The City Commute

Certain rules get dropped in favor of getting around or making a buck in Manhattan. If jaywalkers were vigorously prosecuted, the NYPD would be rich in a day. Reddish-orange light-running is usually kosher as long as you weren’t explicitly trying to kill a Jew. Peddling questionable goods wherever and whenever is usually a safe bet, though directly at odds with the commuting effort.

Chinatown turns this casual lawlessness up to eleven. Walking along the blurry and blurring borders of Little Italy and Chinatown is walking through a narrow bazaar of stacked clothing, buckets of trinkets, and crates of food. It’s hard to tell what’s being loaded into the stores and what’s being sold on the spot. Sometimes it’s being distributed to the street dealers: one crowd of peddlers gathered around a trash bag full of purses had a member whose job it was to fend off interested tourists with shouts of, “No sale! No sale!”

I recognized the shouter from the Starbucks team. She doesn’t work at Starbucks, she works the sidewalk just outside. I assume she and the rest of her team recognize me by now, which is why I don’t hear “watches, rings, watches, rings” muttered quietly in my ear as often as I did when I first started getting coffee there. As far as I can tell, they’re selling approximately the same thing as the blocks of nearly identical stores selling knockoffs or otherwise acquired items, some in the window, some in the rooms you have to ask six or seven times to see.

The confusion caused by the masses of people trying to sell you things on and off the street is roughly doubled by the hosts at the Italian restaurants trying to assure each passing tourist that the restaurant just to the left is the very best Italian restaurant out of the thirty or so that are holding up against the Chinatown onslaught. The only way to navigate or hold a conversation among the turmoil is to create a sensory blind spot and not give any indication that you can see or hear anything that isn’t in the dead center of your vision. It’s also important to do this, since the rules of right-of-way seem to be whoever got there first by not backing down. The roads tend to be 50% sidewalk, and there’s often no way of knowing if that’s because it’s currently safe or if it just happens to be that way because some delivery guys took over a section street, and will at any moment release a stack of angry traffic, or just run you down themselves with an overloaded hand trolley.

It’s Chinatown.

I’ve ridden a lot of trains at rush hour in NYC. The least crowded was the PATH to Jersey, because I was taking it in reverse, since nobody actually lives in Brooklyn and works in Jersey. I regularly had an entire car to myself. The ads were the best part: one advertised condos in Hoboken by pointing out that if you live on the Jersey waterfront, you get to look at the Manhattan skyline, whereas is you live in Manhattan, you have to look at Jersey. They had a point. Another ad proclaimed, “Have you talked to your kids about drugs? Because their friends are.” The grammatical problems with these two sentences made me grind my teeth for a year.

The exact opposite of this advertising meditation commute was taking the 456 uptown from 14th Street at nine in the morning. I’ve never seen anything like it outside of dystopian-future cinema. A lucky day involved getting down the stairs and making the third train. Often, there was a line just to get to the head of the stairs, and you could spend five minutes on them before you got to the platform below. When there was room for them, MTA officials would move people around and clear entrances with flashlights and shouting. I mentioned the tipping point previously; that was every second on the 456 line once you got close to it.

People snapped on a regular basis. I witnessed the most impotent fight of all time, as two men yelled at each other over the impenetrable press of people between them, unable even to make a threatening gesture because their hands were pinned to their sides. Once when I was working my way to an acceptable spot on the train, I briefly got caught on a woman’s purse. She yanked it away angrily and shouted, “Excuse me is a word!” This is false, but I wasn’t going to correct her in such an unstable environment.

The 456 at 14th is also the loudest of all train stops, reaching 106 decibals, which starts causing hearing damage after 30 seconds. The screeching achieved by every single train is equivalent to having headphones made out of two hungry babies. People who just say, “gimme a second” into their cell phones and don’t blink when multiple ambulances go by still flinch when a slow 6 train pulls into 14th Street.

If you’re not from the city, the 456 is the green line on the subway map. Avoid.

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.