BART to Bar Litcrawl Caravan: Litquake’s Journey of a Thousand Stops

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BART to Bar Litcrawl Caravan: Litquake’s Journey of a Thousand Stops

Here was the theory: to make San Francisco’s annual Litcrawl, the world’s largest literary pub crawl, even more enticing, Litquake would take over a car on a BART train headed thataway and start the readings while still on board. We’d bring literature to the people, build a critical mass of Litcrawlers, and arrive in style just before Phase 1 was set to start. I was honored to be invited to participate, and spent a week writing something train-related that could be read in the short one- and two-minute intervals between the four stations I was assigned, each ending with a cliffhanger that would keep my rapt audience hanging on during the orderly, quiet egress/entry of passengers. I spent hours chopping a word here, an adjective there, practiced projecting my voice forcefully, bought bags of Italian chocolate to hand out at a key moment in the reading.

Here was the reality. At the appointed time last Saturday in downtown Berkeley, four of us readers plus our fabulous emcee Janine Kovac, along with about eight friends and family, jumped into the front car of the 4:39 BART train bound for SFO/Daly City. It was already pretty full, mostly of people who a.) were not going to Litcrawl and b.) weren’t super pysched to have literature crammed down their throats. And have you ever noticed how ear-splitting the noise is on a BART train? Shouting only gets your voice to your immediate companion. To reach the whole car, you need to bellow, maybe even scream. That’s if your audience, lurching and grabbing at overhead straps, can even see you. Two stops into your reading, the car may be so packed that you are bellowing into a man’s armpit.

Which could cover up the fact that your delicate slicing and dicing to get your reading to fit into what BART’s website claims is a two minute interval between stations is rendered completely useless when that interval is actually 1 minute 15 seconds, at which point you yell, “SHIT!” and being reading 3X as fast, dropping verbs and modifiers and eventually entire paragraphs of the story you are bellowing into the man’s armpit in a vain attempt to project to at least the middle of the train. The chocolates never leave the row they start in, because no one can move.

The BART conductor shushed us over the loudspeaker, an annoyed skateboarder took out his phone and made the world’s loudest phone call to try to drown us out, and one young man looked like he was fixin’ to die as Claire Hennessy read a hilarious essay about buying a new bra. Look at the lady on the right in this picture using both a phone and a book to pretend we’re not there. Nice try, lady. WE’RE LITCRAWLING YOU WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT.

It was chaotic, it was rushed, it terrified commuters. The first ever BART to Bar Litcrawl Caravan is in the books, and it was pure guerrilla literary awesomeness.

From left: Janine Kovac, me, Benjamin Wachs, Andrew Dugas, Claire Hennessy

At the end of the ride, a friend near the middle of the train said, “I could see your lips moving but I couldn’t hear a thing you said.” Here’s what I was yelling into the void.

Embarcadero to Montgomery

For reasons that BART’s efficiency prevent me from explaining, I once took an overnight train from Venice to Vienna, by myself.

Everyone on my college exchange program knew someone whose cousin’s brother’s roommate had succumbed to sleeping gas piped into the air vents of an Italian night train, and woken to find their backpacks gone. So I was anxious as I boarded at twilight. The families picnicking around me didn’t look like they would gas and rob me, but maybe that was the secret to their success.

Eventually an Italian man seated across from me introduced himself in English. He lacked the smoldering dark looks you’d pray for in that situation. He looked more like Rick Moranis in the “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” era. Still, I was grateful to hear English, and we made stilted small talk while announcements blared overhead in Italian. Like so many Americans abroad, I assumed that if I didn’t understand what the announcement meant, it couldn’t possibly apply to me.

But Italian Rick Moranis understood them, and when I told him where I was headed, he looked stricken. “Vienna?” he gasped. “You are in the wrong car! You must get to the front of the train!”

I hadn’t yet learned that in Europe, train carriages are randomly unhooked at various stations, so you must board not just the right train but the right car on that train.

“I will help you,” he thundered, pulling me to my feet and roughly hoisting my backpack onto my shoulders. The brakes lurched beneath us as the station drew into sight. “When it stops, RUN!” he said, positioning me in the open doorway like I was a recalcitrant paratrooper and he, a sadistic sergeant.

The train was still moving when he shoved me out the door, with a force that suggested Italian Rick Moranis worked out. I narrowly averted a faceplant, lumbered to my feet, and scuttled down the platform like a giant, LLBean-branded canvas beetle.

Seconds later I heard the rapid fall of footsteps behind me. I swiveled to see Italian Rick Moranis sprinting at me full speed, screaming, “I LOVE YOU!” That ignited the old afterburners, and I dove headfirst into the closest car, without even looking up.

Which is how I found myself in an Italian troop transport.

Montgomery to Powell

It took a moment to realize I had just jumped into a railcar full of Italian soldiers. Even if these Italian men were smoldering – smoldering in uniform, no less – I panicked. This WAS an Italian night train.

I knew what would happen. They would ravish me.

Why this Upstate New Yorker suddenly had a Southern accent, I didn’t know, but I did know this:

I would defend my womanhood.

I crept unobtrusively into an empty seat next to a soldier who looked like he might have modeled for the profile on an Italian coin.

I dasn’t capture his attention.

Only, I didn’t have to worry. Because the black darkness of night had turned each train window into a mirror, and the smoldering Italian soldiers were either preening over their reflections, or buffing their nails. This was one military force that didn’t give a rat’s ass about an American invasion.

Indignant, I grunted into my backpack again, with zero offers of intervention by the Italian army. I found an almost-empty carriage a few cars away.

Which is how I found myself riding with a Mafia gun moll.

Powell to 24th Street

My new seatmate on my overnight train trip through Italy was a Mafioso’s girlfriend, but she was no Kitten With a Whip. Wearing no makeup and her hair in messy bun, she looked like a preschool teacher whose book club only read Jane Austen. But love knows no reason, and maybe some guy nicknamed “Big Tweety” preferred sensible shoes over leopardskin bustiers.

Still, something between them went south – like, Sicily south – and Lorena was ready to unload the story. She was fleeing the country sans passport, train ticket, or money. The only thing Lorena had was a Chocolate Kinder Egg, the kind with the prize inside, and the promise of sanctuary from some nuns over the border in Austria.

Lorena’s story held so many inverted parallels to The Sound of Music, my head was about to explode. The Sound of Music was the whole reason I was studying in Austria that semester. Side note: I have actually stayed at the Von Trapp Family Lodge in Vermont so I know that the Von Trapps fled from Austria to Italy not on foot, while harmonizing in matching clothes, but via train. From the station that was literally IN THEIR FRONT YARD.

But I digress. Time passed quickly as Lorena poured out the harrowing details of her life which, again, BART’s efficiency will prevent you from hearing. Her new life, as The Nun With The Best Origin Story Ever, lay just a few kilometers ahead over the Austrian border.

That’s when we heard boot steps in the corridor. “The border police!” she gasped. “My lover, he has connections everywhere!”

Seconds later uniformed men threw open the door and demanded our passports. When she couldn’t produce hers, they took Lorena into custody. Tears streamed down her face as they pulled her from the car. At the last second, she twisted in their grip and pressed something into my hand.

I looked down to see the tiny plastic pear that was the prize from her Kinder Egg. I don’t know what it signified, but I’ve brought you some chocolate to eat while you ponder.

In the empty train car, alone at last, my eyelids felt so heavy. Italian night train sleeping gas! Or the fact that I’d been awake 23 hours.

That’s when two menacing punks wearing leather and spikes stepped into the compartment.

24th Street to 16th Street

By this point in my solo train trip across Italy I’d experienced an unsolicited declaration of love at first sight, a military invasion that took place only in my head, and a roller coaster ride of hope and desolation with a woman escaping the Italian mafia. Two Viennese guys in ceiling-grazing red and green mohawks would have to work a lot harder than just bondage gear to make me flinch.

The two punks manspread themselves across the train seats while talking loudly in German, a language I DO understand. I pulled a John Steinbeck book from my backpack and started reading. I could feel their eyes boring into me.

“Are you American?” one asked, in German.

I put the book down and sighed. “Ja,” I answered, waiting for the inevitable and justifiable anti-Reagan diatribe that was the normal follow-up to that question in Europe during the eighties.

“Ach, super cool! I love New York!” said the taller of the two. They uncorked a bottle of cheap red wine and we spent the final leg of the trip passing it around, toasting the Big Apfel as night ceded to the first light of morning. Ah, to be twenty again, cavalier about infectious disease and convinced that drinking fermented grapes counts as having fruit for breakfast.

We pulled into Vienna’s central station, exchanged phone numbers we’d never dial, and went our separate ways into The Imperial City. And while adventures awaited for me at my destination, that train trip drove home a valuable lesson: a journey of a thousand stops can be its own reward.

16th Street Station. Everybody out for Litcrawl!

Here’s Brick + Mortar, an indie duo from Toms River, NJ with “Train.” Movie buffs help me out – what’s the reference at 1:48? I’m blanking.