Sunrise with Seamonsters (41 page)

I remember a night I spent on the train with a man in the Educational Service, a stranger to myself whose name I never discovered. It was too hot to sleep and we spent the night in talking. Half an hour's cautious questioning decided each of us that the other was 'safe'; and then for hours, while the train jolted slowly through the pitch-black night, sitting up in our bunks with bottles of beer handy, we damned the British Empire—damned it from the inside, intelligently and intimately. It did us both good. But we had been speaking forbidden things, and in the haggard morning light when the train crawled into Mandalay, we parted as guiltily as any adulterous couple.

It is hard to imagine this episode taking place anywhere but in a railway carriage. It is ironic, though, too. Orwell (who was a policeman at the time) and the stranger did not realize that if it had not been for the Empire they would not have had the safe solitude of the railway in which to damn it.

The railway had few detractors, and it has endured—not as a feeble relic, but as a vital institution. Indeed, it has grown. India is still building locomotives and coaches, and extending the lines.

Today, the flavor of the Raj is less in the rolling-stock than in the timetables, with their complex rules and prohibitions and their curious locutions. Under its twenty-one "Rules for Passengers," Pakistan Western Railway includes "Awakening Passengers at Night," "Ladies Travelling Alone at Night," "Servants' Tickets" and "Servants in sole charge of children."
Notes for the Guidance of Public
describes in detail the uniforms of the catering staff ("Refreshment-room contractors: Plain white chapkan and white pyjamas, with green kamarband, 4 inches wide, green turban band 2. inches wide and badges"—and so on, six uniforms). There are pages of "Catering Arrangements" in today's Indian Railway timetable, and these too have that formal exhaustiveness one associates with the Raj, together with some of the Victorian phraseology: "On prior intimation Chota hazari and evening tiffin will be served in trains at stations where Vegetarian Refreshment Rooms are working..."

In an important sense, the railways of the Raj still exist. The great viaduct still spans the Gokteik Gorge in Upper Burma, Victoria Terminus has not been pulled down to make room for a dual-carriageway, the train from Kalka is still the best way to Simla, and there are steam locomotives huffing and puffing all over India. This artifact of the past is carrying India into the future. I have had the luck to travel the subcontinent on these same rails. "With typical Victorian loyalty," Satow and Desmond remark, "streets were named according to the custom of the age: Church Road, King's Road, Queen's Road ... Steam Road..." I was once in Lucknow and was talking idly with an Indian man. Where did he live? I asked. "Just down the road," he said, "in Railway Bazaar." I made a note of that, and I remember thinking what a marvelous title that would make for a travel book.

New Yorkers say some terrible things about the subway—that they hate it, or are scared stiff of it, or that it deserves to go broke. For tourists it seems just another dangerous aspect of New York, though most don't know it exists. "I haven't been down there in years," is a common enough remark from a city dweller. Even people who ride it seem to agree that there is more Original Sin among subway passengers. And more desperation, too, making you think of choruses of "O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark..."

"Subway" is not its name, because strictly-speaking more than half of it is elevated. But which person who has ridden it lately is going to call it by its right name, "The Rapid Transit"? You can wait a long time for some trains and, as in the section of T. S. Eliot's "East Coker" I quoted above, often

... an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about...

It is also frightful-looking. It has paint and signatures all over its aged face. People who don't take it, who never ride the subway and have no use for it, say that these junky pictures are folk-art, a protest against the metropolitan grayness, and what a wonderful sense of color these scribblers have—which is complete nonsense. The graffiti are bad, violent and destructive, and the people who praise them are either malicious or lazy-minded. The graffiti are so extensive and so dreadful it is hard to believe that the perpetrators are not the recipients of some enormous foundation grant. The subway has been vandalized from end to end. It smells so hideous you want to put a clothespin on your nose, and it is so noisy the sound actually hurts. Is it dangerous? Ask anyone and he will tell you there are about two murders a day on the subway. It really is the pits, people say.

You have to ride it for a while to find out what it is and who takes it and who gets killed on it.

It is full of surprises. Three and a half million fares a day pass through it, and in 1981 the total number of murder victims on the subway amounted to thirteen. This baker's dozen does not include suicides (one a week), "Man-Under" incidents (one a day), or "Space-Cases"—people who quite often get themselves jammed between the train and the platform. Certainly the subway is very ugly and extremely noisy, but it only
looks
like a death-trap. People ride it looking stunned and holding their breath. It's not at all like the BART system in San Francisco, where people are constantly chattering, saying, "I'm going to my father's wedding" or "I'm looking after my Mom's children" or "I've got a date with my fiancee's boyfriend." In New York, the subway is a serious matter—the rackety train, the silent passengers, the occasional scream.

We were at Flushing Avenue, on the GG line, talking about rules for riding the subway. You need rules: the subway is like a complex—and diseased—circulatory system. Some people liken it to a sewer and others hunch their shoulders and mutter about being in the bowels of the earth. It is full of suspicious-looking people.

I said, "Keep away from isolated cars, I suppose," and my friend, a police officer, said, "Never display jewelry."

Just then, a man walked by, and he had Chinese coins—the old ones with a hole through the middle—woven somehow into his hair. There were enough coins in that man's hair for a swell night out in old Shanghai, but robbing him would have involved scalping him. There was a woman at the station, too. She was clearly crazy, and she lived in the subway the way people live in railway stations in India, with stacks of dirty bags. The police in New York call such people "skells" and are seldom harsh with them. "Wolfman Jack" is a skell, living underground at Hoyt-Schermerhorn, also on the GG line; the police in that station give him food and clothes, and if you ask him how he is, he says, "I'm getting some calls." Call them colorful characters and they don't look so dangerous or pathetic.

This crazy old lady at Flushing Avenue was saying, "I'm a member of the medical profession." She had no teeth, and plastic bags were taped around her feet. I glanced at her and made sure she kept her distance. The previous day, a crazy old lady just like her, came at me and shrieked, "Ahm goon cut you up!" This was at Pelham Parkway, on the IRT-2 line in the Bronx. I left the car at the next stop, Bronx Park East, where the zoo is, though who could be blamed for thinking that, in New York City, the zoo is everywhere?

Then a Muslim unflapped his prayer mat—while we were at Flushing
Avenue, talking about Rules—and spread it on the platform and knelt on it, just like that, and was soon on all fours, beseeching Allah and praising the Prophet Mohammed. This is not remarkable. You see people praying, or reading the Bible, or selling religion on the subway all the time. "Hallelujah, brothers and sisters," the man with the leaflets says on the BMT-RR line at Prospect Avenue in Brooklyn. "I love Jesus! I used to be a wino!" And Muslims beg and push their green plastic cups at passengers, and try to sell them copies of something called
Arabic Religious Classics.
It is December and Brooklyn, and the men are dressed for the Great Nafud Desert, or Jiddah or Medina—skullcap, gallabieh, sandals.

"And don't sit next to the door," the second police officer said. We were still talking about Rules. "A lot of these snatchers like to play the doors."

The first officer said, "It's a good idea to keep near the conductor. He's got a telephone. So does the man in the token booth. At night, stick around the token booth until the train comes in."

"Although, token booths," the second officer said. "A few years ago, some kids filled a fire extinguisher with gasoline and pumped it into a token booth at Broad Channel. There were two ladies inside, but before they could get out the kids set the gas on fire. The booth just exploded like a bomb., and the ladies died. It was a revenge thing. One of the kids had gotten a summons for Theft of Service—not paying his fare."

Just below us, at Flushing Avenue, there was a stream running between the tracks. It gurgled and glugged down the whole length of the long platform. It gave the station the atmosphere of a sewer—dampness and a powerful smell. The water was flowing towards Myrtle and Willoughby. And there was a rat. It was only my third rat in a week of riding the subway, but this one was twice the size of rats I've seen elsewhere. I thought,
Rats as big as cats.

"Stay with the crowds. Keep away from quiet stairways. The stairways at 41st and 43rd are usually quiet, but 42nd is always busy—that's the one to use."

So many rules! It's not like taking a subway at aU; it's like walking through the woods—through dangerous jungle, rather: Do this, Don't do that...

"It reminds me," the first officer said. "The burning of that token booth at Broad Channel. Last May, six guys attempted to murder someone at Forest Parkway, on the 'J' Hue. It was a whole gang against this one guy. Then they tried to burn the station down with molotov cocktails. We stopped that, too."

The man who said this was six-feet four, two hundred and eighty-one pounds. He carried a .38 in a shoulder holster and wore a bullet-proof
vest. He had a radio, a can of Mace and a blackjack. He was a plainclothesman.

The funny thing is that, one day, a boy—five feet six, one hundred and thirty-five pounds—tried to mug him. The boy slapped him across the face while the plainclothesman was seated on a train. The boy said, "Give me your money," and then threatened the man in a vulgar way. The boy still punched at the man when the man stood up; he still said, "Give me all your money!" The plainclothesman then took out his badge and his pistol and said, "I'm a police officer and you're under arrest." "I was just kidding!" the boy said, but it was too late.

I laughed at the thought of someone trying to mug this well-armed giant.

"Rule one for the subway," he said. "Want to know what it is?" He looked up and down the Flushing Avenue platform, at the old lady and the Muslim and the running water and the vandalized signs. "Rule one is—don't ride the subway if you don't have to."

A lot of people say that. I did not believe it when he said it, and after a week of riding the trains I still didn't. The subway is New York City's best hope. The streets are impossible, the highways are a failure, there is nowhere to park. The private automobile has no future in this city. This is plainest of all to the people who own and use cars in the city; they know, better than anyone, that the car is the last desperate old-fangled fling of a badly-planned transport system. What is amazing is that back in 1904 a group of businessmen solved New York's transport problems for centuries to come. What vision! What enterprise! What an engineering marvel they created in this underground railway! And how amazed they would be to see what it has become, how foul-seeming to the public mind.

The subway is a gift to any connoisseur of superlatives. It has the longest rides of any subway in the world, the biggest stations, the fastest trains, the most track, the most passengers, the most police officers. It also has the filthiest trains, the most bizarre graffiti, the noisiest wheels, the craziest passengers, the wildest crimes. Some New Yorkers have never set foot in the subway, other New Yorkers actually live there, moving from station to station, whining for money and eating yesterday's bagels and sleeping on benches. These "skells" are not merely down-and-out. Many are insane, chucked out of New York hospitals in the early 1970's when it was decided that long-term care was doing them little good. "They were resettled in rooms or hotels," Ruth Cohen, a psychiatric social-worker at Bellevue Hospital, told me. "But many of them can't follow through. They get lost, they wander the streets. They're not violent, suicidal or
dangerous enough for Bellevue—this is an acute-care hospital. But these people who wander the subway, once they're on their own they begin to de-compensate—"

Ahm goon cut you up:
that woman who threatened to slash me was de-compensating. Here are a few more de-compensating—one is weeping on a wooden bench at Canal Street, another has wild hair and is spitting into a Coke can. One man who is de-compensating in a useful way, has a bundle of brooms and is setting forth to sweep the whole change area at Grand Central; another is scrubbing the stairs with scraps of paper at x 4th Street. They drink, they scream, they gibber like monkeys. They sit on subway benches with their knees drawn up, just as they do in mental hospitals. A police officer told me, "There are more serious things than people screaming on trains." This is so, and yet the deranged person who sits next to you and begins howling at you seems at the time very serious indeed.

The subway, which is many things, is also a madhouse.

When people say the subway frightens them they are not being silly or irrational. The subway is frightening. It is no good saying how cheap or how fast it is, because it looks disgusting and it stinks. It is also very easy to get lost on the subway, and the person who is lost in New York City has a serious problem.