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Category Archives: Experience

Up the Down Side

I was descending the stairs to the F train at 34th Street. Two trains had pulled into the station, providing an intimidating mass of people to ascend the stairs I was attempting to descend. I didn’t expect trouble in this, since it was a two-lane stairway, of the sort where two can walk abreast on either side of the dividing handrail. I followed the recommended procedure when navigating such a stairway during a two-train exodus, which is to slither down the right-hand wall and sigh loudly at the people looking at their feet on their way up.

Then I saw her.

At first, I thought she had dropped something, and had turned around to pick it up and apologize to the man behind her. She was on the left side of the right lane, and was holding things in both hands, so was clearly physically capable of descending stairs without the aid of the center rail. She made a slightly huffy shrug, and I expected her to turn around after her forthcoming apology.

Then I heard her.

Few words have ever caused me as much pain as the five whining syllables that exited her speaking orifice in the next one point two seconds.

“This is the down side.”

Uttered as if the fourteen angry people stopped in front of her were mentally handicapped for not shuffling into an orderly line on the other side of the stairway, so she, I, and the dozen or so others going down could have our preferred space while the hundreds exiting the train added a few more minutes to their journey.

If I were a quicker, stronger man, I would have grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her to slither down the wall with the rest of us. Alas, I am not, and I tried to make my way past without incident. The man directly in front of the whining madwoman just looked straight through her, as if defeated, escaping to the quieter caves of his mind until the she gave up, or was attacked by someone else. The woman behind him was more proactive: she screamed, “Are you fucking kidding me you idiot bitch?” and dived around them, directly into me. Being of the thinner persuasion, I was able to navigate this extra spacial intrusion and make it off the stairwell.

I heard the ensuing argument halfway across the station. Madness is an opponent no tactic can fight but for opportunity, and shame.

Travel Blind

A few years ago, before I had an iPhone, some people stopped me while I was walking to the train and asked me how to get to Skillman Ave. I looked around, uncertain, then shrugged apologetically and told them I couldn’t help them.

On the way home that day, I happened to glance up at the street signs and found Skillman Ave. It was exactly one block from where I’d had this morning encounter. I had crossed it thirty seconds before saying I didn’t know where it was. In fact, I’d crossed it twice a day for two years.

I bring this up because there’s a school of thought that suggests my familiarity with my route should make me sensitive to any change, but in truth, I never get that familiar with any of my routes. In a new route, I usually navigate by address the first time, then by landmark, but within a week, I’m going by muscle memory. The landmarks I no longer need are the only things that still grab my attention, since the repetitive locating I did the first week burned various mantras in my head like “turn at the church” and “bear right at the gas station.” Everything else in those first few walks was categorized as “not the church” and “not the gas station.” Once I know a route, I switch on autopilot and spend the walk thinking about coffee and what to do once I get out of work.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that I don’t notice things like buildings going up or falling down along my route. Unless something actively blocks my path or makes enough noise to annoy me, I’m either checking for traffic or not really there at all.

I’m not even sure if the gas station is Sunoco or Shell. Damned if I know the denomination of the church.

The Departure Paradox

When I fly, I try to schedule a departure at the airport as early as possible. Planes leaving at six or seven in the morning tend to be less crowded, and leave on time, because the delays and problems haven’t had time to stack up, and the kind of people who schedule early flights are also the kind of people who get there on time, so on a lucky day you can even leave early.

The L train at rush hour displays similar behavior, which I had forgotten until this morning. For no apparent reason, I was wide awake at 6:30. After making coffee and watching The Daily Show for a bit, I headed to the train with every intention of making it to work by 8:45. I had two things going for me: I was leaving an hour earlier than usual, and I can combine the hat I recently bought with my hoodie and my shades to do a passable impression of popular image of a gang thug, so people get out of my way more quickly.

The Departure Paradox states that if you commute at the particular point on a subway line where the trains can no longer absorb the rush hour traffic, it does not matter what time you leave during the hour of the rush. In my particular case, the rush hour is between 8:15 and 9:15, and if I exit my apartment door during this time, I will arrive at a random time between 9:30 and 9:45 regardless of when I leave.

Once the traffic volume reaches critical density, problems start piling up. A train is no good to you if you can’t get on it, but frustrated commuters will try anyway, thus delaying the trains, thus creating more trains with too many people, etc. As the trains get fuller, probability demands that someone will have a medical emergency as often as not and pass out at a major station. Delays multiply and feedback and a twenty-minute train ride rapidly, so to speak, becomes an hour long. This process is already in full swing by 8:30, and slowly winds down, ending by 9:30, so the later during the rush hour you leave, the shorter your trip is likely to be.

Today, the L train made it to the river, then turned back due to a sick passenger three stations into Manhattan. I gave up and worked from home, on the grounds that if a 400 ton train couldn’t make it across the river, I wasn’t going to either.

Obits

If I died this morning in the manner I suspected I might, this is what my obituary would say:

Peter Welch was killed by a bacon delivery truck while crossing Hester street in Chinatown. He died as he lived.

Groundhog Commuting

Wherever a new job lies, the habitual commute emerges quickly and is fairly immutable. There is nearly always a fastest route, and barring construction, dead trains, or desperation for variety, there’s no reason to change it. Given two or more paths nearly equal in length, I switch between them, but even that switching will start to take on a predictable pattern.

When walking through Manhattan, the regularity of the experience can be shocking. Previously, when leaving from my girlfriend’s apartment, I would get my coffee, smoke my cigarette, walk down to Grand, turn right, cross Forsyth, turn left at Chrystie and walk next to the park, then right at Hester, after which it was a straight shot to Baxter.

Unfortunately, I always ended up having to wait for a light when crossing Chrystie at Hester, which meant always having to wait for a light at Bowery, and those are both long, cold lights this time of year. The Keep Moving Principle is important to optimizing a commute, so this bothered me. I eventually noticed that every time I got to Chrystie, the light was about to change in my favor decided to risk the nasty stretch of Grand between Chrystie and Bowery in the hopes that it would get me to Bowery in time. Unfortunately, the stretch is bad enough that it’s always about five seconds too slow to make the very short light on the other side.

Still, that put me in the game on the long block between Grand and Hester. This block is pretty clear, except for one guy handing out restaurant flyers approximately 30 feet south of the Grand and Bowery corner, and I walk pretty fast, but there isn’t quite enough time to make it the whole length of the block before the lights cycle back to the long wait. However, since traffic is pretty clear, when the light turns in my favor, I can cross about 35 feet before the actual crosswalk and weave through the stopped cars on the far side, thus traversing the Chrystie/Bowery portion without stopping.

To summarize: wait 5 to 10 seconds at Grand and Chrystie. 40 seconds down Grand, turn left, pass the flyer guy at 30 feet on the right, cross 35 feet before the crosswalk.

Every. Single. Time.

And it will be exactly like that until someone changes the timing on the lights or the weather warms up and slows everybody down. Though today a guy crossed the sidewalk in front of me with a freshly butchered pig over his shoulder, so that was new.

Forget it, Jake

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.

Drizzle

When commuting to work from my girlfriend’s apartment, my morning ritual involves a small cup of extremely expensive coffee from a small coffee place three blocks north of her building. It takes two or three minutes to make, because it’s brewed a cup at a time and because it wouldn’t be a luxury item if it was expedient. Once I have my coffee, I sit on the step of a store a couple of doors down. This store has been under construction or deconstruction for a year or more, so I don’t think anybody minds. This whole process takes about ten minutes, after which I do the ten minute walk from the shop step to my office.

Today, the first ten minutes happened to be the ten minutes the sky took to turn from sunny and clear to gray and beginning to rain.

Actual rain changes the walking dynamic into a scurrying maze of death and hate, but pre-rain drizzle has the less dramatic effect of magnifying preexisting commuter habits. Fast walkers lengthen their strides, opportunists break into dashes more frequently, the lost sheep look a little more lost as they eye the sky. A few people already have umbrellas up. The curb creepers edge closer to death, looking for openings. The people who have to work outside and don’t care about anything continue not to care, but except for them, the pace of the street ratchets up a couple of cranks as everyone tries to shave thirty seconds of the minutes between them and their target door.

Overall, it worked out well for me. The drizzle dispersed the mini-clusters of people looking over stolen or knockoff goods along Hester street, and brought the amblers up to speed walker status. For some reason the lost sheep seemed to have wandered their way into another time frame: one woman took a full thirty seconds to traverse the S-curve she was following in front of a delivery truck trying to make a right turn, and a man who couldn’t have been over five feet tall managed to block an otherwise unobstructed sidewalk with a cane and a single plastic bag. I wondered if this was some kind of obscure martial art.

The only things that become more dangerous in pre-rain conditions are the bicycles. Cyclists already eschew law and order in favor of speed, and when the rain is coming, the space reserved for their sense of superiority is annexed by their already amply housed sense of entitlement. Fortunately, they remain a bigger danger to themselves than anyone else, but it’s important to stay out of the bike lanes.

I got to work with only a light moistening, which I dried off with the my edition of the company shirt somebody ordered without asking anybody what size they wore. The rain stopped two minutes later.

» How I made myself feel better today

456

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.

The Tipping Point

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.

Persistence

The kid directly in front of me in the turnstile line is already in rough shape. For some reason, this entrance to the Canal Street station is always less a line of people than a confused amoeba trying to navigate through a sieve. Even hardened commuters’ eyes get twitchy here. The kid looks like he’s trying to stay above it all, the way teenagers do, by looking mopey and sullen. I believe he’s stoned. In thirty seconds I will be sure of it.

It’s one of those moments when you just can’t believe you share a species with some of its members. The kid has a skateboard strapped horizontally across his backpack. Due to his slouching, he’s stopped by the waist high portion of the turnstile after he slides his card through the reader. He simply straightens his body, and, perhaps believing that the apparent similarity of width between the lower and upper portions of the entry is merely an optical illusion, walks forward and is again stopped when his skateboard hits the sides. He looks confused. I move on, wishing it was less crowded so I could see the fallout.

Nothing boggles my mind more than a human failing to understand object persistence. When I left, he was backing out and into the angry amoeba behind him. For the sake of the species, I hope he turned sideways, but I can picture him trying another turnstile.