The Subway Delinquent

Proof, that I am a dangerous criminal!

My family was known for many things when I was growing up, but being on time was not one of them. As hard as we tried, I cannot recall a single event to which we were not anxiously rushing. My mother would try to combat this by setting our clocks fast by several minutes, but the only thing that came of this was that each room of our house had its own slightly different time zone. When it was 8:15 in my parents’ bedroom, it was 8:17 in the kitchen, and 8:19 in the car. In reality it was 8:05 and we were scheduled to be somewhere by 8:00. On Sunday mornings we were always late for church. This never stopped my mother from making a grand entrance and saying hello to folks in each pew as we made our way to whichever unwanted empty space was still available.

I would like to say that the embarrassment of chronic tardiness has pushed me to rebel in a more punctual direction as an adult, but it has not. Try as I may, I’m always running behind. Luckily for me, New York provides a myriad of plausible explanations for such things, many of which are even true from time to time:

“A street protest closed down my normal route, and so I had to take a detour.”

“A sewer line burst, causing fountains of liquid filth to flood lower Manhattan.”

“My train started running express for absolutely no reason and skipped my stop!”

Because of the unpredictability of the city, New Yorkers have adapted to a culture of leniency, for the most part, when it comes to planning. If you make dinner reservations for 7:00, it really means 7:15. If you tell someone you will meet them in 20 minutes, it really means up to 45. If you say you’re on your way, it means you’re still squeezing into your pants. We understand and accept this, all the while, still hoping that we’ll become our perfectly punctual selves, next time.

On a recent Friday morning, I found myself several minutes behind schedule as usual. Was it my fault that the coffee girl was in training? With a steamy to-go cup in hand, I was power walking with determination. As I bounded down the subway stairs to the turnstile, I felt the dribble of my hot beverage absorb into my woven gloves, and quickly turn cold. I rifled through my pockets to find my MetroCard, swiped and saw the dreaded green letters flash on the grimy display; “SWIPE AGAIN AT THIS TURNSTILE.”

Every New Yorker’s heart sinks just a little when this happens. It normally means that the card reader at the turnstile is gummed up, but if you switch to another terminal, the machine will likely “think” you are up to no good and refuse your entry. In good faith, I swiped again, only to see the same message. I swiped a third and a fourth time, with the same result, until I swiped a fifth time and saw the worst of all the turnstile messages: “JUST USED.”

My heart was racing. I could hear the train approaching the platform below. When “JUST USED” appears on the screen, it means the machine “thinks” you have already entered at that station, and you are now just trying to let your friends enter with your card. You are prohibited from trying again for 15 minutes. In a normal case, I would have gone to the attendant in the booth to explain the situation and have them grant me a manual entry, but there was a line of at least a dozen old ladies buying single-fare cards with change being counted out of sandwich baggies. I did not have the luxury of time to allow senile and bespectacled octogenarians to finish with their archaic ritual. The rumble of the approaching train was growing stronger and the pace of everyone else in the station was quickening in response.

I had two choices. I could follow the rules; wait my turn in line behind the grandmothers of Brooklyn and be noticeably and inexplicably late to work, or I could take matters into my own hands. I had indeed paid my fare. It was a mere malfunction of technology that caused the problem I was now facing. As the train could be felt slowing to the platform below, my morality shifted toward the quicker and more devious of my options. My heart raced. I looked at the line of old ladies at the booth, half of whom appeared to be sedated, and I looked down at the train doors below me which were now opening. I steadied my hot dripping coffee cup in one hand, and hoisted myself over the cold metal of the turnstile with the other. In one swift maneuver, I flew over the turnstile with the gracefulness of a groggy toddler.

No sooner had I crossed the threshold, then I heard a shrill voice yelling in my direction, “Sir! Sir! Stop! Sir!”

Much to my dismay, my little insurrection was witnessed by two subway police officers lurking in the shadows. The levels of New York City Police presence range from the riot squad holding shields and wielding assault rifles, to traffic cops moderating left hand turns in the middle of intersections to the subway police which have little more respect or authority than a high school hall monitor checking your bathroom pass. The particular individual I was dealing with embodied all characteristics of the classic NYC “Sir Lady.” If you have never encountered a “Sir Lady,” let me explain.

Sir Ladies can be found in airports, movie theaters, train stations and anywhere else that human behaviors are tightly monitored by rules of conduct that may not necessarily have legal consequences. They are uniformed, often uncomfortably in ill-fitting pants that betray the shape of even the fittest of humans. They are given just enough power to be obnoxious, but not enough to carry a weapon and they take themselves very seriously. Sir Ladies are required to look unamused at all times, and more often than not, they have a walkie-talkie holstered at their hip that choaks out static and microphone feedback.

My heart was racing and my stomach felt like it had sunk to my knees. The train below me was being filled and would soon pull away, leaving me behind. I walked over the the Sir Lady and tried to explain the situation as politely as possible. Before I could finish a sentence I was interrupted with, “Sir! Do NOT talk back to me. Just stand here for a minute while I do what I need to do! Give me your ID.”

She was enjoying the power trip.

She retrieved the walkie talkie from her hip holster as I handed her my Driver's License, then started yelling to a supervisor sequestered away in some unseen corridor. “Yeah, we’ve got a jumper!” she explained to a muffled voice on other end of the conversation. “Yeah… No, not a runner, just a jumper… Yeah.... Uh huh… Nope… Yeah… Ok.”

By this time, the train below me left the station and all of the passengers exiting were enjoying the show. It’s not every day you see a nerdy little man being detained by the subway patrol. I was trying my best to look as though I was not thoroughly embarrassed, but I suspect that my strawberry-colored face gave me away. Any time I shifted my weight or scratched my head, the Sir Lady would give me the stink eye. I tried to continue drinking the coffee in my hand, but this act drew her suspicion and so I stopped. How could I be so insolent as to consume coffee in her lofty presence.

After 10 minutes of mysterious walkie-talkie conversation, she pulled out her ticket pad and a pen. A scratchy unseen voice had given her the green light to proceed. It was obvious that she relished the opportunity to fill out a ticket, and she was going to savor the experience. With a smirk, she handed me a very illegibly written ticket from the Transit Adjudication Bureau. Without another word, she walked away to continue her noble work of “crime fighting” in other corners of the subway.

For my crime of acrobatics, I owed the city of New York $100.00. In nearly 6 years of living in New York, I have always managed to stay below the radar of the Sir Ladies, until now. I am officially a criminal, hardened by the harshness of the city. I have disturbed the peace, and been found guilty in the eyes of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Despite my attempted justifications of the turnstile card reader malfunction, she still described my crime as “jumping over the turnstile to avoid legal payment of fare.”

What have I learned from this experience? What wisdom have I gained from my brush with the law? It's hard to say. Will I change my ways in an act of atonement for my sins? Sure, if it’s convenient. Will this teach me to be more punctual and reduce my risks when running late? Who knows. What I have learned is that it’s always necessary to thoroughly assess your risks before committing a small victimless crime. Look around, especially in the shadows where the Sir Ladies may be hiding. My mistake more than being late, was being sloppy. For that, I am truly sorry. I hope that the citizens of New York can sleep more soundly knowing that justice was served.

A Daily Reminder

The other day, I got off the subway at Herald Square, as I now do each morning. I was consciously ignoring my inappropriate weekday hangover, which is not necessarily an unusual occurrence. Wobbling through the obstacle course of stairways and turnstiles that leads to the exit of the “Manhattan Mall” building, I finally made it to the street after being poked, pushed and stepped on by the groggy mob around me. I’m fundamentally confused by the attempt to have a condensed version of a suburban shopping mall in the middle of Manhattan. I have decided that it makes the commuters feel more comfortable once they show up in the city for work. Sure, you may have JCPenney out on Long Island or in New Jersey, but the feeling of superiority that can be earned by waiting in much longer lines and paying higher sales tax in the city makes all the difference. There are certain cultural activities that unite the bridge and tunnel crowd, which I am unable to comprehend, and this is definitely one of them. At 8:30 in the morning though, nobody is shopping yet. Everyone is in a mad dash to find a source of caffeine before beginning the daily self-betrayal of long-term employment.

There is a certain peacefulness that exists in the act of being carried along in the current of human beings rushing down the sidewalks of Midtown like a steady stream of water. At this time of the day, everyone is determined and united with a common purpose. This enervated singular mindset prevents much of the unpleasantness that is possible after several cups of coffee and a street-cart danish. Unlike the chaos that comes at other times of the day when everyone has energy, the pre-9:00 rush is a sacred time reserved for the workforce of the city in which a universal objective unites us. The key to a peaceful coexistence is chronic fatigue and the hope that no matter how late we left our apartments, we will somehow make it to work on time and perpetuate the illusion that we are, indeed, responsible adults for at least one more day.

I started a new job recently, which means the creation of a new routine. For the past three years, I had my set path from the train to work. There were the familiar strangers I not only expected to see, but looked for in the mornings. There was the donut cart on the corner outside of Penn Station, the one that always charged me a different price for the same Boston creme donut depending on who was shut in behind the glass. There was the window full of fancy cupcakes on 8th Avenue that I always meant to try, but never did. There was the old man that stood barefoot smoking his cigarette in the same doorway every day who I named Fred. There was also the smiling green-eyed Halal meat seller who would sing cheerful songs in Arabic while chopping vegetables and heating his burners for another day’s crop of gyros. I’m sure they’re all still there, carrying on as before, but I am not. I wonder if anyone misses me as part of their own little morning inventory of strangers. Was I part of someone’s tally, or did I just blend into the clockwork mechanism of the Manhattan mornings without making a mark? I wonder.

When I was younger, I never thought of myself as a person who could be comfortable establishing such predictable morning rituals. I used to fancy myself an unapologetic “non-conformist” who would rather die than get caught get trapped in a pattern. Such arrogant thoughts are common in your early twenties. Although I’m not too much further along in my own timeline, now that I look back on it, I’m not quite sure what I was so afraid of. I’ve learned that it’s never wise to spend too much time considering the logic of post-adolescence. Now, I have come to enjoy discovering the patterns that will repeat and form the memories that will become my nostalgia that is cherished later on in life. All of these little things in our routines become part of the stories that we tell, and the stories that we tell become the larger parts of us that extend further beyond our own limited existence, and perhaps for some of us, they will outlive us when we’re gone. A story always becomes richer with repetition, and so does the experience of seeing the same series of things again and again over time. They somehow become more “your own” that way, and I’ve learned to value that phenomenon.  

Now, each morning, as I march into Herald Square with the legions of Midtown, I’m greeted with a view of the Empire State Building reaching far up into the sky, sometimes even gobbled up by low-hanging clouds near the spire. After living in the city for a few years, some of the magic of things which express the canned technicolor ideal of New York-ness have faded a bit for me, but I still get butterflies in my stomach when I walk in the shadow of that building. To me, it’s a firm reminder that no matter what discouragement may befall me, I’ve already come this far, and that alone is reason enough to keep moving upward. You can see the building’s silhouette poking out of the horizon from almost anywhere in Manhattan, watching over everything, keeping it all together. All the the pieces of my routine; the anecdotes, the high notes, the minor disasters and the rhythm that comes with the repetition, they all revolve around this glistening tower, watching over me like God. Sometimes, we all need a reminder of our purpose, and I am lucky to see mine every morning as I trudge forward in the mundanity of my little office job that allows my self-delusions of being a starving “artist” to move onward, and my own New York story to continue ... at least for another pay period.

A collection of momentary romances...

The Harlem sky from my bedroom window.

It is true that I fall in love at least a dozen times a day, sometimes more depending on how many subway rides I might take. Some of these little romances take place for 30, 60, even 90 seconds. Some can last as long as an entire commute if I'm lucky, but they all end in relatively the same way. One moment I'll be sitting (or more often standing and bracing myself against a pole, trying to avoid the sharp elbows and shoulders of others around me) with my nose in a book, and then I'll look up as I turn the page and catch my eye on a person for whom my heart melts like hot butter. Almost as quickly as they appear, they just as easily disappear and then the day continues on...

The violinist:

One evening while changing trains in the labyrinth of tunnels that are tangled beneath the 42nd Street (Times Square) subway station, I took the immense transverse that runs beneath 7th and 8th Avenues. There are times of the day when the maze of tiled passages contain streams of tens of thousands of people all scurrying about rapidly in different directions like ants coming up out of a crack in the earth. There is always the distinct smell of ancient grime, mechanical exhaust and fried food that expands and contracts depending on the weather. Within this vast network of chutes and ladders one can find a wide variety of entertainment from performers to evangelists hoping to make any sort of dent in this ceaseless rumble of footsteps and voices echoing below the city's surface.

At one point there is a very long and steep ramp that runs between the number 7 Train and the A Train. It is lined with mosaics and often with large posters advertising current Broadway shows that can be seen on the streets just above. On this particular evening, I had run out of batteries on my iPod, and as a result, I was unusually more attentive to the sounds around me than I would be otherwise. From the bottom of the great ramp, I could hear something in the distance which was sweet and melodic cutting through the thunder of stampeding humans bounding down the tunnel ahead. It was the faint sound of a violin, singing a sadly beautiful theme. There are often musicians and beggars who frequent this corridor, but rarely do any sound quite as gracefully as what I was vaguely hearing from afar. My pace quickened as I headed forward with curiosity into the great crowd around me. My heartbeat began to hasten as I recognized the tune playing was Chopin's Nocturne. As I drew closer, it echoed through the walls of the tunnel, transforming it into a concert hall rather than a dirty metro station. The tune was being performed with such intimate familiarity that it sounded mournfully sublime. Finally, I was close enough to catch a glimpse of the musician.

He was a smallish man, probably in his mid 30's. He was clean and simple looking. His eyes were closed and his expression was fixed somewhere inside of his mind. He had a black violin case lined with red velvet opened in front of him, and passersby had dropped a few small bills and coins inside. For the most part, he was passed by without a great deal of attention, for after all, a subway station is not a place one generally goes to doddle. Although I had somewhere to go and a train to get to, I stopped for several minutes and listened as he continued to play. If he would have asked me at that moment, I would have surely agreed to marry him, but his eyes never really opened and his awareness of anything but his music didn't seem to falter. Reluctantly, I left after depositing into the velvet-lined case all the change I could find in my pockets (probably amounting to about $1.25). As I turned the corner and the sound of his music faded into the sea of strangers passing by, I made my way to the Uptown A Train with a smile on my face and song that repeated in my head throughout my journey home.

The artist:

There is a section of the A Train that runs express (without stopping) from 59th Street Columbus Circle to 125th Street in Harlem. It is one of the longest singular uninterrupted runs one can take on the New York City Subway. If things are running smoothly, which is often a gamble, from stop to stop it takes about 8 or 9 minutes. This gives one enough time to get involved in some sort of diversion that can make the trip more pleasant, if not interrupted by preachers, political activists, performers or starving mothers begging for change. After a long day of work and running around the city, it's a little treat I often look forward to. I've seen so many peculiar and noteworthy things during this special ride that I could expound for volumes, but at the moment one particular story stands out.

It was one night when I had met a friend for a beer after work at one of those chintzy little Irish pubs that line the streets outside of Penn Station. Was it the Molly Wee Pub, The Blarney Stone or perhaps the Tempest? I'm not quite sure. All I remember is that I had a couple of good stouts in me and I was feeling hopeful about the world. I got on the uptown A Train at 34th Street and by 42nd Street, a group of fashionable young girls got on in my car and took a seat across from me. They all had thick Boston accents, and in their "foreign" dialect, they chattered about nothing of consequence, but the sounds and phrases they used were quite entertaining to me. One of the girls had a particularly flashy pair of boots on, something one would probably find in a mall somewhere in the middle of New Jersey, complete with all sorts of dazzle that made a sure statement of taste. Despite this, and perhaps because of the warm glow I was feeling from the Guinness I had been sipping just moments before, I decided I'd withhold judgment and observe the entertainment before me without expending the unnecessary energy required to mock silently in my own stream of consciousness (or at least I kept it to a bare minimum).

We had passed 59th street, making our way on the long uninterrupted express journey to Harlem, just as one of the girls started talking about something related to Baseball that began to derail my interest. I noticed a hand moving ever so quickly across a page out of the corner of my eye. I discovered a dark thin man in shabby jeans with ink-stained fingers sitting a few seats away from me on the same side of the train car. He had a head full of curly black hair that was pulled back into a little pony tail, revealing a square jaw and a long angular neck. I looked down and saw that he had also made notice of the ridiculous boots of the Bostonian girl in front of us, and he was quickly trying to capture them in a drawing with his pen. He had written some sort of caption above, which I was not close enough to see, but I hoped it said something like "Boston Bedazzled." From what I could see, his line quality and style were reminiscent of Egon Schiele (one of my favorite artists) and for the next 4 minutes I had fallen in love. In my head, Franz Liszt's Liebestraum played, and the rest of the ride was a joy until, inevitably, I had to get off at 125th street and head home to my apartment with visions of the curly haired artist accompanying me along the way. I never saw him again, nor the girls from Boston, but just the same, I'd fallen in love for a good several minutes of my commute which is more than most can hope for in a week.

The Google lackey:

Manhattan decidedly has now joined the world of the tech industry with several large Silicon Valley entities setting up sad little East Coast satellites in old industrial buildings that had seen much better days long ago. It wasn't enough that we in New York had to control publishing, news media, the stock market, the fashion industry, the art world and a number of other trades, but now we've got our fingers in the ever expanding world of the intangible "tech bubble." Situated in Chelsea, in the old Port Authority of New York building, the fortress of Google looks out over the Hudson river, developing new ways to add the woes of New Yorkers to a collection of monetizable analytics. In this relatively new fortress exists an army of awkwardly intelligent minions that can be often recognized without a great deal of effort. They're generally a shade or two more pale than the average person, with insect-like reflexes, a style of dress that reminds one of the folks seen waiting in line at the last Star Wars premiere, and then there's the unmistakable Google lanyard many of them forget to conceal when they leave the building (although I think that some of them purposefully display it as a badge of honor).

One morning, as I stumbled upon the train to work, bleary from an eventful night before, I happened to get squished quite compactly into a very full car. Some insufferable old woman demanded to change seats after the train had already begun moving, which stirred the condensed soup of people into new directions of consolidation. As a general understood rule of train etiquette, once the train begins moving, wherever you have found yourself, you will remain until at least the next stop. The only people who are exempt from this rule are the elderly and Eastern Europeans who just can't seem to get it together on rapid transit. In all the commotion I found myself pushed up against a tall thin man with glasses and a backpack with a water pouch built in. He had the first three signs of Google: the pallid skin, the Lord of the Rings T Shirt and the most definitive - the multicolored and iridescent Google lanyard! My face suddenly found a great smirk growing across it, although I knew not why. I thought to myself, "What about this person makes me chuckle? Sure, he was probably a member of his High School's Audio Visual Club and he probably has a collection of Babylon Five DVD's in his apartment, but how is that so different than me? After all, I was in my school's Lunchtime Library Book Group (which had about 5 members) and I have a whole collection of Woody Allen films in my own apartment that I've memorized forward and backward..."

As I had this little existential debate in my own head regarding which person's brand of nerdiness was more noble, I noticed that Google boy had a pair of very beautiful green eyes behind his glasses. In fact, with less hair gel and perhaps a more neutral T Shirt, Google boy would have been very handsome. Then I looked down and saw that he was reading a biography of Beethoven which made me think of my favorite Beethoven piece, the 2nd movement from Sonata Number 8 (the Pathetique). In realizing that our mutual brands of nerd-dom had found a middle ground, I found Google boy to be quite loveable. For the next two minutes, I debated whether or not backpacks with water reservoirs inside were really so aesthetically bad. As the crowd expanded and contracted at the next stop, he was wrenched from my sight, but throughout the rest of that day, bleary as I may have been, I had a new appreciation for Google.

• • •
There are many other stories I could tell, but these give a small sprinkling of what awaits passengers on the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York. I'm not sure what the moral of the story may be, or if there really ought to be one, but suffice it to say that the older I become, the less I can control my own ability to fall madly in and out of love within the duration of a train ride. Some of these little experiences offer me insights into myself, others offer me warnings about myself, but mostly they are a good source of entertainment that I couldn't imagine finding anywhere else.

Summer in the city...

Seventh Avenue in Midtown on a hot July afternoon...

There is a strange sense of joy that is produced by the smells of ripening garbage baking in the sun mixed with taxi exhaust and the aromatic smoke dancing about in the air from food carts along the streets of Manhattan. When the air is heavy with moisture and you can actually see the heat waves bouncing up from the sidewalk, the thought diving headfirst into the pollution of the Hudson River seems like the happiest of retreats from the sun overhead. It begins in late May and lasts through September. Generally by the second week of June all of the stores are sold out of window air conditioner units and herds of dejected looking sweaty wanderers can be seen staring at their empty spaces on the shelves in disbelief and utter devastation. Now that summer in New York City is drawing to a close, I feel my heart sink ever so slightly when thinking about all things I will miss as three seasons must come and go before she returns again. New York is a town that embraces all seasons, but summer above all...

My last summer in the city, or rather I should say my very first, was so frantic that I hardly had time to stop and enjoy it.  Being that I had just moved to New York with no job or prospects, my main goal was survival. Between finding three different bizarre jobs and inventing my "I'm too poor to pay rent AND eat multiple meals a day" diet, the hot summer months quickly melted by as a very strange and colorful blur. When I think back, although it was chaotic and difficult, I can't imagine who I would be now without all of the craziness of that initial adjustment period. This summer, now settled in and a bit more well-nourished, living my glamourous Manhattan lifestyle from paycheck to paycheck, I found myself much more aware of my surroundings and all of the lovely summertime experiences the city has to offer.

One evening in June, I was visiting with a friend in Central Park. He's a very lovely and very peculiar sort of fellow. Partially French and partially Californian, he devotes a great deal of his time to the study of Eastern philosophies and meditations. I think in his "legitimate life" he's some sort of lawyer, but I am horrible with remembering such things. Generally when other people talk about their jobs, I just sort of glaze over and ponder things like, what kinds of dreams might cats have, or what would the world be like if humans were amphibious. By the time someone has finished explaining their profession, I have successfully nodded along while absorbing absolutely nothing. I think that this, by some definitions, may make me a "flake," but I can't be bothered to really care. In any case, I met my friend of unknown profession in a meadowy part of The Ramble while he beat some sort of animal skin drum made specially for him by a member of a Native American tribe with whom he was trying to become affiliated for the purpose of ritual spiritual practices (I think he met up with them sometime before of after Burning Man one year, but I sort of glazed over for that story as well). It was a beautiful evening, and I enjoyed meandering about barefooted in the grass while my friend drummed away in some sort of trance, communing with the "nature" in Central Park. Once I had stepped on one too many cigarette butts in the grass and my companion had finished speaking with the trees, we decided to walk through the park and enjoy the setting sun. We strolled along the winding tree-lined paths of the ramble, up and down the rocky hills until me reached the lake and the Bow Bridge, which then lead us to the Bethesda Fountain and up into the Central Park Mall. Upon passing all of the stoic stone statues of the Poet's Walk under a canopy of stalwart old trees, we began to hear lovely and strange music playing in the distance. As we drew nearer, we could see a large crowd of people moving about in beautiful motions ahead, swaying around like flowers in a breeze. They were all dancing to Argentine Tango music, some dressed in fine clothes and others wearing shorts and t shirts. Under the pink light of the sunset, the swirling mass of people of all ages and colors dancing on that summer evening was a hypnotic scene to behold. It's not often one stumbles upon hundreds of people dancing the tango in public, but it's just one example of the many unexpected happenings that are so easy to come across in New York. It was like viewing a piece of a dream, only the dream was simply one of many realities of the city in summertime.

There are other less pleasant realities of the summertime, such as the amount of tourists crowding the sidewalks and the sight of exposed sweaty cellulite on the subways, but they are all manageable when mixed with the number of outdoor farmers' markets, musical performances, street fairs and bizarre parades from cultures you would  have never known existed. On holidays like the 4th of July, Gay Pride or the Puerto Rican Day Parade, an influx of overly tanned young people with an abundance of hair products find their passages through the bridges and tunnels on the west side of Manhattan from their native New Jersey and they graciously stink up the city with the sounds of elongated vowels and the smells of cheap caffeinated booze. They run about the streets, throwing litter and tragedy along their path, and eventually go back from whence they came, somewhere in suburbia, leaving New York in shambles. In August, Europe comes to the city in droves, enjoying the generous vacation time granted to citizens by their social-democracies and labor practices that would make members of the Tea Party shutter at the thought of the taxes that support such a human-friendly system. Walking about neighborhoods like SoHo and Greenwich Village or the shopping districts of midtown, one can hear a rainbow of languages spoken by strangers in posh sunglasses and sporty shoes (Europeans always have the best shoes for some reason, and it makes me jealous). I always find it curious to see a large group of Italians or Brits completely enthralled by the squirrels in Central Park. Don't they have squirrels in their own countries? Then this line of thinking gets me to wonder if they mentioned that at some point in high school biology class, but I was too busy glazing over and pondering the dream life of cats or the thoughts in the heads of those monkeys they used to send into space before they allowed humans venture that high into the atmosphere...

Now the summer is drawing to a close, and the feeling of change is in the air on the streets. Billboard advertisements for fall sweaters and snappy jackets are popping up everywhere along with window displays in shops incorporating images of colorful trees and smiling porcelain white mannequins in tweed. My second summer in the city has come and gone, but I feel like I embraced it this time around. Now, as the days become shorter and school children with grumpy faces pass me by on my way to the train in the morning, I am beginning to look forward to the crisp mornings to come and the opportunities to wear my favorite cardigans again. I am anxiously awaiting another beautiful autumn in New York, but not without a tiniest bit of mourning for the lovely summer gone by. The summer of 2011 was a very nice one, and I feel very lucky to have spent it in such a wonderful place.

My closest and dearest of strangers...

Anonymous portrait, captured somewhere underneath New York City...

I have said, on many occasions, that riding the Subways of New York is a much richer source of entertainment than one would ever find from cable television. Being that I do not have access to cable television, I see the inherent reasons to question my credibility in making such a statement, but I would argue it to the death, regardless. I have recounted stories of humor and woe, mere moments in the lives of others witnessed while moving from one place to another, and I've told narrative tales of things which people are willing only to divulge to strangers in moments of vulnerability, happiness or anger, but the truth of the matter is that the best tales are those untold by the folks who seem to just blend in to the background...

Moving about the city via the Metropolitan Transit Authority is a mess of sensory chaos that closely resembles the lunch room of a junior high school on the day before Spring Break, amplified by one million impatient people trying to get to work on time using a system designed to best-accomodate a significantly smaller population. Getting everyone on the train in the morning is much like trying to squeeze toothpaste back IN to the tube. With so many sights, sounds and smells (yes, smells of every sort) occurring simultaneously, it is a wonder that transit passengers are able to even remember where it is they were going to begin with. Generally when the homeless man is screaming and ranting about his missing foot and all of the people to blame for life's inequalities on one corner of the train, an obnoxious teenager is blaring intentionally-offensive music on a loud speaker at the other, and in between are the haggard and frazzled folks just trying to keep it all together so that they don't murder anyone by the the time they get to work. It is generally in the faces of these people, forcing themselves to disconnect from the massive orgy of events going on around them, that I find something very real and beautiful; perhaps something more human that is expressed when the pressures to engage with others around them are taken away.

A few months ago, I jumped on a certain chic and electronic bandwagon and purchased a mobile device, which needs not be named lest everything in the world eventually become branded, but this unmentioned gadget (for which I have great affinity) has allowed me the pleasure of capturing images relatively quickly, easily and, in many cases, "on the sly." Prior to obtaining this new tool, I would always look about the train on my way from here to there and see the most captivating scenes of the most mundane of life's available moments, and wish for a way to share them. I have found in life, that my inability to easily connect with others has only increased my fascination with watching them from a safe distance and making observations. With as much time as I spend eavesdropping and staring at strangers, one would think I could write an anthropological study, but I've yet to draw any solid or insightful conclusions about my fellow human beings. In my quest for understanding, my prize is generally just additional confusion, however, without a full understanding, there has been at least an acquired appreciation for the aesthetic of the strangers I see around me, just passing the time until they are required to be productive again.

Now, each time I get on the train, I'm looking more intently than ever before, because I've started to document the beautiful nothings I see all around me. I take portraits of people I don't know, people who don't know me either and who are (most often) unaware of my presence. Discretely, I snap silent images of other passengers who strike me during these moments in limbo when we're together. Some are happy and hopeful, others look like the most sorrowful to ever have been thrust about underground, but many are just trying to get through their days with as much pleasantness as life can afford them. In these moments when people are so inwardly focused, it's like seeing them in a state between sleep and wakeful life. For whatever reason, I feel such a strong attraction to these moments and I can't stop my compulsion to capture whatever it is that I find to be so lovely. There is a comfort in being a part of this phenomenon. To be a part of a big swirling soup of the most diverse of human experiences all stewed together inside of a moving train for minutes at a time before the next scene change is something I hope never to take too much for granted.

Although my ethics have been questioned and issues of privacy have been brought forward, I feel like my anonymous portraits of my dearest and closest of strangers on the train have been one of my most effective ways of embracing my city and my love for its citizens. Perhaps I'm deluding myself to think that they're anything more than a mere annoyance brought forth out of sheer boredom, but I feel like my intentions can hopefully be felt in the images produced thus far (be they as low quality as they must, given that I am in no way a real photographer, nor will I ever claim to be). I'm just a friendly subway stalker who steals moments of the lives of strangers. I'm sure one day I'll have grown tired of paying attention to the others around me, but for the time being, I can't help but explore their beauty.

To see more of my subway portraits, click the image below for a public album:

Womanizers on a train...

Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn: a really great way to make Southerners become awkward and defensive...

After the Civil War, I believe a council of boastful Yankees must have been formed solely for the purpose of erecting grandiose monuments in New York City intended to make all Southerners angry. There are 39 such monuments maintained by the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation alone, and scads of others littering public spaces in every corner of town. Now that most of the world has moved on, the responsibility of dwelling in the past over the "War of Northern Aggression" rests heavily on the shoulders of red faced tourists and/or involuntary transplants from below the Mason-Dixon line.

One night this week, I found myself in Brooklyn at Grand Army Plaza, which features an abundance of fierce looking bronze figures perched upon a fantastic triumphal arch and verses etched into the stone immortalizing Northern victory. As I am not Southern, and I am a sucker for gaudy remembrances of historical events, I enjoy going there. For Yankees, I believe these places provided a sense of camaraderie at one point, making everyone feel like they were a member of a winning team. Being a winner is only shiny and new for so long, but as the convictions of our drawling neighbors from the lower latitudes seem to suggest, being a loser is difficult baggage to be rid of. If ever I am feeling like I'm fighting a losing battle, I can find one of these numerous Civil War shrines dotting the landscape of the city and remember that no matter how bad things may seem, at least I don't live in the South.

After the novelty of borrowing the essence of proud Northern victory became more than I could handle, I decided to get on the number 2 train and take the long ride from central Brooklyn back to Uptown Manhattan. It was night time, which meant the trains were running very infrequently and making every local stop, so I found a seat on a bench and began to pull out a book when a pair of rather peculiar men appeared on the platform, making me forget all about my anthology of short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The pair was comprised of two very charismatic, although scrappy, Latin men who appeared to have been pulled directly from a New Yorker Magazine cartoon sketch. The younger of the men was tall and lean with very sharp features, deep set eyes and a neatly kept pony tail. The other man was at least a generation older and seemed to be a walking public service warning for what happens to a person after too much sex, drugs and rock & roll during a prolonged bohemian adolescence. His glazed eyes, framed by abundantly overgrown brows, seemed to have almost an innate mechanical ability to detect, with laser precision, any woman within a mile radius. After taking inventory of the platform, the old hippie in his orange caftan approached me on my bench.

"Do you speak Spanish?" a mumbly surly voice asked me. "Oh, not very well," I responded, sensing his disappointment. He then beckoned his younger friend over, who obviously hadn't found any women attractive enough to devote any attention to, and the three of us began a very cordial little dialogue, in English (much to everyone's dismay). I found out the the older man was called Alfredo, and he was from Ecuador, but born in Argentina (for some reason he seemed very proud of this and repeated it several times). He was a photographer (of female nudes, no doubt), and had lived all over the world. He reminded me of an artistic, darker-featured version of Ozzie Osbourne with his slurred speech and rapidly decaying mind. He seemed completely full of shit, but he was friendly and I had nothing better to do than indulge him. The younger man was called Erwin and was from Mexico City. Apparently he was a sculptor of endangered animals, and also a photographer. He lived somewhere on 23rd Street in Chelsea, and thought it was peculiar that being an artist myself, I'd live all the way up on 123rd Street (I'm still not quite sure why).  Every time a woman would walk on to the train platform, they would both stop in mid-sentence to make an assessment, and then come back to the conversation.

By the time the train came into the station, we had become casual buddies and all decided to sit together in the same car, talking more about art and Alfredo's many travels. The conversation circulated to the subject of living in New York, and both Alfredo and Erwin told me about how much they enjoyed the many different types of women in the city. "White ladies, Latin ladies, Black ladies, Asian ladies, and not bad ones, really..." Apparently, the variety of women is much broader in New York than most other large cities in the world, according to these two men, who had obviously been around. When they began to ask me my thoughts on the topic, I quickly changed the subject...

Everything went well for two or three stops, and then finally a small group of attractive young girls, no more than 20 years old, entered the car next to us. I could see the two begin to salivate with a more than healthy appetite over the "cuisine" just one car over. Alfredo's speech became choppy and short, gazing longingly at the bottled blonde hair and cheap perfume that could be detected through the glass. It was clear that our lively conversation that was engaging enough just minutes before had lost all of its luster. As the train lurched to a stop in the next station, without skipping a beat, in mid-sentence both of the men bolted out of our car and entered the next. For the next 6 or 7 stops, I watched the unsuccessful attempts of Alfredo flirting with girls old enough to be his children, while his suave and younger side-kick obviously triumphed. Although I could not hear the high frequency giggles from these hollow headed girls, their stupidity was as buoyant as a beach ball on the Hudson and permeated through the cars. Eventually the girls reached their stop, and I saw the two men move on to fresh prey.

For the next 20 minutes, I sat digesting the experience while the train slowly made its way to my destination. I laughed a bit, glad to have met these rather comical men, but I also envied their ability to easily talk to strangers and have no shame in flirting, even against the odds. Being neither old, nor a product of one too many bad acid trips, nor a Southerner in a land of Yankees made the dreaded walk up my 5 flights of stairs to my apartment all come into perspective...

The romantic misadventures of Ernest, and other Subway tales...

A lovely heart shaped map of the NYC Subway system, illustrating my affections.

In my relatively short time as a resident of New York, I have come to the conclusion that riding the Subway is better than having cable TV (which, for the record, I do not have). In no other place do all of life's idiosyncratic and bizarre tendencies come to a head so abundantly, than in a crowded subway station, especially after 11pm. I have come to relish the entertainments the Subway affords me each day, and have come to think of different stations in different neighborhoods as simply a way to change the channel and pick my own genre of live human theatre.

One of the many charming features of the Subway, aside from the specific and pungent aroma of the stations in the heat, is the fact that one can see everyone from beggars to bankers to aspiring socialites all crammed together like over-sized pickles in an inadequate jar. Men, women, children and the folks somewhere in between, all are forced to interact without acknowledgment, trying to maintain each of their quasi-unique socio-cultural/economic identities as they also attempt to avoid any unnecessary molestation. Much of the time, a quiet sort of Puritan reverence is observed by most passengers, just trying to make it to their next stop without having to make eye contact with another living soul. This is all a noble hope shared by many, but if one is to ride the train for more than about two stops, there's always some character who ignores the awkward, vacuous and utterly impersonal rules of the American personal space bubble and this is when things get interesting.

A couple of weeks ago I was waiting for the train in the elevated station near my building. I sat down on a wooden bench next to a fatigued looking woman and her three equally fatigued children, ranging in ages from about 4 to 10. Soon the sound of athletic shoes on pavement bounding toward the bench caught my attention. The shoes and hasty footsteps came from a man, panting and out of breath, dressed in a very fabulous lime green velour track suit now approaching the emaciated mother of three. She rolled her eyes as he said "Yo, baby, we gotta talk!" The unamused woman responded back, "Ernest, I ain't got no more words left for you." For this, I turned off my iPod, knowing that the show in front of me was much more interesting than my current playlist. Ernest, who's name was shouted loudly and repeatedly, and the nameless woman proceeded to argue for several minutes about the perils of their short-lived romance, which, obviously, was on its way out. Apparently there was some dispute over train tickets from Yonkers, a trashy gift unworthy of a lady, AND another woman whom Ernest protested (a bit too emphatically) that he didn't actually know. As the happy couple argued, the three forgotten children seemed to melt into the bench, obviously a routine they were well accustomed to by now. By the time this mini telenovela-esque episode dissipated, I came to my own conclusions that neither party had argued their case effectively, and subway voyeurism is wonderful. Without resolving anything, Ernest ran off in a huff yelling "forget you!" to the the scene behind him.

Another day I was taking the train down to the Lower East Side for my internship, when track maintenance ensued and an entire train packed with mid-day passengers was stuck in the middle of the tunnel for at least 15 minutes. There was an old homeless woman in the back corner of the car, directly across from me, precariously perched like a pigeon on a makeshift throne of garbage. She was literally shaped like the number 7, her neck and shoulders came to a sharp 90 degree angle with her weather-worn head bobbing along parallel to the ground. She was dressed in rags and was filthy. What she was doing with her garbage throne, is still a mystery, but just as the train lurched to a stop, she woke up from her trance, and ritualistically produced a bottle of rubbing alcohol from one of her bags of garbage. With a theatrical flair, she began dumping rubbing alcohol on herself, the floor of the train car, the seats, the walls, her garbage throne, and the feet of innocent bystanders. She then proceeded to wash the entire affected area with her disgusting, claw-like hands, taking the utmost care and insuring that no surface was left un-cleansed. Half the car immediately moved to one side, gasping for air as the rubbing alcohol fumes permeated the static prison that now kept us under this old woman's dominion. Once she felt satisfied with her work, she then resumed her silent perch atop her piles of trash, taking little notice of the bewildered stares from the other passengers.

Along with these more notable scenes are just the average, everyday rantings of drunks, lunatics, religious fanatics and people who have just stopped caring about the consequences of social impropriety. Riding the trains is not only a mode of transportation, but a rich and unique cultural experience that only New York can afford in such a particular manner. Just like everything else in this city, there is never a dull moment when riding the subway.