Subwayland (10 page)

“It's the equivalent of unplugging your toaster,” Mr. Rivera said. “You ain't gonna get toast.”

The car—which sometimes has to wait in the dark through long, silent stretches while passenger trains get out of its way—has almost everything its occupants need. There is a tiny kitchen, with a microwave and a minifridge. There is also a bathroom, but it doesn't work. It is stuffed full of hard hats and stacks of paper. “We don't use it,” said Rick Melnick, who drives the train. “Because then we'd have to clean it.”

Occasionally, even the highest of the high tech needs a low-tech corrective. The car pulled into the sunlight that morning. Mr. Vargas, Mr. Rivera, Mr. Melnick, a data analyst named Norman Crossdale and three other crew members squeezed out of the train and down onto the tracks with a thing that looked like a giant slide rule. It was a rail gauge, to measure the distance between the rails by hand for comparison with electronic readings. (While on the tracks, Mr. Rivera, a very meticulous man himself, spotted a pile of tiny bones. He bent down. “It was a rooster,” he said. “You can tell by the spurs on the leg bones.” He paused. “Probably from one of those voodoo rites.”)

Back aboard the train, it turned out that the technology was trustworthy. The electronic meters were accurate to within one sixty-fourth of an inch. And so the train headed back to the Seventh Avenue station, where its arrival was once again greeted like the sighting of a U.F.O.

“People do stare,” Mr. Crossdale said, then shrugged his shoulders. “At least they can see where all their money's going.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 1, 2001

THE SHERIFF OF GRAND CENTRAL

He is not a long tall Texan. He is more of a square, substantial one.

And he does not wear a 10-gallon hat, as the song says. But it is almost that serious: a big black felt Stetson, bought at Shepler's Western-wear store in San Antonio, where Glenis Shadrick, 59, was born and raised, and where he says he will spend a lot more time just as soon as he rids himself of this obsession with ensuring that trains—specifically New York City subway trains—run on time.

Lots of people who regularly ride the Lexington line have come across Mr. Shadrick over the last five years, usually standing on a platform in the station at Grand Central Terminal. He wears his big black hat. Below it he wears a string tie, a big gold Transit Authority star on his shirt pocket and a belt buckle the size of a small dinner plate. The people who have seen him have wondered: Does that guy really work for the Transit Authority? Or is he just acting out some elaborate sheriff fantasy in the subway?

“Howdy, marshal,” said one woman last Thursday, grinning as he herded her into a No. 4 train.

“Ma'am,” Mr. Shadrick said, touching a thumb and finger to the brim of his hat.

As it turns out, Mr. Shadrick comes by his shiny badge as honestly as he comes by his Stetson. (He used to wear boots, too, but they hurt his feet too much.)

For the last 14 years, Mr. Shadrick has worked for New York City Transit, first as a motorman, in uniform, and now, with some seniority under his belt, as a plainclothes train service supervisor, a title that hides a multitude of responsibilities.

For the most part, it means that he is the law on the Lexington line, from Bowling Green all the way up to 125th Street. It means that when he gets on the radio, slung across his chest like a bandoleer, and wants to know where an errant No. 5 train is, someone somewhere finds out fast. And when he stands on the platform at Grand Central and stares down the brim of his hat at a man, commanding, “Get your arm outta that door!” the man takes it out posthaste.

“That wasn't that man's train,” Mr. Shadrick explains, sounding as moral as Gary Cooper. “He's got reservations on the next one.”

The man eyes him warily. “I think people look at me and they think, ‘This guy's got to be somebody,'” Mr. Shadrick says.

Last Thursday afternoon, unfortunately, being somebody, even the sheriff, didn't seem to be enough to bring order to Dodge. A No. 5 train, somewhere down south, had a pair of busted headlights and was being taken out of service. This was stalling all the trains behind it and causing the northbound platform at Grand Central to become dangerously packed. It was 5:30, Mr. Shadrick's high noon.

“It's a bad day,” he announced to a cute young rider he had seen before.

“How can you say that?” the woman asked. “You just saw me, so that means it's a good day.”

“Well, darlin', you're right,” he said charmingly. “But it sure is a bad day for the trains.”

Mr. Shadrick never exactly expected to be doing this in the New York City subway. He grew up in southern San Antonio, where the closest thing to public transportation during his youth was a boy giving his friends a lift on a tractor. His father owned a feed mill and a few cattle, and Mr. Shadrick remembers a lot of unloading of hay trucks. (“Lord, did I unload hay trucks.”)

At 17, he left school and joined the Coast Guard, which is where he stayed for the next 26 years, moving to places like Gulfport, Miss., and Adak Island, Alaska. At the end of his career he went to Governors Island, at the foot of Manhattan, and discovered, to his surprise, that not only did he like it, but so did his children. So after retiring, he decided, why not stay here and try something new? He had always loved trains, he said, and before he knew it, he was driving one, beneath the streets of New York.

What will Glenis Shadrick do when his work is done here?

He says he plans to retire in three years, buy an S.U.V. and just drive, with his wife. If he retires in the summer, he will drive north; in the winter, south. He will also buy a little place in San Antonio, to spend part of the year. Until then, you can find him in the subway, with his hat on.

“Texans, as a rule, don't assimilate,” he explains, adding, “The best thing somebody could do for me when I die is bury me in San Antonio with my boots on.”

And the hat? “The hat will live on long after I'm gone.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY 10, 2001

MAN BEHIND GLASS

It is not easy to project human warmth from behind bulletproof glass. Especially when the glass has a big bullet hole in it, right at forehead level, reminding the guy on one side that people on the other side have been known to carry more than money and want more than tokens.

Robert James, the guy behind the glass every weekday morning at the 205th Street D train terminal in the Bronx, explains about the hole: “That happened way before I started working here.”

“People wouldn't want to do that to me,” he says. “At least I should hope not.”

It is probably a safe bet. Yesterday morning about 8 a.m., one of Mr. James's customers bowed her head against the thick glass and offered him a half-second silent prayer before buying her token. “Bless you,” she said into the metal speaker.

“Bless you,” said Mr. James, who had bowed his head, too.

Another woman blew him a kiss. “Hello, sweetheart,” Mr. James said. He whispered: “She just had a baby, she and her husband. After
nine
years, they had another one.”

Later, a man showed up and passed a $5 bill through the slot, asking Mr. James to hold the money for his son. The man's son came by an hour later and Mr. James, recognizing him, passed along the cash, playing neighborhood banker in addition to token clerk.

It is one of about half a dozen roles he has played most mornings for the last 19 years, all while locked in an underground, fluorescent-lighted, soundproofed, burglar-alarmed box about the size of a small half bath. It is his office and his mess hall. It is his library and his living room. It is where he got a phone call last year telling him that his father had died.

It is also among the most uninviting setups for sociability anywhere in New York City. But, somehow, Mr. James has managed to turn it into a town hall. He has become one of those rare people whom big, anonymous cities sometimes produce: a civil servant so friendly, so ever-present, so clearly enjoying his job that he becomes almost famous for it. (Vacationing in the Bahamas once, he was spotted on the beach by a man who started yelling, “Hey, Mr. Token Booth Man! Mr. Token Booth Man! I know you!”)

As such, Mr. James, 47, has become a kind of symbol in the fight that the Transport Workers Union has been waging against New York City Transit, which has announced plans to reduce staffing and hours at 122 subway token booths citywide, including the permanent closing of 35, to save money.

Can a MetroCard vending machine and a full-body turnstile make sure your teenage daughter gets on the train safely, the union asks? Can they call the police to report a man passed out cold in the bathroom, as Mr. James did yesterday?

Can they serve as confidant and confessor, as part-time police officer, as the Virgil who guides lost pilgrims through the Inferno of the new subway map? (“No, baby, the B doesn't go there no more.”)

In other words, can the machine beat John Henry?

The answer, of course, is that it cannot. But unfortunately, there are also not many other token clerks out there who can pull off a John Henry quite as exuberantly as Mr. James, a thin, talkative man who wears blue alligator-skin boots and subway-map ties. There are not many clerks, for example, who, at their own expense, decorate their token booths in theme décor every month.

Yesterday it was American flags and fake roses with fake dewdrops for Independence Day. For Kwanzaa, it was kente cloth. For August, the only month for which Mr. James cannot locate a holiday, he does the booth up anyway, in what he calls “summer-fest” colors, green and yellow.

“You must have an atmosphere that makes you feel congenial in what you're doing,” he says.

And occasionally, the decorations even come in handy, as when he had the booth decked out for Father's Day with fatherly gift things: belts, ties, pipes, combs. Along came a young subway rider whom Mr. James knew, on his way to a job interview. “But I looked at him and his hair was nappy and his pants were hanging off his rear end and he didn't have a tie,” he recalled.

“So I gave him a tie and a belt from the booth and I told him to get in the bathroom and comb his hair.

“I said to him, ‘Listen, you've got to go down there and sell yourself.' And you know what? That man got that job.”

Because Mr. James cannot devote such personal attention to everyone, especially when the rush-hour lines begin to lengthen, he likes to inscribe inspirational verses, most of his own invention, on the message board behind him. Yesterday's were some thoughts on the power of the artist. (“A true artist uses more than one kind of canvas. He is not afraid to experiment or try something new.”)

At the bottom, he had added, “Today is Masterful Monday.”

“What's tomorrow going to be?” he was asked.

“I'm not sure yet. It could be Tenacious Tuesday or Take-Time-to-Know-Yourself Tuesday.”

“But I know one thing for sure,” he said. “It's going to be a fabulous Friday.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY 31, 2001

TUBE WALKERS

It has always been strange, walking back and forth across the bottom of the East River in the middle of the night.

“Sometimes,” Frank Ortiz says, “you can hear the tugboats, going by above you.”

The 53rd Street river tunnel, which runs between Manhattan and Queens, seems like something Dante imagined for the Inferno, the place where every sin has a corresponding punishment.

But looking down the river tunnel, it is hard to figure out what the sin might be. It is dark. There are things to slip on, like decomposing rats. Every 10 or 15 minutes, a train thunders through, leaving little room to get out of its way. When the train is gone, there is still the third rail, biding its 600 volts.

And if something really bad happens, the only way out is to run to one end of the tunnel or the other. This means that safety is more than half a mile away, in either direction, if you are in the middle.

“Basically,” said Mr. Ortiz, who has thought about this, “you kiss yourself good-bye.”

He has been a subway track inspector for more than 10 years. His job began to get stranger after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, when the police realized that an attack in a river tunnel could spread destruction far beyond the subway: It would probably flood a lot of Manhattan, not to mention Brooklyn or Queens.

So in addition to looking for cracks in rails and concrete, which are dangerous enough, Mr. Ortiz and his coworkers were deputized to look for even more dangerous things, like boxes and bags and people who are not supposed to be hanging out at the bottom of the East River.

Now, after the September 11 attack, the tunnel inspectors feel as if the place where they work has become as strategically important as a nuclear missile silo. To get into the river tubes, past the police officers now posted at both ends of all of them, the inspectors must show not only work identification but a driver's license. A log is also kept by transit officials, so that the police know exactly how many people are in the tubes at all times, and who they are.

Mr. Ortiz and his buddies find this a little funny. “There's nobody in the innards of the subway except us,” said Chris Fee, a track worker. “Not the cops. Not the firemen. Nobody. We don't even want to be down there.”

But behind the veneer of humor, even the toughest track workers worry more now about finding something or someone down there with them. River tunnels, buried beneath mud and water, do not seem to be the kind of shining towers of American might that would attract terrorists. But considered another way, they are just horizontal towers. And if they collapsed, it could cripple the city much more effectively than falling skyscrapers have.

Mr. Ortiz and coworkers were talking about this just before dawn the other morning, as the overnight shift ended and they sat in their locker room at Columbus Circle, changing out of their tunnel clothes, thickly powdered with steel dust.