Subwayland Read online

  But a recent impromptu investigation has found that there is still at least one thing most New Yorkers will not give to anyone, under any circumstances, even in this renaissance of compassion: a seat on a crowded subway train.

  To conduct the investigation, a suitable seat-seeker was quickly found: Rebecca Hunter, 32, Brooklynite, professional woman and proud subway rider who also happens to be seven months pregnant and among the most extremely uncomfortable of the uncomfortable riders on the F, A and C trains, the three Ms. Hunter takes to work in the West Village.

  Over the last seven months, Ms. Hunter’s sense of subway topography has changed with each trimester, and to see the system through her eyes now is to see it much differently. It is to realize that there are no air-conditioning vents near the ends of F train cars, so that even when it is less crowded there, Ms. Hunter gets on in the middle, where it is cooler.

  It is to notice that there are few benches on the long platforms at the Jay Street station in Brooklyn, and that the F comes into West Fourth Street in Manhattan two levels down, a long hike for a woman carrying far more than a briefcase.

  Most of all, though, it is to understand the casual lack of courtesy on rush-hour trains, badly hidden behind newspapers, novels and supposedly sleepy eyelids.

  Ms. Hunter, an Internet producer, said she did not mind it when she was less far along. She would see sympathetic people looking at her nervously and she knew what they were thinking: “Is she pregnant or does she just need to lay off the burgers?”

  Later on, though, as her midsection grew and her feet began to ache, she would wrinkle her nose politely at someone staring and mouth the words, “Yes, I am pregnant,” longing for the seat.

  Now, there is no mistaking, and no excuses remain for those sitting around her. “Sometimes,” she says, “people will have conversations with me when they’re sitting and they’ll say, ‘So, how far along are you?’ and I’m thinking, ‘I’m far enough along that you should get up!’”

  Ms. Hunter, who came to New York from Boston by way of Arizona two years ago, does not think that a seat is her right, the way it should be for the disabled and the elderly. She simply thinks it is a nice thing for people to give her. She did it before she was pregnant. Her husband, David, does it.

  At 8:30 the other morning on the F train from Brooklyn, no one was doing it.

  There was a young man hunched intently over a loud electronic game. There was a young woman hunched intently over the novel “Me Times Three,” oddly appropriate because that is the way Ms. Hunter feels right now.

  There was another man who looked promising. “He looked like he might have been a hippie in college and maybe he had some feminist leanings,” Ms. Hunter said later. As it turned out, he had no such leanings. She rode for four stations—conspicuously turning her prominent abdomen, draped in a bright pink shirt. Finally someone got up, but only to leave the train.

  Over the last weeks, Ms. Hunter has made her own accounting of subway politeness, complete with percentages. A quarter of the time, someone gives her a seat, like the nice young woman with the cat glasses last Thursday morning. A quarter of the time, she gets a seat through dumb luck or “through my own cunning”—watching for vacancies and positioning herself like a bobcat crouched for prey. Half the time, there are no seats and no offers.

  Ms. Hunter says that on the lines she rides from her neighborhood, Windsor Terrace, women make up 90 percent of the seat-givers, and young Hispanic men are also very generous. By and large, everyone else falls into the category of great disappointment.

  Standing, she longs to hear these people’s internal rationalizations, and recently she did, sort of. In a subway chat room, there was a discussion of subway etiquette in which a man who called himself Davy opined that pregnant women should not be riding crowded trains anyway.

  Ms. Hunter showed considerable restraint in her response. “Let’s see. Why do I ride the train at such a crowded time?” she wrote. “Because I have a job. Because in order to live in this city, my husband and I both need jobs.” She added, “Do you have a job where you can just come and go as you please? If so, please do me a favor and pass my résumé along.”

  Yesterday morning, standing, on the way to her job where she cannot come and go as she pleases, she said she had made a new resolution.

  “I am going to start asking people to get up,” she said. “I’ve decided.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 30, 2002

  POLE-HUGGERS

  Of the many breaches of that vast, elaborate and unwritten code of conduct known as the Rules of New York City Subway Etiquette, pole-hugging has long been lumped among the lesser offenses.

  It certainly does not deserve the kind of high-pitched and near-violent censure set aside for door-blockers, those who ride in doorways and move for no one. It is not nearly as willful as rushing (entering a car before riders inside can exit) or as oblivious as stopping (entering a car and lingering at the threshold, while dozens behind you try to get in). In the end, its consequences are probably not as serious as either leg-spreading (riders, mostly men, sitting like catchers behind home plate) or bag-sitting (riders, mostly women, storing their recent purchases on the seat next to them).

  But there seems to be a growing movement among subway etiquette jurists—or at least among the dozen or so people who were recently found at random on trains across the city and interviewed—that a reclassification of pole-hugging may be in order.

  Properly defined, of course, pole-hugging is one of two subcategories under the general offense of pole-hogging, which also includes pole-leaning. But the results are the same: the vertical poles inside subway cars, intended to be gripped by as many as five or six hands on a crowded train, are instead monopolized by one body, which tends to be large and perspiring heavily. Often, the body is reading a newspaper and leaning against the pole as if it were in a small-town barbershop. Sometimes, the body wraps the pole in its arms like an old waltzing partner. Occasionally, the body is doing the one-armed hug or the one-shoulder lean—less serious but still taking up wildly undemocratic amounts of pole space.

  It could be that trains are much more crowded now, and pole space is at a premium. It could be that the offense of pole-hugging, overlooked for so many years, has simply grown unchecked. Whatever the reason, the consensus is that it should be discouraged much more vigorously, and that there are many ways to do it.

  Aida Melendez favors the wrist method, considered one of the best. The hand is inserted between the pole and the offender firmly, and then the wrist is given a hard snap to cause discomfort to the offender. “It’s passive-aggressive, like everything in the subway,” said Ms. Melendez, a nurse from Park Slope, Brooklyn. “Except it’s more aggressive than passive.”

  She added that if the offender still does not budge, she adds the additional and sometimes effective technique of “sucking my teeth and rolling my eyes.”

  Large rings, bracelets and watches make the wrist method even more effective. But Stephanie Leveene, an editor who rides the N, R, 4 and 5 trains, counsels that true opponents of pole-huggers must be willing to go the distance with them. “They don’t want the hand in their back,” she said. “But sometimes they won’t move and I won’t move, and we just ride like that, all the way.”

  “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 shou
ld 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.”