Subway Characters

Yes, I may have lived in the mountains of Colorado for the last 10 years, but even the coldest day I ever experienced there doesn’t compare to the bone-chilling winter in New York City. I’m pretty sure this goes for anywhere in the northeastern United States. And Prague. And Moscow … all of those cloudy, grey, thick-air winter places. I may be a mountain girl but the humid Arctic wind around here is almost too much for me.

Apparently, it’s too much for the bums, too.

Riding the subway continues to be both the most fascinating and revolting part of my week. The other day when the high temperature was around 24 degrees (comparable, I’d say, to maybe 2 degrees in drier climates), I got on the subway from Queens to Manhattan and there was an enormous garbage bag in the middle of the floor with a passed out, dirty man slumped onto the seat behind it. Like most homeless people who ride the subway, there was a thick odor emanating from the guy like a palpable, Pigpen-like cloud. I found a seat a couple benches away, but kept glancing over at him. His head rolled slightly every time the train slowed. When it pitched to the right at a particularly abrupt stop I saw a noose-type cord around his neck and actually jumped up to get a better look, thinking he had been strangled. The cord was wrapped around the top of his garbage bag, presumably so nobody would steal it. After I stared long enough (while the surrounding passengers glanced a little at my peculiar behavior but essentially – as they do – ignored me) to decide he wasn’t actually dead, I sat down.

 I took the subway twice more that day and saw another couple of derelicts passed out. When it’s this cold, they pony up for a subway ticket and just ride the trains around the city all day.

 My GF told me that a homeless guy sat next to her on the subway the other day (reeking to high hell) and she noticed he wasn’t wearing socks. She now travels with an extra pair in her bag in case she sees him again … or someone else who needs them.

The first time I ever took the NY subway from Jamaica Station to Manhattan a black guy with no legs opened the door between train cars and crawled along the floor between the crowd asking for money. In Queens, there are some guys on some sort of probation program selling packages of Oreos and fruit snacks, kicking off with an announcement about how they’re just trying to make some honest money and work toward a better life. They follow up with the same speech in Spanish.

The other day we were headed into Manhattan on a relatively empty train and the doors between cars loudly puffed open. Who should come striding through but a dude wearing an impeccable Batman uniform. Like, he could have really been Batman. He even had a camouflaged box of supplies (Bat-shaped Chinese stars? Tranquilizer darts?) built into the costume at his chest. At first, my blood ran cold and every muscle in my body clenched up. My Catastrophic Imagination pitched forth an image of the guy whipping out fistfuls of explosives and blowing up the train. As he strutted down the aisle closer to where we were sitting, it turned out he was wearing jeans. Otherwise the outfit was spot-on. As my girlfriend shot me a look and hissed, “what the fuck are you doing?”  I managed to take this blurry photo (left) before he got off the train.

At the Queensboro Plaza subway station today the crowd on the platform quickly doubled and then quadrupled. With the razor-like wind blowing and everyone trying to turtle their heads further into their jackets, the train was horribly delayed but finally, after about 10 minutes, it rolled in as the loudspeakers announced that a water main had burst and the tracks were jeopardized. The voice apologized for the inconvenience. A guy wearing a San Francisco 49ers hat and jersey was shrieking at the front of the train as it pulled in.

“What the fuck. This is bullshit. It’s too cold for this shit. These trains are shit. The MTA is shit. This fucking shit doesn’t happen in Chicago and Detroit.”

As everyone boarded, so did he and his rant continued.

“Look at this fucking garbage everywhere. This fucking train isn’t even clean. I hate this train. I fucking can’t stand this shit.”

At least he was expressing his anger by ranting and not shooting the place up.

Also today, before the hordes piled into the train, a Hispanic man sat next to me as I was glancing through my email on my phone. His eyes kept darting in my direction and again, my inner guard dog leapt to attention. “Dude wants to steal your iPhone,” the guard dog said. A while after I put my phone back into my pocket and started flipping through a book, the guy stood up to get off the train but first handed me a single, card-shaped flyer. He didn’t have a whole stack. He didn’t give anything to anybody else. I tried to reject it. He left it on my knee and got off the train.

“Jesus will save us all,” the card said. “God is waiting.”

But the subways aren’t all bad.

The Union Station stop is awesome. There are always people busking there – either right on the platforms playing the cello or violin or harp or on the floors between platforms. Most of them are amazingly talented. There is a hip-hop group that has a boombox (straight out of 1986) blasting while they take turns break dancing while the others strike flawlessly choreographed collective poses. Also, there are hiphop dancers that bring their speakers onto the trains and do rhythmic acrobatics on the ceiling bars, slow-motion running in the air and dangling by the tops of their Converse.

It’s a circus of reality around here.