I never liked taking the subway, but there wasn't much choice. The
buses remained a mystery even after two years surviving in the Big
Apple. Rotten to the core, it was, as we used to joke in those days.
Shopping was the only entertainment I could afford, provided I bought
nothing. Saturday was shopping day, a real expedition. It was an
education. I remember some days better than others. Let me think for a
moment here.
I knew all the better men's clothing stores, mostly the Madison Avenue
variety. Brooks Brothers and Trippler's, for example. I bought a suit
at Trippler's once, wore it twice and it fell apart. The fabric was too
delicate for my physique. That's one explanation. The tie was much
better, last of their fleur de lis range. Such excitement. I still have
it someplace. I had many suits and shirts from Brooks Brothers. It was
the uniform of the day. Their semi-annual sales were a big event in my
life. It was a bit sad. I kept the cashmere socks for many years after
they developed holes in the heels and toes, a fitting souvenir, don't
you think?
There were many more stores. They all had personalities and clientele
of their own. I could tell where someone worked by the way they
dressed. It was very compartmentalized in those days. Ah, Soloman
Brother's I see! Nice tie! Oh, J.P. Morgan, for sure, that one. You
know, that kind of thing. I think the British call it trainspotting.
Something like that. You get the idea. New Yorkers loved to brag about
how unique they all were, oh so much hipper than the dull fly-over
clods growing between the two coasts like crabgrass. My hobby was
pricking that balloon by pointing out how predictable they all were.
Quite easily categorized and classified, they were, like insects in a
grade school science project. I rarely failed. I had few friends.
On Saturday I would take the subway from Brooklyn Heights to 42nd
Street/Grand Central Station, not so Grand at all in those days, then
walk up Madison Avenue as far as 59th Street. Shops, shops, and more
shops. Then across 57th Street to the West Side and more of the same,
maybe hit part of Fifth Avenue, then all the way down to Barney's,
quite a slog, but good exercise in decent weather. Somewhere along the
line I'd pick up a box of cigars, or two or three. The little
tobacconist on the East Side had a line of supposedly pre-Castro Cuban
cigars they'd found in an old warehouse. It was an exclusive, as well
as a likely story. I bought as many as I could. Armes del Casa, I'll
never forget the name. They were great, but they weren't making any
more of them, so to say. The supply ran out, forever. I am still sad
about that.
JR's was my usual haunt for cigars. West Side. Nothing fancy about this
place, just a warehouse showroom all steamed up like a humidor. Great
place. I can still smell the pleasing acrid intake. That was the good
life. It's almost enough to make me start smoking again. Almost.
Somewhere on the West Side I got the subway for Brooklyn, as usual, a
Saturday afternoon like any other. This train was supposed to go all
the way to Brooklyn, no changing at Chambers Street. I felt lucky, one
of life's joys, really.
Did I already tell you I don't like the subway? Especially back then,
in the shadow of Abe Beam, they were awful. That's a joke, actually.
Mayor Beam was less than five feet tall. He was also fantastically
incompetent. The city was bankrupt. Nothing worked. Violent criminals
roamed mid-town Manhattan at will. The police were on the take. Abe
Beam had no business being mayor. He was in over his head, which did
not take much given his exceptionally modest stature. It was a great
joke, but not quite so funny for those of us living there. In short, it
was a dreary place. Twilight of the idlers, about to go dark forever,
that's what we thought.
The train arrived at Chambers Street in lower Manhattan. The doors
opened. I stayed put, standing. It was not my stop. For some reason,
there weren't many people out and about that day. A few got off, no one
got on that I recall. The doors closed. The train took off. It really
did take off, something like a teenager flooring his old man's
Oldsmobile. It went about fifteen feet and jolted to a complete stop.
None of this was so unusual. It happened all the time. No one knew why.
No one bothered to explain. Passengers have no unions, you know.
Now came the tense time. We were stopped, still well inside the
station, doors still closed. We might be trapped in there for hours.
You couldn't put it past them. They could have easily opened the doors
and let everyone out, but you could never count on such things. If
anything, you could almost certainly count on them doing something
stupid, really stupid.
Maybe a couple minutes went by, who could tell. I was not about to be a
clock-watcher and show my lack of sophistication in such matters. The
passengers slowly began to catch each other's eyes, briefly,
fleetingly. If we're here long enough, someone might speak, break the
silence, make a joke, something like that, I thought. Or they might go
crazy (these were the days before "going postal" had taken on its
current meaning) and start hitting, stabbing, or shooting. It was not
impossible, far from impossible. This was New York City, opportunities
abound, they said.
The doors sprang open. The driver announced that everyone must leave
the train. It was being taken out of service. We should seek a
different route to our respective destinations. I was not happy. It has
been a long day. I'd walked about 80 uptown blocks and four cross-town
blocks, not to mention walking inside the stores, up and down stairs,
standing around, gawking. I was carrying four boxes of double-corona
Honduran cigars, maduro no less. I was tired, hungry. I wanted to go
home. I was ticked off. I needed someone to blame.
On the platform I just stood there looking angry from all angles. No
one noticed. It was impossible to distinguish oneself in Manhattan that
way. Intuitively I knew this, but I had not yet stopped trying. I was a
slow learner. Still am. There was no way to get another train to
Brooklyn Heights from there. The good news was that the on-ramp for the
Brooklyn Bridge was just outside the station. A taxi would cost a
dollar fifty, the hidden tax on subway riders. I had done this many
times. I walked towards the exit stairs, muttering under my breath,
stomping on the cement to make sure everyone knew I was still angry. It
hurt my feet.
I walked past the cause of our difficulties.
A woman was trapped between the train and the platform. She was dead.
At least she was not moving or making sounds. It was hard to say how
she'd gotten there. There was only about an inch of clearance between
the edge of the concrete platform and the train. She was trapped at the
waist, facing the open door of one of the carriages. Something ironic
about that, there was. She was stiff like a plastic doll. She still
held a shopping bag in each hand. They were rather large paper shopping
bags with handles, the kind stores give you when you buy a lot of
stuff. They were full, resting on the platform. I forget the name of
the store printed on the bags. It was nothing impressive, like
Bloomingdale's. She did not look like a Bloomies kind of gal, certainly
not now. She was in her late forties. She had fuzzy black hair in the
poodle style so popular back then. Her hair was starting to grey. She
wore a cheap housewife's dress. She might have been Puerto Rican, maybe
Italian. Her skin was a darkish ashen grey, though that was not exactly
the natural color, I suspected. Her torso aimed back at a forty-five
degree angle. Her neck was straight and stiff, like her torso. Her eyes
were closed. It must have come as a shock.
A few people were standing around and staring. I was one of them. She
looked like a statue, a sculpture of some kind, a toy that some kid had
played with one time too many and now it was ruined.
"Is she dead, do you think," some guy asked.
"Hell yeah, for Christ's sake, what does she look like!" another guy
barked out. New Yorkers are very helpful in that way, even today.
Everyone appeared satisfied with that diagnosis. At least no one
offered a contrary opinion. There weren't many of us left by then
anyway. We were curious, but not that curious. Mostly we were annoyed.
Our day had been disrupted, again.
The police arrived with the jaws-of-life to extract her from the
transport system. Someone announced over the loudspeakers that we
should all go away and mind our own business, or words to that
effect.
I walked upstairs and hailed a cab.
