Hitching a ride on an out-of-service train WHILE on acid

Is dumb. dumb. dumb. dumb.

but 19 years later, it makes for a pretty good blog post. so here it is.

I and three of my good friends were on acid one night, down in midtown. I think we wanted to go to one of the video arcades in times square that no longer exist. they were the kind of places that most resembled the bar on planet Tatooine in star wars. Smokey, dark, and extremely dangerous, even for Han Solo. the scum of the earth lurking behind every corner, waiting for a chance to prey on the weak. they would take your quarters and walkman at knife point if you weren't paying attention, or just decide to beat the shit out of you for getting close to their high score. a lively and fun social spot for three young boys knee deep in hallucinatory influences. believe it or not, none of us had ever even read any Hunter Thompson yet, so we were pretty much cutting our own path through the jungle of insanity.
It was hot, africa hot. or worse yet, NYC hot. sticky and no movement of air. you would inhale your own breath if you didn't keep moving. kind of similar to sharks that can't stop swimming in order to breath. we were in the 50th street station on the blue line waiting for a downtown E or C train. we had taken up one of the thick wooden benches that used to be in all the stations. it was around 2 or 3am so nothing was coming. my friends were all smoking cigarettes, i might have been too actually. all i remember is that i was really messed up and the smoke was just sitting there staring at me. it was so hot the smoke didn't rise up and away, it just got thicker and thicker and enveloped me completely.
between the heat, the spinning visuals going on all around me, and the dense reeking smoke, i began to get sick. well, i didn't begin to get sick. i GOT sick. i lurched forward and sprayed the ground beneath us with a nice even coating of barf. so now you can add the smell of that, and the look of partially digested pizza to the mix and the environment became quickly intolerable to the 3 of us. Self, Cosmos, and Ages (my three amigos) jumped up and ran away from the bench while i wiped the shrapnel off my lower lip.

I should take a second to briefly describe my three fleeing friends. not just because they were, and still are, very important to me. but also because they have very interesting backgrounds and were part of the flavor of NYC back then.

Ages came from a pretty poor household. he lived in a very small apartment with his Dominican mom in the projects behind Lincoln center. His neighbors were very dangerous drug dealers that covered their front door with "Jesus Loves" stickers in a show of humorous irony, or maybe it was to throw off the cops. i never asked them. but Ages was always the center of the party. everybody loved him and he had somehow managed to parle' himself into one of the best private schools in the city where he was very popular. he was a football and baseball star. he was also unbelievable funny and always down for adventure. to this day, i find that my friends and i still quote him regularly. unfortunately his awesome sense of humor wasn't universally appreciated by the uptight asshole teachers of Fieldston High School as much as, say, my sense of humor was. of course MY parents paid thousands of dollars in tuition so tolerating my miscreant behavior became simple economics. Where he got fucked out of a diploma and ended up disappearing off the map somewhere near San Jose, i was allowed to graduate. it's really very very sad.
Ages and I on 181st street in front of a burning van. circa 19 years ago.

Cosmos was also not very well off either and he lived in subsidized housing in hell's kitchen. He was the child of Algerian parents, spoke 5 languages and was basically too smart for his own good. He ended up in trouble simply by making people feel small in comparison. He was one of those guys who spoke of Inner Chi energy and focusing oneself in the universe. Right before lacing on some Doc Martin Steel tip boots and swinging from a street sign to karate kick someone in the head ( that's not a random analogy. it happened). He was the super genius who got dealt a bad hand. His mother moved to Alaska to become a Moony (the cult), and his dad was kind of a loose canon. he was the kind of lunatic that could only come out of the old school...and he came from old school Algeria. I once went to his house in the projects and his dad asked him if he wanted dinner. he said yes, and the next thing i know the guy is yelling and screaming at us in a language i can't even recognize. he then throws a packet of baloney at us before kicking us out. his dad eventually kicked him out for good. roughly around the same time, he was caught with a hit of acid at Horace Mann, kicked out of there, and was suddenly on his own. My mom ended up saving the day by putting him up for a few months and then using her clout as a defense attorney for foster care children to get him into the Kaplan house on St. Marks Place. but thats a whole other story. needless to say, Cosmos was a boy who faced tough odds, but was more then well equipped. he was that flower child who could kick ass and score higher then you ever did on any test. As a matter of fact, Cosmos moved out to oregon and got a masters in brain activity and is currently on his way to London to start a brain related job. it's always good to hear from him.

Self was more or less the leader of the pack most of the time. He was from the upper east-side and before that Governor's island and before that Hawaii. His dad was in the military so he was the one guy in our inner crew who had actually lived outside of NYC. He was also the first one of us to get into Graffiti via an older, very well known writer who managed to pass to Self a lot of skill and technique. Self was by far the most talented writer and artist we had and he raised the bar on us, which i think made us all work harder to get our own art up to a certain level. He was also key in getting us all into skating. By the time we were a writing crew we had already been a skating crew. Everywhere we went was by board, we always had them tucked under our arms or under our feet. It was more then a mode of transportation, it was our lifestyle. We often mixed the two pastimes. skating around taking marker tags was a great way to spend a night..or day. thanks to Self, both of these themes came together in our crew. We weren't thugs, as we liked to think, or as some people ended up thinking of our crew...we were like Self. Artists on wheels. Although I can't leave out one of Self's better talents. He didn't take no kinda shit from nobody. Most of our fights came from that aspect of him. people misread him because he had the look of a nice jewish boy, but the heart of a, um, lion. Now he is living in a great house in LA with a half-pipe in his backyard, which is approved of by his lovely and successful wife and two adorable kids. His artistry is still flowing, only now, like me, he has gone digital. he helped make the Harry Potter films amongst other great films, and now he is making an 3D/2D animated version of the widely known comic Block-Hedz.
Self-One...his backyard in LA...

So these three power houses had left me in a cloud of their smoke and a puddle of the consequential up-chuck.

"yo, where you guys going?!" I yelled as i got up and slipped in the puddle a bit trying to catch up with them.

"Fuck the train, it's not gonna come. let's go through the tunnel to forty doo-wops! We gotta get away from that nastiness" said Ages over his shoulder.

Now, in retrospect, OF COURSE THE TRAIN WOULD COME. just not in the time that we wanted it too. so i nodded in agreement and we walked to the downtown end of the platform. gave a quick look back at the station, saw nobody, and proceeded to enter the darkness. It's the local so we were up against the far wall where there is a foot wide ledge that you can walk along. slowly. if you lose your footing you fall about 5 feet onto dark tracks. there are rats, puddles of sludge, and all sorts of sharp and dangerous nooks and crannies to fuck yourself up on in the pitch blackness. there was also the hum of the third rail below, just waiting to turn one of us into the next Ramo of Beat Street. so we had to use the distant light of the 42nd street station and the occasional dirty light bulb to make out the thin ledge from the dark void.
Every 2 blocks or so there was a small exit to another shaft that seemed to be mostly for workmen. They were also good places to go when trains pass. But the long arduous stretches between them were just ledge. although the wall we were up against wasn't straight. it was a repeating alcove or arch-like indentation that was about 10 feet wide. at its deepest it was about 3 feet and at it's edges the ledge width was a foot. it made it difficult because one second we had enough room to face the direction we were creeping along in, and the next second we had to turn sideways and slip carefully past the outer edge of each alcove. it was hair rasing and slow. and we were...again...on acid. I tried not to freak myself out by looking too long at anything or trying to see into the pitch black at all. i just kept my eyes on Ages' Fieldston Football shirt. It was one of those brightly colored jerseys that had the school orange on it. his number was in bright white and the sleeves were bright white, making it visible in front of me.

It was after about 4-5 blocks that i noticed something changing. we were deep into the tunnel, about half way and i noticed the front side of the tracks getting lighter. then i noticed Ages getting lighter. I turned to see what was doing that and saw it. It was a train. And it was already pulling out of the 50th street station where we came from. the headlights where big and getting bigger. I guess we figured we would here it before it got too close, but we didn't. probably because we were making so much noise ourselves fucking around and joking about what we were doing.

"HOLY SHIT! GET TO THE NEXT EXIT NOW!!" I yelled. I see the flash of 3 sets of eyes look back over my shoulder and suddenly disappear and start moving forward away from me. I chased after them. but it was too late. we couldn't run for fear of bumping on of the alcove sides and falling in and we were too far from the next dimly lit exit. I would say we had a city block to go to get to the next little workmen exit. Cosmos suddenly stopped at the deep part of one of the alcoves of the wall and mushed himself up against it. Ages then flattened next to him and i was last to flatten myself up to the wall. I remember Ages trying to put his arms around the three of us and pushing towards the wall. there was a lot of "Oh Shits" and "Fuck dudes" and "This is crazy" remarks and I remember feeling the filthy concrete all cold and wet against my face. I peeked to my right just in time to see the train barreling down on us. I peeked down at my feet and could tell in the train's headlights that we had about a foot and a half between us and the edge of the ledge. What i was really worried about was the off chance that something was sticking out from the train or if the train's speed and size would create some kind of wind vortex that might pull us into it. I also remember thinking that i wanted my mommy.

The next thing that happened was pretty much unbelievable. The driver must have spotted Ages' bright white sleeves wrapped around Self, Cosmos, and I. The horn sounds really loudly and keeps on blasting as it passes us. the screech of the breaks being pulled and the train whizzing by was incredibly loud. our own screams got completely swallowed up by it, and yes, we were a' screamin'. I would like to take a moment now to mention that this story happened TWICE. everything up to this point was basically the same both times. but the time i am not talking about was graffiti related, and when the train came to a stop and the doors opened two cops came flying out just barely grabbing us before we ran top speed back the other way. You can run much faster when the light from the train is illuminating the ledge and you don't have to worry about falling into the tracks because the train effectively prevents that from happening just by being there.

but back to the acid trip time. this time the train stops, and one lone door opens. a fat face pops out of it and yells "Hey, whada fuck are yuz guys doin' here?! Yuz aint allowed on da tracks! Get inside here!"

We raise our heads and look incredulously at this random conducter and realize that he just wants us to get on the train. "We thought that the train wasn't running and didn't have enough money to go out and walk down to 42nd and then pay again" said Cosmos. smart guy that he was.

The conductor just shakes his head and mumbles that we weren't allowed on the tracks again. We looked at each other, realized that this guy was a bit "slow" and we weren't going to get much trouble from him. so we boarded the train. In the light of the train i got to see that both of my friends were now black like charcoal from the dirt on the walls. we looked like chimney boys from mary poppins. the train doors close behind us and the train starts moving. a minute later we pull into 42nd street and the train comes to a stop halfway in. the conducter steps out and uses his key to open just one door for us. "Dis train is outta suyvice. yuz boys don't do that again..ok?"

we nod at him and step off the train. i remember there were a few people at the stop who seemed very confused about why three filthy boys who clearly didn't work for the MTA got off an empty train half pulled into the station. we had literally just hitched a ride from the conductor.