipated the possibility that anyone could nest as he does in mossy woods and still ride underground rails a mere four or five hours from his doorsill.

There's a thud. His knees buckle before he regains his balance. The giant cigar box begins to throb toward the rubbery dark. He clings to a stainless steel pole for balance. An electrical moaning winds up in volume and pitch from beneath the carriage as the invisible skipper beside our Duma opens the throttle, who hasn't yet become accustomed to the takeoff. If sailors gain sea legs, commuters gain subway knees – and he has a way to go. Soon the kayducer has his assembly of cushions flying blindly. As this iron horse sways along its route, the wishbone steel traces gleam. The train's twin spotlights finger into the wraps of darkened perspective, and he is fascinated by the hints of a subterranean existence he never could have imagined. The parallel rails deflect streaks of light from other trains, from crews working in the depths, and from traffic signals within the murky tubes. Out on the elevated stretches, rails glint from the sun, moon, and stars themselves. Bejeweled switches, intersections, curves, and signals emerge from a designer's imagination and a civil engineer's slide rule. The most amazing thing, he realizes, is that the system works at all. Moving 3.7 million passengers each day is no easy task. His previous waiting is long forgotten. Above the clatter, he ponders the way the system resembles an enormous glistening spider web. But when he recalls the purpose of such gossamer weaving, he wonders just who in this particular network is the spider and who will be the victim. Analogies, like the subway itself, go only so far. He thinks, too, of the cosmic illusion woven by Maya herself and how reality exists somewhere beyond any perception; overhead, in the glitter of bright lights and high fashion, the web snares ever more victims. He quietly repeats his mantra and prays to be agile enough to escape unscathed. Below him, the wheels and engines repeat a mantra all their own against the drumming of the rails.

In his bell-bottoms and headband, he himself appears nearly a rail. His electrical charge could put the Transit Authority's to shame, for he rides blissfully awaiting his rendezvous with Tara, a bright-eyed and burgundy-lipped free spirit who has been instructing him in the redemption of love. Though he and a dozen others now rent the rustic farmstead in the mountains where she is a frequent guest, she comes to town to visit her mother – and he, well, he might be here anyway to indulge in galleries and concerts. Together, however, she is able to show him facets of the metropolis few others could. He counts his blessings.

He should look more closely, off to the side. Don his special sunglasses, too – sometimes they help. A person who has prepared properly might see a fugitive standing with thumbs outstretched by the side of the tracks, where a few daring souls wait out the passing motorized couplings. With patience, he will discover what these desperados flee as well as what they seek. Up on the spiraling heights and down in the hushed tubes, a few clandestine riders share a secret life. When trains halt briefly between stations, when no doors open and there's no conductor's announcement, most people simply assume it's one more delay in their journey. But he will discover that these unanticipated stops allow freeborn riders to clamber aboard between cars, a practice having its own tricks and great dangers. Tara will speak to him of her fifth-grade classmate who tried and failed: she heard the screams. She will tell him of the cinder bulls and their handcuffs. She will relate a litany of spelunking technique. Only then will she challenge him to recognize the differences between people and institutions.

Let them board, these forgotten dreamings, these mysteries that spring obliquely from unknown recesses of our minds. Without warning, they etch through memories and fears, desires and visions. Short of shutting down the entire system, there's no stopping them. Once he learns to see what few others envision, he will acknowledge unscheduled trains thronged with Subway Hitchhikers coming and going as they please, weaving time and space like a diamond pretzel.

While riding the D Express from Coney Island, he sighted his first Subway Hitchhiker. As the train approached Kings Highway, Tara, his leonine girlfriend, pointed to a motion beside the tracks. A second later, he discerned a burly man wearing a blue-checkered shirt and ponderous earthy backpack. The bruin's right hand rose in gallant thumbing; the left hand clutched a bag of Nathan's hooper-dooper french fries.

The train hesitated, then skidded to a halt. Though he could not see the hitchhiker embark, he recognized a pattern. He finally knew: somewhere in the cars behind him, there was one more passenger.

Later, he would hear about legions of counterfeiters who try to ride freely. These scofflaws outnumber genuine hitchhikers; because their mission is self-centered, it eventually goes nowhere. Often they do great damage and remain a constant source of concern for the True, Benevolent, and Fraternal Order of Subway Hitchhikers.

Many mysteries lurk in the tunnels of the world.

Discovery can be a costly, often perilous, chase.

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Transfusion

Back then, the Dalai Lama wore outlandish sunglasses. Eight thousand miles from home, he faced audiences of Hollywood minds unprepared for mantras or miracles. Below us, in visions, dusky gorges howled for our deaths. Above us, on windswept, frostbitten cloud-lands where men and spirits dwelled, native hunters chanted. We would begin in Lhasa, even if he were in Rome. We would dare foggy passes with bodies we hardly knew. If we failed, our flesh would call out vultures. But there were too many obstacles we could not overcome. We realized we would have to wait. Perhaps other passages would open.

In the meantime, my brothers and sister read eagerly of secret doctrines and practices. They tested flags and prayer bells. They wanted to embrace sensations they could merely infer through texts and imaginations. But no one could enter the Forbidden Land while the Dalai Lama remained absent. We would have to sit faithfully, preparing ourselves for release.

In Gon-kang, Yi-dam snorted. Dispatches flew. Chinese bureaucrats could not trace the messages. No sword disemboweled The Mysteries, even though monks were slaughtered. A baby was born in Iowa. There's little sense in relating much of his family cover and childhood care. He came to be called Duma Luma, a strange thing even for a Tibetan.

In time, Duma journeyed east, seeking knowledge. East to Daffodil, Indiana, where DeMenthe River State University, self-proclaimed Athens of the Midwest, enclosed a great monster-aery of learned beasts. Despite its claims, the complex resembled an imposing Potala above Lhasa far more than a graceful Acropolis. White stone edifices, designed after Oxford, as university officials describe its style, did not deceive Duma, though he had been to neither England nor the Continent. For that matter, he had never even sat in an airplane, much less flown anywhere. Duma accepted his situation philosophically. Hausser les epaules, as French novels say. With a shrug of his shoulders, he assumed everyone meant later than Oxford, progress in this case running definitely downhill.

Half of Indiana's ridges collide in Daffodil, which explains why Duma continually walked uphill. It was his karma. Life is seldom easy, and when it is, you should be suspicious.

Duma was bothered, as usual. Few