The Invisible Commuter 

A Chicago man reflects on his high school commute into Manhattan and discovers, a decade-and-a-half later, just how much those train trips meant to him.

by A-J Aronstein

He’d shuffle down the ramp at Grand Central, and sometimes I would pretend not to see him. A salty backwash of embarrassment at my own incapacity to knock on the window would flood my throat. I was a bad grandson. A bad person. It was part of a larger problem: an inability to extend the smallest gesture of affection to anyone related to me. I couldn’t figure out how to cure it.

In other words, I was a teenager.

I commuted from Westchester County to high school in Manhattan, amplifying the effects of an already acute sense of adolescent alienation. I did so in order to escape certain death at the hands of lacrosse-stick-wielding tyrants at any of Westchester’s prep schools. Instead, I went to an all-boys, all-Catholic, all-scholarship high school where it wasn’t a capital offense to profess a love for Proust. I was so far from every jerk I’d known up to that point in my life I was almost in an imaginary place, a different dimension.

But as it turned out, I was never too far from my grandfather, whose own commute intersected mine just when I felt least capable of dealing with family contact.

I cultivated an identity as a sort of bipolar New Yorker. My relationship to New York relied on public transit. I went to school in Manhattan every morning on Metro-North, and I left it behind on the train every afternoon. This routine required inhabiting what often felt like two planets—one on which I was subject to the arbitrary rules of suburban parental hegemony and one on which I could explore New York’s expanding horizon of possibilities.

From school, I could walk to the Met in five minutes. I could find someone who would want to go to a play with me on a Wednesday night. I could write comically serious poems about my commute and submit them to a literary journal (not very much has changed, it now occurs to me). And because I went to school for free, my mom gave me an astronomical $50 each week to spend however I wanted to. I had a credit card for emergencies. I had a Nextel cellular phone: a microwave-sized appliance that I used to tell my father what time he could pick me up at the station.

How much more independence could I possibly have wanted?

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