Subwayland Read online

  But in the end, the results in the basket were not much better. And so at half past noon, when Steven Clark, 30, a longtime Michael Jackson impersonator and serious subway moneymaker, showed up, the Professor and his protégé were willing to negotiate.

  “Want to make a deal?” Mr. Clark asked Mr. Yapur. It quickly became clear that the two men had conducted this very transaction several times before. They walked off to the side of the stage, conferred briefly, and then Mr. Clark handed Mr. Yapur a crisp $20 bill. Mr. Yapur then nodded at the Professor, and the Professor began to pack up.

  The Times Square stage handoff had occurred, in an orderly and bloodless manner.

  Mr. Clark, wearing the black fedora and blousy shirt of later-vintage Michael Jackson, explained the wisdom of the deal from his point of view:

  “I know that $20 I gave him is going to flip over and over for me,” he said. “And him?” he said, pointing to the Professor. “He ain’t going to get 20 more dollars playing today. He knows it.”

  Mr. Clark acknowledged that there were risks involved—namely his harshest critics, the police, closing his show down early. But he accepted this risk.

  “The Constitution is on my side,” he said defiantly, and then added hopefully, “The policeman should understand what I’m trying to do. He’s got kids to feed, too. If he wants me to go out there and sell drugs and bust somebody upside the head, then I’ll do that. But I don’t want to do that.”

  Sometimes, sadly, subway show business can be even riskier than the upstairs kind. Only an hour into Mr. Clark’s show, a couple of officers brought the curtain down on him. He had barely earned back his investment.

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 24, 2003

  SALVATION EXPRESS

  A rush-hour subway train on a Monday morning is probably the best place in New York City to watch collective avoidance hard at work.

  People are trying to avoid admitting that it is Monday again, that it is rush hour again, that they are on the subway again. They are trying to avoid touching, smelling or acknowledging the existence of the strangers around them. They are trying to avoid thinking about the rest of the morning, not to mention the rest of the week.

  With this in mind, it is easy to see why Frank Meyer is not the most popular guy on the train on Mondays or, actually, any other day of the week.

  Mr. Meyer is a small man with a big voice, and the only reason he steps onto a subway train is to try to force everyone onboard to think about the future. But not just the rest of the week. He wants them to think about the rest of eternity. The everlasting. The great beyond. The forever and ever, amen.

  “Death will reach out its hand and take you,” he told a crowd of silent passengers yesterday a little after 10 a.m., as they made their way south on an A train, not thinking about their mortality.

  “Hell,” he added, “is a place as real as McDonald’s.”

  Mr. Meyer, 38, got up early yesterday and did what he does about four days a week. At Columbus Circle, he met up with a group of fellow born-again Christians who, like him, take very seriously the Gospels’ exhortation to tell people about Jesus.

  First, Mr. Meyer said hello to his friends—Roslyn Chan Chue, 51, an administrator at a law firm; Frank Pacific, 51, a former hospital consultant; and Darnell Harris, 45, who works for New York City Transit. The four picked up the simple props they would need for their sermons—a cup of coffee, a Danish, some newspapers. They hopped on a northbound A train, spacing themselves out along the car and being careful not to make eye contact.

  And then, as the train sped down the tracks, Mr. Meyer began. He started to sing “Amazing Grace.” Characteristically, no one looked up at him.

  Then he took a sip of his coffee and began to make a very big deal out of it. “This is good coffee,” he said, loudly. The people near him looked up, cringed and sunk slightly into their shoulders.

  He took another sip. “I don’t know why but this coffee is so good,” he said, “that when I drink it, I just have to sing.” And then he launched into another hymn, “Blessed Assurance.”

  Mr. Harris, whose transit job involves collecting the paper coffee cups and other detritus that subway riders throw onto the tracks, spoke up loudly from several seats away and asked Mr. Meyer if he could have a drink of that amazing coffee, too.

  Because most people sitting near the two men at that point did not know that they knew each other, this bit of street—or sub-street—theater produced the intended effect. People surfaced from their newspapers. A few conversations fell briefly silent. The guy with the headphones who was rocking out pulled one earpiece back from his ear.

  Mr. Harris took a sip of Mr. Meyer’s coffee. Then another. Finally, he smiled broadly and said, “Oh, yeah! I feel it now.”

  The two men ran with the coffee-as-Holy-Spirit metaphor, using it from 59th Street to 125th Street to weave a complete minisermon that ranged from redemption to judgment to forgiveness to sin, including one sin that seemed to be sorely tempting Mr. Meyer yesterday with spring in the air. (“Springtime comes and the women start wearing those clothes and, boy, do these eyes want to sin,” he said of himself. “There is lust in these eyes.” A woman in a business suit near him rolled her eyes.)

  In a subway system where passengers are constantly being offered batteries or cheap children’s toys, where they are always being asked to help the homeless or some other cause, Mr. Meyer and his fellow preachers carefully plan their pitch for God.

  First, they never ask for money. They ride mostly the A train because its long express run between 59th and 125th Streets allows them as much as seven or eight uninterrupted minutes to get their message across to the congregants packed into the subway pews. They also make sure to leaven their message with a little amusement.

  “Jesus did miracles first and taught next,” Mr. Meyer explained. “Well, we can’t do miracles, so we try to catch their attention some other way.”

  Sometimes it works. Yesterday, two thirds of the people in one car of an A train accepted miniature copies of the Gospel of St. John. There was even a smattering of amens mixed in along with the angry I’m-trying-to-read-heres.

  Many other times, however, the seed falls on some very rocky ground. Mr. Meyer cannot count the number of times he has been told to shut up or do much worse things. Once, a man tried unsuccessfully to pitch him bodily out an open door and onto the platform.

  Mr. Harris also preaches in prisons, and he said that it was hard to say which congregation was more difficult, the one in the jail cell or the one in the subway car.

  “Both places, it’s a lot of people sitting there, not wanting to listen,” he said.

  “The only difference is that the guys in prison probably know they need help. The people on the subway don’t.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 17, 2001

  5

  HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE NON-TRAVELER

  Eye of the storm: Every weekday, more than four million riders take the subway. Sometimes, it seems as if they are all standing right next to you.

  SUBWAY SEAT SOCIOLOGY

  The ethnic multiplicity of New York is a beautiful thing, for many reasons. It teaches understanding and tolerance, or at least it should. It makes for great places to eat. It is rarely ever dull.

  As an added bonus, it can help you get a seat on the subway.

  The strategy is one that has been used by deft subway seat-getters for as long as there have been crowded subways. You make an educated guess about who is going to leave a seat based on how the person in the seat looks, which might indicate where that person lives or works and therefore where the person will get off the train.

  Of course, it’s not always about ethnicity. On southbound No. 6 trains into Midtown, for example, seatless riders place their bets on anyone with a backpack and baggy pants, because those fitting that description tend to be Hunter College students who give up their seats at 68th Street.

  On the N and R trains and also the Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 5, Brooklynites com
ing into Manhattan in the morning will try to discern who looks powerful and pinstriped enough to be disembarking at Wall Street. On southbound A trains in Washington Heights, the clue is hospital scrubs, whose wearers almost always leave warm, empty seats at 168th Street, near Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.

  But the ethnic strategy is one of the most reliable and widely used. And as ridership continues to climb and open subway seats become more of an endangered species (the Straphangers Campaign says that at the most crowded times of the rush, only 28 percent of riders get to sit) riders’ sociological radars have become finely tuned instruments.

  Ernest Enriquez, 35, a computer technician, is a student of the phenomenon. He gets on the B train in the morning near Coney Island, so he rarely has trouble getting a seat. Instead, he entertains himself by watching the seat games people play.

  On the B train, it mostly involves Chinese-Americans, who get on around Sunset Park, where a miniature Chinatown has grown up in the last 15 years. Many of these passengers will then get off at Grand Street in Chinatown in the morning. So as the train fills up on its way to Manhattan, Mr. Enriquez says, he watches standing riders angle for seats by positioning themselves in front of groups of seated Chinese-Americans.

  “Happens every day,” Mr. Enriquez says. “They’re making their odds better.”

  Steven Roper, 20, a pharmacist’s assistant, takes the F train from Bensonhurst to Jay Street in Brooklyn, where he changes to the A train to 178th Street in Manhattan. When he has trouble getting a seat on the A, he says, he banks on 59th Street and recalls a line from a John Sayles movie, “The Brother From Another Planet.”

  In one scene in the movie, a magician is performing card tricks on an A train. The train pulls into 59th Street. From there, it will go express to 125th Street in Harlem and then to Washington Heights. The magician says to another character: “I got another trick for you. Want to see all the white people disappear?” And as the doors open, all of them do.

  “The magic trick?” says Mr. Roper, who is black. “It still works.”

  He adds, smiling, that whenever he takes an N train to Bensonhurst, “the same magic trick happens in reverse: all the black people get off the train in Brooklyn by 59th Street.”

  “It doesn’t help me much,” he explains matter-of-factly, “because I’m almost home by then anyway.”

  As the borders of New York’s ethnic communities begin to blur—as more Bangladeshis move to Astoria, more white people to Harlem—the game becomes much harder to play. Even in his years of riding the A train, Mr. Roper says, betting on a white rider to vacate a seat at 59th Street has become much less of a sure thing.

  But then again, in a city as complicated as New York, it has never been all that easy, for the seatless or the seated.

  Take Takafumi Kunioka. He is Japanese-American. He lives in Sunset Park and rides the B train to West Fourth Street in Manhattan, where he transfers to the F train to go to the Parsons School of Design.

  He usually gets a seat on the B. And invariably, he says, as the train doors open at Grand Street and Chinese riders begin to pour off, the weary-looking man or woman standing in front of Mr. Kunioka will register a look of anxiety, followed by one of disappointment.

  “I always know what they’re thinking,” he said the other day, waiting for the B in Brooklyn. “They’re thinking, ‘Hey man, this is Chinatown. Why aren’t you getting off?’”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 16, 2001

  PRE-WALKING

  Maybe it happens in other cities, too. But it seems that New York offers its residents many ways to earn what could be thought of as identification cards.

  Not the laminated kind, but ones much better and less tangible. Ones displayed bodily on the street or exchanged in conversation. Or just carried around confidently in your head.

  What they consist of—in a place that is complicated, chaotic and crowded—is inside knowledge of how to bend the iron city to your will. Knowing, for example, that secret way of getting onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway without having to take Flatbush. Or, like George Costanza on “Seinfeld,” knowing where all the best unlocked office-building bathrooms are.

  The subway holds out unparalleled opportunities for earning true New Yorker ID cards. But the platinum card goes only to those who know how to do something that we can call, for simplicity’s sake, pre-walking.

  Pre-walking involves walking to the correct place on your departure platform so that when you get off the train at your destination platform you are at the correct place to zip right through the turnstile or exit you want, allowing you to avoid the crowd and to lead the charge back up into daylight. (In other words, no more trudging behind the living dead who take half an hour to climb a set of stairs.)

  Pre-walking is a quintessential true New Yorker trait because it involves not only beating crowds but also beating the clock.

  “I mean, you’re not doing anything except standing there waiting for the train, so you might as well do the walking then,” said Ann Krone, a St. Louis woman who has visited New York frequently for years and said she felt as if she had been admitted into some kind of secret society when she figured out pre-walking. “It felt like I was beating the system,” she said.

  Skilled pre-walkers are not hard to spot if you know what you’re looking for. Take the train to Roosevelt Island, for example. Watch how people tend to pack onto the second-to-last car in the evenings and then line up near the back door long before the train arrives at the station. This is because there’s only one elevator out, and only about 20 people fit into it. The rest have to wait or suffer the long, slow escalator ride to daylight.

  Nirmala Narine, a personal banker, is as good a pre-walker as you could hope to find. But even she was thrown off her game going home last week because transit officials were running shorter shuttle trains to Roosevelt Island during construction. Ms. Narine was in the second-to-last car, as usual, but those in the last car were closer to the elevator and she found herself the odd woman out, waiting for the next elevator.

  “The shuttle screwed me up,” she said, sounding like a pro basketball player who had just missed a layup.

  But it gave her time to diagram, proudly, her personal pre-walking strategy for her morning commute: Get on the train around the middle, near the escalator on the Roosevelt Island platform. This puts her out at Rockefeller Center near the right staircase to transfer quickly to a platform for an uptown B or D. When she reaches that platform, she pre-walks to a spot near a subway map stand, because she knows that spot puts her in the right place to get out at Columbus Circle near the closest staircase to her office.

  Asked how long it had taken her to map all this out, she said, without missing a beat, “Maybe being late to work twice.”

  Other riders have even more exacting pre-walking standards. When a request for pre-walking tales was posted on the Web site of the Straphangers Campaign last week, letters poured in with accounts, including such precise specifications as “second car, third door”; exit-closing schedules; and reminders to be careful with Nos. 2 and 3 trains because they can be different lengths.

  Steve Hamill, a Web and graphics designer, and his girlfriend, Michele Bonan, a tenant organizer, were among the many who reported using geographic markers to pre-walk more professionally.

  “Michele gets off at Rector Street and needs to be two benches and one map in front of our Union Street station entrance to end up at the stairs,” Mr. Hamill wrote. “Unfortunately, I have to be one bench and one movie poster back in order to be at the rear turnstile at the City Hall stop, where I work.”

  In other words, pre-walking can divide. Sometimes, however, it unites.

  A rider was at the 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue station last Sunday night and pre-walked, as usual, to his spot. Just as the train doors were closing, he looked up and saw that his wife was also on the platform and had pre-walked to the same spot.

  “All of a sudden,” the man wrote, “it felt like our fir
st date all over again.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 5, 2001

  WHEN NATURE CALLS

  Since the early 1980’s, when the subway system seemed on the verge of ruin, almost everything about it has gotten better. Hundreds of miles of rusty rails have been replaced. Stations that looked like decommissioned coal mines look like stations again. Announcements have become more frequent (sometimes even intelligible!). Subway cars nearly always have lights and no longer come with “a thick layer of rectified garbage juice” applied to the floors, as Russell Baker once described them.

  But sadly, at least one place in the subway has not gotten much better over the years. It is that place where you must go when you are going somewhere and realize that you have to go—really bad.

  So bad, in fact, that you will squeeze past the sad, confused-looking man in the camouflage overcoat who seems to have appointed himself the palace guard at the only men’s room at the 34th Street station on the Avenue of the Americas, the one without any toilet paper.

  So bad that you will brave the smell inside, which is powerful enough to bring tears to the eyes of a grown man. And so bad that you are even able to ignore the message someone has scratched into the metal stall divider, announcing ominously, “I died in here.”

  “I’ve never had to go that bad,” said Tony Hernandez, standing near the bathroom late last week and watching Camouflage Man shuffle in and out, his arms full of plastic bags. “Not in that one.”

  “I’ve been in other ones,” he said. “But when I go in, I take a big, deep breath and then when I come out, I let it go.”

  Depending on the strength of your bladder, it might be wise to develop this breathing technique. While New York City Transit does not publicize the list of the 60 or so restrooms that remain open in the subway—most were in such squalid shape that they were closed by 1982—it is often possible to find them just by following your nose.