Unless there's a Halle Berry or Monica Bellucci picture on page eleven, I can usually get The Post read in its entirety in the time it takes the F train to go from Kew Gardens in Queens to 34th street in the city.  It's not done without effort of course, without dedication and concentration, but there's no better feeling in the world (sic) than being able to walk off that train and being able to throw that paper in the nearest trashcan, knowing that a sea of interesting facts is now heaving in your brain, knowing that you're now suitably equipped to start or end a  conversation on any number of topics, even one as compelling as, say, the cupping marks on Gwyneth Paltrow's back.  Wash the ink smudge from your fingers in a nearby bathroom and by God you're right for the day.
 
     I can't get it done on my own though; my Significant Divinity has to help in arranging the following: a weekend, an early morning, the first car, a seat, plenty of personal space, some delays (not as common as you'd think), no pretty girls (they only appear after 8am anyway), and no weirdos (that's a tough one).  On Saturday last, His deific benevolence had me on an early train, and already belting through the real estate section as we pulled into Roosevelt.  My rule of thumb is that if I'm in the real estate at
Roosevelt, then success is likely.  Only two people got on when the doors opened, one directly opposite me, one further down.   After giving them the once over, I went back to The Post.  Note here that for detail appreciation and retention, my once over is the equal of another man's five minute stare.  In fact it's been a disappointment in my life that I've never been called upon to put this forte to good civic use, such as fingering a Times reader in a police line-up.  Even after just a quick glance, I figured there was something a bit off about the guy who got on nearest to me.  It wasn't the conservative attire; the white shirt, the black pleated pants, the black shoes well polished.  Nor the banker's hair, jelled off to the side.  Nor the deeply tanned skin, the slight frame, the thirty something years.  It wasn't the brown shoulder bag, or white plastic bag in his left hand.  Everything was normal about this guy, except that is for the smile, a big intense beam of a thing which, it seemed, he was directing right at me.   With my head back in the paper I could still feel it on me, bearing down on my furrowed brow and folliclely routed dome.  Was my reading plan going to be thwarted by a well-dressed, well-to-do, grinning madman?  Was I now going to have to walk around with the bloomin' paper for half the day, and the dirty hands that go with it?  It was looking like it as I wasalready stuck in a two bedroom condo in Brooklyn, and couldn't budge aninch.  Something had to be done!  I pulled on my hard-bitten, hard-favored disguise, set my face to that of a much abused bulldog chewing on a wasp, and looked up.

     He was still smiling.

     "Excuse me sir, does this train stop at 50th Street in Manhattan?''

     There was an accent, possibly Pakistani, maybe Bangladeshi, most likely Indian.  An out-of-towner at any rate, so I softened a little; they can never rival the home-grown for madness.  But his question had stomped me.  I take that train fairly often, but I still only know the major stops.  A bit embarrassing that.  I told him it definitely stopped at 42nd, which is only an eight block walk.  I would have gotten up to check the map for him, but unfortunately the ones closest to me were obstructed.  In other words, actual human beings were sitting in front of them.  I blasted the MTA. Could they not have found a better place to hang a subway map than right behind where people sit?

     I thought I had done all I could for him, so I went back to The Post.  But he didn't think so.  With a profound ignorance of proxemics, he sat one seat up from me, even though there were plenty of other empty seats, and now, while it was just my right eye that was subject to the glare, it was no less distracting because of that.  He obviously wanted to turn a quick question and answer session into a full-blown conversation.  In anticipation, I could feel the piece about Gwyneth's cupping marks positioning itself on the tip of my tongue.  He started up again, and not wanting to give New Yorkers a bad rap by being rude, I gave him my attention again.  He had just flown in from Michigan he said and he was heading for Radio City Music Hall.  He had come for a date. 

     "Wow!" I said.  "That's a fierce long way to come for a date."

     I'd hardly cross the Hudson myself for a date, not to mention four or five states.  He was still making me nervous, especially the way he was looking at me so solicitously.  Was it a 'he' or a 'she' he was coming to see?

     "Are you going to meet 'her' at Radio City?" I asked rather slyly.  He said he was.  They had got in contact over the internet it seems, and had been emailing and then phoning for months now.  They had exchanged pictures, but this was going to be the first face to face.  To my further amazement he said that prior to this, he had already been to California and to Texas on dates, but those dates had been great disappointments.  The pictures they had sent him during courtship - pictures that had been shot from great distances out - hadn't captured the finer points of their homeliness.  As he recalled those meetings, the great beam died out for a moment. I was intrigued by his tale, having thought about internet dating myself in moments of weakness.  And I was in awe of his determination, his sense of adventure, his willingness to traverse the globe in search of love.

     "But are there no women in Michigan?" I inquired.

     "No!" was his reply.  No Indian women I surmised.

     "Nothing in the Midwest, the great plains?"

     "Nothing!  You have to go to the big cities."

     "Hey, if you fall for her," I said, "I guess you'll be moving over here then."

     "She'll have to move to Michigan," he said with some finality.  "I've been in the same job for the last seven years, and I can't give it up now."

     Whoa!  So much for that spirit of romance and adventure which I had attributed to him minutes earlier.  The reality it turns out, was the stuff of which movies aren't made - "Man gives up girl of his dreams for his nine-to-five." How's that for a theme?  Only Tarrantino could do something with that.
Still, this was mere begrudgery on my part; he was energetic where I was lackadaisical, enthusiastic where I was apathetic, adventurous where I  was timorous.  Or else he was a very lonely man.

     He asked me what my situation was, and I, still being a bit cagey, told him that I was engaged to be married, even though I have just become as  single as the night is long.  Hearing this, he wanted some advice on a particular matter, from an 'expert' so to speak.  He had bought a dozen roses at La Guardia - which he was carrying in the white plastic bag - and he wondered if he should present them the
minute he met his date, or if he should wait twenty minutes to a half hour and then surprise her.  "You
know these things," he added, which I found to be a little ingratiating, and annoying, seeing as if you took one look at me you'd know that I certainly don't know these things.  But then again, when did abject ignorance ever prevent a New Yorker from giving an opinion?  Or an Irishman for that matter?  I told him that his plan B - giving them to her after they had been hanging out together for a while - was not a good one at all.  He would look silly walking around with that over-sized plastic bag, and doubly silly when he began rustling in it for the flowers.  So he would have to present them at the outset, with a kind of flourish I suggested, with a kind of a whip-from-behind-the-back gesture.  He recognized the counsel of an expert immediately, and said he would follow my advice.  He began to prepare.  Off came one plastic bag, then another, and finally out of the last one came the roses, tightly bound and rather soggy.  They weren't red roses either.  I got a shock when he pricked his finger on a thorn and the blood came.  Roses in the wild I suspected had thorns, but I assumed that the domesticated ones were
thorn-free and user-friendly.

     "You're going all out," I said with enthusiasm, but I was starting to think that plans A and B were equally useless.  I kept that thought to myself though.  I mean, what was she going to do with the flowers?  After the initial "Aah, that's so sweet!" what would she do then?  She could go back to the apartment and put them in water.  But she would have to take him with her, and was it prudent to take a relative stranger back so soon after meeting.  And what if, in her effort to be ready for the date, she had left the bathroom in a mess, with wet towels on the floor, used issues in the sink, discarded underclothes by the door?  What kind of impression would that make on him? Maybe the guy knew exactly what he was at.  Maybe he knew that she would have to take the flowers back, and by so doing, she would be playing an unwitting part in his fiendish plot, a plot whose endgame involved her own speedy dismemberment on the kitchen table with her very own cutlery.  Was that the smile of a cold hearted killer just three feet over from me?  No, she couldn't take him back.  She would have to lug those flowers around with her all day, her poor fingers ripped and rent by the cruel thorns, her new pants spattered with the dripping blood.  Even something as pleasurable as going to the cinema was now fraught with difficulties.  Where would she put the flowers?  On the seat beside  her?  What if it was taken?  Should she put them under her own seat?  That might be insulting.  She would have to hold them on her lap for the entire movie, the last of their moisture seeping down on to her thighs as the petals wilted fully in the heat. Disaster!  Him and his bloody flowers.  But I said nothing.

     The train was pulling into what was indeed 57th street.  Well it's a confusing station anyway, in that it says 50th and 47th on the wall, so I wasn't going to beat myself up over not knowing it earlier.  I wished him luck with his date, and off he went, through the doors and up the stairs at a clip,  heading for the pulsing city of love and romantic possibility.

Michael lives in Queens, and continues to plow a very narrow furrow in the barren field of IT support.  He can be medicated at thecross1916@yahoo.com

Read Michael's last Subway Chronicles essay "Sleeper Car."