Curious threesome of Pulaski Skyway hangers abscond with recovered refuse from drowned ’71 Cadillac Eldorado
The acid rain becomes gently refreshing to anyone’s uplifted face, should they be out at this time fevering in some inexplicable triumphal revelry as it tapers down to a shower and now a fine mist, purpling the night over the Pulaski Skyway and Newark, New Jersey with awesome toxic incandescence.
Now the choking, almost nauseous stench of sludge and uncounted tons of untreated hazardous wastes, ruptured landfills and nefariously racketeered garbage dumps, rundown waste disposal plants and incinerators, stagnant swamp-and-mud-sponged pools and lakes of industrial runoff and spillage and illegally disposed of oil and petroleum-based wastes and burned rubber rises to befoul the night anew, heavy and immobile in the drenched air’s captured heat.
Sewage floats at high standstill throughout the metropolitan low grounds, first running off in ecstatic black excesses flooding the major highways before the inner-city streets can even begin their slow and almost motionless emergence back atop the familiar seedy urban horizon broken in its potholed darkness, unforgivingly depraved in dank narrow bleakness.
As the waters recede, leaving the streets coated in a residue of slick wet garbage and slime, a melancholy of soot-soaked filth-glutted sodden gloom rises above the streets, strangely pleasant to the native who loves this land with a heartache of sweet sadness because it is his.
There, inside the poison radiance of the after-rained night, at the Essex County side of the Pulaski Skyway, its gargoyle girders emptying into Newark, is a human figure, shaking in the exit.
It is the great American writer, octogenarian Philip Roth. He is wearing a waterproof Stetson or Brixton bucket hat, although it could be a Tumberry Fleece Lined – in inky purplish nights such as this looming over the Pulaski Skyway, this depth of detail is hard to discern; but what is clear is that the hat does boast a faint but distinct deep olive-grove and rust plaid weave – almost tastefully complementing rather than clashing with a knee-length, single-breasted navy-blue trench coat he picked up cheap with shrewd bargaining in a warehouse outside Munich during a stopover from Israel – was it last year, or the year before last.
Whether the coat is also rainproof, as expected, that feature’s not helping Philip Roth much, since he has it open and flapping as he springs aggressively about. But he doesn’t seem to care, as he only now begins to calm down, the careworn old man’s lines of his face filling out a little with visible relief, the crazed desperation dissipating as his wild man motions come to a halt.
For until just recently – this very moment, in fact – he had been jumping up and down and flailing his arms about, his antelope body and rabbit head stuttering maniacally into the dark, as he strained with every incorporeal cell of his will to wave off in a scary way three strange and furtively shifting figures, costumed as if en route to a masquerade, who seemed intent on entering Newark – until they suddenly dropped out of sight.
He’s stopped them, he feels. They’d been heading his way, coming right at him, aggressively, he believes, their arms cradling formless shadowy bundles and odd-shaped things, raised from the murk of the river below the skyway. And then, they suddenly dropped out of the picture, disappearing far more quickly than they’d appeared, for the walk toward him had seemed interminable; the panic this triggered, that nerve-racking, taunting deliberativeness of their slink forward, the fucking latex-bound scumbags, their lips upturned into pointed crescent leers, a seine of sweat pressing suddenly through his skin, burning his forehead with the pollution ingested by his organism and pores, and they were almost at him, a nightmare coterie of brimstone-souled clownishness, some kind of spooks swelling, uncurling their costume-striped limbs toward him like satanic party noisemakers, he jumping and screaming, flailing and snarling in front of the Newark exit, his 80-something heart beating out of his chest, and then they simply disappeared.
Who were they and what had they wanted?
For Philip Roth hadn’t seen the ’71 Cadillac Eldorado drop through the construction break in the Pulaski.
But he had seen them – oh, he’d seen them: the trio’s lunatic male hoisting via a clever medieval contraption of pulleys and ropes his two mass-titted accomplices, whom Philip Roth ached for, out of the mucky slag and slough, lugging up amorphous objects dripping with sludge and mire and the drossy waste of the Passaic River’s shallow deep – not far before it meets the dead backwaters of Newark Bay.
But now the moment is finally over. Whoever they were, they did not get into Newark. His heart beats a little calmer, a little softer.
Philip Roth is still deeply bitter and resentful over losing the Promethean Award – the Kyiv-based literary prize that bows in global prestige only to the Nobel Prize for Literature – to one Andrew Plumb. Or had that indeed been the Nobel Prize after all – the disturbing, almost opaque images rising in his mind like expired ghosts who’d outlived their usefulness in some bad dream. After his terrifying ordeal on one end of the closed and as yet unreconstructed Pulaski Skyway just now, why, of all things, is he suddenly overcome by this memory and feeling? It is so inexplicable and strange. It is as if he has almost intuited, almost understood that among the refuse pulled by the treacherous latex-and-bell-clad threesome out of the viscous morass was…
But no – he remembers nothing now, as the memory and the bitter feeling that goes with it dissolve like the toxic chemicals here in the water, ground and air. He doesn’t even remember remembering.
Suddenly, overwhelmed by joy, pure and fresh, childlike and magical, Philip Roth begins to laugh. He laughs and laughs, and begins to jump again, not with his former violent intent, but stomping up and down, like Gene Kelly in the puddles.
And now he plants his feet apart to form a coat-slapped crotch arch and alternating his small fists begins punching them into the air – it’s all so absurd… and futile.
As for me, John Smith, I’m sick of these old hacks, but really, right now that’s neither here nor there.
What am I doing here? I’ve got business to attend to in the States – what’s left of them.
And now we leave Philip Roth, his antelope body and rabbit head, jumping about at the Pulaski Skyway’s Newark exit, pumping his fists into the poison-drenched air because it pleases him to do so, for we no longer need him.
And turn southeast, back toward the Hudson River, the New Jersey side, and Antipolex, the final city of Hudson County after Jersey City, hooking its threatening horn, peaked, jagged and sharp at either end, into Upper New York Bay and the river. For all that, it is no Thomas More’s Utopia. Seen on a map, the lines are but their own contours, which may, perhaps, only subtly, just barely, betray a, shall we say, somewhat lean and hungry look – and even that impression, and the depth to which one forms it, if at all, depends very much on the map itself.
But viewed aerially, people often comment how the natural land formation resembles some oozing arthropod’s pincers, like an insect’s mandibles or the chela of a scorpion or lobster, or the maw of a giant primordial shark, except much, much worse, those sea creatures that defy our wildest imaginations and overwhelm even our nightmares, existing only in illustrations of National Geographic, a monster’s jaw, gaping sleeplessly up the Hudson to devour Lower Manhattan.
Filed by John Smith, September 28, 2015