Strangers On An R Train
We’re in it together for duration of the ride.
Every morning of my commute to Soho, I saw the same guy on the uptown R Train. We invariably got in the same car. If it wasn’t so awkward it would be quite romantic (bro-mantic?), like the opening scene of a Nora Ephron movie. (The likely reason is that we both strategically figured out that the same car door stopped directly in front of the Prince St. exit.) I had never spoken to him. I didn’t know who he was, or what he did.
Tall-ish, olive-skinned, he proudly sported a pencil-thin, trimmed beard, and the inflated arms and bull-like shoulders of a bro who only does upper body. Crude tattoos cover his arms, in memoriam of family members, naked pinups, and flags of Italy. (Or was a flag of Mexico? I imagined his name was Miguel or Carlos or Jose. He looked like a Jose.) He wore the same odd ensemble: tight white t-shirt, boot-cut flared jeans, flat-brim baseball cap, oversized headphones, and a petite backpack that seemed ladylike and effeminate. It was a curious hybrid of hyper-masculine swagger, metrosexual grooming, and bizarre, mismatched fashion pieces.
New York is a city of eight million. Statistically, you’d think you could go about your entire life and never see the same person twice. But in New York we see the same people all the time: at the bus stop, at the deli, at the coffee shop, at the gym, in the park. New York is surprisingly insular if you frequent the same neighborhoods. The difference is New Yorkers don’t acknowledge this phenomenon to each other. New York is a city of eight million egomaniacs and narcissists. We’re too busy and important to stop and say something nice and decent to someone like, “Hey, we’ve gone to the same gym/deli/coffee shop for years, just thought I’d say hi and introduce myself.”
There’s something about travelling in the same direction with complete strangers. It’s an equalizer. It gives us a commonality and shared experience. Even though we are from all walks of life, dramatically different from each other, we are in it together for duration of the ride.
I’d become conditioned every morning to look for the guy on the R Train. I played a little mental game of whether or not he will be wearing the same funky getup, or will be sitting in the same subway car. He very rarely looked up from his phone, and I rarely looked up from my book. (I tried to catch up on the classics on my commute, but I think I’m like most straphangers, only pretending to read books or magazines or newspapers to avoid looking at other people.) Our eyes never met directly, but I could feel that he sensed me and likewise internally recognized the weirdness of seeing the same random stranger every single day on a subway. Sometimes we’d pass through the exit turnstiles side-by-side, silent, hustling up the steep gum-stained stairs to our final destinations. Above ground, we’d divorce each other for the day: he turned left, I turned right, swallowed by the madding crowd of Prince & Broadway.
But I knew I would see him the next morning, like the old Warner Bros. cartoon of the wolf and sheepdog time-clocking in and out. His daily presence on the train was comforting. He added a sense of familiarity and normalcy to the repetitive, mind-numbing dullness of my public transit reverie. When I didn’t see him, my heart sank. I was disappointed. I…missed him. I felt a pang of loss, like a fallen brother in battle. I concocted scenarios of what might have happened to him. Maybe he took a different car? Maybe he went in early? Maybe he’s running late? Maybe he’s dead, running across the street and struck down by a bus?
I realized this about New York, and maybe also people in general: we don’t want real, authentic human moments and connections, we just want to be reminded of them. We are intensely selfish and conflicted. We crave interaction and conversation, but when given the chance to interact and converse, we don’t. It requires too much time, and time is one thing New Yorkers don’t have.
Practically, I didn’t wish to be involved in Jose’s life, nor do I imagine he wished to be involved in mine. But for ten brief and silent minutes on a ten-foot wide subway car hurtling beneath the earth, we could not escape it.
