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Order this writing in the collection book Layers of Creation available for only 1795 |
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This appears in a pre-2010 issue
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Tour Guide
Pat Dixon
If thou beest born to strange sights,
Things impossible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights
Till age snow white hairs on thee. . . .
—“Song,” John Donne
Speaking as an expert who has lived and worked in the Big Apple for over thirty-five years, let me reassure all of you that the danger of being mugged here is far slimmer for people of our ethnicity than for literally any other group. Yes, go ahead and smile if you like. I should caution you, however, that there is a slight but very real danger in stores and restaurants, in hotels, especially in elevators, and out on the sidewalks and streets. Furthermore, very very rarely, some of us have been deliberately run down by nut cases in their cars. Rarely, I say, because the state officials have taken some precautions to keep such folks off the road. However, as you’ll appreciate, no system is perfect—they miss some, are bought off by others, and a few will drive cars even if their licenses have been revoked. Realistically, though, you’re far more likely to get a few bruises simply because somebody bumps into you inadvertently, especially during what they call the rush hour here.
I will be taking all twenty-three of you out for a stroll from here in about half an hour. Please feel free to eat from your box lunches while I give you this orientation. This office overlooks Penn Station and what is now called Madison Square Garden—although for some quirky reasons I will explain during our tour it is nowhere near Madison Square. In case you would like to look out the windows and compare what you see with the street maps you were given or the skyline photo on the wall here, this window is facing west, and that one, of course, is facing north.
As you were told in our brochures before you came here, we will not be making any comfort stops during any segments of the tour, so please, if you have any needs of that kind, take care of them before we leave. The facilities are through that door there. Please do not wander off, however, to explore. Although we do “own” this entire floor, and indeed have done so since the building was constructed sixty-three years ago, most of the rooms are unoccupied and contain nothing but thin drapes and lamps set on timers. When we return after today’s outing, my assistants and I will show you where your bunks are. The accommodations are quite Spartan here, but no worse than you’ve encountered elsewhere if you’ve traveled before. One of our economies, of course, is we’ve hired no bell hops because none of you brought any luggage or changes of clothing. Yes, thank you for smiling at that, ma’am. Usually at least one person laughs aloud. Seriously, one more thing: let me emphasize that the elevator on which you came up is to be operated only—for reasons connected vitally with the safety of you all—by our official personnel.
The chief danger in New York City, as some of you no doubt already know, is down in the subways which I’ll be guiding you through personally tomorrow in groups of five or six. I don’t recommend that any of you go down there alone while you’re visiting the city. Always take at least two adults with you who know their way around. This sounds like an augmented version of the buddy system, but it has been found to be effective. Make no mistake: this is especially true at night when the Menace Quotient or M. Q. goes up by roughly 37 percent!
I’ll get back to the dangers of subways and subway stations in a few moments, but first I want to remind you that New York is hazardous to your health because of its sheer filth. Other places you’ve lived or visited no doubt have their own problems including a little litter on the ground, but this will be like nothing you’ve ever seen before. You folks who came down here from Quebec and Toronto are especially going to be in for a real shock. People here seem to consider it their constitutional right to discard whatever is in their hands wherever they please.
To digress briefly, I was leading a tour of our people from Munich around last autumn, and one elderly chap was so outraged each time he saw a New Yorker toss a newspaper or food wrapper on the sidewalk that he strode over and punched them in the side of the face and yelled “Schweinhund!” in a gruff voice. He was fairly frail, so he didn’t hurt them much, but, as you can well imagine, it startled them plenty. Now, I did have to restrain him, and I will restrain any of you who get out of hand like that. Just remember where you are and who you are, please. As for the litter and filth, be aware that it is all around you, and that the wind is often blowing it about. You do not, for obvious reasons, wish to become “papered” even briefly, and I would strongly recommend that you brush off yourselves fairly thoroughly at half-hour intervals. I find that even with such brushing I need to wipe myself down with a damp cloth every four hours on a normal work day here—and the whole cloth is totally black with grit, grim, dirt, soot, whatever. I wish I could provide you with breathing filters, too, because the local saying here is that a day’s worth of city air is as noxious as smoking two packs of Camels. Little joke—because I know that none of you smoke.
Do any of you have questions so far? All right then . . . oh, you do. Are we going to Times Square? No. No, it isn’t one of the places we’ll be going to even though it’s fairly well known around the world. We will be circling it tomorrow night about a block or two away from its center just so you can see its lights, and the reason is the high risk factor you would be experiencing if we were to walk right through it, whether singly or in groups. I know this from experience. There are just too many weapons in the wrong hands there, which makes it dangerous in ways that the famous subway system is not.
Any other questions? Have I ever been shot at or personally injured? Yes. Yes, I have. Three times I’ve been slightly slashed by people in the subways—people like those we’ll be seeing tomorrow. And once near Times Square some user or dealer or user-dealer fired off a burst from an automatic pistol—aimed directly at me, I am certain—and parted the hair of my buttocks and left me with that two-inch scar you seem to be staring at with such fixation. Just minor scratches, so to speak, and I’ve never been badly hurt yet.
Other questions? No, we won’t be seeing the home of Mr. Lovecraft—chiefly because it would be in Providence, Rhode Island, if it is still standing, which I don’t know it is, but even if it were here in New York it would be too chancy to visit because of the unbalanced cultist mindset of most of his fans. A lot of ‘em are borderline cases, but they have far more credibility than a bunch of junkies or “subbies” do. Not really high, mind you, but why look for trouble with a group of five or six of ‘em? No, we didn’t have anything to do with his death, at least so far as I’ve heard.
What am I talking about? All right, this young man was just asking about the American author H. P. Lovecraft, one of the sighted kind, who is best known to us for his story “The Dunwich Horror,” which he based partly on three sightings he made in Brooklyn back in the mid-1920s. He was what we call an F. P. or Functional Psycho, who lived chiefly in the capital of Rhode Island most of his life and even mailed his shirts and shoes back there whenever they needed a button replaced or a sole fixed. This youngster was wondering whether we were responsible for offing him, and I said no, probably not. I am in a position to have heard, and I’m sure we didn’t bother. If you ever take the time to look up his story, you’ll see that he got only the germ of an idea from his observations and, as the raven quoth, nothing more.
Whoa, now! One at a time! You heard that we killed a crazy Frenchman named Maupassant in the 1890s for writing “The Horla”? What is your evidence? I’ve heard that, though he was one of the sighted people, that particular story “proved” he’d gone ‘round the bend completely and led to his being put into an asylum—where he died of syphilis or some other perfectly natural cause. Whom did we do, then? All right, give me a few seconds to collect and sort out my thoughts on this. Don’t press me: “You can’t push a chain,” as they say. Let’s see . . . . This is just off the top of my head, because nobody has ever asked me about this before, and I don’t have anything prepared in a formal way.
All right—so far as I can recall, we did kill an Irish immigrant writer named Fitz-James O’Brien. He wrote a little piece of fiction called “What Was It?” based on a personal sighting in the late 1850s, and we got him during the American Civil War and destroyed his background notes and diary. And there was another fellow named Ambrose Bierce, who published “That Damned Thing”—no, “The Damned Thing”—in the 1890s, based on a sighting made by an F. P. aunt of his. He never did see anything himself for another twenty years or so, but he was compiling legends about us in the southwest and was experimenting with peyote, and when he suddenly saw four of us one afternoon in Mexico and reached for his rifle, we finished him off, burned his notebooks, and buried him where he lay.
No, no, no, we didn’t do in Judge Crater or Amelia Earhart—or Buddy Holly! Nor even Elvis. At least I haven’t heard about it. I did hear, however, that Rudolph Diesel, the fellow who invented the engine, you know, suddenly began beating on one of us with his walking stick while crossing the English Channel and had to be summarily pitched over the side of the boat.
Usually, of course, we don’t need to do anything. Let me give you a modern footnote, so to speak, about one of the 1992 presidential candidates who reported seeing would-be assassins in his yard. That was just a couple of our Texas teenagers, larking around. Since no one else saw them, and this fellow—a congenitally sighted F. P.—already had a credibility problem, there was no threat to us at all. Besides, most of the folks we’ve eliminated have been comparative nobodies—most of them are like the people I’ll be pointing out tomorrow, and they simply end up on the third rail or under some wheels in a very prosaic way. There’s just too much bogus, melodramatic folklore about celebrities being spread around, and some people seem willing to believe nearly anything! My personal rule of thumb is to maintain a skeptical attitude. Let’s have a different, more relevant topic, please.
Yes, we will be going to the Tibetan Museum in Manhattan—as well as the one on Staten Island. You’ll all enjoy the ferry ride, I’m sure, and the price is right, as the saying goes. Just so we’re all “up to speed,” as they say, and “reading from the same sheet music,” let me confirm that the paintings, the statuary, and the descriptions in The Book of the Dead are indeed based on mystics’ close encounters with our ancestors. Incidentally, the parallel sightings of the so-called “Yeti” by Himalayan lay people are indicators of what inbreeding and/or high altitudes will do to folks’ brains over an extended period of time. Of course, because their mindset is peaceful, indeed even reverent—unlike that of the majority of people in this city if not the whole country—we’ve never been concerned about sightings or even close encounters there. You will no doubt be amused to see these paintings and sculptures first hand and full size. I’ve found that there is something totally charming about them that never fails to bring mistiness to the eyes of most tourists I show them to.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any Tibetan monks doing a sand mandala in the city at this time, but I will be playing several videos for you tonight to prep you for the uptown museum tomorrow. I actually attended the “painting” of one of these mandalas last year and was quite touched by several of the monks, and I purchased a video of them at work just last month after viewing it on a local PBS program. One old monk in particular, who was in charge, looked up at me and, without a single word, beamed me the sweetest, most loving smile I have ever seen. He said nothing to the others, but each of them, independently, glanced up briefly from time to time and smiled to signify that I was completely welcome there. Of course, I am not on the video, but I will point out the smiles directed at me as they occur.
All right, now. I see that it’s almost time we got started. Again, does anyone need to visit the facilities one more time before we leave? We will all wait. No? Then I’ll just lead the way to our elevator and will finish my orientation about the New Yorkers we call “subbies” as we descend. Keep together, please. Oh, as you board, notice that the number thirteen is above the door there. This will probably be the only time during your stay in New York that you’ll see that number for a floor. In the lobby, which I’ll be leading you through in a couple minutes, you’ll note that both of the elevators there have dials over them which read 11, 12, 14, 15. It’s based on some sort of irrational holdover of a pagan superstition, or so I’ve been told.
Down, please—basement. Just another little joke: this elevator only runs between the basement and this floor. We’ll have a short flight of steps up to the lobby, and after that I will be “signing” my commentary to you. I don’t know how much longer we can continue tours like these—perhaps only another two decades unless something changes the direction of this society. In the past dozen years, apparently because of greed-polluted water and air, job stress, bad diet, and the snowballing homelessness—especially when the “care-giving system” dumps non-functionals into the streets—the number of Threat People or T. P. has made a quantum jump. Their brain chemistry is changed somehow—that’s all we know.
I have glanced over three or four medical books and a dozen or so articles about schizophrenics and drug users, not for the details, of course, but for the general bottom line. And the bottom line is that their bodies, because of heredity and environment both, put out greater and greater amounts of perception-altering enzymes. As you’ve all probably heard or guessed, like dogs, some of ‘em can hear sounds that their kin are deaf to, and, like butterflies, some can see light far beyond their kin’s normal spectrum.
Most of these, of course, don’t impact on us at all, one way or the other. But when I take you into the subways tomorrow, you’ll be amazed at the dozens of people down there who will suddenly look up at you and shout at you and even scream in terror at you. Some will even rush at you and try to touch or hit you. Most of them are harmless—malnourished and pretty weak—so there isn’t much danger of getting more than a scratch like these on my chest and shoulder and thigh—just fly bites, comparatively speaking, as you can see. A few are more aggressive and will have to be dealt with by me or one of my two assistants here.
The amusing thing which will surprise you even though you’ve been told about it, however, is that the present majority of “normals” will at first totally ignore these screamers, then they will move away from them because the screamers are deranged and defective in their view—shouting as it were into empty air—and finally they will often summon one of their transit police officers to deal with these loud public nuisances. They see their own sighted kind as the menaces and, for now at least, look straight through us large “demons,” who are invisible to their “sane” eyes.
