Here Be Monsters (maybe)

In the far Northern reaches of Manhattan, up where the streets are numbered well into the two-hundreds; where the island narrows around Broadway till there is no land and only the street remains, one tiny thread crossing the Broadway Bridge from which hangs the whole bulbous Christmas ornament of the island; up where blocky post-war apartment buildings brood; and just where the subway bursts from its banishment below ground to sail like a galleon in victory over to the Bronx, there stands an Arch.

It might be a miniature Arc de Triomphe if the residents of way Upper Manhattan had ever been Francophiles. It might be a gateway from some grand palace outside Moscow, moved to New York by a robber baron rich in Vodka. It might be a power relay station or an auxiliary outpost for subway machinery built by a crazed designer addicted to neo-classicism when the city had some spare money to throw away.

Who knew what it really was, or had been? It was one of those odd, old pieces of forgotten architecture New York is full of, crowding up against the newer, more efficient structures, and as eager to be remembered and fawned over as an opera diva past her prime.

What the Arch on Upper Broadway became, though, was more definite. In the last half of the Twentieth Century it variously served as: a landmark; a sometime billboard; a pedestal for a city garden more hopeful than burgeoning; an extra storage area for three businesses built in front of it, and, once, long before Rachel knew her or took her first step onto any stage, it was Testy Lesbiana’s home.

Testy had moved in on a whim, both hers and the owners. The Arch then formed the back two rooms of an auto body shop where she came looking for a used motorcycle. The owner, Lenny, turned out to need a bookkeeper, and they struck a deal. Testy kept the shops books clean and well-trained, and he built her a Harley-Davidson out of the bits and pieces that passed through his hands. The cot was an added extra, and every few days he would lumber back to it in the Arch’s left leg and drop a carburetor or a gas tank or a pedal, grunt, and leave again. Testy would open one eye, stare at the newest puzzle piece in all its grimy glory, and go back to sleep, unless the sun was high enough to fight its way in through the exhaust fumes and wave to her.

The whole process took over a year, and Testy used her hours and hours of free time, every day, to roam the city and haunt the streets. She learned New York, and she uncovered mysteries there.

New York had no recognizable, assertive identity as cities like London and Paris did, she thought. It had no intrinsic spirit like New Orleans. It was a mishmash, not really a melting pot, but more of a human junk drawer. And proud of itself for that. For someone like Testy Lesbiana, who thought consistency was not just the hobgoblin of little minds but the downfall of whole civilizations—Rome, she claimed, really fell from boredom, because what was left to do there?—New York was endlessly entertaining. The city was a candy store, and she was a sticky-fingered six year old.

She spent her days collecting oddities for her own mental menagerie. She met strangers, and then she met even stranger-ers. She sought out whatever was odd or outstanding in the city, whether living and breathing or stone and mortar. Or sometimes both.

The Arch was her starting point. It was only the first example, the first hint of another, hidden city below the veneer. Someone dreamed and schemed to build this, she thought one day as she glanced up from her books. This was someone’s great ambition. She stared out the door and up at a bit of the overdone dome, with all its bas-relief and crumbling plaster floridness. Someone had envisioned this baroque bit of concrete, and then either their abilities faltered and this was as far as their dream got, or else she hadn’t yet stumbled on its other outgrowths.

She decided to go out looking. If the Arch were here, hulking in the middle of Broadway, hunkered with no explanations in the middle of Washington Heights, then there must more fabulous and romantic leftovers lurking just underneath common perception. She put down her pencil and went out to look. And she was right, and they were everywhere.

She found herself, in short order, unearthing a Manhattan made up of another mishmash altogether. It was, to some extent, the metaphorical Manhattan everybody imagined, the real source of the city’s fame. But it was much more subtle, much stranger, and much more filled with weirdness than the legends had let on.

This Manhattan was made up of lost, forgotten dreams from generations disappeared. It had a different skyline than the island’s well-known bed-of-nails profile. It had a different sky. It was peopled by characters barely real, and sometimes blatantly fictitious. They walked among the normal hustle-bustle without ever being noticed, because that was what the physical Manhattan prided itself on.

And Testy got to know it, and its denizens, because she looked for them, and was willing to accept them on their own terms. And she’d been known to frequent some barely-believable wonderlands before, truth be told. She had a well-stamped passport from all sorts of alternative realms and kingdoms.

And now, as the days were getting longer and the sky had long since given up any hope of blue, settling for a steely gray even at noon, Testy walked both sets of streets again, and scanned the buildings, and noted the changes.

“Come on, bub,” she breathed as she went. “Come out, come out, wherever the hell you are. What are you waiting for? You should be here by now. Rachel's gonna give up and go home if we don't hurry.”

NEXT POST: A FORTUNE TELLER'S NIGHTMARE (Friday 12/25 — yes, on Xmas)