I moved to Waltham, Massachusetts a few days before my job started at Metropolitan State, and so I decided to look around Boston. Without a lot of cash, the best thing to do seemed to be to get on the T, pick a station, get out and wander around. I did precisely that, and as I got off the T at about 8:00 a.m., a guy with a shaved head walked up to me, looking rather lost, and perhaps a little jittery.
“Hey, uh,” he said sheepishly, “do you know the way to the train?”
“Do you mean the T?” I asked, unsure if he meant the same thing.
“Nah, I just came from the T,” he said in his thick Boston accent. “I mean the trains, like, to leave town.”
“Sorry, I have no idea, I just got here,” I explained. “I just got off the T, but that’s really the only thing that I know where it is.”
“That’s cool,” he said, and wandered off, presumably to ask somebody who knew what they were talking about.
He was quickly forgotten as I saw the sights in Boston, returning early in the afternoon. I got off the T and stood at the bus stop for one of the electric buses that passed near my Waltham apartment. As the bus came, a woman with a baby struggled with folding her stroller and asked if I would hold her baby for a moment.
“Sure,” I said, as the baby slept, and I was careful to support his neck.
She got on the bus with the stroller. The bus doors closed, and the bus drove away.
So I was alone, in a strange city, with a baby, and no earthly clue as to what exactly I should do next. I was going to get on that bus, obviously, so I at least had to wait for the next one, but if it came… should I get on? Would it be better to stay put, or go somewhere like a police station?
The thought occurred to me that this was my baby now, and I was picked, not to hold the baby for a moment, but to raise it as my own.
Another bus came by, and I decided not to get on. The most reasonable course of action seemed to be to just stay put, until the baby woke up. And then figure out what to do.
As I contemplated this, another bus stopped on the other side of the street (coming the other way) and the mother jumped out in a panicked run across traffic, yelling something along the lines of “OHMYGODMYBABYTHANKGODTHATFUCKINBUSDRIVER.” My ear had not quite attuned to the Boston accent, so I’m not entirely sure. At any rate, she gave me a hug, and took her baby. When the next bus came, I carried the stroller on board and got on first.
I hadn’t even begun work yet.
At the end of my first week of work, my supervisor assigned me to “take out the trash.” There was a big plastic-over canvas on a steel frame cart filled with trash bags and loose trash; “Dan” pointed out an old-style freight elevator in the middle of the ward with a steel door that required keys to open. “You can get down to the tunnels down through there, and then it’s a bit of a maze,” he explained, as I pushed the cart into the elevator. “Gordon will show you. He’s a patient, but he’s pretty trustworthy.”
With that endorsement, “Gordon” stepped onto the elevator as “Dan” walked away — he seemed awfully familiar, and we were descending to the tunnels as I suddenly realized where I’d seen him before — he was the person who had asked me for directions to the trains.
“Gordon,” who hadn’t said anything but had been staring at me since he got on, recognized me, too. “Heeeey,” he said, “you’re that guy I asked for directions.”
“Ah, I remember you as well,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so to fill the uncomfortable silence, “did you ever find the trains?”
“What the hell do you think?” he said, becoming agitated. “Would I be back in this hospital if I’d found the goddamned trains?” He grabbed the trash cart, and started lifting it up and smashing it into the metal walls and steel gate of the elevator. The racket echoed up and down the shaft, and through the tunnels, and he was shouting now. “YOU KNEW WHERE THE TRAINS WERE, YOU JUST DIDN’T WANT TO TELL ME BECAUSE YOU KNEW I’D ESCAPED, YOU SON OF A BITCH” “Gordon punctuated this by slamming his body and the cart into the walls of the elevator as I backed into a corner, trying to be inconspicuous.
The elevator stopped. So did “Gordon.”
“Oh good, we’re here,” said Gordon cheerfully, as if nothing had happened. Seeing me frozen into my corner, he laughed and said, “just messin’ with you, man.” He started whistling and pushing the trash cart. “By the way, don’t tell anybody I escaped, they won’t let me do this any more.”
The tunnels at Metropolitan State were absolutely amazing. Under the buildings, miles and miles of tunnels criss-crossed the gigantic campus, leading to intersections, dead ends, sometimes entrances, and long-forgotten rooms and parts of buildings that hadn’t been used for years. Trash detail was an opportunity to explore that I thoroughly enjoyed — most of the time, “Gordon” and I would go together.
Most of the tunnels were long-ago painted concrete corridors lit with bare bulbs, in some cases so sparse that you could barely see the next lit one in the darkness ahead. A channel ran down the middle of the tunnel for drainage, and the floor gently sloped toward the channel. In the channel there was sometimes a trickle of water, but more often there would be some of the largest, most fearless cockroaches I’d ever seen in my life. Rather than hide, they had a tendency to stop and rear up as you walked by. It was like being threatened by a wallet with antennae.
A lot of rooms were empty and uninteresting, containing little but debris, but there was a room that contained an old-style dental chair with restraints with a few large splashes of brown stains on it; a few rooms just filled with little cages, about rabbit-sized; a room with one larger cage in the center, about human-sized; a room with a bed frame in the center of the room where the concrete walls had been chipped away nearly everywhere that a person could probably reach; a room where chains hung from the ceiling from a couple of high beams. Every new discovery was bizarre and creepy, yet stimulating. Most were probably arranged as we found them for much more mundane reasons than we could imagine.
As we explored further and further from the ward, we’d have to run in order to avoid being missing for too long — the loading dock entrance where we dumped the trash wasn’t very far away, and presumably either one of us would be missed — at least I thought so, until we got lost. So lost, in fact, that we had to leave the tunnels to get our bearings, and didn’t recognize the buildings around us — though it was an easy matter to walk back to our building by navigating by the bell tower. (We didn’t want to run, since that would probably raise questions, and possibly an alarm, so we settled for as casual-looking a power walk as we could manage.)
We slipped into the ward through the front door, then back down to the tunnels to retrieve the trash cart.
“Dan” saw us step off the elevator with the trash cart. “Where did you guys go? Did you guys get lost?”
“Gordon” answered before I could, “Yeah, nobody down there knew where the FUCKING TRAINS are.”
