Subwayland (19 page)

“I will,” she added, proudly, “put up with a back on my hand if I have to.” (She and Ms. Melendez are both short and point out that short people hate pole-huggers even more because the horizontal handrails are usually too high for short people to hang onto comfortably.)

Tom Range, a retired accountant who rode the crowded E and F lines for 30 years and won many battles with pole-huggers, said he relied on a briefcase corner in the kidney area, followed by a very sincere-sounding apology.

Raymond Tatti, a computer network engineer, favors a less direct method. He will reach up and put his hand on the pole above the offender's head, menacingly. Others counsel reaching for the midsection if the hugger is facing you, but this should be used with extreme caution because some huggers may be looking for exactly this sort of interaction.

As you might expect, pole-huggers and leaners tend not to be the types of people who like to explain themselves. Last Friday morning, on an R train in downtown Brooklyn, a tall, pudgy man was leaned against a pole, touching it from his rear end to the top of his head. He was pursued out of the train, where he declined an interview. “I am not interested in participating,” he said nervously, putting his headphones back on.

Aldo Medina, at the 23rd Street station on the No. 3 line, said that many huggers and leaners are simply misunderstood. Mr. Medina is another kind of leaner, a bench leaner, by necessity. He is homeless and sleeps in the station. He woke up that morning on the rudely segmented bench, stretched and groaned in pain.

“Some people need to lean, man,” he said. “Some people lean because they're tired.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 28, 2002

RHYME, RAIL AND A SUBWAY RAT'S TAIL

In the rush of news about fare increases and potential transit strikes, an interesting piece of news was overlooked in this space last year: the announcement of the winners of the Poetry in Motion contest, in which all New York City residents with poems in their hearts were invited to submit them last spring, for a chance at having their verses displayed in thousands of buses and subway cars.

Winners in three categories—adult, young adult and children—have now been chosen, and the first poems will begin appearing in the system this October.

Sadly, this column has learned that it was not among the contest's winners—in large part, apparently, because of a failure to mail in its entries. And so, in the spirit of what might have been, here they are in their entirety, unexpurgated. Judge for yourself. (Any resemblance to previously published poems is completely incidental.)

TO HIS COY F TRAIN

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, F train, were no crime.

I would sit and wait for you

Till my fingertips turned icy blue,

And thou wouldst remain

Behind a stalled work train

Somewhere near Ditmas Ave.,

So late the conductor fain would laugh.

But at my back I always hear

The office punch-clock's whirring gears;

And yonder before me lie

So many stations, so many cries

Of, “Where's the train? We're very tired.

If it comes not soon we'll all be fired!”

(The unemployment office is a warmer wait,

But none I think desire that fate.)

Now therefore, while a youthful hue

Is upon my face like the frozen dew,

Please roll my way with newfound haste

Before another morn goes all to waste.

Though I dare not dream you fast

Won't you come, oh F train, come at last?

THE BUSKER

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I was riding, weak and weary,

To my home in a borough far,

While I nodded, soundly napping, suddenly there came a tapping

As of someone loudly rapping—rapping on a bongo drum in my car!

“'Tis not right,” I muttered, “'Tis the dead of night.”

“Please, kind sir, accept this dime and play your drum some other time.”

And a coin I dropped into his hat that sat upon the subway floor.

“That's it?” quoth he.

Quoth I, “Only this and nothing more.”

Then to my nap returning, all my soul within me burning,

Soon again I heard a tapping, way louder than before.

“Surely,” said I, “this man's a loon.

And he's got to stop that racket soon.

Or I will throw him out the door.

It unnerves me to my core.”

“Will you cease, sir?” quoth I.

Quoth he, grinning: “Never. Nevermore.”

And so the busker, never flitting, still is sitting,

Still is sitting inside my subway train

Causing mental anguish and eardrum pain.

Each song is followed by five encores

And the busker yelling:

“Never! Never! Nevermore!”

ODE TO A SUBWAY SEAT

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the width that my rear end will fit into

And the depth that I can scoot back, wedged tight

Between the sleepy guy on my left and the sweaty guy on my right.

I love thee to the level of every day's

Most pressing need to take a load off between

Grand Army Plaza and Times Square

I love thee dearly, as men strive to get thee before I can.

I love thee purely, as I see them smugly sitting there.

I love thee with the weariness in my weary legs

And the ache in my aching feet!—and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after I get a seat.

SONG OF MYSELF

(From the perspective of a veteran subway rodent)

I sing the third rail electric,

I am the poet of the track and of the tunnel,

And of the small dark place to hide

And especially of the god from above

Who just cast a fresh half-eaten Danish my way.

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk

Of expresses and locals,

But I do not talk of expresses or locals.

Eat and eat and eat

Always the hungry urge of my world.

Straphanger, you have given me food—therefore I give to you …

 … Well, the willies.

O unspeakable passionate love!

I am not the poet of Danish only, but of bagel, of Twinkie and

Ho Ho and of heavenly piece of hot dog.

I am not contained between my teeth and tail.

Filthy I am and make filthy whatever I touch or

Am touch'd from.

At home behind the big trash can at Canal Street.

At home next to the token booth at Tremont Avenue.

At home under the platform at Parsons Boulevard.

I know I am deathless,

I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a track cleaner.

I am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless and cannot be scared away.

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 7, 2003

TRAIN OF LOVE

“He lost her in the subway, down at the City Hall.

He married her that morning. That night he had no bride at all.

Just think of his dilemma. No honeymoon that day.

Oh me, oh my. I could cry. He lost her in the old subway.”

—from “He Lost Her In the Subway,” recorded by Ada Jones for Edison Records, 1907

Only a few years after the Interborough Rapid Transit system opened in 1904, it had already become so crowded and chaotic that popular songwriters of the day found the thought of losing one's bride in the subway a very funny conceit.

What follows, almost a century later, is a story with an even funnier conceit: finding one's bride in the subway.

Be forewarned: The plotline of this story is not linear. It involves, among other things, shyness, attempted suicide, panic and service disruptions before somehow arriving at its very happy ending.

The tale begins about three years ago, not at City Hall but at the 23rd Street station on the F line, where a very friendly-looking young trademark lawyer named Brendan McFeely boarded the train every morning. On a few of those mornings, he noticed another commuter—“very, very cute”—who seemed to take the train around the same time. But he could never summon the courage to talk to her.

“It just seemed too goofy,” he explained. “It was the subway.”

The object of his affection, Bonnie Andersen, a project manager for a real estate company, admitted that she had never even noticed Mr. McFeely, but she defended this oversight. “I'm a little cranky before I have my coffee,” she said. “So I'm not really scoping people out.”

Their fates could have diverged like two passing express trains. But one morning in December 1999, something happened, at once horrible and providential, to change that. Ms. Andersen was standing near the back of the uptown platform where trains enter. Near her was a man who paced nervously.

“He didn't look dangerous,” she recalled, “but he just wasn't somebody that you wanted to stand next to.” Her fears were confirmed when the next train roared into the station and the man leaped right in front of it.

To this day, Ms. Andersen's memories of what happened next remain hazy.

“I remember standing back against the wall going, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! He jumped! He jumped!'” She also remembers people in the train staring wildly at her through the windows, unaware that a man lay on the tracks beneath them, not dead but gravely injured. (She later learned that the man, somehow, survived.)

The next thing Ms. Andersen recalls is the complete stranger on the platform who rushed up to comfort her, asking her if she was O.K. and volunteering to stay with her until the police arrived. “He was just standing there,” she remembered of Mr. McFeely. “He was the only one.”

She added, “I don't know why, but I immediately trusted him.”

That morning, Mr. McFeely stayed with Ms. Andersen for more than an hour, accompanying her on the subway and making sure that she reached her office. He guessed correctly that she was in no mood to be picked up right about then, but he simply could not leave her without leaving a hint. So he gave her his card.

Again, though, they almost missed their connection: Ms. Andersen was already dating someone seriously.

But for some reason, she said, she could not bring herself to throw out the business card, and when she broke up with her boyfriend the next summer, she began to wonder about the man she never saw again, the kind, redheaded one whom she had come to call “subway guy.”

“I'd tell my friends, ‘Someday I'm going to call subway guy,'” Ms. Andersen said. “And they'd say, ‘Call him! Call subway guy!'”

So she did.

And thus on Saturday evening, slightly behind schedule—somehow appropriate given the place they met—subway guy and cute girl stood at the elegant altar of the Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue and 29th Street, he in white tie and she in a lovely white dress.

At “for better or worse,” Ms. Andersen became so overcome with emotion that she began to cry, and Mr. McFeely again came to her aid, wiping a tear from her right cheek. At 5:43 p.m. they became husband and wife, kissing so ardently that the two hundred guests broke into applause.

The new couple said they had absolutely no desire to take the subway to their reception, but they did want to take a few pictures down in the place where it all began. So they hopped into a cab and shot over to the 23rd Street station.

As they walked down the platform, the train of Mrs. McFeely's dress sweeping elegantly behind her, a homeless man looked on with perplexed awe, knowing that he was witnessing a momentous occasion but having trouble figuring out just what kind.

Finally, a smile crept across his face. “Happy birthday!” he exclaimed. “Happy birthday!”

Asking a passerby for a dollar, he confided, “I just love birthdays.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 28, 2003

TOKEN SUCKERS

In five days, when the last New York City subway token slides through the slot of the last booth to sell them, few people will notice and fewer will care. There will be no official ceremony to mark the passing. If there is music in the background, it will not be taps; it will be the bleating love song that turnstiles sing to valid MetroCards.

But off in a corner, in the shadows where things begin to smell, at least a few observers will notice and care quite a lot. They belong to a sad and desperate breed of criminal that has been in decline for a long time, one that will soon become as irrelevant to major lawbreaking as moonshiners and horse thieves.

Officially, the crime is classified as theft of Transit Authority property. But among transit police officers it is more accurately and less delicately known as token sucking. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it is exactly what it sounds like.

The criminal carefully jams the token slot with a matchbook or a gum wrapper and waits for a would-be rider to plunk a token down. The token plunker bangs against the locked turnstile and walks away in frustration. Then from the shadows, the token sucker appears like a vampire, quickly sealing his lips over the token slot, inhaling powerfully and producing his prize: a $1.50 token, hard-earned and obviously very badly needed.

Even among officers who had seen it all, it was widely considered the most disgusting nonviolent crime ever to visit the subway.

“It gave you the willies,” said Brendan J. McGarry, a veteran transit police officer. “We've had cases every so often, these guys would end up choking and swallowing the tokens. Then what do you do? You've got to wait for the evidence to come out.”

In truth, most token suckers usually had enough evidence already in their pockets to warrant locking them up—some of the most dedicated were able to extract more than $50 worth of tokens a day. And deterrence, when dealing with someone willing to clamp his mouth to one of the most public surfaces in all of New York City, was next to impossible.