Riding the Drunk Train Home
“We are now approaching our final stop, Grand Central Station. Please remember to take all of your belongings,” the conductor repeats as if he has been saying it all his life. “And,” he moves on to the more time-specific portion of his valedictory announcements, “please throw out all your trash. Take all your beer bottles off the train with you and put them in the trash,” he emphasizes.
It might be going a little far to say that Metro North sanctions drinking on the train, but there’s nothing they can do; it’s allowed. The functionaries are contractually complicit, while the riders revel uncertainly within the confines of the car and the gaze of the conductor. And the conductor, incidentally, has learned his late night crowd, his reminder at once a token of his complicity and a gentle indictment: you are not getting away with anything, here; you are not special or outrageous. We’re all still on the side of the law — an affirmation that is at once comforting and disconcerting.
There’s a degree of condescension — if not disdain – in his final announcement, as he reminds his captive audience that you will, in fact, need a ticket if you plan to return home on the 1:47 train. He isn’t resentful, though, as he continues to issue what ultimately becomes a pat on the head. He closes with what must be a response to a drunk train FAQ: “If you need to have your iPhone serviced, please be aware that the Grand Central Apple Store is closed at this time. The Apple Store on Fifth Avenue is open 24 hours, but the Grand Central Apple Store, I repeat, is closed at this time. Have a wonderful evening.”
For all his subtle mocking, he is tender — a tenderness which feels unwarranted when directed at the seemingly transgressive act of drinking on a commuter train. There is no consensus among passengers on how best to indulge in the luxury of locomotive libation. The idea of being allowed a swig or a flask or a fifth (or, heck, a handle) is, indeed, more befuddling than the threat of punishment. We have all heard that it is easier to seek forgiveness than permission; so what are we supposed to do when we don’t even have to ask permission in the first place? We lack the structure of rules to govern our behavior; Metro North and functionaries are immune to the spectrum of adherence, clandestine transgression, and inflammatory disobedience.
The train is a capsule of public space – at once awash with strangers and inaccessible to most of the world it whizzes through. Of the passengers on a certain train Philip Larkin writes that “none / Thought of the others they would never meet / Or how their lives would all contain this hour,” in “The Whitsun Weddings.” A train ride is a shared experience in which most of the participants tacitly refuse any sort of “bonding.” Relationships within the train car parallel the insular nature of the train itself, which moves too quickly through time and space for anyone to even have time to consider longing or attachment.
Those who prefer a bibulous trajectory from New Haven to New York rejoice in the boozy freedom of the train car, but they also rely on its implicit social structure. Drinking on the train, then, presents a pathway to conviviality within a shared hour — but this is not why we drink on the train. We prefer to uphold its insular organization: come alone, drink alone. The girl sitting next to me during my ride on the drunk train took methodical, alternating swigs from a water bottle and a bottle of Diet Coke, firmly sealing and replacing each bottle in her purse before opening the other. In the far corner of the train, a raucous group of four played a vodka-soaked game with increasingly challenging and arbitrary rules.
The act of drinking on a train — like the act of riding a train — barrels toward a destination. The parameters of the train’s trajectory emphasize an end point, a goal. Just as the car acts as a contained vessel for its passengers, so does the timing of the trip act as a vessel for action. The parameters are clear and the ending is in sight (and as predictable as train schedules will allow). To drink on the train is to indulge in the knowledge that soon the ride will be over. It is an act of quantity — the bottom half of the hour glass filling as the top half empties. When you come out on the other end, everything is — must be — different. But no matter what you do, the Apple Store in Grand Central is still closed for the night.
Another recast from the now defunct CASE Magazine, from December 2013.
