My dad first took me on the NY subway when I was 7 years old. We lived just across “The River” [Hudson] in NJ, but culturally, we saw life thru a NYC lens: all our TV and newspapers were NYC-based. My dad was born in Queens. Every few months we would spend a day in The City [that’s what people in the NY Metro area call NYC], and often we would go across the GW Bridge to visit relatives or see a sporting event at Yankee Stadium or The Garden.
I actually saw the Rangers play the Mapleleafs at the old Garden, where a puck could come off the ice and make it into the upper mezzanine—the stands were so steep! My first Yankee game was at 6 years old—Whitey Ford lost, but Maris homered and Joe Pepitone still played first base—I treasured his baseball card.
Dad let me keep a 15 cent NY Subway token that first day I rode the rails at 7 years of age, and I still have it. A memento of a younger day, a family-history lesson: dad told me that my grandfather built some of those subway stations when he came over from Italy, many years before.
Riding those rails, knowing my grandfather had worked there, connected me to a larger whole, symbolized by the subway system, which is the ultimate NYC melting pot. Rich and poor, black, white, brown and every other color, ride the NY subways. It is a NY rite-of-passage, literally and figuratively.
But there was another subway ride, when I was 17 years old, that will always stick in my mind. To get to the theater district, I’d take the 40 or 45 bus to the GW Bridge, then hop the A Train to Penn Station. One night, coming home on the train with my buddy, Terry, we had a bit of excitement—the kind I’d rather live without.
I wrote a poem about it—here it is: [I hope no one takes offense; poet Yusef Komunyakaa read it and took no offense].
The A Train
Hundred twenty fifth street station. Harlem
like some white man’s fantasy
of black man’s heaven, one hundred feet above
the tunnel where the opposite of love is written
on the walls in paint and urine. After catching the show
at the WinterGarden, Terry and I take turns closing our eyes
to profanity and dirt on the journey back to Jersey
through an underworld of sterno bums
and circus side-show freaks. Sandwiched between sixty,
maybe seventy black bodies on a train
designed for forty, our two white faces
bob like smallcraft on a dark and terrifying sea.
From what seems to us like out of nowhere,
a young black warrior in chains and leather
disturbs an old man’s peace, demanding retribution
from the father that he never had.
More than pride is wounded.
A black tide sweeps us to the far end of the car
where the air is liquored
with the sputum of a salivating mob
shouting nigger, blood, and motherfucker
indiscriminately. I am pressed so close against my friend
that in the flash of red that whets a blade, I feel him
tense his muscles like some dimestore-comic superhero.
Before Terry has the chance to kill us both,
I grab his arm. We stare into the cold no glare
will ever warm, but neither of us blinks or turns away
before the old black man decides the outcome for us.
When the train grinds to a halt the vanquished warrior
picks his body off the floor, retreats into the nowhere
that he came from. The mob evolves into a crowd again
as we scramble for our seats, smiling like condemned men
whose lease on life has been renewed,
but from that point on we question
whether courage and compassion are compatible
with the instinct for survival or salvation.
