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Posts tagged: subway sketches
Some Subway Sketches
- Next time you’re rattling over the Manhattan Bridge and the weather’s that clear calm cool sort that makes the East River uniform in that manner of what’s non-uniform yet vast, take a look out over that span and that surface you’re crossing and you’ll see that it’s walking on water that’s a perfectly natural accomplishment and the building of something like the Brooklyn Bridge that’s the miracle of a fanatic.
- Over the span of riding along the Manhattan Bridge a man’s phone rings five times. Five separate calls. He never answers. I worry something has happened out in the world or that there’s some budding or ongoing catastrophe in his life. It has to be something important, no one’s that popular.
Photo of the Williamsburg Bridge by Several Seconds on Flickr.
Some Subway Sketches
- Three A-trains-in-the-direction-I’m-not-heading later and I begin to wonder how much time I’ve dumped into this platform. Hell is hot, but purgatory is pretty humid.
- Four women headed back home, deep into Brooklyn on the Fulton Avenue Express. Three of them keep bags on their laps, one keeps her hands folded there instead. A different grouping of three rest their eyes (weary from the last Summer Monday of hard work, I imagine), one reads from her phone. A different set of three are wearing shoes or boots, the fourth one baring her toes in sandals. Three of them are middle-aged, only one is younger than me. I watch them all stand up at once, like a unit, and get off at Euclid.
- A large man fidgets in his seat. “Large” doesn’t really cut it here. Frighteningly large, intimidatingly, bafflingly. I can handle myself in a fight situation, it stupidly makes me more comfortable among the city public, but there are some mythical creatures among us, like this man who could overwhelm by means of mass, a man too much to behold, much less manhandle. Fidgeting is unbecoming on a size like that, but he keeps doing it anyway. He also keeps glancing to the back of the car, behind me. I try to use the reflection in the window to see the angles behind my ears, see what might be making him so nervous. The reflection’s no use so I look over my shoulder and still nothing, the usual variety of post-10-pm-tired B Train riders. As the train pulls away from Broadway-Lafayette the big man stands, now shuffling from foot to foot, jingling his change, and giving even more intent stares to the back of the car. He was making me nervous before, but now I notice his own nervousness, like his stares to the back of the car are not out of curiousity, but born of fear. My own nervousness compounds with this. What am I missing? No one back there is even making a sound. The train stops at Grand Street and the man moves to the door but without urgency, still inspecting the car, waiting for something to happen. And I’m waiting too, for him to make some sort of drastic move that no one will be able to stop, waiting for him to break from his pause at the open door as the moment he’s been waiting for develops. He just stands there and stares and at the last instant exits the car, choosing to wait on the platform for the next train to come through. Something in this car didn’t agree with him. What did he see back there? The train is traveling now over the Manhattan Bridge, a ride that always feels lengthy and loping, as much as a train ride can. It’s one of those extraordinarily long stretches in the system, especially when you feel the aspect of being stuck, suspended. So who or what am I trapped in this car with as we head over the bridge? What in the hell am I in for?
Some Subway Sketches
- We all got caught in the rain, everyone I can take stock of in this car. It’s the rare instance, even for New York, where one can be certain, down to the faces, that there are about 30 souls sharing the same momentary misery, in this case soggy and over air conditioned. Some make it halfway through a displeasing shoe squishing before stopping themselves. Some keep their soaked items away from themselves as if it could possibly make them more damp. My favorite is a woman making her way through a sopping New York Times. An unwieldy publication to read on the train even when dry, now she’s carefully separating stuck sections and pages and trying to avoid all the inevitable silent tears in the runny newsprint. I’m trying to decide if the scene is sad or intrepid or some sort of parable.
- During the rush hour (and why do we pretend that it’s just one hour? Maybe the pretense of Happy Hour being just one hour makes up for it?) the train pulls into any number of platforms crammed with bodies. The worst is Wall Street with its too-small-to-accommodate platform and burdened-by-business-attire crowd. It’s bad that despite the heat they’re still shoulder to shoulder or even shoulder in shoulder to the point that I have no doubt some of them are trading sweat with each other. It’s worse, though, that they suffer and wait for the train to stop with pleading eyes and broken postures and not one of them has bothered to take off their shirt so they can feel free to stand up straight.
- A smoking jacket, swimming trunks, and sandals. No bag. What party or locker room are you coming from?
Some Subway Sketches
- The smell, the realization I’ve entered an entirely empty car, and a new obnoxious ad campaign for deoderant declaring “WARNING. Entering B.O. Zone”; they all hit me at once. Next is the closing of doors behind me, the realization I’m not alone in the car, the moan of a homeless man as he rolls over in his seats and (it seems ) begins to masturbate. I wonder at the feasibility of kicking out one of the car’s windows, not for ventilation of air as much as frustration at everyone and everything. Except, actually, my fellow traveler until the next stop.
- A poet who claims the name Divine reads some aspirational crap. When he asks the car for money I think that his verse was so terrible, sounded so much like it came from a self-help book, that despite his attempted means of a living I have nothing for him. And besides, with a name like Divine he should be fine anyway, right?
Some Subway Sketches
- When a train sits in the station with its doors closed it is palpably awkward. People stand and stare at the doors waiting for them to open in a way that would make Pavlov proud but nothing happens like the mocking silence after a burst of polite conversation between two forced acquaintances. I was starting up the stairs away from a scene like this when I heard a disembodied voice attempt to sound authoritative, “Open the doors!” I turned and watched the train remain immobile while a woman pressed a hand against the closed door, like it might be the key. I kept seeing the train jerk forward, taking her hand with it. But the train didn’t move. Bouncing between the tricks of my imagination and the evidence of my senses it created the perceived effect of a train rocking back and forth, indecisive about coming and going. Not too far from the truth since there stood all those people earnestly confused by the disruption of the norm, no one inside our outside the train having figured out yet whether it was coming, going, or staying forever. Something something Deleuzian difference, went my brain.
- Street level heat is bad, but I go down a level to swipe my card and it’s worse. Then down another level to where the Manhattan bound trains stop. Then down another level to head deeper into Brooklyn. Here lungs feel heavy with humidity and walking down the platform is better described as plodding. Plodding down to where the back of the train will be when it comes rolling in, the 3 train does come rolling in, pushing ahead of itself rolling waves of air. Disgusting summer air, tunnel air, nowhere else to go but forced in (or out. depending.) and directly at me, straight into my face. A new form of death and torture occurs to me, suffocation by means of air, not its lack. When the train doors open I step into a nearly empty and ice cold car, but I still feel heavy and I wonder if breathing is still difficult for other reasons. Something something Deleuzian difference, goes my brain.
Some Subway Sketches
- From the elevated tracks headed out to Rockaway I always notice the cemetery. I used to think it was two cemeteries or one large one that snaked around the area of trees that are pretty thick, even for a residential portion of the city. But one day riding the train I noticed that there were grave stones even between the trees, making it three separate sections of one odd cemetery. Where the trees and gravestones mingle must be the oldest part of graveyard, grown over with time. I have visions of favorable pasts and futures. I see a past where what we made to represent ourselves was perfectly imperfect, rough hewn, and lasting, like nature itself. Or that in the future we can rely on nature reclaiming even our works that outlive us, while also enveloping our hubristic evidence of having been here. The erosion of all our markers slowed but still inevitable. Everyone’s a winner.
- At the Howard Beach station the weather inhabits the track inhabits you. On a Winter evening the wind whips mercilessly through and around you, feels like cold iron wrapping your joints and around your neck. In the full-on Summer you can taste the heated metal floating into the bridge of your nose, sun bounds from rocks and rails onto your shoulders like a yoke. Most people take shelter in the enclosed area provided by the AirTrain to JFK, you can see your train coming from at least a quarter-mile away up there, safe and no sound.
Some Subway Sketches
- A youngster — I’ve decided anyone who is clearly beginning college is a “youngster”, the level of clarity being comfort for passing judgment — with an impressive motormouth sways in front of her friend. But the efficiency of compressed words is wasted on excessive “wows”, “fucks”, “likes”, “ums”, “shits”, and “bitches”. She would impress with her skill and hide her verbal failure with some simple subway etiquette but instead she’s made herself loud enough that if the words don’t reach you the first time, they certainly assault after bouncing off the walls of the car.
- A mountain of a man slumbers in a seat near the doors and I can’t help staring, cataloging all the things that make his rest seem important and justified: beat up bags, slouched shoulders, a touch of grey in his beard, shoes one wears when one expects to be standing for a long time. But it’s not just the sight so much as the clockwork that’s captivating. Three snores between each stop. Wakes up and checks the signage every time the doors slide open. I expect most subway sleepers to sit up with alarm and scramble out the door, knocking into innocents, but everything about this man implies cool deliberation, even in a moment of vulnerability. Just above his hands (scary in their size, but gently folded into each other) is some text stretched and distorted across his protruding belly, “This Is The Take Over”
Some Subway Sketches
- The dangers of falling asleep on the train are apparent enough that it feels silly to list them. Even in the middle of the day falling asleep on the train seems like the ultimate state of vulnerability, alone and exposed to a rotating group of all sorts from places you wouldn’t usually go. I know people who have fallen asleep on the train, ridden it back and forth unconscious. Most of them wind up lost or robbed or both, but everyone’s always relieved to have come out of that sleep alive. These episodes are reserved, though, for the sorts of people who have them as a matter of course. The ones who don’t surprise with their surprising stories about where (or rather “How”) they wound up. And that’s just the thing, not “Where does the train go” but rather “Where do you wind up” after you’ve fallen asleep on the train that causes the anxiety.
- You can’t help falling asleep on the train from time to time and when it overcomes you it’s awfully nice. There’s usually a bit of magic to it, the train jerks just right to wake you up before your stop. There’s the brief moment of embarrassment that fades when you feel the boost from the brief rest you’ve gotten and the feeling that someone was watching over you (rather than casing you). Even missing your stop doesn’t seem so bad, maybe it’ll happen while riding the 6 downtown leaving just your lone, prone body in the car to go the circuit around the closed and quiet City Hall station. You won’t even have to switch platforms after waking up and realizing you’ve missed your stop.
- There are times (and they always seem to come early in the morning or after a workout or other moments when you’re just exhausted and susceptible, these times) when you’ll enter a car and the lights will be broken or dimmed to the point of making reading your book impossible so you’ll rest it on your lap and relax your posture (no need for the forward lean into the book you can’t read) and you’ll feel the weight of yourself settling with the steady click-clack of the tracks which seems to have been engineered for exactly this purpose and the fear of losing control will be just enough to keep your senses but not enough to really keep your eyes open between stops and the jerk of the train in certain turns will remind you that you aren’t working hard enough to protect yourself but that seductive metronome of the train in sound and slight vibration will make you want to smile (it’s almost too disgusting to think of such a thing) at the idea of release and when your eyes close they roll back into your head and you don’t even notice that nice reflex until the moment of opening them again comes and forcing them back into place and it feels legitimately painful not least of all because holding on is just so hard and maybe just a couple stops, but if it’s just a couple stops can’t you just be vigilant enough to make it, fuck. Just thinking about it makes me sick.
Some Subway Sketches
- How does a sparrow wind up down in the subway? How confused does it have to be finding itself flitting between crusted steel beams? Little bird, please leave, you’re making me sad. A pigeon accidentally winding up down the subway I can somehow understand. Perhaps because of how easily pigeons are connected, in the city mind, to rats. And as for rats, it’ll take just one ambitious one (which is not unusual) to angle on catching this poor little bird.
- An after-midnight 2 train starts pulling into Borough Hall at a snails pace. Transit construction workers sit on the benches in the station, all of them leaning one way or another with exhaustion. Between the benches are massive pieces of machinery and metal, each piece big enough to frustrate five or six men in attempt to lift it. It is baffling how they could have made their way onto the platform at all. The train comes to a stop so gently that it doesn’t have to create a screech, making the closing chime of the doors stand out as an offending sound. The train departs just as slowly as it pulled in as if making sure to move as quietly as possible and not wake the workers who happen to be sleeping between shifts.
Some Subway Sketches
- At Grand Street, the middle-aged and elderly Chinese pour through the door in a solid stream, but instantly break up and bee-line for every open seat once they’re in the car. At the same time they don’t mind standing at all, they seem to mind less than most. What always strikes me is the proliferation of orange plastic bags with their entrance. They carry these bags on and I don’t have a clue what’s inside, but I imagine despite the nearly uniform outsides the insides are pretty varied, something like food, or decorative items, or other spoils of the day from working and socializing in the streets and parks of Chinatown. What will happen in a couple years when this generation bows out, will the orange-ish bags go with them? Will the well manicured younger generation take up the mantle, assuming orange-ish bags as their duty at some designated age?
- After a day off from work that resulted in a trip to old haunts and places of living in deepest Brooklyn, a day-laborer begins leaning bit by bit into my right shoulder as he nods off in his seat on the M train. I don’t mind too much when people briefly fall asleep on me on the subway and I somewhat like the smells of paint and drywall that I’m starting to notice, but it disturbs me how, against the laws of physics, he feels so light against my shoulder in comparison to the young boy who fell asleep on me on the F train several nights earlier.
