Today, in some misguided attempt to be healthier, I forwent my morning coffee and cigarette until after I’d braved the subway. Or, I got up late and didn’t have time to make coffee and I can’t smoke a cigarette until I’m working through my first cup. One of those.
The mind of pack-a-day smoker prior to his first cigarette is like superheated water. Placid crystal until you introduce the slightest impurity, whereupon it boils explosively. By the time I left the apartment, I’d already snapped once trying to put on a wool sweater about a size and a half too small. I spent the fifteen minute walk trying reclaim my mental purity for the first train.
Despite the wait, I didn’t even bother trying to get on the first train. A close friend of mine wandered by and took out his headphones to say, “Are you one of those people who likes to chat with their friends on the train in the morning?”
“Well, sometimes, but I haven’t had coffee,” I tried to say, though it came out closer to, “Well vshwom bu haven’ts coffshe.”
He nodded and put his headphones back in. “Great, I’m going to stand a ways down.”
Relieved, I managed to get on the second train. It was crowded, but there was breathing room.
The next stop removed that breathing room.
The next stop was the tipping point.
The tipping point on the NYC subway is when you go from trying to make room to holding your ground. There is no more room, and any room conceded to new bodies is taken by squeezing and contorting existing bodies. In this situation, if you don’t hold your square foot of ground, you’ll be bent over someone who’s hanging off the overhead handrail trying not to shove their crotch in the face of someone lucky enough to have a seat. In addition to the damage this will do to your spine, your bag is already between your feet at this point, and any further loss of ground means losing your bag. You also won’t be able to make sure your wallet is still in your pocket without copping a feel from whomever is pressed against your back. In this quiet mosh pit, elbows start to tighten out of necessity, and the desperate calm begins to fray.
The train was slow. At 14th Street, where half or more of the train’s occupants disembark, they peel out slowly. I and the guy who I’m preventing from checking for his wallet both have to bend down to get our backs. This process is equal parts tango and yoga in slow motion, as we drop by inches into the opening space around us, grab the first part of our bag we can get a grip on, and make for the door before the tide encircles us and we have to fight through it again.
As a woman cuts to the left while dashing down the stairs and against the flow of the recently freed, I growl at her, but refrain from sticking my foot out. The line at Starbucks doesn’t even register as an inconvenience.