Subway Chronicles

One Man's Subterranean Journey to Work

By Jon Franklin

 

Wednesday

So I start out marginally content with my lot, my Wednesday, when I spy an anomaly. The train is reasonably crowded, say 90 or 95% seated capacity, a couple standers, but way off on the end I spy two whole rows of three-seaters with only one person sitting in any of them, and she's not even homeless, doesn't even smell! No puddles of urine, no vomit. Can it be?

 

A high school kid (with iPod at completely acceptable volume) takes one of the seats, I take another, and the doors haven't even closed on my station yet. What bliss! It almost smells nice in here too - clean, closer to a doctor's office than fabric softener, nicely neutral.

 

The water sparkles beyond the cranes and derricks past Red Hook. Those few blocks of Carroll Gardens between highway and train tunnel verily glisten in the crisp morning sun, so charming as to appear foreign, up early for bread and coffee in Paris when they've just finished swabbing the streets.

 

The Bergen Street platform is jam-packed with kids, rambunctious, but they're inexplicably all waiting for the G. A large couple sits shoehorned into a two-fer reading the paper together, making conversation. Kinda’ obese and singularly unattractive - she with the scraggly gray-streaked mouse-brown hair, he with the tremendous red Amish beard, mustache-less, and both in Velcro shoes to bypass the peril of tying - they are completely lacking in awkwardness, completely unselfconscious, content. But it's not the contentment of the physical freak, the fat stretch-pants wearer or junky a' nod, not at all oblivious, just, why the hell should they care? They scrunch close to kiss and it's not even gross.

 

Delancey darkens the mood a bit with gentlemen far too well-groomed for huge jeans and baseball jackets talking too loudly about sports, but I've got to transfer soon anyway, and look! there's the express train, patiently waiting. A not-so-fat stretch-pants wearer with obligatory tight, short down jacket gets up to get off and a middle-aged toothpick chewer, Nextel in hand, nearly snaps his own neck in admiration.

 

Encased in aluminum, buried underground, springtime in the city...

 

 

Photo by Lee Seidenberg