SUBWAY

I LIKE THE SUBWAY. I ride it. I believe in it as a democratic institution. When I ride, I imagine all the black and gray and white stretch limos that sit stuck in traffic on the street overhead and the anxious phantoms behind the smoked-glass windows cursing and steaming, rolling their bulbous red eyes. They sit on black kid leather, a reading lamp over the right shoulder, air-conditioned, a television screen and a bottle of bourbon within reach, but they aren’t going anywhere, and meanwhile I roll along from stop to stop in the company of my fellow New Yorkers, a patient and humorous and classy people, to 42nd, 34th, 23rd, 14th, while the big mazumbo’s palace inches a few feet now and then, packed into a narrow sidestreet at the bottom of a canyon, a herd of plutocrats trapped like swine.

Despite this comforting thought, the subway often tests your democratic resolve. You descend from the street into a basement smelling of urine and buy tokens from a black lady sitting in a thick glass-and-steel case strong enough to withstand artillery. Nonetheless, she looks a little scared. Her voice comes out through a tinny speaker, as do the track announcements, and you can’t understand a word. You drop a token in the slot and push through the ancient heavy wood turnstile which, like the mosaic tile walls, suggests a glorious past, long vanished. Your fellow detainees line the long concrete platform in the gloom, staring glumly into the black pit where the rails lie, garbage strewn along the ties. A rat darts out and skitters around the wrappers and cans, sniffing.

Couples hold each other. Little children clutch at their parents; they don’t tear around like they do in parks or in stores. It reminds you, if you’re a man, of when you stood naked in a long line of naked men at the Armory, taking your draft-board physical, waiting for the army doctor to tell you to bend over to have your rectum inspected. Coldness. Pale dry uneasiness, dread. Complete separation from your fellows. You long for humor, for someone to make that simple brilliant wisecrack that breaks the ice and makes all men brothers—what would Jimmy Stewart say in this situation? waalll, gosh if I know—but your brain is stuck. You think, “This could be a dangerous place.” Far up the platform, a man sleeps on newspapers spread under a bench next to a door marked “MEN,” a door you’d never open, not even if ordered to by thugs. A room full of garbage, filth, killer bees, Nazis, crackheads, flies who carry AIDS, the works.

A distant screeching. It gets louder and louder until the train light appears in the dark, so loud that instinct tells you to plug your ears—your eardrums hurt, Mozart will never be so beautiful again, your wife’s voice will sound flat after this: you are destroying your fabulous ears and getting a pair of nineteen-dollar ones instead—but putting fingers in your ears might mark you as a greenhorn, so you stand placid and afraid as the antique piles of spray-painted cars slide slowly past and stop, a door opens halfway, your fellows squeeze past, we all shove in, the voice in the speaker overhead says, “Watch for the closing doors,” and the doors shut on us packed in tight, lurching into each other as the train jerks forward.

A tall man with long filthy hair, dressed in ripped jeans and dirty sneakers, on crutches, carrying an empty Crisco can. He says loudly: “PEOPLE. I’M A WOUNDED VIETNAM VETERAN. I FOUGHT FOR YOU, PEOPLE. I DON’T HAVE A HOME OR FOOD OR ANYTHING. IT ISN’T RIGHT, PEOPLE.” You look at your shoes as the train bangs along and we careen from side to side. You sneak a look: he’s unshaven, red eyes, cuts on his forehead and cheek. Will he shoot us? He says, “PLEASE, PEOPLE.” He shakes the coins in his can. Some people reach into their pockets. Sitting, they hoist up an inch and fish change out of their jeans, dig down deep. He limps through the crowd, swinging on the crutches, the train sways, he almost tumbles, holding out the can. “I GOT NOTHING, PEOPLE, AND YOU GOT EVERYTHING. IT ISN’T RIGHT AND YOU KNOW IT. JESUS SAID TO HELP THE POOR AND THE HOMELESS. DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO GET SHOT DEFENDING YOUR COUNTRY AND THEN HAVE TO SLEEP ON A FLOOR IN THE BUS STATION? PEOPLE! I NEED YOU!” His voice breaks. “GODDAMN IT, I’VE JUST ABOUT COME TO THE END OF MY ROPE!” Change clinks in the can. People drop in a pinch of change here, a pinch there. You reach into your tweed jacket pocket and touch bills and fish out three singles, and after two seconds’ thought, you stuff them in the passing can and immediately turn red and feel dumb, feel pity and anger at the same time. Pity for the man and anger at him for manipulating us like this. All of us good middle-class folk, black and white, brought up to respond to suffering with compassion, trapped in a hot car banging and screeching through the black cave, afraid (“VIET VET RUNS AMOK ON K TRAIN, LIMOUSINE LIBERAL AMONG THOSE SLAIN”), and, worst of all, embarrassed by your own lack of humor and ingenuity in the face of fear. You dimly recall an old movie about a wounded veteran (played by Jimmy Stewart?) who wanders the city streets, homeless, when one day the plain kindness of a tall stranger in a brown suit (“Son, here’s a dollar and here’s my phone number if you want a job”) restores his faith in the goodness of people. You wish you could be that stranger. The train comes into a lighted station, stops, and you push out the door, up the stairs, and into sunshine.