--As a suburban adolescent I spent my formative Sunday mornings at an urban church. Mom thought the church closer to us was just telling people (Republican people, though she didn’t put it exactly that way) what they wanted to hear. At the urban church, the parishioners (a significant minority of whom were from the same suburb as I) would sway and clap to the progressive beat of bongo-and-flute accompanied hymns. Indirectly, I think, this was a class thing.

--In one of the first scenes of the film Collateral, Tom Cruise (playing Vincent, hit man) gets into a cab driven by Jaime Foxx (playing Max, everyman). Max asks if this is his first time in L.A. “No,” Vincent answers. “To tell you the truth, whenever I’m here, I can’t wait to leave. Too sprawled-out. Disconnected. You know…?...I read about this guy, gets on the MTA [Los Angeles’ nascent subway
system], here, and dies. Six hours he’s riding the subway before anybody notices. This corpse is doing laps around L.A., people on and off, sitting next to him, nobody notices.” Two hours later, in one of the last scenes, Vincent dies on the MTA blue line and his body rides to Long Beach.

--I have always felt I had a profound and morally substantial relationship with the vagrants I meet on the street. It’s nonsense though. They paralyze me. A sort of reactionary sympathy wells up at every tooth-less-y smile (or scowl), followed in short suit by resentful loathing, and all I can do to avoid freezing is fumble for change. Each time I try to gauge their relative sincerity and merit, and
each time I am completely befuddled.

It’s not odd that the entire long row of seats is empty. 242nd Street is the beginning of the line and I always make an effort to walk up to the far end of the platform so as to get the most vacant car. I don’t see her, initially. I see a plastic bag occupying the seat next to her, and, peripherally, a rag and another bag arranged on the floor at her bare feet, in an offensive perimeter of sorts. I pivot
just quickly enough so that I turn almost 90º without appearing to change direction. Thank God.

Five months before this I only took trains for fun. I lived in Los Angeles. Behind their raw eyelid rims, Southern California street floaters had a pronounced gentleness to them. The most amiable descended from an ancient stereotype – the naked, laughing island dwellers who ate ripe fruit right off the trees and huddled under Precambrian-sized leaves during downpours – the kind Columbus described in his journals.

Once I was stopped by a weathered, grandfatherly black man pushing a shopping cart half-filled with empties down the street. He only needed a minute. He babbled about his Air Force career, his family (“They say I’m an alcoholic…I am an alcoholic, though. I never miss a day…”) and some land he owned before he pulled out his wallet, revealing a wad of twenties, and offered to take me to lunch. Halcyon days indeed, and so clear.

Days like this were the beginning of the end though.

For instance: a burly, distressed-looking black man was working the side entrance of a parking garage in Pasadena, following a flowing crowd of tourists with a pained expression. My girlfriend and a troupe of her friends I was meeting for the first time were just ahead of me when I saw him and reached into my back pocket for my wallet, pulled it out and opened it wide. Reflex. As soon as I started it was too late to go back, to shrug in solidarity or mouth “Don’t have it, sorry.” He could
clearly see a bill, though he couldn’t see what it was; he couldn’t see Andrew Jackson, jaw clenched tight and gaze, usually off to the side, this time flush with embarrassment. No pain, no….I patted myself on the back and folded the bill for discretion. If I could get a few yards away and nobody noticed it would be fine. To no avail. As soon as the bill was in his palm he lurched forward and wrapped me in his meaty arms.

“Thank you man,” he said, gently rocking me back and forth, people still streaming by, slapping his hand on my back. “Thank you.”

There were other incidents. Ambling down Wilshire Boulevard on a sweaty afternoon I found myself at a crosswalk. On the opposite curb was an elderly, bent Asian woman in a moldy fisherman’s cap. She had just pushed a shopping cart up a hill. Something in my head lit up. I gulped the rest of my Coke as we waited at opposite ends of the crosswalk. It was next to nothing so far as giving goes, but symbolically, that was the more important thing, symbolically it was perfect; quiet but palpable, with a touch of wizened understanding, maybe dignity too. This is definitely the right thing to do, I thought. As the signal changed and we drew closer, I saw her front teeth – at an almost 90° angle relative to her gums. Pitiful. I dunked the empty bottle into her cart in one smooth motion.

What’s this?” She let out a confused half-snort.

“Uh, oh, I’m..." I noticed, before I bolted for the far curb, that her grocery cart was half-full of groceries. For the next block I whispered, “I’m so sorry” over and over.

She looks like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings franchise. Only with smaller, darker eyes, less hiss and not as well animated – but clearly Gollum. She lists forward. Her face is in the slow process of collapsing in towards her mouth. She seems oblivious. I hope she’s high, so high we can all just ride this out. Just be calm. Be cool. “What you looking at?!”

The entire concept behind the subway is unnatural – and you really feel it when things like this happen. For two to five minutes at a stretch you’re functionally locked in a speeding hallway. The homeless are supposed to be rootless – free, in the barest sense of the word. So are you. The purest form of the have / have-not relationship is the freeway off-ramp model, in fact: you, moving forward, insulated, come to someone in need (or someone who says they are, or someone who
just radiates it) and at the speed of traffic decide whether to keep moving forward, faster, or slow down and contemplate. Whooshing through tunnels in an aluminum box we’re all in the same sealed boat, and that’s anyway but the way it actually is.

“This is my house,“ she snarled at no one in particular. “My house.”

People are getting on at each stop – 225th Street, 215th Street – it’s getting harder to look around her. The entire long bench opposite her is filled up, though the process was halting. The people on it now are diligently staring at their knees, with the possible exception of a young man wearing a dude rag over his dreadlocks, listening to an iPod and glancing over at her now and again.

207th Street. She’s slipped back into oblivion. A tiny Hispanic woman isn’t paying attention. Probably thinking she’s lucky to find an open seat this late in the commute she takes the seat at the far end of her bench – five seats removed, but definitely across a line. As soon as she realizes she turns her head in the opposite direction, almost to where it touches her shoulder, and scoots to the edge
of the seat. But she can’t bring herself to just get up – that would seem vaguely offensive. She waits until the train jerks forward and the engine churns, the closest she’ll get to cover, and springs up and stands, safe, a few feet away.

 Dyckman Street. An older Hispanic woman, with her chin up and wraparound sunglasses on steps into the car, through the door closest to her. Something about this woman sets her off. She twists around in an instant.

“Get away, bitch. This is my house. Get away.”

Wraparound sunglasses stumbles back onto the platform. She hesitates, then turns for the nearest door on the next car. They slide shut before she recaptures her bearings. The train is on to 191st without her.

She’s muttering as we descend into the tunnel. Suddenly she’s writhing out of the grimy sweatpants she has on. Tug by tug she’s peeling them off her pocked thighs. She pushes them down to her ankles and takes a minute to leave them there. One small move and her loose sweater, which is miraculously holding the line, could shift out of place and then...this is eternity. As suddenly as it came she’s rummaging through her bags and finds a corduroy skirt and yanks it on.

The guy with dreadlocks says something to the effect of “you really need to pull
yourself together.”

“Fuck you. Fuck you – I’ll beat your ass. I was in the army. I fought for my
country. I’ll beat your ass!”

He shakes his head.

168th. Out on the platform I walk past the waxy wood benches where old men sleep, doubled over and wrapped in sheets, heading towards the A train, to 175th Street where the bus station access tunnel always has two or three of them in the afternoon. But I’m not there yet. The doors slide shut and the One train lurches forward again, dragging her down the line. I don’t care.
 

Louis Wittig is a freelance writer in the Bronx. His work has appeared in the Concho River Review, the Albany Times-Union and now, The Subway Chronicles.