Brooklyn Subway Nightmare
It was a Saturday and I had attended a party at Cité in midtown for my uncle Don's sixtieth birthday?a poignant event, as he was about to quit the course of chemotherapy that had been making him feel lousy. Everybody drank quite a bit to keep the poignancy both close and at bay, and the party ran very late. Afterwards, I walked to Times Square and caught a 2 train to Brooklyn. The express track was floodlit and under construction and the train crept?yea, crept?down the local track, clocking about two streets a minute. I leaned my head back and by Park Pl. was out cold.
My first flicker of regained consciousness found me in an environment of absolute silence. I opened my eyes and found myself in an empty and brightly-lit subway car. The doors stood open to a red-tiled station, also empty and brightly lit. I stood, and a man at the other end of the car seemed to materialize, his head snapping upright, giving me a hard stare from moist, bloodshot eyes. His gray Sacramento Kings jacket and gray sweatpants had camouflaged him on the bench seat. There is not a touch of namby-pambyism in saying that he was a menacing character?really but for the fact that he was much too wiped out to even get up unless viciously provoked. I backed out of the car and his chin fell back down onto his chest.
The station signs read "Flatbush Ave."?the terminus of the 2 line. Again, it is not unfair to observe that Flatbush is one of the rougher neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and a drowsy and baffled-looking white guy in a sport coat and tie stands out of the ordinary at 3:30 a.m. But upon my emerging from the train there was no one to notice me. The station's emptiness was exquisite and creepy?I headed for an exit in full knowledge of the chances of finding a cab on Nostrand Ave. at that hour, but found each of the three exits locked, either by a pulldown grate or a padlock and chain. Empty public buildings seem to offer themselves up easily as dream settings (wandering naked in a division of motor vehicles office or riding a too-small tricycle around a customs warehouse), and being locked inside this empty red train station, all dressed up, was far more dreamlike than an average dream. Still, a moment of truly not knowing whether a situation is material or somatic is not without some pleasure.
There was a loud "bing bong" and the doors of the train closed. It hissed and began to crawl out of the station. In a middle car I saw a conductor's face behind a window, and ran alongside, dress shoes clopping madly on the tiles. "How do I get out of here?" I yelled. She gave me a long appraising look through the window without lowering it, keeping the train at a steady pace. "How do I get out?" She still just looked at me running next to her. After 30 yards or so we got to the end of the platform. At the last second she took pity and thrust her thumb toward the other end of the station. I followed this mute gesture as best I could and found a passage, unseen in my earlier exploration, to both an exit and the inbound platform. A train waited and I sat down inside.
For about 10 minutes I was there alone. Then I heard loud voices. Two Haitian men in their early twenties came into the car. One carried a Styrofoam container full of pungent Chinese food. Both were very intoxicated. We exchanged quizzical looks?or rather, they looked quizzically at me and I put on my most stolid and ingratiating expression. There were several seconds of silence.
"So when you think this train gonna move?" the man with the food asked me in the process of lying down full-length on the metal seat. I apparently paused too long before answering. "I'm askin' you, when this train gonna move," he hollered with an edge either of impatience or menace.
I told him the truth: I wished I knew because I might piss in my pants if wasn't very soon. This, it turned out, made him (but not his friend) laugh. The train started moving while he laughed and that seemed to increase the mirth and his friend and I started to laugh too. Then the friend came over and helped himself to my copy of New York Press. "I need to stay awake," he said after returning to his seat.
The man lying down with the food stood up to look at the subway map. He squinted at it for about 30 seconds. "It's so blurry," he said. "Will you read it for me?" I leaned in over the map with him and read aloud and then counted the stops between Nostrand Ave. in Brooklyn and Fulton St. in Manhattan. "Will you wake me up when we get to Fulton?" he asked.
"Sure," I said and felt an immediate pang of dishonesty because I was getting off before that. I preferred that he go to sleep just because he was so drunk.
The friend had been very still, studying the Press. He looked at me with a strange expression on his face and seemed to be trying to digest some disturbance or anger. He held up a page of the tabloid with a scraggly pornographic illustration printed in the middle of it.
"Do you read this?" he asked.
I shrugged.
He flipped to another page, the beginning of the "Adult Services" classifieds, and held up an ad for the "Chopsticks" massage service in which a nude Asian woman with wet hair smiled happily, her nipples artfully obscured by her phone number.
"This is a regular newspaper?" he asked, shaking his head gravely.
"They serve several markets, I think."
He got off two stops later still holding the Press, still inspecting the adult classifieds, but perhaps looking less outraged by them. The other man was still stretched out with his eyes closed and his Chinese food clutched to his chest. The train inexplicably went express at Franklin Ave. and roared past my stop at Grand Army Plaza and Bergen St. beyond it.
When, at a quarter to five, I got off at Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn's shabby underground train hub, I gave the Haitian guy a tap on the shoulder before leaving him alone in the car. He opened his eyes and looked up at me woozily.
"You should try not to fall asleep," I said.
"Where will I go if I do?" he mumbled.
"Maybe a railyard in the Bronx, but I'm not sure."
"I don't like the Bronx," he said, his eyes fluttering shut.