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  “Sir,” she sang out. “There is a line here.”

  The man looked murderous but he shuffled to the back of the line while everyone else smiled.

  “Men,” said Ms. Mendez, shaking her head in disgust. “They just don’t like to be told.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 23, 2002

  WATCHING YOUR BACK

  In case you do not have enough things to worry about right now—the subway shutting down next week, your fare going up next spring—Sgt. Randy Stoever would like to give you several more.

  First, worry about standing in line near MetroCard machines. Worry about going through the turnstiles. About getting into a crowded train. About wearing a backpack. About carrying a purse that opens with a side flap. Actually, at this time of year, about carrying a purse at all. Or a wallet or, God forbid, credit cards.

  “I don’t let my wife carry credit cards,” the sergeant said early yesterday morning, in the subway, looking very worried. “Too risky.”

  In fact, he worries when a waiter at a restaurant takes his credit card away from the table to process it. “Not a good idea,” he said. “You should watch him.”

  Just after 6 a.m. yesterday at the Columbus Circle subway station, Sergeant Stoever met a group of men who looked almost as worried as he did. They shared almost no distinguishing characteristics except that several had mustaches, many chewed gum aggressively and all seemed to dislike ordinal numbers. (14th Street and Sixth Avenue becomes “one-four and six”; 116th and Eighth sounds like a telephone number.)

  To an amateur, none of these men looked much like what they were: some of the most experienced undercover antipickpocket police officers in the country, preparing to melt into the subway to help ensure that your purses, wallets and credit cards remain yours throughout this holiday season.

  One officer wore a pinstriped vest and a nice blue tie. Another wore stereo headphones, through which the crackle of a police radio could be heard if you stood close. Another wore greasy hair, a goatee and an El Vez T-shirt.

  “That’s my hippie—I let him dress that way,” Sergeant Stoever explained, and then pointed at the man, shaking his head: “You really can’t put a suit on that.”

  The sergeant, who has led the pickpocket unit for nine years, was less expressive—a mock turtleneck, black corduroys and wraparound shades, giving him the look of a bouncer at a better nightclub. His men, who would rather not see their names in the newspaper, have also been dressed at various times as busboys, bankers and FedEx deliverymen. One plans to dress up soon as an old woman. And if you see a particularly bedraggled homeless man on a train late at night, in a wheelchair, with an eye patch, check for the outline of a 9-millimeter handgun under the dirty blankets.

  “Down here,” Sergeant Stoever explained, “it’s a game of who sees who first.”

  As the sergeant and his partner began threading rapidly through the morning rush crowds yesterday, ricocheting from 86th Street to Fulton Street and everywhere in between, they were hoping to see several old acquaintances before being seen.

  Many of these have been arrested so many times that their unflattering pictures hang on the walls in the subway police station house at Columbus Circle. “Check out this guy,” said the sergeant, pointing to a man with a strange facial deformity, a clear drawback in his profession. “Looks like the guy’s nose is taking a right-hand turn.”

  Some pickpockets are known as cutters, old-school thieves who love the thrill of razoring women’s wallets from their pocketbooks, leaving them clutching their bags, completely unaware of the robbery. Others are creepers, who do not like to work crowds or jostle their victims but instead follow them out of the subway and are so talented they can steal a wallet, take a credit card from it and then replace it without the victim knowing.

  “Some of these people have been picking pockets since they were 12,” Sergeant Stoever said. “They know us. We know them. And they all know each other.”

  Yesterday it seemed as if they had all called one another and agreed to take the morning off, though it was unclear whether to consider this a positive sign or one of an impending blitz.

  In their absence, the sergeant and his partner seemed to move at an even more frantic pace, looking for the less evident signs of a pocket about to be picked—signs like subway riders who suspiciously “loop,” leaving one car rapidly to enter the next before the doors close.

  At Grand Central, the officers spotted a known looper, a red-haired man in an Aztec-print coat whom they had seen some months before. But the man never made a move for a pocketbook. “I think he might just be looking at the girls,” the sergeant said. “Sometimes you get those.”

  They followed other loopers, again with no results. At one point, a reporter was positive that he had seen clear evidence of looping himself. But by the end of the shift, the only pickpocket unmasked was Sergeant Stoever himself, who admitted lifting the wallets of his very own men.

  “I’ve stolen from every one of them,” he said, “just to keep them sharp. So they know they can be beat.”

  The reporter instinctively reached into his back pocket. The wallet was still there.

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED DECEMBER 10, 2002

  “DROP AND GIVE ME 20”

  Somewhere in the coat pocket or the employee locker or the sock drawer of nearly every New York City subway conductor is a 26-page booklet called “Customer Communications and Platform Observation Procedures,” otherwise known in subway circles as the blue book.

  It is the bible and the Bartlett’s Quotations of the conductor. Among the quotations is a classic, on page 6, “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.” And another, more obscure but more dramatic, on page 18: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the conductor. We are delayed because there is a person on the tracks.”

  Transit officials do not intend these quotes to be edifying but to be memorized and repeated, ideally word for word, any time a conductor presses the intercom button and addresses his or her considerable audience, up to 2,000 passengers on a crowded morning train. The booklet is probably the most detailed on the subject of what should be said when one or two of these 2,000 people decides—out of malice, impatience or stupidity—to hold open the doors of trains.

  Conductors can choose, for example, “Ladies and gentlemen, please do not hold the train doors open.” Or perhaps the slightly more direct, “Please release the doors so that the train can leave the station.” But whatever phrase is chosen, the blue book counsels, “The last thing we want is for a conductor to overreact, and to make an announcement in a confrontational tone of voice.”

  With this in mind, there was clearly an unscripted moment in progress yesterday morning at the Atlantic Avenue station in Brooklyn, where unseen hands or feet somewhere along the crowded platform were holding the doors of a Manhattan-bound No. 2 train.

  A woman’s scratchy, angry voice rang through the cars. “Move into the train!” she commanded. A few seconds later this was followed by “You need to MOVE into the train!” Then, erupting like a cheap machine gun, “MOVE IN, MOVE IN, MOVE IN, MOVE IN, MOVE IN!” And then later, with the train still sitting, a more slow and threatening command, like Dirty Harry with a door button: “Let GO. Of the DOORS. In the REAR! LET ’EM GO!” (The doors were finally released. A woman on the platform remarked, admiringly, as the train sped away, “You go, girl.”)

  This is a subway phenomenon that has existed, of course, ever since trains have been crowded, meaning, essentially, since the first minute the subway opened. But in the last several years, as the number of riders has increased greatly, it seems much more prevalent: the conductor as drill sergeant.

  While they do not demand push-ups, these conductors, like drill sergeants, use a wide range of aggressive behavior modification tactics. There is yelling and repetition. There are insults and threats. (“I will call the police!”)

  There is, perhaps most effective and widely used, shame and demonization. (“You, with the blue backpack, if you just
let go of the doors, then all of these nice, tired people can go home.”)

  Sometimes, however, it simply seems as if the conductor is just taking it all a little too personally. Such as the one Clayton Parker, 15, heard on a No. 1 train announce, “I have no problem taking this train out of service and leaving you suckers on the platform, so let’s try again.”

  Or the one that Laura Napolitano, 19, came across on a Q train the other day, maniacally shouting “Slam!” as he opened and closed the doors rapidly.

  Veteran subway conductors explain it is very easy to get frustrated on the job, but some get a lot more frustrated than others. “Some of the people I work with don’t—let’s see how to put this—don’t have all the social graces you might hope for,” said Jimmy Willis, a 15-year veteran who explained that he decided many years ago that closing subway doors was just not something he was going to get angry about anymore. And he has seen plenty to make him angry.

  He has been spat upon at least 15 times on the job. He has seen high school students ram batteries and pens into the subway door tracks to jam them. He has watched a woman put her baby into the path of the closing doors to make him open them again. Once, he narrowly missed being clocked with a baseball bat. And another time, an impatient passenger actually managed to connect.

  “There was an old lady on the platform,” Mr. Willis said, “the quintessential old lady, and she bops me on the head with her umbrella. I thought, ‘This is it. I’ve seen it all now.’”

  Deborah Hardwick has seen even more in her nearly 20 years in the conductor’s cab. She admits she has sometimes played drill sergeant. But now, older and wiser, she uses a new tactic—call it urban bonding—that works better. Perhaps one day it, too, will be enshrined in the blue book. It goes like this:

  “It’s the end of my day. I want to go home. Just like you do. So if wouldn’t mind…”

  “Thank you.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MARCH 4, 2003

  THE BIG SUCK

  Very early yesterday morning while you were sleeping, a group of generally large men got up, got dressed and did some vacuuming for you.

  Being generally large, they did not use a small vacuum cleaner: it was 225 feet long, weighed several tons, cost $15 million, sat atop four Detroit Diesel engines and was capable of moving 55 miles per hour. When cranked up, it did not sound much like a Hoover. It sounded more like the end of the world.

  Despite the fact that this vacuum had no special hose attachments, it was quite effective in getting at those hard-to-reach places, like the subway tunnel between Jay Street and High Street on the A line.

  In fact, over the last two years, since it arrived from France—that nation of progressive vacuumers—this particular vacuum cleaner and an identical counterpart have reached almost every unclean spot in the underground portion of the subway and have a lot to show for it, none of which you would want to be in the same borough with.

  Together, they have sucked up almost five million pounds of the gunk and junk deposited daily in the system by subway riders and by the trains themselves, whose wheels leave behind a fine, black steel dust that coats everything—from the garbage to rats to track workers—with what looks like dark-chocolate frosting.

  It is difficult to tell whether the following analogy makes them Mets fans or demonstrates a special hatred of the team, but the men who operate the subway vacuum trains like to calculate that all the trash they have suctioned out of the system since they began in 1997 would cover the infield at Shea Stadium to a depth of 27 feet.

  Most of the more sizable, interesting and frightening things left on the tracks—umbrellas, cell phones, tennis shoes, hypodermic needles and folding chairs, for example—are usually picked up by advance track crews who walk out ahead of the train with garbage bags and flashlights. But sometimes, as when your home vacuum cleaner accidentally inhales a sock, the vacuum train also stumbles across something bigger.

  “You wouldn’t believe what we’ve had,” said John J. Doherty, a superintendent. “We’ve had a wedding dress. We’ve had mattresses. We’ve had things I couldn’t even identify.”

  Mattresses? He quickly clarified: “Not a queen-sized. Oh, no, it couldn’t do a queen-sized. I’m talking more like a—what do you call it?—a single bed.”

  After the five-car train thundered into the High Street station yesterday morning just after midnight, Michael Sullivan, another superintendent, opened a door on the side of one bright yellow car to show where these larger incidental items were trapped so that they would not clog the train’s filters.

  He invited a reporter to put his head into the opening and look around. There were no wedding dresses or mattresses inside. Instead, it appeared as if a small delicatessen had imploded. “You want to take a sample of that home for breakfast?” Mr. Sullivan asked, smiling wickedly.

  Basically the only items the train will not pick up, he said, are AA batteries and wet newspapers, because they are very dense for their size. Although the train sucks 70,000 cubic feet of air per minute, creating a violent foot-high dust storm below it, it is designed to leave small, heavy objects behind so that it will not extract the small ballast rocks from the track beds.

  Rats, he said, have become very adept at not being extracted, scurrying out of the way just ahead of the lethal suction. “If Ben don’t run fast enough, then that’s his problem,” he said, referring to the long-tailed star of the 1972 horror film “Ben,” which seems to be a favorite among the members of the vacuum train team.

  About 1:15, after unsticking a stubborn suction hood, everyone climbed aboard and the vacuuming of the subway began, in a methodical two-mile-per-hour crawl south toward Jay Street. The train then reversed and headed north, slowly sucking its way under the width of the East River, a particularly ticklish spot in the system because trash fires could trap riders in the under-river tube, far from any station.

  While there are all kinds of special cars that ply the rails of the subway in the dead of night—pump cars, crane cars, tank cars, wash cars, observation cars, de-icer cars, ballast-tamper cars and cars that apply a strange, toothpastelike goo to the rails to keep trains’ wheels from slipping—the vacuum cars probably draw the most attention in subway stations. In part, this is because riders find it almost impossible to discern the purpose of the gargantuan yellow train, and because the noise that attends a cleaner, safer subway is truly brain rattling.

  Very early yesterday morning at High Street, one homeless man, sprawled on a bench, somehow managed to sleep through the din. Two other men sat with their hands over their ears, looking oppressed.

  A fourth removed his shirt, pulled out a rag and began to wash himself, seeming to get into the cleaning spirit.

  “When we first pulled in,” said Richard Cardiello, a subway general superintendent, “he was doing push-ups and sit-ups. He’s in pretty good shape for a man of his size.”

  —ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 29, 2003

  LOST IN THE SUBWAY

  Losing something in your own living room is bad enough. Losing something in the street is much worse—the frantic review of the route, the desperate search of the dirty sidewalk, the hope that people are more honest than you have always assumed them to be.

  But undoubtedly the worst place to lose something in New York City is the place where you cannot go to get it even if you find it, even if it is just beyond your reach: the track bed of the subway, where neither station agent nor police officer nor firefighter will descend, where the rat holds dominion, where the third rail silently harbors its 600 volts and where a 350-ton train could be right around the corner.

  And yet even in that murky and dangerous ditch, there is the possibility of redemption.

  In fact, more than three quarters of things dropped down there are found—including, once, unbelievably, the wedding band of a thoroughly drunken man who let it slip from his ring finger between cars somewhere in Brooklyn and was afraid to go back home to his wife without it.

  Usually the
lost valuables are not so valuable. But if someone still wants something back after it has been on the tracks, New York City Transit will go get it. If it tumbles down anywhere between Coney Island and 23rd Street in Manhattan, the call usually makes its way to a phone in a locked corridor of the DeKalb Avenue station in downtown Brooklyn, where a man with a thick mustache named Mario Trischitta usually answers it.

  Mr. Trischitta, 42, has almost 20 years of experience working down where the only people allowed are those who have been trained for five weeks in how to deal safely with live subway tracks. His coworkers, Reggie Corbett and Larry Cummings, have 43 more years of track experience, collectively. They are, as Mr. Cummings puts it, the seasoned veterans, “the firemen of the track division,” and the name of their unit reflects it. They are known as the subway’s Emergency Response Team.

  Arranged in 10 small crews throughout the city, the teams are paid to sit and wait for the worst, and when it happens they are usually the first on the scene for every kind of it: track fires, broken rails, water main breaks and the call they all dread.

  “A man under is the worst,” Mr. Corbett, 43, said the other day at DeKalb. “Nobody wants to go to a man under.”

  But in the midst of emergencies and helping to prevent them, the men are also charged with doing the equivalent of what firefighters do when they rescue cats from trees. It might not be a real emergency, but it seems so to the cat owner.

  In the same way, when a pair of dentures is lost on the subway tracks, it certainly seems like an emergency to the man who uses them to eat.

  “People drop their dentures,” Mr. Corbett said, shaking his head. “I just don’t know how they fall out of their mouths.”

  People also tend to lose wallets, cash, canes, hats, gloves, books, cell phones, MetroCards, receipts, utility bills and tiny teardrop-shaped earrings. (“Earrings are the hardest,” said Mr. Cummings, 48. “Like looking for a needle in a haystack.”) Mr. Trischitta usually doesn’t ask questions when he retrieves personal possessions, but once he went to get a man’s shoe from the tracks. He found the man standing near the token booth, with one socked foot held up gingerly off the dirty floor.