train i ride

ian frazier once wrote a piece called, i think, "take the f" in which he describes his community by taking the f train from one end of brooklyn to the other, just telling what he sees. i use it in class to help my students pay attention to detail and setting and to notice small things that might be big. they like it because, as they say, there's no end of crazy on the trains.

i ride the train. if you ride often, you see plenty you wish you'd never seen. there's the easy stuff- the woman hitting her kid while swearing at him, the constantly scratching guy hallucinating things crawling on him, the homeless guy peeing on himself, the floor or a seat, the teenagers who think you want to know why someone who isn't even on the train with you really really really is a bitch, the guy with the kilt and no underwear sitting across from you. but i seem to attract the unusual. friends insist they witness a greater spectacle when they ride with me. i am a magnet. people are more likely to rock, shake, chant, howl when i am in their car. homeless folks don't just sit next to me. they introduce me to their invisible companions and they always, always hold my hand.

i was trapped for ten minutes between stops alone in a car with two teenage boys who ingested a large quantity of something that made them want to kick out all he windows on the train while eating funyuns. i sat at one corner of the d train from coney island while an old man hunched over a crack pipe at the other end and smoked until bay parkway when another passenger got on. the problem, according to friends who also ride, is paying attention. when a tall, disheveled blind man with a harelip began pacing the car screaming "bell harbor, bell harbor. where my dogs at?" on the train a few years ago, i tried the not paying attention. when screaming people smell like pee, they'e difficult to ignore.

i have twice been on the train with someone promising to have a bomb. you think you know what you will do in this situation because you think you know what everyone else will do. "in this post-9-11 era...." blah blah. but when a drunk, deranged, dirty guy in camo starts screaming about the bomb he has and how everyone is going to die, what you don't expect is that the entire rush hour train will ignore him, continuing to read books and magazines, continuing to listen to whatever is pouring out of headphones while you begin to dissolve inside because you are foolish enough to think that a man with a bomb on the a train at rush hour would announce what he's doing before doing it.

the ones i like best, the least scary ones, are the guys who just yell information endlessly. the q train, 7pm on a wednesday headed toward brooklyn. cold outside. stink inside. packed in like overcrowded sardines with laptops and i-things, and this voice clawing its way over all the other stupid conversations on the train, grating and shrieking with a cadence like that of children i know with autism. he was sitting down and at first seemed to reading one of those stupid brochures about the bridges and the trains. we are, of course, going over the manhattan bridge at this point and he's saying, "some say the brooklyn bridge is the more famous bridge........... manhattan bridge is the only bridge with four trains going over it- the b, d n and q.... titanic..." so now it's not just some jerk reading something obnoxiously. he's starting to get strident. to get "all het up". i peer back though the tired, sweaty, wrapped up messes on the train and see this perky older gentleman with bright white hair and muttonchop sideburns bellowing from memory all this information.

as we leave atlantic another passenger, one who has not yet figured out that this train crier is, well, a little unusual, begins to argue with him about the very loud free tour of the bowels of brooklyn we're enjoying. or not. perhaps because the narrative had turned to a terrible crash on the brighton line during a strike when the driver/engineer was unlicensed and was travelling in excess of 70mph around a 6mph curve, at least according to our tour guide, the passenger felt a friendly little "shut up" was in order. it may be helpful here to let you know the q travels the brighton line and we were nearing (well, not really, but for the sake of the story we were) the site of this crash. it was how the historian (of sorts) responded that was so beautiful, though. his voice rose until it sounded like speaking was painful. "i do not do this all the time!" he shrieked indignantly. "in fact, the only time i give this particular speech is on this particular train line at this particular location! this is the brighton line! a brighton line train crashed into the wall right here! it is important for people on this train, here in brooklyn... brooklynites many of you, you should know this! if we don't know history...."

he really meant it. imagine. so much passion every day. such faith in the importance of his work.