Subwayland Read online

  Mr. Del Signore, who usually wears a polyester tuxedo over his spandex, has had people take his pants down while he tried to stay still. He has had people pinch his rear end. Once, a man swung a tire chain at his head. Once, he chased and tackled a man who had punched him twice in the arm.

  “You’re silver and you’ve got to stand still,” he explained. “Basically, you’re a target.”

  Last Friday in Times Square, the crowd watching the two men, more than 50 people at times, was very respectful. But even so:

  “Ooh, scary mimes,” said one woman, hurrying past.

  “Mommy, why are they there?” asked a little girl, eyes wide.

  “Get a job,” yelled an elderly man carrying a briefcase.

  Then, just before 5 p.m., two police officers joined the crowd and one began to write something in his ticket book as the crowd looked at him with stony faces. Finally, he walked over to the two men and said, “Rush hour, guys. You got to move along.”

  The men now say they have decided to move along for good. “It’s just too much of a risk,” Mr. Del Signore said. “We never know if we’re going to get a ticket, and $50 is basically a whole day’s work.”

  Where will they go next? Sleepier stations in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, probably. Maybe a national “tour,” in a few months. “I can see us standing in front of the Grand Canyon,” Mr. Cretella said, “going to strip malls, that kind of thing.”

  This fall, they said, they even plan to throw their milk crates into the mayoral race, to try to make New York City more tolerant of silver men.

  Their slogan? “We stand for change.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 3, 2001

  THE OLD NO. 2 TRAIN TRICK

  It seemed as if Olmedini, El Mago Magnifico, had performed his final trick and disappeared like the Third Avenue El.

  This reporter found him for the first time about five years ago aboard an R train, changing a red scarf into a white dove. In the process, he was changing something much harder to change: a whole subway car full of sour-faced commuters turned into children again, at least for a few minutes, as they rumbled under the East River.

  “The biggest trick,” Olmedini likes to say, “is pulling people out of their daydreams.”

  When the reporter tried to find him again last winter, he began to fear that Olmedini himself had been just a daydream. He looked on the R train, with no luck. A call went out to the International Brotherhood of Magicians, who knew Olmedini. They said he was originally from Ecuador and was the only magician they knew who performed on the subway. But when they tried his number in Queens, no one answered.

  They suggested calling Reuben’s restaurant at Madison Avenue and 38th Street, a magician’s haunt. But no one had seen him there for a while, either.

  Then, last week, on a whim, his number was dialed again. And like the spring, it seemed, Olmedini had returned.

  “I am sorry,” he said, in richly accented Spanish, sounding like an Ecuadorean Vincent Price. “I took some time off. I did not know you were looking for me.

  “Let us meet on the subway,” he said.

  So it was that last Friday was spent on the No. 2 train watching dollar bills float in midair, watching the bills become doves. Most of all, the day was spent watching people—even those who tried hard to feign indifference—watch Olmedini.

  It is impressive enough to hear someone play a saxophone on a loud, lurching subway car. It is amazing to watch a troupe of young dancers performing a routine, complete with somersaults, down the middle of a crowded train. But to see a man on the subway produce a live, fat rabbit from an empty wooden box just inches from your eyes is something else altogether.

  “That man should be in the news,” said Kenneth Chrysostome, 11, whose class was on its way from Flatbush to Carnegie Hall to hear a Dvorak symphony and caught Olmedini’s act between Chambers and 14th Streets. “That man should be on the front page.”

  In fact, Olmedini—born Olmedo Renteria and raised in Guayaquil, Ecuador—was in the newspapers quite often in his home country. He found magic by way of the circus, which he joined at 18 to work as a booking agent. But he soon fell under the spell of a circus magician named Memper, who took the young man under his cape, showed him a handful of tricks and helped him find a job with a circus, a job that paid exactly nothing.

  “They said that when I learned enough to be a real magician, then they would pay me,” he recalls.

  He learned to be a real magician, a very good one. But the pay never quite followed. Though Olmedini (his stage name is an homage to Houdini) became quite well known in Ecuador, levitating beautiful young assistants and transforming them into Dobermans, he could never support himself and his family the way he wanted.

  So in 1988, he decided to move to New York. But the nightclub invitations did not come pouring in here, either. And so one bitter December day in 1989, when he was performing outside near Columbus Circle and the wind was making his hands go numb, he decided to go underground.

  He did O.K. on the subway platforms. He later found, though, that he could do much better inside the train, where he had a captive audience and more time to collect money from appreciative viewers. So he shortened his act and built himself a sort of rolling Dr. Caligari’s cabinet, using drapery fabric and wheels salvaged from baby carriages.

  That was seven years ago, and he has been performing on the trains ever since, making as much as $25 an hour on good days, enough to pay his rent in Jackson Heights and send a little money back to Ecuador to help put his daughter through college.

  “In the subway,” he says, “I am famous.”

  Last Friday, he was on stage along one of his favorite routes, the No. 2 between Chambers Street and Times Square. (He has determined that the No. 2, the A, the D and the N are the most lucrative trains, and he sticks to them unwaveringly. He will let a parade of No. 3 trains pass to catch a No. 2.)

  Because Olmedini, 60, still struggles with English, he does not speak a word during his brief shows but instead smiles and whistles quietly to draw people’s attention, like a mass-transit Harpo Marx. After his last trick, he produces a purple banner from a seemingly empty velvet sack. He holds it up to show the bright yellow words, which say, “Thank You.”

  “Some performers on the trains are needy and demanding, and they’re always invading my space,” said Laura Meagher, a performance artist who caught his act. “With him, I just heard this whistling. And then I look up and there’s a dollar floating in the air.”

  The life of the city’s subway magician is mostly a lonely one. He lives by himself, with six doves and his rabbit, named El Cielo, which means sky, so named because his eyes are a bright blue. But his neighbors complain about the noise the doves make. And Olmedini can’t become too attached to El Cielo because, like all his rabbits, he will grow too fat for his special magic box in about another year and have to be given to a pet shop.

  “In my career, I have known probably more than five hundred rabbits,” he says, adding, “Sometimes, I would like to stop using rabbits.”

  Sometimes, he adds, he would also like to stop taking the subway.

  “People in the subway, they love me,” he says. “But you know what my fondest wish is? It’s to be so successful that I never have to work in the subway again.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 29, 2001

  TIMES SQUARE SHUTTLE BLUES

  As stages for musical performance go, it could not be much worse. The acoustics stink. The lighting lacks all subtlety. The stage itself lists from side to side. Occasionally, the patrons smell. And every few minutes, someone interrupts to say something semi-intelligible about the Port Authority.

  Even in a city where creativity can flourish in every crevice, there should be a better crevice. Yet something seems to keep bringing Brian Homa back to the Times Square shuttle, carrying a Takamine guitar, a shiny metal pot for collecting his paycheck and a mental playlist that includes everything from “The Tootsie Roll Song” to “The Star-
Spangled Banner.”

  It may be that, coming from a place as small as Port Crane, N.Y., near Binghamton, Mr. Homa feels more comfortable performing aboard the smallest subway line in the system, oscillating back and forth under Midtown like a metronome. It may also be the particular kind of masochism practiced by people who come to New York and want it to be hard and merciless, a corrective to the comfortable place they came from.

  But whatever the reason—even Mr. Homa can’t quite explain it—he has made a shuttle car his only cabaret for almost three years now. And somewhere along the thousands of miles he has traveled between the Times Square and Grand Central subway stations, he has made himself one of the better known performers in the system. (The jokes about him going nowhere fast are actually funny now, he says.)

  If you are a regular performer on other, more expansive lines, there’s a good chance that subway riders could go weeks or even months without seeing you. But on a line as compact as the shuttle, tens of thousands of regular riders have to try very hard to miss Mr. Homa. Plus, there’s no competition to speak of.

  “There’s one other guy named Jazz, who plays the flute,” Mr. Homa said yesterday, uncasing his guitar and preparing to punch in. “He’s been playing about a year longer than I have, so I give him the respect he deserves.”

  To spend a few mornings with Mr. Homa, 25, is to experience an intensely concentrated version of what it is like to be a subway performer. It is to see, first of all, how the depressed economy has depressed them. When Mr. Homa began playing in the summer of 1999, after moving to New York that winter, he could sometimes make more than $200 a day, his car filled with New Economy largesse. His earnings paid the rent at his Harlem apartment. Best of all, he could play his own eccentric compositions instead of pounding out Beatles covers.

  “There was a while there when I really felt like I could play anything and people would give me money,” he said. For example, a song that sounded like an Irish ballad but was actually about space aliens. Or one about a man who replaced his own failing heart with an artichoke heart.

  Or this folkish ditty, “Cerebellum,” about brain damage:

  Oh Cerebellum-bellum

  Don’t you leave me behind

  Oh, won’t you please be good

  Like you know you should

  And ease my worried mind.

  But now that the Old Economy has returned and is not doing so well itself, Mr. Homa is making much less. When he talks about paying the rent now, he makes quote signs with his fingers while saying the words. And he has had to resign himself to crowd pleasers, though not exactly the obvious ones. For example, last Friday, he launched his set with a furious rendition of “Misirlou,” from the movie “Pulp Fiction.” This led to “I Got You,” by James Brown—a tune not often heard on an acoustic guitar—and to “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the big band standard.

  After half an hour, he looked down at the floor and into his change cup, which doubles as a foot-cymbal to keep the beat. “I think I just made 80 cents,” he said, with mock enthusiasm.

  Of course, he still has a small coterie of devoted regulars. Ailin Kojima, a shuttle rider and a big fan of Mr. Homa’s for two years, walked up on Friday and quietly slipped a crisp $50 bill into his hand. “He cheers me up,” explains Ms. Kojima, an account manager at a marketing firm. “He’s kind of shy and sweet and he has that small town feel to him.”

  Yesterday morning, his medley of songs from “Star Wars” got things off to such a good start that it almost felt like the old days again. After he played “Folsom Prison Blues,” one man whooped and said, “Johnny Cash, yeah!” before dropping a dollar in his pot, and then an attractive blond woman told him admiringly, “I’m amazed you can do that while the train’s moving.”

  But despite a good morning, Mr. Homa says he has decided that it’s high time to step off the shuttle for good. He is now looking for a full-time job—nonmusical, please—so that he can pay the bills, chase his musical dreams and ride the subway like normal people do.

  Perhaps the words from one of his own songs express his feelings best:

  My friends and my neighbors they ask me for money

  I’m broker than they are, I laugh cause it’s funny

  Oh who do they think I am, some damned Easter bunny?

  I’m only a subway musician.

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 15, 2002

  SOUTHBOUND WITH BLOOMBERG

  Before this one, it is probably fair to say that all 17 men who served as mayor of the city of New York since the subway opened in 1904 at least pretended to be subway riders, some more convincingly than others.

  Mayor George B. McClellan boarded the very first train and took the controls himself, driving under nervous professional supervision all the way from City Hall to Harlem. “Well, that was a little tiresome, don’t you know?” he said later, setting the tone for his successors.

  Fiorello H. La Guardia used the subway, along with babies and baseball, as a handy political prop but not as a regular means of conveyance.

  Edward I. Koch said he took it at least once every two weeks, but people did not believe him, and he had to write letters to newspapers insisting that it was true.

  Rudolph W. Giuliani liked to take the subway when feeling nostalgic, riding with his son, Andrew, to Yankees games. But their more frequent means of getting to the stadium was riding in something that seemed almost the size of a subway car, the mayor’s massive white Suburban, with a police light flashing on top.

  Considering this tenuous relationship between mayors and mass transit, there was a great deal of skepticism when Michael R. Bloomberg pledged last year to take public transportation every day he went to City Hall, if the voters would only send him there.

  The widespread assumption was that public transportation, in the mind of a successful billionaire, probably meant a taxicab, in which he would have to forgo the legroom and minibar selection of his limousine.

  But in the three weeks since he has been in office, Mr. Bloomberg says, he has taken the subway to work all but one day, with little fanfare or attention, generally only in the company of two large men with curly wires leading into their ears and a couple of hundred other citizens of his city who have crammed themselves into his car on the Lexington line.

  Mr. Bloomberg’s press secretary swears that it is so, and probably the best indication that it really is true is the way the mayor responds when asked whether he enjoys riding the subway. He looks at the questioner as if he has asked about a minor dental procedure.

  “‘Enjoy’ isn’t quite the right word,” he says.

  Accompanying Mr. Bloomberg on his way to City Hall one morning last week helped to demonstrate amply why he feels this way. It is a testament to something—maybe principle or civic pride or progressive thinking or just plain old masochism—that he has decided to become the first subway-riding mayor.

  The station nearest his town house on East 79th Street in Manhattan is the 77th Street station, which means that, even among subway riders who feel themselves beleaguered by crowding, Mr. Bloomberg has joined the vanguard of the oppressed, the Lexington line riders, whose morning trains are usually the most packed in the city.

  Last Thursday morning, the mayor left his house a little after 7 with his beige overcoat buttoned to beneath the knot on his maroon tie, like a well-heeled Cheever character. He stopped off for a cup of coffee and swiped his MetroCard through the turnstile. He usually gets to the station at least an hour earlier, but he had decided that morning to mix some campaigning into his trip, stumping at the station for a fellow Republican, Assemblyman John Ravitz, who is running for State Senate in a coming special election.

  The 77th Street station can be chaotic enough on a slow day, so the campaigning showed the mixed blessing of having a mayor as a fellow straphanger. It is possible that your station might be a little cleaner than before, but it is also possible that you will enter the station to have a man yell three times into your ear as you go through the tur
nstile: “Say hello to the mayor of New York City and Assemblyman John Ravitz!”

  At a little after 8, the mayor, his bodyguards and a group of aides and reporters made their way to the platform. A No. 6 train pulled up that appeared far too crowded to enter, but Mr. Bloomberg plunged ahead like a linebacker, positioning himself in a corner near the conductor’s cab, where he was less likely to get jostled. (He points out that he is no subway neophyte; during the 15 years when he worked for Salomon Brothers, he took the train every day. “And that was back before air-conditioning,” he stresses.)

  On the way to Grand Central, where he jammed himself into an even more crowded No. 4 train, Mr. Bloomberg chatted with a seated elderly woman after the surging crowd shoved him up next to her. “God bless you,” she said, appearing a little flustered to find herself suddenly knee-to-knee with the chief executive of her city.

  The woman sitting next to her was more representative of the true spirit of the subway. Sleeping, she cracked one eye open, appeared annoyed that there was so much talking going on, and promptly fell back to sleep.

  Gilbert Cruz, a property manager who was standing next to the mayor, beamed. “Look at him,” he said. “He’s interacting with the public, no problem.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 22, 2002

  AROUND THE WORLD IN 40 HOURS (OR “I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M DOING THIS”)

  At 6 a.m. yesterday, a 17-year-old Brooklyn high school student named Harry Beck got on the subway.

  If you are reading this before noon today, there is a good chance that Harry Beck is still on the subway, probably somewhere beneath Brooklyn or Queens, badly in need of sleep, with a sore back, a weak cell phone battery, a ringing in his ears and a subway map on which most of the lines have been inked over in blue ballpoint pen.

  The pen marks mean that Mr. Beck has traversed these lines sometime during the previous 24 hours, and if he is lucky—if he has not been stranded in a stalled train or accosted by gangs of high school bullies or fallen asleep on a bench at Coney Island—he will be close to marking off the last line on the map, and ending a very, very long subway ride.