The once-glorious, still scrappy NY Press has an alternately amusing/disturbing essay about a certain family’s predisposition to suicide–no, not the Hemingways or the Plaths–and how the author often sought out trains to expedite her trip to the sweet hereafter.
Dorri Olds claimed the Press‘s Summer Non-Fiction contest prize with her essay, “9 Lives for a Weeble.”
She writes:
Later that same year, 1973, I stepped on the third rail of the Long Island Railroad and nothing happened. So I stepped on it again. I was under the impression it would electrocute me instantly.
“Hey, kid,” a station worker called out. “You could get yourself killed.”
Next day in science, I asked a classmate, “Hypothetically, what would happen if I accidentally stepped on the third rail?” “Nothing,” he said. “You’re wearing sneakers. Rubber can’t conduct electricity.”
At 15, in 1975, I ran away via the same train rails, back to my native Manhattan. I’d absconded to escape despair and shake off suburbia. In Greenwich Village I found my Mardi Gras and became a street urchin. One day, at West Fourth Street, I jumped a turnstile. While I fled from a cop, the subway tunnel summoned me. The iron rails promised an instant solution to loneliness—death. I looked back to see who or what I was running from. Then, magnetically pulled toward my dead heroes, Jimi and Janis, I jumped down onto the subway tracks in front of an oncoming train. Steel hurtled at me with the promise of ram-ming, crunching, killing. At the speed of that E train, it hit me: I could be maimed—and live. Existence would be far worse as an amputee.
I squeezed tight against the wall. Blast of horn and screech of metal blew out my eardrums while manic swirls of grit choked off my breath. After the train passed, I followed the rails to the nearest exit and kept running.