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A PHANTASMAGORIC JOURNEY ON THE Q TRAIN

Mel Waldman

Did you know that prehistoric creatures roam the subways?
Well don’t look at me that way. I see the quizzical look
instantly vanish into...a metamorphosis wearing a twisted

face of terror. I’m not mad! I really see them. They seem to
hang out here in Brooklyn-where weird stuff happens every
day- bombarding you, frying your brain-like a bad trip from
the sixties.

Just yesterday, I took a phantasmagoric journey on the Q train,
heading for Coney Island. Hiding inside the shell of eerie, I
saw the Dinosaur-Man. He was real, believe me, in this unreal,

dreamlike voyage on the Q. Yet I doubt the others saw him.
The prehistoric creature was skeletal, scaly, half-man, half-
dinosaur. Nearby, a few deep breaths away from me, he stood
tall, a grotesque giant looming in the foggy car.

I studied him from a distance. I watched him inhale and exhale
the toxic air inside the minuscule box that contained us. And
when he exhaled, he seemed to eat my brain, this chimerical

creature catapulting me on a phantasmagoric journey,
claustrophobic and suffocating in a cattle car to Auschwitz,
perhaps, but really heading to Freak Land a.k.a. Coney Island.
The freak watched me too.



His dark alien eyes swallowed me, revealing intimate knowledge
of who I am. How did he know my darkest secrets? Yet in the
past year, his brothers discovered them too.

Just before we reached Coney Island, he smiled wickedly at me,
wearing a big fat grin of metamorphosis. Instantly, I closed my
eyes. And when I opened them, the familiar creature was gone,
vanishing inside phantasmagoria, leaving me behind in

Freak Land, Brooklyn, New York, freak that I am, sometimes
labeled crazy-psychotic-schizophrenic-but merely a human being
of vision. Just like you. Right?

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