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Many in the area know Robbie Leaver. For years he and his wife Blair lived in West Shokan. He’s written screenplays with Olive-based filmmaker Larry Fesenden and shown his own short works in the Woodstock Film Festival. He’s shown art in local galleries. He’s played music at local venues…and is one of those thoughtful folks who’s also deeply funny. He now lives in Greene County…and writes.
Earlier this month he started crawling the length of Broadway in the New York City borough of Manhattan…or at least a long stretch of it from the Customs House, down in the Wall Street District, to his apartment way uptown in the 160s.
“I imagine if you don’t live in Manhattan crawling up Broadway could seem sort of self destructive. It’s true, I could get vomited on, or kicked in the face, or spit on,” he noted in his first crawling day’s blog. “An insane homeless man limps by me now with bare torn up feet, muttering to himself, stabbing at the air with his hand. He might jump on my back and try to ride me. I see construction workers who look sort of drunk on the sidewalk smoking and spitting and cat calling at passing women. What will they say when I crawl by? Then again maybe the person who is dangerous is the one who is crawling.”
He reports conversations before he starts.
“What about your wife and son, man, what do they think? Is this a cry for help? Why are you doing this?” Leaver reports a friend asking him.
“I’m crawling so you don’t have to, I tell him,” is his reply. “This is an offering. A loving gesture to my fellow man! My sense of why I’m crawling flickers in and out of sight inside my head. Can something be profound and pathetic all at once? Of all the things I could be doing with my time. This is lame. Shame. Penance. Punishment. Blah blah blah.”
Leaver’s crawling outfit’s a slightly-too-large blue pinstripe suit inherited from his father, kneepads, work boots and work gloves he uses for building stone walls up in the Catskills. He realizes, and examines in his blog, the art-world connotations of what he’s doing…but also something deeper that’s at play; something his ten year old seems to get when father and son talk before one goes off to school and the other leaves to write, and crawl, for the day.
“I haven’t crawled more than a few feet since I was a baby, back before I could walk. Back before I could walk…That’s where I’m going,” Leaver observes. “A young cop leans down into my vision and his voice is genuinely nice and concerned, ‘What are you doin?’ ‘Personal project,’ I say, like it’s nothing to worry about. I keep moving. I’ve got it under control. ‘Okay.” He says and that’s it. He disappears. I was going to say ‘private challenge’ I think that might have worked too.”
Already, as he crawls on days he can find a wing man to help him and chart his progress, he’s questioning whether he can make it the whole way he’s planned. Some — including myself — have offered to crawl with him for stretches. The world he’s seeing on all fours is fresh and different, invigorating even.
“Zucotti Park is all yellow leaves on trees strung with party lights. What do I Occupy? Maybe I’m a sign that says things are really starting to fall apart. The end is nigh. I imagine someone going home and saying when they saw a guy crawling in the rain, that’s when they knew things were really fucked,” he writes. “Some teenage kids move alongside me. They look like the kind of kids that get loud and nasty and scare people on the train. The kids ask me questions and some film with their phones and tell people on the phone about what they are seeing. I am not prepared for how gentle they are towards me…because I am below them? They seem stumped, amused and sympathetic.”
This is a novel in action, it seems, and performance art of the highest order, where it draws to the surface inner dreamlives and deep human questions.
“Someone says, ’He’s making a movie,’ writes Robbie Leaver, writer, artist, father, crawler. “A construction worker yells down, ‘What are you crawling for?!’ I yell back, ‘I’m crawling for you!’”