B1 - The Tunnel

The Tunnel

My Guide and I crossed over and began

to mount that little known and lightless road

to ascend into the shining world again.

He first, I second, without thought of rest

we climbed the dark until we reached the point

where a round opening brought in sight the blest

and beauteous shining of the Heavenly cars.

And we walked out once more beneath the Stars.

The streets of Deep Ellum were lined with an eclectic array of nightclubs, restaurants, tattoo parlors, bars, and intimate concert venues. During the day, the place was reminiscent of an old, forgotten ghost town, but as the sun set over the downtown skyline, everyone from fake-ID-toting high school girls, to wannabe Rastafarians and rosy-faced middle-aged businessmen flocked to its boulevards. As dusk settled in, the sidewalk filled with an unnatural blend of rap, rock, and reggae as music seeped out the open doorways, and the smells of deep-fried food, cigarette smoke, and alcohol saturated the air. Stereotypical bald, portly bouncers stood like permanent fixtures at many of the thresholds, calling out to us from the shadows:

“Hey, ladies. It’s ‘Ladies’ Night.’ That means a three-dollar cover charge. You and all your friends.”

We only smiled politely and moved on. Usually, Jenny, my best friend, added something to the effect of, “No thanks, we were just on our way to meet a friend at All Good Cafe,” or “Sorry, I just spent all the money I had at the record store.”

On more than one occasion, we were approached by a mob of evangelicals donned in identical white t-shirts who paraded around the streets of Deep Ellum, carrying a seven-foot tall white cross made from two-by-fours and chanting in unison some clever catchphrase designed to convert all of the sinful heathens who frequented that questionable neighborhood. “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” a pimply teenage boy inquired one evening.

Of the four of us, Jenny was the only one to speak up. She told him that we attended school at a Catholic college, that a couple of us had been going to Catholic school our whole lives, and that we were all, to varying degrees, Christian. “Are Catholics really Christians?” he asked. “I didn’t know that.” The rest of us were eager to move on, but Jenny was busy cheerfully enlightening the boy about early Church history, the Reformation, and the like. By the time she had concluded her little lecture, Jenny and Mark were on a first-name basis, and he had gladly given each of us stickers saying, “Smile, Jesus loves you.”

“Rachel! You have to come get your cards read with me!” I suddenly found Jenny pulling my left arm toward a woman sitting behind a small card table on the corner of Commerce and Malcolm X.

“Tarot?” I asked, planting my feet into the pavement.

“Yes, Tarot. Come on, you don’t have to take it seriously if you don’t want to. It’s just for fun. And besides, it’s only five dollars.”

“It’s not fun. It’s creepy . . . and stupid. And besides, I’m completely broke. Where’d Caitlin and Diana go?”

“They’re using the restroom in All Good Cafe. And you wouldn’t be broke if you didn’t spend all your money on those cancer sticks. That's such a waste of money.”

“And getting your cards read isn’t?”

“Fine then. I guess you’ll just never get to know all of the magical things your future holds,” Jenny retorted, as though that was supposed to hurt me. Then she smiled sympathetically. “Anyway, at least stand with me and watch me get mine read.”

“Fine,” I grumbled.

Soon, we were standing in front of a plump, longhaired, middle-aged woman wearing a tie-dyed shirt and shuffling a worn deck of Tarot cards. A single stick of incense burned in the middle of her table. Madam Capricorn was her street name, as I learned from the small, laminated sign duct-taped to the front of the table. I stood there with my arms folded, shivering as I watched Jenny lay a five dollar bill on the table.

“Would you like love, career, or life?” she asked in an Eastern European accent as she fondled the stack of cards.

“Love, of course.”

“Okay, love in general, or for specific person?”

“Just in general,” Jenny said matter-of-factly, as though she had her Tarot cards read everyday. A final shuffle of the cards and then Madam Capricorn prompted her to split the deck. She flipped through the cards with some strange, confusing methodology that looked made up.

Finally, three cards lay face-up across the width of the table. Madam Capricorn then explained to Jenny what each card meant. “Yes, yes, you have very bright future ahead of you. When you walk in, you—how do you say?—you light up a room. And soon, very soon, you will fall in love. But he—he is already in love with you. Yes, everything in your love life looks good. Very good.” Jenny was grinning ear-to-ear. I rolled my eyes and signaled to her that it was time to go.

We were turning our backs to walk away from the table when we heard, “Wait a minute!” I looked back over my shoulder. Madam Capricorn’s Eastern European accent had fallen away, revealing the Texan accent I had heard so much growing up that it didn't even sound like an accent to me. Her eyes were wide with intensity.

“Don’t you want your cards read, too?” She was looking at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, more determined than ever not to waste a penny on that woman's gibberish. “I just don’t have enough money with me tonight.”

A sudden gust of wind almost scattered her cards into the street, but even as she secured them with her hands and arms she continued to stare at me. She seemed to be studying something on my face—beyond my face—, and some wildly imaginative part of me felt as though she could see the dark mysteries of my soul. After a few seconds, she said, still in her natural voice, “Well, you girls be careful tonight, okay? Just be careful.”

I half-smiled at her, and we turned back around. “See, wasn’t that fun? Don’t you wish she had read your cards?” Jenny was still beaming, as though she hadn't heard what I'd just heard.

“I think she put a hex on me or something. I’m really not feeling so great,” I muttered, staring ahead through the swarming masses.

The panhandlers loitered at the outskirts, and each one had his or her own unique tale of tragedy. One old man, in particular, whom we encountered over the course of several trips to Deep Ellum, always seemed to be dying of AIDS, emphysema, bone cancer, or some equally tragic condition. Jenny, Diana, or Caitlin inevitably gave him some of their loose pocket change, for which he repeatedly uttered, “God bless you, miss.” He was one of the skinniest men I had seen in my life. Jenny, of course, was patient and sympathetic as she listened to the entire duration of his life story while I, growing tired and ready to return to our dorms, kicked at the curbs with my hands lodged deep in our coat pockets.

Though I never mentioned it to the others, I felt half-sorry for the man. I could hear my mother’s voice, my inner voice of conscience, berating me, “He may be lying, but it only means he must need the money more than you do. Or else he wouldn’t be begging on the street like that.” But as much compassion as I felt swelling up within me, nothing, not even pity, could overpower my fear of him. So when I saw him approaching us, I walked away from the other girls, pretended to be on my cell phone, and allowed them to spare him some change, all the while hoping he was lying about it all.

  

             The wind blew relentlessly that particular early December evening, even on Main Street. It whipped the dead leaves and independently-published news pamphlets in tiny dust devils around our ankles. Smashed cigarette butts rolled down the sidewalks like tumbleweeds until they fell from the curb to the street and finally, into the sewage drains. Flyers shivered in the breeze, beating themselves against the blackened telephone poles, each of which was impaled with a thousand rusty nails.

             As we turned the corner, the gusts grew stronger than before. My jaw chattered uncontrollably, and I tightened my coat around me. I paused for a moment to try to light a cigarette, using a doorway alcove as a windbreaker, but it was useless; the wind assailed me from every direction. I realized how filthy I felt, as though the grime and soot I sensed in the very air of the city had now penetrated through my clothes and onto my skin. I was positive I could feel my hands crawling with deadly bacteria and disease. But these worries were pushed out of my mind as soon as I realized that the tunnel lay ahead of us.

             The crowded streets that night had forced Diana to park her car on the other side of the tunnel, in a relatively quiet street. When we had arrived in that neighborhood earlier that evening, there were still a few traces of lavender lingering in the west. We had entered Deep Ellum through the Good Latimer pedestrian tunnel, adjacent to the dipping road but raised by about ten feet from the racing cars of the expressway. The catwalk was like its own small tunnel within the larger one. Inside lay a thousand chocolate-brown shards of broken glass, flat pieces of damp cardboard, a few stray soiled articles of clothing, and several crumpled piles of old newspaper. The reeking odor of urine overwhelmed the air, forcing us to hold our breaths for the minute or two it took to power-walk through to the other side. We had agreed, at that point, to find a different route back to Diana’s car at the end of the night. Our alternate route would be the tunnel’s narrow sidewalk, which immediately flanked the busy street where drunk drivers raced by on their way home from the clubs, recklessly swerving around the curve and each other.

             At the front of our single-file line, Jenny skipped around and flailed her arms like some kind of fanciful mythological figure. She was always doing something slightly embarrassing like that. She looked straight up into the sky and exclaimed into the wind, “Isn’t tonight glorious? I mean, look at those stars! We never see stars like that in Baytown, do we, Rachel?”

             I glanced above at the stars, silently twinkling in all their cold isolation in the darkness, and then immediately returned my eyes to my feet on the sidewalk. It was a beautiful night, and I almost allowed myself to enjoy it, but I was far more concerned about accidentally stepping into a pile of broken glass or losing my footing and stumbling onto the street into the traffic. “Yeah,” I muttered from the back of the line, “It’s great.”

             I became aware of the tunnel’s intimidating presence. It neared us with each step we took, its mouth gaping and ready to swallow whatever dared enter its depths. At least, I consoled myself, the tunnel would provide some relief from the wind.

             “I guess it’s always too polluted in Baytown to see the stars . . . who'd have thought you could see the stars better in a big city?” Jenny asked rhetorically, still looking high above at the sky, her neck arched in such a way that it made my own ache just to look at her.

“Yeah, guess so,” I said under by breath between shivers.

“Damn pollution!” she apostrophized into the open air, presenting her middle finger to the night sky. “That’s what I have to say to you, smog!” She turned around and smiled, enjoying the humored reactions she had received from the others. Jenny’s eyes then returned to the sky, careless of where her feet carried her, and as the tunnel closed in around us, the vast, sparkling abyss disappeared.

  

             The tunnel's walls were covered ceiling to floor with murals painted by some nameless faction of avant-garde, freelance street artists. Rising up on my right was Jack Nicholson as the lunatic from “The Shining,” hungrily glaring at me from between a latch-locked doorway. Beside him there was Angelina Jolie, whose silicone-injected, pouting lips the artist had humorously overcompensated.

But I scarcely paid any attention to the many murals along the walls; I could only look down. I watched the glow from the cars’ headlights and the darkness of my own shadow grow in intensity upon the painted concrete. With each advancing car, I felt a growing anxiety, and my mind flooded itself with dark imaginings. I expected, with the sound and light of an approaching car, the sensation of an incredible blow from behind, crushing my thighs, shattering my kneecaps, and pinning my body against the giant slab of concrete. The last image my eyes would rest on would be Jack Nicholson’s madman grimace on that cold, hard wall of that reeking tunnel, as dark, red blood pooled around my feet, overflowing off the sidewalk, into the street, and down into the fathomless depths of the city's sewers.

             I attempted to shake myself out of that self-induced nightmare, but it was impossible. Cars seemed to be screaming through the tunnel at ninety miles an hour. The vibrations of deep baselines filled the walls and ceiling and buzzed through my bones and organs. I could hear their tires rumbling over the pavement, coming closer and closer. Reverberations assailed us from every direction, and I became nauseated with fear. Every part of me, save my feet, which somehow managed to move along the sidewalk, felt numb and paralyzed.

I raised my eyes to look at the others up ahead of me, who were strolling down toward the tunnel’s lowest point. I watched Jenny gaze in amazement around the tunnel at the countless murals. A part of me envied her seeming oblivion. The big city always had a way of making me feel lost and small.

Suddenly, something in my peripheral vision caught my eye. On the wall on the other side of the road was written in large black letters, in a capitalized font which demanded to be read: “FEAR CONTROLS KNOWLEDGE . . . KNOWLEDGE CONTROLS FEAR.”

I turned my eyes ahead again, and watched Jenny. Every move in her step spoke a phrase of fearlessness. She lived like an immortal, unafraid of death, its pain, its mystery, or its permanence.

             Then, in a sudden flash, I felt the violent thrust of a car beside me. Something, it must have been terror, knocked my shoulder against the wall. I then watched the car disappear as it rose out of the tunnel, the pitch of its blaring horn lowering into the distance. My heart was either racing or had stopped all together. It was only seconds later that I felt a slight sensation on my arm. I began to realize that the side mirror of the passing car must have grazed my elbow; but, I felt no pain. It hurt no more than Jenny’s firm grasp on my arm as she dragged me to Madam Capricorn’s table earlier that evening.

             A swift rush of adrenaline melted my entire body, and for the first time that evening, I laughed. Death had always been just inches away, and it always would be. And somehow, because of that, it was nothing to fear.

I looked back up to see that Jenny, Caitlin, and Diana were looking back at me over their shoulders. “Are you okay back there?” Jenny called out.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, controlling my laughter and wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.

We continued our journey through the rest of the tunnel without incident. I walked more leisurely now, taking time to discover the numerous murals. My mind envisioned an artist standing on that very sidewalk some years before, painting his intensely personal piece, uninfluenced by the styles and subjects of the many paintings surrounding him. I wondered how long he stood up there on his wobbly ladder amid the noises of passing cars, engrossed only in his own little creation, as though nothing else in the world mattered.

A moment later we had reached the other side of the tunnel, where the silent, starry sky opened up to us once again. The wind now seemed gentler than before, and, for a moment, the whole world was quiet and still.