The Man Who Bumped Against Me

by Richard Goodman

     You are riding in the subway. It’s crowded. There are no seats, and you are holding onto a strap. It is 1976. There is a bulky man standing next to you. His features are large. He has fat fleshy ears and droopy cheeks.  He is pushing against you. He is crossing that line of what will come to be known as “personal space” some years later but which is now simply, don’t. He moves against you one too many times and you are about to say something to this large man finally who is about 40 dressed in worn clothes, maybe he’s a superintendent in a cheaply run building but who cares.

     You try your best to ignore him. You haven’t been living in New York City that long. You haven’t been riding the subway that long. You were shocked when you first arrived at how intimate the subway is, and how invasive. But you are young, and the adventure of living here surpasses and subsides so much of what long-time residents complain about. You don’t really mind. You are living your dream, of trying to be a writer in New York, and you have so much going for you. You live on a splendid street in an old beautiful small apartment with a woman you love. You have good friends. You don’t know yet what kind of writer you’ll be, but that hardly matters now. You escaped Michigan, and you landed safe and sound on your feet, and better. This is home. New York City is home, and part of that is riding very day to your menial job on the subway. This is worth it. More than worth it.

     But not today. Not this morning. This man moves his bulk against you aggressively, heedlessly. You even slide slightly away, as much as possible in the press, to give him the benefit of the doubt, and more precious inches. But he engulfs that hard-earned space as well and leans against you. You look up at him. His face doesn’t show the slightest indication that he is greedily sucking up all available room. That he is pushing, pushing, pushing against you. And my, how shabbily he’s dressed. In an old faded shirt, the colors beyond being washed away, and in pants that are frayed with small beginnings of openings near the pockets. You hate him, you are mocking him in your mind, and you are ready to speak up.

     Then you look at the arm holding onto the strap and see twelve misshapen numbers inked on the inside of his forearm. The tattoo is sloppily done, uneven, with some numbers larger than others, and it looks like an insane bank account. You blink. It’s a slap across your head, the dark, inked numbers parading across his arm. This is the first time you have seen this. For the first time in your life, simple numbers look treacherous to you. You look again. This is a reality that goes far beyond reality. You try to absorb this, but you can’t, because the enormity of the desecration is too confusing. The meaning of the tattoo on the man’s arm grows bigger and bigger and bigger, and soon your head is about to explode, because it cannot contain the burgeoning meaning. You want to run away. You can’t run away.

     How old is he?  He’s about 40. When was he branded?  It is 1976. Your mind races and tries to calculate. Thirty-five years ago?  When he was 5 years old?  Someone grabbed his arm and embedded numbers, one by one, permanently, on his small arm. Where?  At what camp?  You don’t even know all the names. What did this man see? 

     So you let him bump against you as much as he pleases. You try not to look into his eyes. The numbers on the inside of his forearm are so close to your face you can practically smell them. Later, you will see more inked arms, the digits on the arms bleeding slightly and hardly ever straight or even. You will see more inked arms in various places in New York City, and you will see more inked arms on the subway. You will see a woman’s inked arm on the subway, and that somehow will seem the most pitiful. You are sure there are others with tattoos on their arms in other cities, but there are far more in New York, which they say has more Jews than in Israel. You do not know if that is true. You begin to understand that day that no matter how truly and bravely you live your life there will be some things you will never understand and that there is a holiness that goes beyond any faith you know and that you can never be certain where you will encounter it.

Richard Goodman is the author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France. He has written on a variety of subjects for many national publications, including The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Commonweal, Vanity Fair, Garden Design, Grand Tour, The Writer’s Chronicle, salon.com, Saveur, Ascent and the Michigan Quarterly Review. He has twice been awarded a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony and twice been awarded a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  He is a winner of a Hopwood Award for his fiction. He wrote the introduction for Travelers’ Tales Provence. His essay, “In Search of the Exact Word,” is in the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. He is the Fine Presses Editor for Fine Books & Collections. He presently teaches creative nonfiction at Spalding University’s MFA in writing program in Louisville, Kentucky.