Subwayland Read online

  Most people take the train to get to work. Mr. Beck is taking it, more or less, to get to college.

  In truth, there were easier research projects he could have conducted to complete his senior thesis at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights, near where he lives. But Mr. Beck loves the subway, its history, its mythology and its minutiae, with the kind of love many teenagers reserve for their headphones and their girlfriends. (He even runs his own subway Web site, and in his bedroom, plugged into the wall, is a real, working subway signal.)

  So, he thought, why not attempt the transit Everest—468 stations, 230 route miles, 30 to 40 hours, Van Cortlandt Park to Rockaway Park, with everything in between—and see if someone would give him school credit for it, too.

  “I mean, some kids are writing about French cuisine or ‘This is me going skiing every weekend at my country house,’” he said yesterday, in Hour 4 of the project. “I like riding the subway. So why can’t I do that?”

  As a literary exercise, it was not the first subway endurance test. The novelist Paul Theroux once spent a week riding the system from end to end, and imparted his most important survival technique, given to him by a friend: “You have to look as if you’re the one with the meat cleaver.” (This was in 1982.)

  As a research venture, Mr. Beck’s trip was not exactly Darwin aboard the Beagle, although he did decide to take pictures and notes and to count the homeless people he came across on his journey (10 by 10 a.m. yesterday, on 11 different trains). Mr. Beck also decided not to try to break the world record for navigating the whole subway in the least number of hours, which now hovers down in the low 20’s.

  Yesterday at about noon, however, he was thinking that perhaps he should have. He was growing a little fatigued. He had tried to get a good night’s sleep the night before the trip, and had even swallowed two allergy pills to knock himself out, but he was far too revved up and finally drifted off at 4 a.m., an hour before he had to get up.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this, actually, now that I think about it,” he reported at about Hour 6, sitting on a No. 2 train, across from a woman watching him suspiciously as he wrote in his subway notebook. “I mean, what a weird thing to do.”

  Mr. Beck does not look the part of what transit workers call a foamer, meaning someone who loves the subway so much that he appears rabid when discussing it. He has long, black, rock ‘n’ roll sideburns and was traveling with a Weezer CD in his portable stereo yesterday, packed into his green knapsack along with $27 in cash, two bottles of water, gum, breath mints, nose drops, eyedrops, a radio scanner, gloves, a cell phone, his typed-out itinerary and two books for a class he is taking called “Death and Dying.” (“It’s pretty much a big downer, that class,” he said.)

  Of himself, Mr. Beck said, “I’m not king popularity, but I’m not a loner either, like some subway guys. I’m not getting beat up in school or anything because I like subways.” His physics teacher, Flo Turkenkopf, confirmed this. She says he knows there are things he loves that make him a geek, “but he has a sense of humor about it all.”

  The school’s administrators and Mr. Beck’s parents, a psychologist and a former teacher, had less of a sense of humor about his plans to skip two days of school to do something that usually lands other teenagers in a truancy office.

  But they were eventually persuaded after Mr. Beck explained the valuable lessons he would be learning in sociology and urban affairs. Plus, he agreed to schedule in lunch and dinner breaks and have a teacher ride along with him overnight.

  Reached last night by cell phone somewhere on the L train, Mr. Beck reported that he was faring well, that he had passed through about 230 stations or almost half and, as a bonus, had seen many good-looking young women on their way home to Williamsburg.

  Next, he said, he was headed back to Brooklyn to eat dinner at his house. “You know, for my mom,” he said, unconvincingly. “To calm her down.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 26, 2002

  MASS-TRANSIT MOSES

  When people speak of having a bad subway day, it is generally understood that the day in question took place in the subway.

  For Anthony Trocchia, this is not the way it works.

  In fact, he explains, having trouble in the subway—on a subway train, dare he dream—would be a minor victory, something to be savored while stuck in the tunnel.

  It was just after 9 a.m. yesterday, and he was explaining this in a humid corner of the Jamaica Center subway station, laughing the way people sometimes laugh to emphasize how thoroughly unfunny something is.

  This was because Mr. Trocchia had found himself, once again, feeling a little like Moses.

  Not to conflate subway platforms with the promised land, but if you make your way around New York in a wheelchair, as Mr. Trocchia does, and you would like to do so in the subway—using the 38 stations that transit officials have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last decade to make accessible for disabled riders—reaching the platform is the minimum requirement.

  Mr. Trocchia would not be able to do that yesterday morning. He would look down a short staircase and see the platform stretching out in front of him. He would see the E train pulling in. Then he would look at the elevator door in front of him, the one with the ragged red plastic tape stretched in front of it.

  And he would slowly turn his motorized wheelchair around for a trip back to the street.

  “Welcome to my life,” he said, “and all its dysfunction.”

  In the interest of full disclosure, Mr. Trocchia, 33, who has muscular dystrophy and has been unable to walk since he was 11, is not just any guy in a wheelchair trying to use the subway. He is president of an advocacy group, Disabled in Action of Metropolitan New York, and he had invited a reporter to meet him in Jamaica yesterday to explore the workings, or nonworkings, of the subway from the perspective of a wheelchair seat.

  He had not set out hoping to find dysfunction. In fact, Mr. Trocchia—who regularly rides city buses and says they work very well for passengers in wheelchairs—had chosen one of the most accessible stretches in the subway, three stations in a row along the E line in Jamaica.

  Before he left his home in Brooklyn, he had called the New York City Transit hotline that provides information about broken elevators and had learned that no problems had been reported at any of the three stations. Indeed, at Jamaica Center around 9, it seemed as if things had improved since the last time he had tried, and failed, to use the subway: The elevator from the street worked when he pushed the button. (Mr. Trocchia rolled into it with the caution born of experience. “You never know what the odor du jour is going to be,” he warned.)

  But the mezzanine, and the all-too-literal red tape stretched across the entrance, turned out to be a harbinger for the rest of the morning.

  Stoically patient, cracking jokes in a musical voice, Mr. Trocchia made his way back to the street and rolled eight blocks down Archer Avenue to the Sutphin Boulevard station, which is listed as being wheelchair accessible on New York City Transit’s Web site. And indeed, in theory, one might concede that it is accessible, except that the elevator is in the middle of a construction project and has been shut down for several months.

  Mr. Trocchia began buttonholing employees to see if they knew of another elevator, but his questions were met mostly with blank stares. A helpful New York State Police officer offered to get a partner and carry the wheelchair down the stairs, until he was told that it weighed 300 pounds. “Oh,” he said, and then added, when asked about the elevator situation, “I have no official comment.”

  Mr. Trocchia rolled on. (“Thank God for Paxil,” he said.)

  His last attempt of the day was made at the Jamaica–Van Wyck Station, where the elevator was working but the button at street level was not. Mr. Trocchia waited for the elevator to be brought up from the mezzanine, where the button did work. But upon reaching the platform—at 10:20, more than an hour after he started trying to take the subway—he was finally
defeated by the obstacle he had known he would find all along. The thresholds of the arriving trains were about 4 inches higher than the platform, making it almost impossible for Mr. Trocchia to enter the train without his chair flipping over backward. A platform riser, which has been installed in some other accessible stations, was absent at Van Wyck, meaning that the elevator did little more than provide a meaningless sightseeing trip down to the platform.

  Mr. Trocchia, smiling a little sarcastically, mentioned that an elevator was scheduled to be installed in the subway station nearest to his home in Williamsburg. “I think it’s supposed to be done in 2012,” he said, smile widening. “I guess I’ll put my plans on hold until then.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY 23, 2002

  RESIDENT COMIC

  It has been one of the longest-running performances in the history of the subway.

  Nearly every morning and evening for the last 12 years, from the depths of winter to the dog days of summer, a very bitter, disturbed and funny man named Carl Robinson has taken the stage at a narrow, overcrowded theater otherwise known as the subway station at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street.

  The morning show begins with the rush. The evening show can last until midnight. Sometimes there is singing, but usually there is just the stentorian voice of Mr. Robinson, booming out a monologue that falls somewhere between scabrous stand-up comedy and postmodern performance art. On good days, it is reminiscent of early George Carlin. On bad days, especially when Mr. Robinson recalls the many women who seem to have wronged him, the material veers toward late Lenny Bruce and commuters tend to veer away from him.

  But even those who are not fans of Mr. Robinson (and he has his share of very angry critics) have come to think of him over the years as an institution at their station, as inseparable from it as the subterranean funk or the steep escalators.

  So last Monday, when the morning rush arrived and Mr. Robinson was not there to greet it, some people began to wonder. Tuesday passed without him, then Wednesday, and rumors began to swirl on the platform and in nearby offices that he had been attacked or struck by a train.

  “Everyone is thinking he is dead,” said Mohemmed Khan, who manages the station’s newsstand and stood in it yesterday shaking his head sadly. “Every day, thousand people and thousand people more ask me, ‘Where is Carl? What happened to Carl?’”

  Sybil Ferere, an administrator at a nearby brokerage firm who has given Mr. Robinson food and money for years (he does not panhandle), said that by midweek she was so worried she called the police. “I just couldn’t believe that Carl wouldn’t be there to talk to us every day,” she explained. “I had to find him.”

  Ms. Ferere eventually did, in a hospital: Mr. Robinson had been attacked, in the early-morning hours last Monday as he slept on the platform, by a man who tried to rob him and then returned and cut his throat open with a knife.

  The good news, however, was that the subway’s comedian-in-residence could not be silenced so easily. He was at Bellevue, very much alive and healing well. And, as he demonstrated himself last Friday, sitting up in his hospital bed, his attacker did not manage to sever his sense of humor.

  “The doctor told me that they cut off only my head,” he reported, smiling weakly, “so luckily no vital organs were touched.”

  Removing his neck brace to reveal a six-inch horizontal row of stitches across the middle of his throat, Mr. Robinson said that he was certain that he was going to die as he stumbled, bleeding, down the platform to find a pay phone. (The police are still searching for his attacker, whose face Mr. Robinson said he did not see clearly.)

  “You know what I was thinking?” he asked. “I was thinking of this girl I know who doesn’t like me very much and how I would never get to see her again.”

  Propping himself up with a pillow, Mr. Robinson explained that he came to be homeless and living in the subway about 15 years ago, for reasons that he did not care to discuss in detail. He would say only that after a few years as a clerical worker, he came to a powerful realization: “I watched a lot of people go broke, and I thought that I would just stay broke and bypass the process.”

  He decided to settle permanently at the station at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street for purely practical reasons. “The acoustics,” he explained. “My voice carries very well there.” And thus began what Mr. Robinson calls his Fifth Avenue Show, subtitled “Free as long as you pay the $1.50.”

  He sees himself not merely as a comedian, however, but as a voice crying in the wilderness, revealing the truth behind the day’s events and trying to disabuse comfortable New Yorkers of their comfortable illusions. “Most of these people I see,” he said, “they’re living in cages. The cages are very nice. They’re made out of gold. But they’re still cages.”

  As something of a misanthrope, Mr. Robinson is not quite sure what to make of all the attention and concern that many of those delusional and caged people have exhibited toward him since his attack.

  Ms. Ferere phoned him. A worker at the newsstand, Mohemmed Youshuf, went to the hospital to visit him last Thursday. And Mr. Khan, the newsstand manager, even put up a sign in the station to let commuters know what had happened to Mr. Robinson.

  It says: “Mr. Carl. He is in the hospital. He is okay.”

  “Carl is a good man,” Mr. Khan said. “A very, very funny man.”

  Whether he will be funny once again on the platforms beneath Fifth Avenue remains uncertain. But Mr. Robinson hinted that if he returns, he will be better than ever.

  “The cut on my throat has improved my voice,” he said cheerfully. “Can you believe that?”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 20, 2002

  TANGOS WITH MANNEQUINS

  It is not easy being the hardest-working man in subway show business.

  It means starting the day, as Julio Diaz does, in a tiny basement room in Corona, Queens, that is about as wide as a subway car but much shorter. This room is his kitchen, his living room, his bedroom, his workshop and his rehearsal hall.

  In it, there is a bed and a television and a window the size of a takeout menu. There are pictures and newspaper clippings ringing the room like wallpaper, showing Mr. Diaz with Tito Puente, Mr. Diaz with Celia Cruz, Mr. Diaz with his adoring crowds. There are albums of thank-you letters and certificates from places like the Smithsonian. And there is a huge box of prized videotapes, several of which Mr. Diaz played yesterday morning to demonstrate his durable renown: glowing interviews with him on Japanese television and Colombian television and Telemundo and CNN.

  As he was doing this, however, he was interrupted by the sound of a toilet flushing from the common bathroom down the hall, and one of Mr. Diaz’s neighbors, a small man in a red tie, shuffled by, brushing his teeth. “Buenos dias,” the man said, through his toothbrush.

  “Buenos dias,” Mr. Diaz said, sullenly.

  And with that, he began stuffing a suggestively dressed mannequin that he calls Lupita into her Samsonite suitcase and limbering himself up for another day on the job.

  If there were a way to measure the distance between fame and fortune, the subway would undoubtedly be one of the places where the chasm between the two yawns the widest. Performers there can be seen daily by enough spectators to pack a small stadium. They can bask in the kind of adulation usually reserved for rock stars. Because of the iconic position the New York subway holds not only in the city but also around the world, they can become cult heroes and minor media stars.

  But while a few escape to careers aboveground, many more find that subway fame, as great as it may grow, does not translate well to auditoriums where the walls are not tiled. What remains is something that occurs to few subway riders when they pause to watch their favorite performer: a steady working-class job.

  The job may be more interesting and rewarding than most, but it is a full-time job nonetheless, as demanding as they come. And if anyone ever decides to draw up a seniority list for such jobs, Julio Cesar “El Charro” Diaz, the ubiquitous subway mannequin
dancing man, will surely be at the top.

  “It’s my only work,” Mr. Diaz explained in Spanish yesterday afternoon, before taking the stage for two hours of almost uninterrupted tango, salsa and mambo on the mezzanine at the station at 34th Street and the Avenue of the Americas. “Me and Lupita, we are out there every day, every day. We work very hard.”

  So hard, in fact, that if you have ridden the subway any time in the last eight years—since Mr. Diaz left the suburbs of Bogotá, Colombia, and decided to seek his fortune in the subway—it has been hard to miss him, his black dress shoes permanently tethered to the high heels of the 30-pound female mannequins he manufactures himself on an ancient Singer sewing machine in his tiny apartment. (As with B. B. King’s procession of guitars, all named Lucille, there have been numerous Lupitas over the years. Mr. Diaz said he now keeps six, repairing them as he rapidly wears them out.)

  Despite the laughter and applause that follow Mr. Diaz every time he draws his partner from her suitcase, he acknowledges that many subway riders have never quite known what to make of a grown man dancing with a buxom, life-size doll, even if the man dances very well.

  “They think that I am lonely or a sad man,” he said. “They make jokes about what I do with the doll when I am alone.”

  But Mr. Diaz points out that his kind of dancing has roots that long predate him or the subway. As a young man in Colombia, he remembered, he and others would dance the “baile de la escoba” or broom dance, a folk tradition in which couples pair up to dance but they are always one woman short. A broom takes the place of the missing woman, and the dancer who ends up with the broom in his arms when the song ends has to buy drinks for everyone else.

  The way Mr. Diaz became a professional dancer with inanimate partners sounds like a folk tale itself: a friend of his had lost a beautiful girlfriend to the handsome son of a shoemaker. He asked Mr. Diaz to make an effigy of the woman and dress it in her old clothes, so that he could burn it in the street and rid himself of the painful memory of her.