Coming Down with a Bad Case of New York City Subway Karma

I, like most New Yorkers, have grown accustomed to the regular annoyances and violations of personal space that occur during the journey to and from work on the subway. I've come to accept that some recent transplants haven't yet learned subway etiquette, and choose to plow their way into the subway car, as opposed to stepping aside and heeding the call of the irate conductor shouting "let the people off, let the people off!" I've acquiesced and put down my book in defeat when a bunch of teenagers get on the train at rush hour, and crank up a boom box with blown woofers to accompany an acrobatic hip hop show; why get annoyed with the deafening volume of the music, or the clapping and the flips? These young entrepreneurs are just trying to make a buck like the rest of us. I barely notice the spooky mumblers who slither through the subway cars whispering "Duracells, one dollar, Duracells, one dollar" —unless, of course, I need a battery, then the subtle sales mavens are nowhere to be found. This is all part of living in the big, bad city, and the easiest thing to usually do is to just roll with it.

But there are days, and thankfully they are few, when one's inadvertent proximity to the cacophony below ground can make one never want to step foot on an MTA subway car again. Yesterday, I experienced one of those commutes from hell, and wondered what might be worse: riding the MTA that day, or journeying across the Atlantic in the hull of a pirate ship?

It normally takes me about 45 minutes, door to door, to get to and from work. I left the building I work in at 5:15PM, and briskly walked down 6th Avenue. While dodging various people on their cell phones, and getting cut off by a slow-walking gaggle of tourists gazing gape-mouthed up at the Empire State Building, it occurred to me that instead of taking the B or D train at 34th Street, like I always do, and transferring to the A or the C at West 4th, it might cut down on my travel time if I walked the extra few blocks to 8th Avenue and caught the A train. I have the somewhat unhealthy habit of striving for petty efficiency, and often feel compelled to keep moving; I cannot bear being in a state of inertia, especially when it involves being stuck in enclosed places with other human beings plastered against me. As I approached the 34th Street subway station, I gave in to my own impatience; instead of walking the extra two blocks to 8th Avenue. I decided to duck into the 6th Avenue station and catch the B or D trains, which are usually fast and frequent.

When I reached the bowels of the station, I dodged bodies down the escalator; there was a downtown B train at the platform with its doors open. I hopped off the escalator and sailed into the car, breathing a sigh of sweet victory that I had managed to get on a train immediately. A moment like that, in New York, is respectfully referred to as “good train karma.” But, as I basked in the glow of instant gratification, I noted that the doors of the train had not snapped shut. And the F train across the platform was sitting there, wide open and idle. This was a bad sign. I didn't have to wait very long before a muffled announcement came over the MTA PA.

"The B and D trains are being held at the station, due to an emergency situation at Grand Street station."

Everyone on my train groaned. Emergency, in NYC MTA parlance, often means that someone has been pushed, or has purposely jumped, in front of the subway. It struck me as an inevitable byproduct of city living that myself and everyone on the B train felt more inclined to bitch about our commute being thwarted than we did to contemplate the horror of a person losing their life on a live subway rail. Since it would most likely be a long time before they got the B and D trains moving again, I got off the train and hopped on the F. I figured that even though it wasn’t moving either, it was probably just temporarily stopped at the station, perhaps waiting for the track traffic of rush hour to clear up ahead. No such luck. After a few minutes had passed, and several dozen people had jumped on to the B train, given up, and packed into the F train, the crackle and fuzz of the PA system intruded again.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the F train is being held at the station due to a signal problem at Bergen Street. For customers traveling to Brooklyn, we recommend you get off this train and go upstairs to the N, R, Q or W train. We apologize for the inconvenience."

Everyone groaned a lot louder this time, and there was a mass exodus. I followed the crowd out of the train, and begrudgingly realized that if I had only taken my own advice earlier, I would've already been on an A train, headed home. I had already lost a precious 15 minutes on this excursion, and couldn’t take any of the other Brooklyn-bound trains at the station, so I now had to walk over to 8th Avenue anyway. I headed back upstairs, and figured I'd salvage the botched mission by getting a $2 refund on my Metrocard.

I tapped on the glass-enclosed window where an MTA worker stood. I told her my spiel, and asked if I could get a refund.

"I'm all outta refund tickets. You're gonna have to go across to the other booth and get one there," she motioned behind my back.

I turned, expecting to see another booth in eyeshot. "Where?" I queried.

"Go back in the station and cross to the other side."

"Go back in the station and cross to the other side?!" I asked, incredulous. That meant I'd have to go through the turn style and pay another $2, just for the privilege of being able to visit the other booth, which may or may not have refund tickets in stock.

I decided not to question the absurdity of the situation. It wasn't worth getting worked up over, because ultimately, there would be no opportunity for a self-righteous payoff. I'd eat the $2 and head over to 8th Avenue, and at the very least, I figured, get a shot at catching a train heading straight to the more tranquil milieu of Brooklyn.

When I arrived at the platform on 8th Avenue, I could not ignore the irony of the first train arriving on the local C & E track turning out to be a B train. Hmpf. I wondered if it was, in fact, the very same B train I'd gotten on earlier. It glided to a graceful stop and it's doors slid open. I stuck my head inside the car to see if there'd be an announcement about where the train was going. I waited.

"It's running on the C line," a guy said, hopping into the car.

"In Manhattan, or Brooklyn?" I asked.

He shrugged, and none of the other passengers offered up any information, so I decided to avoid taking the risk. I waited for a C train. As luck would have it, one arrived not five minutes later, so again, I was thinking: ok, now that I've gone to the right station, I’m finally getting to experience true good train karma. It’ll be a straight (albeit slow) shot from 34th Street in Manhattan to my stop in Brooklyn. I'll do a little reading, finish the short story about the Americanized Russian guy with the immigration problems in this week's New Yorker. I figured it would only be a matter of minutes before the stress of the work day, and the bullshit 6th Avenue lockdown, would soon be behind me.

It was indeed an uneventful, even pleasant ride for two or three stops. I was on a car filled with other weary workers who were intent on reading or taking a nap. No one's iPod head phones permeated my ear zone with the not so faint sounds of music I did not choose to listen to. There was no sign of the inevitable twosome of girls riding together whom I always seemed to encounter when I was most in the need of silence; one, or both of the girls would talk loudly, and non-stop, about the incredibly dramatic machinations of their 20-something lives. And no one sat next to me who was wearing either too much perfume or cologne, which saved me from having to give up my coveted seat to avoid having an allergy attack. I was thrilled at the notion of a tolerable train experience. But no sooner had the relaxation vibes take over my body than the train stopped. I looked up to see how far we had traveled, but it was impossible to gauge; we were not at a station platform. There was nothing to see but the dark, graffiti-strewn walls of the subway tunnel. I sighed in defeat. My symphony of movement underground was being crushed by circumstantial inertia.

Everyone on the train did the requisite shuffling of feet, of sighing loudly, of quietly murmuring to themselves about the efficacy of the New York City transit system. The conductor came on and apologized, but suspiciously made no promises about how soon we'd be moving. In an effort to thwart feeling claustrophobic, I opted to keep the focus on my reading. I was soon mildly distracted when, out of nowhere, a skinny, light-skinned African American, who's gender was indeterminable, wandered by me, with his/her hand extended.

"Anybody got $2 for a hero?" She/he said in a high-pitched voice.

At first, I thought this wispy beggar had come up with a clever sort of wordplay, asking for $2 because she/he had performed some sort of gallant deed in the past. For a second there, I even thought it was kind of charming—anybody got $2 for a hero? Then I noticed that the guy sitting next to me had his sweater pulled up over his nose. I glanced back at the humble stumblebum and looked at her/his bonny ankles, which were sockless, and crusted with dirt and blood. My gaze traveled up her/his spindly, stretch-pant-clad legs and noted they were camouflaged by several brown tinted stains, the largest of which was spread out over the meager cheeks of her/his behind. I gave the air a sniff, and wondered why the guy next to me was so intent on shielding his schnoz; I couldn’t smell a thing. But then as the vagrant slowly ambled away from our section of the train, the full fumatic glory of her/his poop-scented pantalones reached my quivering nostrils—it was one of the worst homeless person aromas I had encountered in a while. I grabbed at the collar of my sweater and pulled it up around my face. Everyone else around me had done some form of the same; one guy employed the fashionable “scarf wrap” around his nose, a lady across me was pinching her nose closed with two fingers, and a younger guy a couple seats away had pulled the hood to his sweatshirt up and yanked the strings tight so that the opening for his face closed up, barricading him from the aroma. With this shared act of bracing ourselves against the odors trailing the begging hero, a bit of camaraderie started to develop.

A woman with a Caribbean accent started chatting with the Italian-looking, New York accented guy sitting next to her; they made a contradictory, but somehow congenial couple—she a primly and impeccably dressed, middle-aged black woman, and he a casually, somewhat sloppily attired, middle-aged white guy. They had a lengthy conversation, and the air was punctuated with their hearty laughter. I slipped my sweater down away from my face, and tested the air, and was shocked that our area smelled just as bad as when the beggar had been standing right in front of us.

“Oh no, here she comes again!” called out the Italian-looking New York guy. His jovial tone somehow struck a chord with everyone in the train car; what had been a train full of individuals, shielding their noses and staring down at their laps in shame, suddenly became a clan—New York City transit riders—whose eyes met each other, starting to realize the humor in our predicament.

The beggar, who I could now see was indeed a female, did another drive by and got no results, so she hastily beat tracks to the other end of the car. A gaggle of people from the other end of the car suddenly migrated to our end of the car. A younger guy, wearing glasses and totting a brown, leather rucksack tried to go through the door leading to the next car, but his attempt was for naught, as the MTA had come up with a new rule that prevents riders from passing through the doors between subway cars unless a train is stopped in a station.

“No luck, huh?” The New York guy said.

“I already moved from a different car at Canal, ‘cause she was in that one,” the younger guy, who had a German accent, announced, “and now I come here, and she’s back!”

It was at that moment that the New York guy decided to do his fellow subway riders a public service; he whipped out a small can of Mexx cologne and sprayed a wide arc over our area of the subway. For some reason, this struck me as hilarious, and I burst out laughing. The girl sitting next to me started snickering too, which egged New York guy on, causing him to stand up and give the area a generous covering of cologne. His Caribbean buddy next to him clapped her hands in glee. The guy sitting on the other side of me, who had been muffled and stoic up until this point, let his sweater slip down off his nose, and he took in a deep breath of the sweet, sexy air.

The beggar did one more round of inquiry, sticking to her tried and true “anybody got $2 for a hero?” and it finally dawned on me that people in New York, unlike in my native Massachusetts, where we call them “subs,” refer to large sandwiches filled with cold cuts as “heroes.” I guffawed over my linguistic misconstruction. That set the girl sitting next to me off again, which New York guy interpreted as a call for more Mexx. As he shot his last wad of fragrance toward the ceiling, there was a jerk and a scrapping sound, and the train finally started moving again.

The beggar decamped for more lucrative possibilities at Broadway/Nassau, and as the train made it’s descent under the East River to Brooklyn, I had to marvel at the strange dichotomy that exists in all New Yorkers lives: On the one hand, we see or experience things that are disturbing, sad, or reprehensible, and on some level we feel deep sympathy for the people we observe or experience in difficult or horrific situations. But because of our inadvertent participation in, or proximity to these people or situations, we more often than not end up feeling annoyed, or emotionally drained by them.

This concept was glaringly illuminated on the final stretch of my subway ride—from Jay Street to Clinton/Washington. After being held captive on the New York City subway system for one hour and fifteen minutes (a half an hour longer than my usual commute), I had to endure the loud, screechy whines of a five year-old boy, and his mother chatting loudly with her girlfriend. This lasted non-stop, through 3 subway stops. Was I overcome with maternal instincts and the Nanny 911 desire to help this mother better control her child? No. All I really felt like doing was yelling: “Will you please shut the fuck up?!”