Posts tagged: subway sketches
Some Subway Sketches
- A soot covered sparrow hopping on the platform would’ve been the saddest thing I’ve seen if I hadn’t caved to the compulsion to look away.
- Standing on a street corner will make a Cynic out of you. Diogenes lived on one so imagine that. Riding on the subway is like that street corner amplified. The dirt is more visible and accumulated, the disregard more regardable and the humanity more inhumane. The real difference is that inside the subway car (or tucked below the streets in an underground station) there is no big open sky like on the street corner that gives the Cynic her hope. Riding the train will not make a Cynic out of you, it will only make a cynic out of you.
- Imagine the collected absent-minded ticks of all the subway riders, removed from their original owners and brought together en masse to create a new person of only ticks or, in other words, another ordinary but new person.
Looking down the nearly empty platform I see the silhouette shape of a dog, funny to see those perky, almost-bat ears stark against the white tile walls of the underground. A completely still police-dog is something unusual. Obvious kinetic energy stalled as calm potential is something unusual. I wish I could sit and talk with all service dogs. This one is almost telling me something. “An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language” or so says Martin Buber. The trouble is translation. The dog pants for a moment and it seems awfully happy but who knows. What is known, though, is what isn’t known, how even its poor master is unawares of the bigger beast they both serve, here, down in one of the bellies of the belly of it. So I walk right past the dog and start climbing stairs.
- The train crawls along the elevated and down in one of the streets running along-side and under it I can see a crowd around an SUV stopped with the motor running. One man is being dragged from the car, flailing at his assailant. I crane my neck as we pass, I even get up and move down the car to follow the receding action. I miss action between windows, but I can fill in what I miss, calculate how a punch was launched by seeing how it landed. Most people on the train put on airs of disgust at my interest, but they crane to get an extra look at the violence too.
- Sometimes you’re watching an action flick or some disaster movie and you watch all the characters who weren’t fast enough, who don’t dodge the falling debris, who don’t make it across the crevasse before the bridge collapses. Sometimes you might think “Oh c’mon. I would have been fast enough. How can these people misjudge that timing.” Ride the subway for a couple stops, watch all the people who misjudge the gap and stumble or get caught in the closing doors.
- Nearly every day I pass under and then over the East River. Taking the view from outside time, seeing all of it at once, solidifying my “self” as a smear of energy across the landscape and overscape and underscape of the city, it is two rivers of me above and below the surface that the East River threads through.
- A little girl rushes ahead of her babysitter to claim the only open seat in the car and set to the important work of picking at and analyzing a plastic bucket children get for Halloween. Absentmindedly she let’s a tune escape her, “waiiiii emmmmmmm… waiiiii…. seeee… waiii emmm seeee… waiii…. waiii emmm seee ayyyy….” It is the only and the greatest cover of YMCA ever sung.
- How do you know they’re toursits? (well, various signs, of course). But really after a time you see it straight off, in the body language of exiting and entering and reading the name of every station to themselves along the way.
- Here are some messages conveyd to me from the subway: Sleep is not a perk. Five nights a week. Spies don’t get pink slips. Please. Escape your commute. Do not lean, do not hold. Please. We’re in. We dare you to scream. Like never before.
The dreaded Crawl. Everyone knows The Crawl that some trains must pass through. Sometimes you know it so well, you’re so used to where it likes to lurk, that you see it coming before you’re even there. And The Crawl is a place. In The Crawl time has no meaning, motion removes itself inconspicuously and time becomes both too fast and too slow. So without time to locate it, it can’t be an event, but a place. In the sub-municipality of The Crawl headaches and yawns are born. There are certain laws in Crawl, strictly enforced: not even the happy should be smiling, physically expressed exasperation is required from at least one passenger every 3 minutes, every instance of The Crawl must feel longer than the last. From inside The Crawl the rest of the world, in its opulence of freedom and unfelt time, is the enemy, and you would die for the municipality of the Crawl while cursing it simply fueled by hatred. The Crawl is the claustrophobia of movement. The Crawl insists that the inner-ear is connected to the breathing passageways, insists on motion and not enclosure, and insists on the fact that when the Situationists said “Live without dead time,” they were a bunch of assholes for assuming it was up to the self. The Crawl is the stick pushing up along the back of your throat and you live with it or you do not live in this city.
- The Not-In-Service Train… sure it’s in service. I see it with my own two eyes, don’t I? Do I? Is the Not-In-Service Train a mirage train? There is a moment where it is a mirage, when you see the lights coming, sheening off rails form a distance andyour Pavlovian perk-up for your arriving chariot, the moment right before the moment of let down, even bordering on these moments (the borderlands we label “Disbelief”). After all this the Not-In-Service train *is* in service of disappointment. The Trash Train is worse, a stinking insult to expectations, much less hopes. The Money Train is not so bad, though, since we all like to dream big. This is also, in its own way, a mirage train.
- Stopped at Hoyt Street I look at the sign just outside the car window, looks close enough to reach out and grab its griminess. The Interborough Rapid Transit Company did its best to instruct in a spur serif font, but how many poor souls failed to heed the prohibition of crossing the track just because the sign wasn’t in Helvetica?
- Don’t touch the third rail. So important a caveat that we’ve colloqusalised it. That’s a “third rail issue,” political suicide. Don’t you touch that third rail, cuz that’s where all the power is. Don’t you touch that third rail, yeah, but third counting from where?
I was told once that if you are waiting for a train, an interesting way to pass the time is to look for a battery, down on the tracks. You’ll find one every time. Don’t believe me? try it yourself. Or you do belive me and are waiting for me to tell you how it plays out. The first two times you’ll think it’s funny. The third time you’ll think it’s uncanny, but not in a way that really does the word “uncanny” justice. The fourth and fifth times you’ll think it’s funny, but in a much more sinishter way than those first few times. The sixth time you’ll realize that you’re on one of the platforms you’ve checked before, but this time you’ve found an entirely different battery, the sinister feeling will return combined with a nausea you’ll have for the duration of the following train ride. On the seventh time you’ll realize they’ve all been Duracell batteries and on the eighth time, seeing another Duracell, you’ll start to wonder if someone is just fucking with you. When the ninth time comes you’ll see an Energizer and for a moment you’ll think you were right that someone was fucking with you, but how would they know what you were thinking and were you *really* sure last time that they’d all been Duracells. It will be the only Energizer you’ll see until the 47th time you check for batteries. By the 140th time you find a battery laying along the tracks you’ll long since have given up hope for humanity and you will have replaced it with the hope that the batteries will never let you down. They won’t. After the 2,000th time you can finally stop looking, after that the batteries will come and find you. Happy hunting!
- I’m thinking about the slow decay of my eyesight over the years as I peer down a subway tunnel, leaning out over the platform, craning my neck to see which train is coming. V? Is that a V? I should stop leaning out over the edge, but I can’t fucking see. I step back, it’ll be here soon enough, it’s an M… oh right, the M replaced the V. How long will I keep seeing V instead of M and keep hearing trains that aren’t coming and keep misdressing for the weather on the platforms and keep relying on the faculties of a younger me and keep losing my eyesight but all these things but still surviving?
- “Good morning, Brooklyn, Good Morning, this is what we do in Brooklyn.” The train operator knows. How do I know he knows. Because he does. Underground he knows if it’s cold, if it’s raining, if you need to pull up your socks, if you need to transfer to the express, what’s on the front page of AM, how long your ride will be, how long your ride has been, what you did last night, how heavy the hangover is, what stations you need to hustle through, the election results, the sporting results, what stops you’ll fall asleep at, and whether your coffee is strong enough. He knows every station agent along his route and he doesn’t have to leave his car to know them. It’s his omniscience of mindful action. “4 train across the platform. Get to steppin. Don’t run, just walk fast.” The 4 train comes to a stop shortly before the 3 does. The doors open. Everyone does exactly as foretold by the train operator.
“Late Traveler” by Martin Lewis, 1949 (via thisismyblognotyours)
Some Subway Sketches
- Trying to hide a stuttering walk that’s filled with physical exhaustion, at the end of my night and at the end of the block I can see the green orb, the subway station’s street-level signage. Always happy to see how the station light somehow climbs out from inside the stairway, lays itself out across dark pavement like a welcome mat. I know once I am down those stairs I am sliding through those turnstiles and once I am through those turnstiles I am on that platform and once I’m waiting on the platform I am on the train home and once I am on the train the rumbling click is easing me into rest and so I know once I enter that light at the top of the stairs I am back to the subway and just another part of the machinery, again.
- Waiting at the mouth of the 7th Avenue station where wind curls through from its Flatbush Avenue path. The wind’s just enough to make me think I’m cold and warm subway air blasts up the stairs periodically to make me think otherwise. Watching Brooklyn stroll by. You all look pretty good from right here in this corner of yourself, Brooklyn, flaunting new seasonal swagger through style, new hats, new high socks, new weapons, new dogs, new jackets, new news. It’s all enough enough to keep me from myself in that good good way, not keeping court on what sorts enter or exit or simply pass by that warmer-than-here mouth to the subway.
- Well here’s a fellow eating pistachios and SONofabitch he’s just dropping the shells (and an occasional nut) on the floor of the car. sonofabitch There goes another and it’s not like I don’t eat on the train myself but sonofabitch another shell on the ground makes me think about how this is why rats run the show, why we can’t have nice things sonofabitch there he goes again. I don’t think it should be against the rules because I hate it when they treat us like children, but I hate it when we act like children too sonofabitch he just doesn’t seem to want to stop until there’s a mountain of shells at his feet. When he gets up he shuffles through the shells, he couldn’t do a better job of spreading the mess if he tried. He tosses the bag, still w/ a couple pistachios inside, on the seat he was on before walking off sonofaBITCH.
- Click… am I hearing that? …. click. Something rattling in the train? Whatever Click… Why can’t I ignore click this and just read my book? Because this book is click fucking hard to click understand. And this noise, there’s no rhythm to it keeping click me from cutting through and concentrating. Wait, I think I recognize that sound click but can it really be there’s click a motherfucker on this train clipping his fingernails? ….Click… I put down my book and take a look around.
- A blind man deftly navigates through a semi-crowded car at the tail end of rush hour. Some commuters slouch, dive into their books and digital devices, my hands dig into empty pockets. The blind man’s solicitation is repeated and punctuated by a rattle of change in his cup.
“August seventeemf, nineteen and ninetyseven. Can ya help?”
Looking for that lost day or maybe some of the intervening 13 years.
“August seventeemf, nineteen and ninetyseven. Can ya help?”
A mantra of the day he lost his sight.
