The Subway

This essay is a rollercoaster of sights and sounds inspired by many morning's commute on the NYC Subway.

The Subway

New York is an empire of a city, divided only by borough "- Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx; and Long Island. What unites them all is a native utility to the New York experience: The Subway.       

Pride of the MTA, the subway is the limbic system of the city. An electric place, thick with ambition and emotion, alive with breakdancers and breakdowns in progress. It is The Circus that never sleeps. 

Today the walk to the subway station is six blocks in Tuesday morning’s freshly broken dawn. Brooklyn is all sleepy brick buildings this early; not even the bodega is open, yet. Making the corner at Nostrand Ave, a cold wind stings my face, rolling food-wrapper tumbleweeds down the block. Ahead, the ten foot Globe Lamp marks the station like a giant green push-pin dropped from the heavens. 

Slipping down the marred steps, I find the same platform: a living relic of cement wallowing in dilapidated luster. I can’t help but wonder at the grandeur of it all "Did Walt Whitman wait on this platform? Did Henry Miller read the newspaper on this spot? Maybe Rita Hayworth or Babe Ruth? Like others, throughout the city, this platform smells invariably of hot garbage in the summer time and pneumonia in the winter. It’s not a comfortable place, by any means, but it is one of the most communal places that exists in the city. In every car, if only briefly, passengers all subscribes to the one ratified goal: Get there. And, hurry up about it.

This morning the platform is empty and quiet, which is rare. Against the tiled back wall, I take notice of the iconic subway map. It is everywhere, although I never notice it these days. 

A frenetic tangle of red, blue, green, yellow and orange; stares back at me from behind a deeply scratched plastic cover.     

***

My first day on the commute, waiting on this same platform, I had studied this same map so intently, tracing my rout with the tip of my finger, checking and double checking the name of my stops printed in microscopic font. It was a little after 6am, that morning, when the first train blew through the station" didn’t even slow down. Just gave us the horn. And then nothing; no trains until almost seven o’clock. So, I was pretty sure that I would to be late for the very first day of my new job. 

By ten after seven, the platform was packed" at least eight deep the entire length. Soured faces jostled for a spot closer to the platform’s lip with no regard for the textured yellow stripe, warning of the gap. They fought their way up in turn, to stare into the yawning abyss, urging a light down the tunnel with quiet little profanities.   

Eventually, the one-eyed 2 train rumbled into the station. The doors slid open with the same easy “bing-bong” that I’d heard on TV all of my life, and forced a smile into my heart. The wall of people surged forward, two big steps, and then bottlenecked to a shuffle at the gaping mouth of the double doors. They pushed and shoved their way into an impossibly packed car, in muted irritation. The scrum was intense. In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to elbow past a hunched old lady in a plaid raincoat; and that was it. I just didn’t make the cut. My heart sank, as I watched the train pull away. A toothless man on crutches laughed, showing me his raw gums and shaking his head, as I joined the feeble ranks of those left behind, to wait again. 

Our dejected silence was only broken by the shrill squeak of an obese sewer-rat, galloping for the edge of the platform with the better half of a cinnamon raisin bagel in his grubby little snout. I didn’t flinch, but my expression must have given me away. This distinguished old Caribbean woman, in her salmon colored overcoat, suspiciously looked me up and down fingering the stained-glass elephant broach pinned to her lapel.   

“Look,” she said, “just don’t go make a whole lot of eye contact… less you need some more crazy in your day.”  Squinting into my eyes, she seemed to choose her next words carefully. “Just mind your own business… and don’t do nothing stupid,” that got a healthy chuckle from the group. “and just keep going; okay baby? You’ll be fine.” The deep lines in her face pulled to a smile that warmed my heart, as she tentatively patted me on the shoulder, and asked “Where’re you from, anyway?” I didn’t smell like a New Yorker yet. 

When the next train came along, that first day, I did my duty. I pushed my way on. Mashed into the backs of landlocked commuters who moaned indiscriminately, gasping for any fresh air at all. When the doors closed I could have picked up my feet" suspended by friction alone. I was forty minuets late to work that first day and I had sweat completely through my shirt, but I made it.

I am lamenting a pride that I haven’t felt in years, when the electric whir of the locomotive yanks me back to today’s reality. My mangled reflection stares back at me from the scratched plastic map cover. Rusty steel wheels grind against the track" screeching here and there, as the snub nosed 2 Train snakes into the station and jerks to a stop in front of me. 

***

Before, I would have been happy just to know that I was on the right train, headed in the right direction. But now, the implacable tenacity of the straphanger has calloused my soft heart. Now, I’m nonchalant as I surf the ebbing car, coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other.   

***

“Stand clear of the closing doors, please.” 

Today The 2 Train is crowded. A track-fire somewhere up the line probably, but I don’t bother to pull my earbuds for the distorted announcement. I find most of a seat next to a matronly Ukrainian woman in a flowered silk headscarf. A few stops in, it strikes me how comfortable I have become with the death of personal space, as the nodding babushka, wilts, slumbering, to my shoulder. She snores there contently, for the next three stops. Until, I get up to offer my seat to a very pregnant woman, who, ends up, is not with child at all. In a huff, she plops down into the seat, anyway. Today I am proud to call myself a straphanger, even if no one cares but me" Somehow its better that way.

The stink-eye radiating from the deceptively portly woman in my old seat, has now evolved into a vindictive snarl. So, at the next stop, I jaunt back to the previous car" striding as casually as possible, and just make the closing doors. This new car is only half-full, but everyone is jammed into the back; most standing in wrapped attention. In the front of this car sits a rosy-cheeked young woman happily reading The Daily News. She sways to her ear buds grinning brightly " not an apparent care in the world. 

The spectacle here is the orange plastic subway seat, directly to her left, which is dangerously full of what appears to be, either Mt. Dew or urine. The situation is only amplified by the homeless gent passed-out directly across from her. He is sprawled face-down, across four seats, with half of his a*s hanging out, and one hand tucked down the back of his stained grey trousers. Neither of these sights, individually, would have raised a collective eyebrow, usually. Anything short of running through the car with one’s hair on fire is fervently ignored on principal alone. But today, no one can seem to fathom why she doesn’t get up and move" Is she slow? Maybe she doesn’t see it? Is that possible? I can see this odd train of thought all over the faces that  join our car’s silent democracy. It is way too early for this sort of nonsense. So, I decide to transfer at Borough Hall and gamble on the Yellow line.

The R Train, on the yellow line, is not an express, but some mornings it can be faster. It’s a gamble really, but everything is luck in transit. If it was raining I would stick it out on the Red line because the stations connect in an underground maze like some intricate boiler room. But, today it’s bright and chilly, and I want to feel November’s sun on my face one last time before the trek below the watery expanse of the Hudson River to New Jersey. Wouldn’t mind stopping for a bagel either. 

Borough Hall is the last stop in Brooklyn before crossing the East River into Manhattan. It is also one of the original stations" 1908, when the subway was still a luxury. I take the steps, two at a time, up to the platform to wait. At the top of the steps an adorned mosaic anoints the station in glossy white tiles set against a flat field of green. Terra cotta bas, in high relief shows vaudeville’s splendor in repose. A chipped green cornice outlines the stations’s anonymous history and a golden age seems to wink at me from behind missing tiles everywhere. Before I can take it all in, the gun-metal R train jerks into the dimly lit station.      

This time I get a seat right off. Across from me, a familiar balding man sleeps soundly in his usual seat next to the doors. He doesn’t stir when the stops are announced. His chin never droops to his chest. He sleeps confidently. Probably from the far edge of Queens " how else could he get that seat so often? 

Hurling down the line, far below sewers grates and crowded city sidewalks, I am estimating just how many hours a year I can bank slumbering in transit. At the next stop, a teenaged Korean girl boards the train and wanders the length of the car looking for just the right seat. As she passes, this girl snaps a covert picture of sleeping beauty with a bedazzled white iPhone. I watch as she examines the picture excitedly from her seat, glancing back to confirm the stolen image against the real thing. She giggles when she sees me take notice, but she isn’t embarrassed. She must have albums full of unconscious commuters, succumbed to sleep en rout. What dose she do with them all, I wonder as the PA garbles the name of my stop: Cortland Street.  

The walk through Lower Manhattan in the fall is cathartic. Under a sky full of rusty-orange foliage, I watch people rush around" franticly waving after cabs or pushing crowds down the block, as they rush to engagements large and small. From the sidewalk an ensemble of jackhammers harmonize with the chorus of anxious cab horns. This symphony is refracted off of craggy cobblestone streets while a mangey storm of pigeons flap off, cooing loudly, overhead. A symphony of chaos envelopes my senses and I want to close my eyes and experience it all. Checking my watch, I just don’t have the time. 

           To shave a few minutes, I cut through the courtyard at The Trinity Church, weaving my way through a glut of historical tourists eagerly snapping away. This courtyard is home to the oldest graveyard in Manhattan. Incarnations of the original five points lay here in repose. The grass covered mounds are a vibrant green and the headstones stoically record the consequence of a history forgotten. The church itself, now a practicing tourist attraction, looks like Gregorian chant might spontaneously erupt at any moment.  All around this hallowed ground, the rat-race rolls along with no regret and little regard. 

The thought that these precious few moments won in transit each morning will never accrue, tamps down my spirit, and it dawns on me that we all rush to the end of our own little races, one day at a time. 

The wind is biting in gusts, and people on the street bristle to it, tugging at fashionable scarfs and turned up collars. Waiting at the crosswalk, the mouth of the statin at the World Trade Center looms grey and heavy above the choppy roar of the Hudson River beyond. Next to me, a wall of TVs in the widow of an appliance store silently glare a kaleidoscope of some innocuous toothpaste commercial. For a second I am caught by a shard of memory"the day that The New York Giants won the Super Bowl. Just off the train, I find mismatched groups of fans, still clustered in front of these same windows. I watch as strangers embrace and cheer awkwardly with a transcendent abandon. The blast of an irate cab horn pulls me back to reality a second before the walk sign changes, and we're off. 

Crossing the street, I fall right in-step with a very small and tough looking old woman, bouncing along in a clear plastic rain-bonnet and black overcoat; umbrella ready at her side. She strides in impossibly small, black, gum-soled orthopedic shoes, at the unyielding pitch of a woman unintimidated. The mob slows, shouldering in close, while the people far ahead swipe their fare at the turnstiles. When the oafish man in front of her fumbles in his wallet, this little old woman jabs him in the ankle with the tinned tip of her umbrella. When he turns over his right shoulder for any explanation, she dives around him on the left; weaving her way through the thick of the crowd. Now that is a New Yorker. I think, and wedge into the shuffling queue, wobbling toward the bank of turnstiles. 

Now, just to be clear, this is the in-between-time " After The Towers, but before the memorials and museum. Years before the Freedom Towers will break ground. The first thing rebuilt is the Station at the World Trade Center because commerce must go on.

This temporary station has persisted now for years. Out front, street venders peddle counterfeit chunks of souvenir-rubble and patriotic chat-skies to confused tourists, seven days a week. There is really nothing here for them to see yet. But, they come anyway. They hang from the chain link fence and stare at the gaping whole in the ground spanning a few city blocks.

Inside the station at the Word Trade Center is on the scale of magnanimous. Even in a city of epic edifice, this grotto of polished cement is imposing. The herds tromp down flight after flight of narrow steps at a reckless pace, balanced on impossibly high heels and oxfords worn by the necessities of life. 

    Below, in this subterranean cathedralIndustrial, florescent lights hang a mile overhead, tinting life an unnatural hue as I watch steam rises from the bare heads of a few commuters destined for Jersey City and beyond. 

The tracks are empty, and I can see out past the platform, to the void where the base of The Towers once stood. A mounded acer of rubble is rifled to life by the trailing echo of heavy machinery. I am transfixed on a flag, planted by the crew, that flaps violently above the site. It strikes me that each day I wait here so impatiently, in memorial of so many that I will never know. 

Watching my own breath twist in the cold damp air, the Path Train lurches into the station.

Hurling along, deep below the Hudson River, the pulsing “click-clack, click-clack” of the railcars over heavy wooden tines, swoons to the strobe of artificial light, roaring between columns of rusty-steel girders. 

Hunched-over in a seat in the corner, sits a distraught ginger-headed girl with heavy mascara streaking down her cheeks. I notice her two-seconds before the lights in the car flicker, and then go out" as they often do. Everything is black and still until, languid and smoldering notes contrive to form an aching melody. She sings with the whole of her heart, as if her life depended upon it. When the lights flicker back on, I can see big tears drops rolling from her swollen eyes, lids shut tight. Her voice boils to a voluptuous crescendo and then falls silent.   

The high note is still ringing in my ears when my stop is announced. Checking my watch, I should just make it to work in time. Riding the elevator up to the thirty-fourth floor I am haunted by reverberation of her loneliness. My reward for running the gauntlet, one more time? I get to keep my job, one more day.     

Author's Note

This is a draft, so any constructive grammatical advise would be appreciated. Also I am new to the genre of the essay so any insights into structure or flow would be great too.