Realized that I hadn’t written here in a long time, so here’s a story.
To ride the subway in New York City, one must know how to create and be comfortable in solitude. Because of the high population of people in the city, and because the train, even though it’s increasingly more expensive, is still the most affordable form of transportation, riding in the system means that you will come in contact with the many different kinds of people who live here. This diversity of people extends to different races, genders, and gender performances, as much as it does to class and every other attribute and background that differentiates one person and their situation and existence from another.
The city’s most wonderful quality is also its most often complained about quality — you are exposed and in friction against others. And nowhere does that happen more often than on the trains where everyone has to sit and stand together as they move through the day and the city. The rich often avoid this friction by driving or taking cars from place to place. Even then they still complain that the existence of people who they see as lower than them, on the streets, or abstractly in their imagination, is a sign that the city has gone to the metaphorical dogs. For the rest of us who actually have to come in contact with human beings different from them, cultivating a great level of solitude is an absolute necessity.
Anything can happen on the trains. The trains sometimes feel like extreme versions of what life in the city is like — there’s as much possibility of the magnificent as there is for the bizarre and off-putting. You might casually see a world-renowned musician performing at a station or in one of the train cars, or you might stand in shock as a homeless person masturbates in the middle of the day on the B train. That’s New York, baby!
In order to weather these extremes, to survive the friction with others while going about your day to day exercise of surviving, you have to first acknowledge and accept that life in the city is hard. There’s extreme wealth disparity, everything is expensive, the drivers are trying to kill you, and the government seems hell-bent on using a budget that exceeds those of whole countries to do everything but actually make the experience of living here easier and more enjoyable. At every moment, it feels like you’re fighting for your life. Once you extend that knowledge outside of the self, it becomes an awareness and acceptance that everyone else is having a hard time. As they say, everyone’s fighting their own battles. The way that I like to frame that truth is that everyone in New York City is losing their minds, we’re just all on different parts of the spectrum.
Once you accept this general madness, you begin to embody the greatest of New York City truths, the foundational element that holds life up in the city — it’s none of my business. Whatever is happening around you is none of your business. The person crying on the bench, the bloodied man taking up several seats in the morning train, the homeless person that is talking and fighting with themselves, the dancers throwing kicks extremely close to your face, the fire and smoke that is coming from a small distance? None of your business. There are so many different lives happening out there, people are going through whatever they’re going through, and they’re fighting their own demons internally and externally, and that’s not for you to worry about.
If an innocent person is being attacked, or the police are harassing someone, or if you get too uncomfortable, of course you take action. You do what you can to alleviate the situation, whether that’s in helping someone escape, standing witness, or simply changing train cars. But generally, whatever’s going on, is not your business. You put on your headphones. You avoid eye contact. You go into your solitude, into the personal world that you’ve created that allows you to be in the midst of the madness without losing your mind more than you already have.
Most of the time that you’re on the trains, things are generally fine. You can go weeks without experiencing something truly strange — at least from the perspective of someone who lives here. The madness is usually humming at a low level. It's usually tourists from smaller cities and suburbs who get easily shocked and then describe things here as more chaotic than they really are.
When you’ve lived here for a while, you develop a sense of when something is happening. You can feel the increase in tension, like the air gets heavier, and if you’re paying attention, you will see people gravitate away from the inciting person or incident even without anyone saying anything. When there’s really no space to shift away from the person causing the disturbance, people will generally exchange glances to make sure everyone’s on the same page and is aware of what is happening.
For example, a few weeks ago I was on a crowded B train going into Manhattan. I had my headphones on and I was scrolling through my phone mindlessly, completely locked in my own personal world. I was squished, like everyone else was, but not uncomfortable. Or the better way to put it is that I was uncomfortable in a way that was normal on a crowded train so I wasn’t bothered. It was just the price to pay for public transportation in a big city. The man who was sitting to my left had recently gotten on Atlantic Avenue and was shifting a bit. I imagined that he was trying to get to that perfect position of comfort in the greater discomfort that would let him access his own solitude and ride the rest of his trip in peace like I was doing. Everything was as if it should be.
The songs of Ryuichi Sakamoto filled my ears and every stop, I looked at the signs outside to make sure that I was still going the right way — since the trains also have the knock for madness and sometimes will suddenly decide to run on different lines or skip stops with little warning.
Then suddenly, I felt it. Something shifted, something changed. I looked up and saw the standing passengers had moved away from me. At first I wondered if I had done something to irritate people, which I hadn’t, or if I smelled bad, which I didn’t think that I did and if I did, it made no sense that the passengers were reacting to it so late. I locked eyes with the older woman opposite of me, and she used her eyes to direct me to the man sitting to my left. I leaned away from him to get a better look and saw that he had been shifting because of a greater problem than the comfort in a crowded subway car. He had tears streaming down his face and he was saying something loud enough that the other passengers were stealing glances at him and giving him space.
I pulled away the headphones from my ears to hear what he was saying, and it seemed that he was in a kind of loop over his pain. He was telling a story, to no one in particular, or to all of the people around him who would listen.
He said that it wasn’t as if he was a freeloader like the homeless people around the city. He was a hardworking man who was just unlucky. Why couldn’t she understand that? Why couldn’t her parents understand that?
He had been dating this woman for half a year and they had fallen in love very quickly. They liked the same kind of art and even though she was much more social than he is, it wasn’t a problem. He liked to hear her stories after the parties and it was nice for them to have different hobbies and parts of their lives that didn’t involve each other. He didn’t ask her to change because of him, and he appreciated that she respected that he had no interest in some of the events and places that she liked to go to.
The problem was that like many people in the city, his life was precarious. He was essentially living to survive and waiting for the chance to make enough to give him the chance to live the life that he actually wanted. Unfortunately, instead of things working out for him, they turned towards the worst.
He was laid off from his job, as part of a vague “restructuring” effort. He tried to find work of the same level and in the same field, but everyone was “restructuring” and laying people off. What made it worse was that he also couldn’t find work elsewhere because either he was underqualified or overqualified and the companies were suspicious that he was going to use them as a launching pad towards another job. No matter how much he tried to insist that he wasn’t going to abandon the job for something else, since what he needed was a job in the first place, no one seemed to believe him. Months passed without work and he had to give up his apartment and move in with roommates as he lived off his savings. He didn’t like the roommates or like having them at his age but what choice did he have if he wanted to stay in the city? The man said all of this as if he was speaking to a close friend on the train, though no one responded to him.
The critical incident seemed to be that he had gone to dinner with the woman in question and her parents recently. And her parents, who had been so kind to him when he was employed, were suddenly cold and asking him questions about his lack of work. They wanted to know what he planned to do with his life, since they didn’t feel comfortable with their daughter tying herself to a man who couldn’t provide for himself, let alone a future family. All he could say to them was that he was trying and picking up odd jobs until he landed something permanent again. To make matters worse, the woman didn’t defend him. She sat there silently as her parents made the judgement that he was unfit to be with her.
At the end of the dinner, he pulled out his credit card to at least pay for his portion of the food but her parents insisted that they pay for everything. Not as a gesture of generosity but as a final humiliation. When he left that night, he knew he would never see or speak to her again.
Part of going into your solitude on the train is also that one of the best things that you can do for someone suffering in public is to look away. People cry all the time on the train and their accompanying stations because life is hard. Life is hard for so many reasons. Love is often one of these reasons and hearts are constantly being broken and betrayed in New York City. At some point, everyone who lives here will find themselves crying or being ready to cry in public because a person that you like or love has let you know in some way that they don’t want you or care about you as much as you care about them. Since everyone else understands this pain, and other pains that lead to tears, they tend to let you cry in public without judgement. Sometimes people will offer you a napkin, or at least some condolences.
The sight of this man crying on the train affected me deeply. His lack of reservation and the honesty in his words and tears felt so profound in that moment. These qualities were made even greater because he seemed to be appealing to God or to the gods directly. Something unfair had happened to him and the universe needed to hear and acknowledge that he didn’t deserve it. He wasn’t just a heartbroken man, but the saint of heartbreak, the living embodiment of that type of loss.
The man’s openness in turn brought me out of the private world that I had been in, and was a reminder in that moment, of our shared humanity. All of us in that train car were parts of one great whole, and our pains and joys were drawn from the same well of humanity. I felt then that I needed to console him, to acknowledge his pain, and let him know that though he was suffering, he wasn’t suffering alone.
I gently touched the crying man on the shoulder and the face he turned to me with was a complete mask of pain. Not knowing what to say, I asked the traditional rhetorical question one asks to get another to open up, a question that always feels silly since the answer is always on some level, no. I asked the man if he was okay.
The man looked at me stunned for a second. As if he was just seeing me for the first time. Then his face turned into a mask of annoyance and he told me to mind my fucking business. In those words exactly. He faced forward again and looped back to the beginning of his story. He wasn’t a freeloader like the homeless people around the city. He was a hardworking man who was just unlucky. Why couldn’t she understand that? Why couldn’t her parents understand that? Why couldn’t this one thing go right for him when everything else had gone wrong?
I covered my ears with the headphones and went back to listening to my music. As the train passed over the Manhattan bridge, some of the passengers shifted and turned to look at the view. The crying man became less interesting.