Subwayland (6 page)

Ms. Ferere eventually did, in a hospital: Mr. Robinson had been attacked, in the early-morning hours last Monday as he slept on the platform, by a man who tried to rob him and then returned and cut his throat open with a knife.

The good news, however, was that the subway's comedian-in-residence could not be silenced so easily. He was at Bellevue, very much alive and healing well. And, as he demonstrated himself last Friday, sitting up in his hospital bed, his attacker did not manage to sever his sense of humor.

“The doctor told me that they cut off only my head,” he reported, smiling weakly, “so luckily no vital organs were touched.”

Removing his neck brace to reveal a six-inch horizontal row of stitches across the middle of his throat, Mr. Robinson said that he was certain that he was going to die as he stumbled, bleeding, down the platform to find a pay phone. (The police are still searching for his attacker, whose face Mr. Robinson said he did not see clearly.)

“You know what I was thinking?” he asked. “I was thinking of this girl I know who doesn't like me very much and how I would never get to see her again.”

Propping himself up with a pillow, Mr. Robinson explained that he came to be homeless and living in the subway about 15 years ago, for reasons that he did not care to discuss in detail. He would say only that after a few years as a clerical worker, he came to a powerful realization: “I watched a lot of people go broke, and I thought that I would just stay broke and bypass the process.”

He decided to settle permanently at the station at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street for purely practical reasons. “The acoustics,” he explained. “My voice carries very well there.” And thus began what Mr. Robinson calls his Fifth Avenue Show, subtitled “Free as long as you pay the $1.50.”

He sees himself not merely as a comedian, however, but as a voice crying in the wilderness, revealing the truth behind the day's events and trying to disabuse comfortable New Yorkers of their comfortable illusions. “Most of these people I see,” he said, “they're living in cages. The cages are very nice. They're made out of gold. But they're still cages.”

As something of a misanthrope, Mr. Robinson is not quite sure what to make of all the attention and concern that many of those delusional and caged people have exhibited toward him since his attack.

Ms. Ferere phoned him. A worker at the newsstand, Mohemmed Youshuf, went to the hospital to visit him last Thursday. And Mr. Khan, the newsstand manager, even put up a sign in the station to let commuters know what had happened to Mr. Robinson.

It says: “Mr. Carl. He is in the hospital. He is okay.”

“Carl is a good man,” Mr. Khan said. “A very, very funny man.”

Whether he will be funny once again on the platforms beneath Fifth Avenue remains uncertain. But Mr. Robinson hinted that if he returns, he will be better than ever.

“The cut on my throat has improved my voice,” he said cheerfully. “Can you believe that?”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 20, 2002

TANGOS WITH MANNEQUINS

It is not easy being the hardest-working man in subway show business.

It means starting the day, as Julio Diaz does, in a tiny basement room in Corona, Queens, that is about as wide as a subway car but much shorter. This room is his kitchen, his living room, his bedroom, his workshop and his rehearsal hall.

In it, there is a bed and a television and a window the size of a takeout menu. There are pictures and newspaper clippings ringing the room like wallpaper, showing Mr. Diaz with Tito Puente, Mr. Diaz with Celia Cruz, Mr. Diaz with his adoring crowds. There are albums of thank-you letters and certificates from places like the Smithsonian. And there is a huge box of prized videotapes, several of which Mr. Diaz played yesterday morning to demonstrate his durable renown: glowing interviews with him on Japanese television and Colombian television and Telemundo and CNN.

As he was doing this, however, he was interrupted by the sound of a toilet flushing from the common bathroom down the hall, and one of Mr. Diaz's neighbors, a small man in a red tie, shuffled by, brushing his teeth. “Buenos dias,” the man said, through his toothbrush.

“Buenos dias,” Mr. Diaz said, sullenly.

And with that, he began stuffing a suggestively dressed mannequin that he calls Lupita into her Samsonite suitcase and limbering himself up for another day on the job.

If there were a way to measure the distance between fame and fortune, the subway would undoubtedly be one of the places where the chasm between the two yawns the widest. Performers there can be seen daily by enough spectators to pack a small stadium. They can bask in the kind of adulation usually reserved for rock stars. Because of the iconic position the New York subway holds not only in the city but also around the world, they can become cult heroes and minor media stars.

But while a few escape to careers aboveground, many more find that subway fame, as great as it may grow, does not translate well to auditoriums where the walls are not tiled. What remains is something that occurs to few subway riders when they pause to watch their favorite performer: a steady working-class job.

The job may be more interesting and rewarding than most, but it is a full-time job nonetheless, as demanding as they come. And if anyone ever decides to draw up a seniority list for such jobs, Julio Cesar “El Charro” Diaz, the ubiquitous subway mannequin dancing man, will surely be at the top.

“It's my only work,” Mr. Diaz explained in Spanish yesterday afternoon, before taking the stage for two hours of almost uninterrupted tango, salsa and mambo on the mezzanine at the station at 34th Street and the Avenue of the Americas. “Me and Lupita, we are out there every day, every day. We work very hard.”

So hard, in fact, that if you have ridden the subway any time in the last eight years—since Mr. Diaz left the suburbs of Bogotá, Colombia, and decided to seek his fortune in the subway—it has been hard to miss him, his black dress shoes permanently tethered to the high heels of the 30-pound female mannequins he manufactures himself on an ancient Singer sewing machine in his tiny apartment. (As with B. B. King's procession of guitars, all named Lucille, there have been numerous Lupitas over the years. Mr. Diaz said he now keeps six, repairing them as he rapidly wears them out.)

Despite the laughter and applause that follow Mr. Diaz every time he draws his partner from her suitcase, he acknowledges that many subway riders have never quite known what to make of a grown man dancing with a buxom, life-size doll, even if the man dances very well.

“They think that I am lonely or a sad man,” he said. “They make jokes about what I do with the doll when I am alone.”

But Mr. Diaz points out that his kind of dancing has roots that long predate him or the subway. As a young man in Colombia, he remembered, he and others would dance the “baile de la escoba” or broom dance, a folk tradition in which couples pair up to dance but they are always one woman short. A broom takes the place of the missing woman, and the dancer who ends up with the broom in his arms when the song ends has to buy drinks for everyone else.

The way Mr. Diaz became a professional dancer with inanimate partners sounds like a folk tale itself: a friend of his had lost a beautiful girlfriend to the handsome son of a shoemaker. He asked Mr. Diaz to make an effigy of the woman and dress it in her old clothes, so that he could burn it in the street and rid himself of the painful memory of her.

But before Mr. Diaz's friend could burn the effigy, he decided to take one last, drunken, dance with his lost love. And the crowds watching on the street went crazy with applause.

“That is when I decided once and for all,” Mr. Diaz said. “The next doll I am going to make will be not to burn but to dance with.”

He shrugged yesterday between dances and wiped the sweat from his face. “And so,” he said, “here I am today.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 24, 2002

LEFT OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

If it is true that great art is born of great suffering, what happens when there is only a little suffering?

In fact, what happens when the suffering is so common that tens of thousands of New Yorkers probably experienced it this very morning and the plot of their collective tragedy could be summarized like this: Hero hurries into subway station, hero sees train, hero runs for train and misses train. Doors close abruptly in hero's face with a dirgeful ding-dong. Flourish. Exeunt motorman, conductor and train.

It is clearly not the stuff of Antigone or even Edvard Munch (though screaming with hands clamped to head is a way that many tragic heroes have been known to react to missing the train).

The misfortune is infinitely smaller, more personal and more trivial. Yet when a New York video artist named Neil Goldberg began several years ago to notice the faces of people in the subway as they missed their trains, he was struck by the miniature portraits of loss that he saw on platforms all around him.

The loss, of course, was only that of a ride in a crowded subway car, and another would be along shortly to offer the same inglorious opportunity. But the faces seemed to resonate something more than urban impatience—something about fate itself, about how we all view ours, even as reflected in the most mundane daily transactions.

As Mr. Goldberg describes it—in a way that places a missed subway squarely among the subjects of the world's greatest art—the experience is about nothing less than “what happens when you want something and the world has other plans.”

So since this summer, Mr. Goldberg, 39, has been venturing into subway stations with a handheld Sony video camera to record these ubiquitous three-second transit dramas. He has stood by stairways and doorways from 125th Street to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, waiting for the subway to come and for the small, bad thing to happen to his fellow citizens.

“Sometimes,” he admitted the other day just after 7 a.m., filming at the West Fourth Street station in Manhattan, “I almost find myself rooting for people to miss the train—and that's not really something you want to be doing with your life.”

But over weeks of filming, often during the most sweltering mornings of the summer, he has learned several things. Among them is that capturing quintessential images of subway disappointment, in a system awash in them, is not always easy. Sometimes, he would film for three hours, with trains arriving every five minutes, and would leave with only one good shot. (“That liberal door-opening policy,” he complained jokingly the other day, as a nice conductor held the doors open for latecomers.)

He also found that the reactions of those who missed the train were a lot less operatic than he had expected. People grimace or roll their eyes. They exhale loudly. Some look around, as if for moral support. Sometimes they just look painfully embarrassed and smile strangely, as if they have done something stupid to cause the doors to close on them.

Most interesting and striking in some of the 17 hours of footage Mr. Goldberg has taken so far is the way that commuters briefly let down their subway masks, allow their faces to register real emotion and then, realizing where they are, quickly bring the masks back up again.

“It makes it almost hard for me to watch sometimes,” Mr. Goldberg said last week in his studio, where he will eventually distill the hours of recorded faces into probably five minutes of pure disappointment. “Somehow, it's almost sad.”

His past work, some of which has been shown at the New York Video Festival and on PBS, has also dealt with these forgotten corners of human emotion, a theme he often classifies under the heading of “Hallelujah Anyway,” a title of one of his previous gallery shows.

In essence, he says, it is about how “life can be an insane and depressing drag and thank God for it.”

He has, for example, videotaped storeowners in the weary earlymorning ritual of hauling up their security gates. He has taken a music box around the city and filmed it in various places playing the hymn “How Great Thou Art.” He is at work on a documentary about what he sees as the almost mystical nature of Wall Street futures trading.

Mr. Goldberg said he tried once before to do a project in the subway, in which he wanted to ask token clerks to read a piece of Whitman's “Song of Myself” through their microphones. (It includes a passage that sounds almost as if it is referring to the subway: “Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand.”) In the end, though, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority decided not to allow its clerks to partake in any literary moonlighting.

It is unclear what the agency thinks of Mr. Goldberg's latest project, but most subway riders, when told about it the other morning at West Fourth Street, simply shrugged and kept their subway masks firmly in place.

“Personally, I don't get upset when I miss the train,” said Steven Badice, a dealer in women's garments. “There's always another one coming.”

—ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 8, 2002

TAKING THE TRAIN HOME

Paul Kronenberg of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, says he is trying hard to break out of “this subway buff syndrome,” the one that has held him in its stubborn grip for at least 50 years now.

But it cannot be easy, especially when he goes to sleep each night and rises each morning to see a motorman's cab from an old subway car bearing down on him from a corner of his bedroom like a rail-bound Flying Dutchman.

Or when he heads to his kitchen, past a subway sign in the hall that says “To the Trains.” Or when he looks at his broken player piano, atop which sits a destination marker from a D train, seeming to announce that his piano is Coney Island–bound.

One afternoon last week, he gingerly stepped around his latest creation, a sizable piece of evidence that his subway fascinations have not, in fact, faded at all: a life-size reproduction, on his living room floor, of an elaborate 1904 Times Square mosaic, rendered in construction paper instead of tile. He estimates that he has painstakingly cut out and pasted together more than 2,500 tiny pieces of paper so far.