A bus ride through the past ...

The entity that is UFO Magazine has made the migration south and west for the winter. It began as we taped up the final boxes of magazines and books, leaving them at the door in the hopes that Fedex would soon be there to pick them up and ship them after us. Then there was the half-mile schlep, lugging our rolling suitcases behind us, to the bus stop for the ride to Port Authority, thence to JFK, thence to Long Beach, and finally to the shores of Santa Monica Bay.

For me, the entire adventure was a bus ride through the past, traveling through my own personal history and hitting almost every major spot in reverse before we winged over the coastline to Long Beach. Riding along Rt. 202 in New Jersey from the western shore of the Delaware River, we crossed Route 31 into Flemington, just up the road by a few miles from the college where I taught for many years in a former life.

We ride along 202, heading east and north into Branchburg and the house we lived in over thirty years ago. We pass Princeton, also down the road from the Somerville circle, where we also lived and our kids went to grade school, and then right through the center of New Jersey until we change busses at Port Authority for the next bus to JFK.

Manhattan has no east-west crosstown freeway the way LA has. If you want to get from the Lincoln Tunnel to the Queens Midtown Tunnel or one of the bridges out to Long Island, you either have to take the West Side Drive or one of the avenues down to the Battery, drive around the bottom edge of Manhattan Island, and make your way up the East Side along the FDR Drive until you come to one of the East River crossings, or you can take your chances cutting across one of the cross streets.

From Port Authority, the cross street of choice is 42nd Street, which cuts through the Theater District and Times Square and past Grand Central Station. For me, this is a romp through the past. When I was in the School of the Arts at Columbia, 42nd Street and the Theater District was our classroom.

And when I was in high school, coming into Manhattan to go to the old record stores on 42nd and Sixth Avenue, right across from Bryant Park, like a trip into forbidden territory. We skirt past old college watering holes on the way to Grand Central Station, where there was a huge steam pipe blast just last month, head past NYU Medical Center, and then into the Queens Midtown Tunnel and some more old neighborhoods.

This is like living your life in reverse. The driver takes us east along the Long Island Expressway, the reverse commute I used to take into Manhattan when I drove to the dorm. We get off at 108th street, right near Forest Hills High. I’m home. He takes 108th to Queens Boulevard, and I even think that if I squint my eyes in a certain way and vibrate or something, I can see myself walking out of the T-Bone Diner or out of Sid’s on Continental Avenue. The September world of 2007 may be gearing up in Santa Monica, but here, on a still-summer day in Forest Hills, it’s 1961 and the Tokens are recording The Lion Sleeps Tonight and the world is brand-spanking-new and full of hope.

Past our old apartment building, past Union Turnpike and into Kew Gardens, and we’re skirting the service road of the Van Wyck to the entrance to JFK. This is the reverse route the Pope once took when he came to New York. This is the route that Bobby Kennedy’s motorcade took when he was running for his New York Senate seat.

My father and I were following his car along with the rest of a mob of people when my father fell down. Bobby told his driver to stop, actually leaned out over the rear seat to extend a hand to help him up, looked straight at me and said, “You-ah take caeah of ya’ fatheah, OK?” The world was mine.

I didn’t know that he had been boinking Jackie and Marilyn while was trying to get his brother off the liquid meth that Dr. Feelgood had been shooting into him since before the 1960 election. And I didn’t know that he’d promised Hoover's job at the FBI to Los Angeles Police Chief Parker, and then reneged. And I, of course, couldn’t know that in just a few years he would be shot dead in Los Angeles while he was on his way to winning the Democratic presidential nomination. All these memories are there on just a few feet of Queens Boulevard in Forest Hillls.

The sight of Kennedy Airport, the old and celebrated TWA terminal, the origin of Flight 800, and we’re at Jet Blue. The present is closing in again as my PDA lights up with emails. The September issue proofs are waiting for us, History Channel is heading us into pre-production on another round of UFO Files episodes, the New Year is upon us, and the light from the afternoon September sun is casting long shadows across the runway tarmac.

It was a short, short summer indeed.

Here are some cool additional links to check out:

Richard Li

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