The Crazies

He stepped into the subway car and announced in full voice, "I never met a woman who wasn't a government agent."

And then I turned up my iPod. He continued to rant, but I could only see his lips move. Then I looked down. Don't make eye contact.

I am thankful for the little blessings in life, such as the ability to tune out this stuff. But I am also grateful for the ability to tune it back in on demand. If memory serves, I recognized this guy as the same one who once declared that lesbians like to eat fish. I wondered at the time what might have given him such expert status. Clearly he has issues with women of all stripes. I clicked PAUSE.

Apparently it was a short story he had to tell. The next thing I heard him say was just a recap. "I never met a woman who wasn't a government agent." And, thank sweet Jesus, I was able to turn the music back on.

Sometimes you can avoid these visitations. As the subway is rolling to a stop at the platform, you see one empty car among a dozen jam-packed cars. Too good to be true? Yes. Don't enter it. Usually a homeless person is sleeping inside under a pile of coats and blankets, and the odor of months-unwashed clothing, rancid breath, festering human tissue and, very likely, near-death illness is enough to keep the car clear.

A subway car suddenly overtaken by a noisy class of teenage girls on a school field trip is also enough to send one running in the other direction. I have even left a car to avoid an aggressive panhandler. (He threw someone's change out the door at a stop, because he felt disrespected.) But sometimes you are too tired to move and you just close your eyes, turn up the volume, and hope it will end.

The Gay and the Godly

A man on the train this morning was witnessing for Christ hoarsely and vociferously. It was one of those moments when you curse the express trains out of Queens, because you know you're stuck with it for a good number of stops. He started out collecting change for a "food program" for the homeless, which was dubious enough. (It's how to be a Christian, he explained.) But he soon made it worse by lurching headlong into a tirade about Gee-zus.

You can be saved, he was telling us. Just say a prayer. He was generous enough to share that prayer with us. I won't remember the words now, but we've heard it before: some combination of biblical quotation and plea for salvation in exchange for eternal allegiance.

"Boom!" he said. "You're saved. Now how long did that take? Seven seconds. That's all it took to save a crackhead like me. That's right, I said I was a crack head."

Somehow it didn't surprise me that he had been a crackhead. What did surprise me was that seven seconds could save anyone. (Even Madonna had four minutes!)

"A good-looking man like me." (I can't confirm how good-looking he was. I was avoiding eye contact.) "I did some terrible things in my life. I did some despicable things in my life. Sold my grandmama down the river for a rock of crack." (He said "crack" with the same fervent rhetorical emphasis as "Gee-zus" in a way that made me absolutely believe that he was very well acquainted with both, crashing through each consonant and elongating each vowel as if the words were struggling to escape from their sentences.) "But if I can be committed to crack, I can be committed to Christ. If I can be committed to crime, I can be committed to Christ." And so on and so forth.

He was very interested in us committing ourselves to Jesus immediately. "Everyone believes when they're dying," he said, "because you got no choice left. You're desperate. But you gotta do it now. You could die any time."

"Yeah, but ain't no one dying here right now," one young woman said to her friend.

I have never been much for street preaching and missionaries. It's sort of a pessimistic approach for a religion to take, if you ask me. No one will believe this unless we convince them by all means necessary. If Jesus is the way, the truth, and the light, these guys apparently have very little confidence that we'll find him. Have they given up on teaching by example?

At the same time, I absolutely respect their convictions and the strength of their faith. I just sometimes wish they'd go get saved somewhere else. But you ride it out until you leave the train or he does. In this case, he backed out the door at Queens Plaza, still preaching his good word, and walked to the local track to transfer. We heard every word until the doors closed and reduced him to a muffled echo.

One night a while back, I saw one of these religious experiences turned around in a way I'd never seen before.

It was the end of the night for me and my boyfriend, and we were on our way home. We were comfortably lit and a little sleepy on the subway seats, not particularly in the mood for anything remarkable, looking forward to bed.

Three women stepped into the train and assumed spots standing directly in front of us. They looked very well put together, if not a little gaudy, like they had just come from a wedding, all long, gleaming fingernails, iridescent lips, bright brown and beige tones across their cheeks, gold and silver synthetic fabrics.

One of them had her eyes closed, and she was bobbing her head like she could hear music that the rest of us could not. When it became too much to contain in her head, she began to sing. It was "Amazing Grace," and yet... it was not.

The other ladies perked up and sang along:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

It's a beautiful song. Or, rather, it can be a beautiful song. But after the first verse, she ad-libbed the rest, singing simply "I love the Lord, I love the lord..." over and over against the same melody. It seemed spontaneous — and unplanned, judging by the uninventive lyrics. Occasionally one of the other women would join or take over the "song," none of them contributing much but the odd vocal flourish or worshipful gesture of the arm. It must have been past midnight, so I guessed they had just come from some sort of day-long worship service — Methodist or Southern Baptist, by the look of it, if my sense of stereotype is anything to go by — and they were still a little touched by the holy spirit.

Unfortunately, very few of the other passengers seemed to be feeling it. I was annoyed by their righteous and presentational self-indulgence. What's worse, it was all very monotonous.

Many people just looked away. Some glared up at the women. A gay couple across the aisle from us were rolling their eyes. I closed my eyes and sighed and hoped it would end, or that at least she would break out of the trance and sing something different. But rather than merely being annoyed, or telling them to shut up as we all wished we could, Jeff looked up and tapped one woman's arm. "Hey, excuse me. Excuse me. Do you know 'On Eagles' Wings'?" he asked.

"On Eagles' Wings" is one of those post-Vatican II hymns from the '70s. It's taken from Psalm 91. Everyone raised on Catholic Mass knows it.

No, they said, they didn't.

Jeff stood up. "Can I sing it for you?"

I wasn't sure if I was amused, pleased or embarrassed, but I looked at the floor for a moment. Not only was he responding to a pack of crazies, but he was actually participating. I was preparing to be mortified, but he began singing the refrain:

And He will raise you up on eagle's wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun,
And hold you in the palm of His hand.

And just like that, they were totally disarmed.

Ooh! they said. They did not know it, but they certainly liked it. How does it go?

So Jeff sang it again. It was like a walk-off for Jesus. The ladies enthusiastically tried to sing along with him as he stood there with his hands outstretched like a youth minister. All that was missing was a guitar and a tambourine. The gays across the aisle were laughing. Almost everyone in the car had a smile. And we were — what bliss! — approaching our stop.

"That boy has the Lord in him!" one of them called out as we stood to leave.

"Yes he does," said another.

I had never thought of that before, but I supposed it was true. Jeff had succeeded in undermining their annoyance in their own language and in a way that was not disrespectful. It was brilliant and accidental, an unlikely connection between people very unlikely to cross paths outside of the Great Equalizer, the New York City subway system, and I have rarely been so amazed by him as I was then.

Definitely Not a Mets Fan

Jackson Heights, Queens, is one of those neighborhoods — unlike Maspeth or Rego Park, lord knows — that seem to get a lot of media attention. It is a marvelously ethnically diverse place and is often cited for its rich selection of restaurants or the reaction of its citizens to the goings-on of their homelands around the world.

It is also home to the same brand of crazies you find anywhere else in New York. Gothamist reported today on an incident that occurred on the 7 train, which runs right through the neighborhood. A guy in a Yankees shirt pretending to be asleep behind his sunglasses had his pants undone and his junk hanging out, half-concealed by a newspaper, and a woman caught him on her camera phone.

I'd say "I love New York," but there's nothing particularly "New York" about it. Dorks like him live everywhere.

Just My Luck

Should I consider it a good omen that a bird shit on me late last night while walking home from the bar?

If so, then good luck has been clamoring to find me this week. On Wednesday, as I was crossing 9th Avenue toward my new barber, I heard a splash near me on the pavement, maybe a foot away from my shoe. It was surprisingly loud, considering the level of midday city noise, and blended in well with the customary filth of the street. Looking up, I saw a row of pigeons on a streetlight suspension wire.

I considered myself lucky at that moment that I had dodged a bullet, so to speak. I mean, there's a time and a place, right? Apparently that time was about midnight and the place was 82nd and Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.

As the train passed, I felt something light strike me in the chest. I thought it might be some small piece of debris falling from the underside of the elevated tracks of the 7 train, but whatever it was seemed to have stuck there. I could feel its light weight sitting on my chest. Without thinking, I reached up to my chest to feel what it was, and my hand slid across the warm, slippery substance and came away with a bit of bird shit.

It was the color of graphite and much more solid than I had expected, like an exuberant dollop of acrylic paint. And it covered a good three or four square inches of my shirt. It was revolting.

The last time a bird hit me, I was about 7 or 8 years old and standing under a tree. It hit me on the back of my right hand. I wiped it off on the tree trunk without comment and carried on with the business of hide-and-go-seek. With the enormity of New York's pigeon population, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. At least it did not land on my head or on my face this time.

There was a rumor for a while that a bird once shit in Cyndi Lauper's mouth, back in 2004, while she was going for a long note at a concert in Boston. "My grandmother says it's good luck," she said, "but I think it's disgusting."

She put the rumor to rest recently: "It is not true that a flying bird once pooped in my mouth when I was singing in a concert. It did not go in my mouth. It went on my lower lip. I could not taste it. I just wiped it off."

The shit-upon shirt was my spare. Living in Queens and working in Manhattan, I have learned to carry my house on my back; never knowing when I will will get back home in the day, I always have a spare shirt, some basic toiletries, reading material, and sometimes gym clothes in a bag when I go off to work in the morning. So I changed back into my slightly damp shirt from earlier in the day.

I don't particularly like the shirt. I got it from the clearance rack at Gap, and every time I wear it, I see three or four people wearing the same thing — without fail. I avoid wearing it if I am going out into the city. Maybe the bird was merely suggesting I retire the garment and try one of the boutiques along 82nd Street.

Happy Night Shift Workers Day!

Believe it or not, but Wednesday (yesterday) was National Night Shift Workers Day. Working late nights can suck, but there is more to consider than the obvious problems of having a wonky schedule.

Someone dear to my heart went around the city Tuesday night to talk to people working the third shift and produced an awesome video story for ASAP, The Associated Press' service of innovative and original multimedia stories: Night workers get their day

Ironic, I think, that this national day of commemoration could not be observed by the folks for whom it was intended. They were all sleeping.

People

The ad says something like "People who need people. People who know people. People who know people who need people."

Something like that.

It's a subway poster for the Freelancer's Union, and before I even comprehend the message, I react mainly to the number of times the word "people" appears. Of course, they want to focus on people: It's a union. But when it's repeated, like, 10 times in a single ad, it makes the word look weird.

Look at it:

people

That "eo" combination is just bizarre. Stare at printed English long enough and the words begin to look as foreign as another language. (Maybe because most of them are.) At the same time, they are totally familiar.

Say it over and over: people, people, people. Pee-pull. It just sounds weird. I'm embarrassed to say it. Do people (ahhh!) really say that word?

I don't know if the ad makes me think about people, but it sure does make me think about "people."

Next Stop, Dreamland

The way her mouth hung open and the way her eyes were just not quite shut, the little girl looked dead. She was obviously sleeping. If it were more serious, I imagine her mother, against whom she was leaning, would have displayed considerably more alarm. Instead, she herself looked half asleep and quite at peace with whatever state her daughter was in.

It was early morning, and the poor thing had clearly not gotten enough sleep and was now sort of just passed out — hard asleep — on her mom. Ordinarily I'd think: "Cute!" But her dull, mannequin eyes peering out into empty space through the slits in her eyelids threw the picture off, like she was only imitating a human and there was just one little detail she couldn't get right.

I was careful not to let her mother see that I was staring at her face. Those eyes! They were like glass or plastic and did not move. Not even a jitter. They must have been taking in light, and surely they were recording something, but they were essentially switched off, like burned-out lamps.

Every few minutes, a man on the other side of her, her father, I presume, poked her in the side in an evident attempt to wake her just enough to assume a more dignified pose. It wasn't working, and he wasn't trying very hard.

A fat braid of hair came down from the side of her head, serving as a sort of cushion, framing her broad, smooth face against the shoulder of her mother's jacket. She's probably a nice-looking kid — when animated — I thought.

I love that kind of heavy, total sleep, when your field of vision closes in on itself, the words on the page in front of you begin to say things that aren't there, your eyes shut off before they are even closed, against your will, and your arms go slack, and your body slips at first, then plunges deep into unconsciousness. And how much sweeter it is to have someone to lean on. You abandon yourself with no care for your destination. Mom will wake me. You sink back until you're enveloped in grey cotton. The storm of activity in your head dissipates. The last thing you read is carried forward into a sentence of nonsense and transmogrified into something fantastic that makes complete sense, an alternate, other sense, in that moment. When you wake up, you have a bitter taste in your mouth; you're sweating from your scalp to your shoulders and down your spine; you have to teach yourself to move again, to lift your arm, to close your book, to stand, to step forward and off the train, and to climb the stairs toward home.

Sick Time

As spring takes its sweet time getting here, I am reminded that, in this period of seasonal transition, i.e. April (the best April Fool's joke I've seen in a while is yesterday's temperature), one is well served to guard against germs and other nasties roaming the range. They seem to really sock it to you this time of year as the changing conditions play havoc with immune systems everywhere. I myself just got over my annual cold relatively unscathed. Now, right on schedule, it's time for some minor throat trauma.

It's around this time last year that I was fighting off an as yet undefinitively identified infection that was threatening to eat away the roof of my mouth. I can still feel the scars where the festering craters of decay had formed. I can still see the puzzled faces of the doctors with their pen lights aimed into my mouth (What is that?). I can still hear the otorhinolaryngologist wagging his finger, implying that my fondness for sex with men was probably at the root of my problem. (I still can't figure that one out.) I can feel the needle pushed deep into my ass cheek for the first of a series of three just-in-case injections. (Praise Jesus, I didn't need installments 2 or 3.)

The best part was the weight I lost avoiding, at first, solid food, and then all food, full stop.

Now we wait for the summer sun to come and burn off the fog of infection. Until then, people are getting pretty gross.

Yesterday while staring out my office window toward the street, I saw a woman sneeze on her kid. She was facing my building, pushing a little girl in an open stroller across the street. She reared back like a pitcher winding up for a fastball and let loose what looked to be an enormously satisfying sneeze. A thick mist issued from her face directly downward, raining droplets of biological refuse, visible from three stories up, onto her precious little charge.

She sniffed back some gack and carried on without pause.

Good luck, kid, I thought.

A day later, another woman on the subway let go of the chrome pole she was grasping so she could sneeze at her hand, only half covering her face, and then put it back exactly where it was on that pole. Another woman on the pole, wisely wearing gloves, registered her shock with a flurry of incredulous blinking and stepped aside to join a companion a few feet away.

Train, in Vain

Please use all available doors. Stand aside of passengers entering and exiting the train. Please stand clear of the closing doors.

How many times do I hear this? How many hours of my life do I spend on the F train?

How many times do people refuse to obey these simple rules?

My favorite times are when the conductors call people out, when they scold them and talk to them like they're four years old. Usually they deserve it.

One morning last week, while we were stopped at West 4th, headed south, a man stepped between the closing door. He was asking people outside the train a question. He turned back inside and asked someone else a question. I presume the same one, though I couldn't hear him. I was just coming to attention, out of that staring-into-nothing, looking-for-meaning-in-subway-ads commuter's haze, just becomming aware of the people around me.

No one was responding to him. It was like he was invisible. Or crazy. Or some other ignorable species. But he was real, right there, holding up the train, stopping us from getting to work.

"Please stand clear of the closing doors!" the conductor said emphatically over the intercom.

The man continued to stand there. People began to show their exasperation, including me. I heard several sighs.

Answer him, you idiots, I thought. Let's get going.

"The reason the train is not moving," explained the conductor with false calm, "is that there is a passenger holding the doors open. Please stand clear of the closing doors!"

He asked his question again to someone sitting nearby who just sort of dismissively shrugged and shook his head. The man turned to me. He was dressed like anyone else. He didn't look homeless or dirty or crazy. He seemed foreign, maybe, but his English was clear.

"Does this train go to Canal Street?" he said.

Is this all he wanted? No one could answer him this simple question? Everyone this far south on the F train at this time of day, with only four stops left before Brooklyn, should know that we are not going to hit Canal Street.

"No," I said. "No it doesn't."

He relaxed his shoulders a little bit, went a little less stiff, widened his eyes. "Thank you!" he said.

I got the impression he was emphasizing this. Thanking me, to set me apart from all the others. I was at once pleased with myself and annoyed with everyone else who had ignored him. Would they rather simply be annoyed with him for holding the doors than to give him a hand and help ourselves in the process. His tone made me feel like I had just shown him the greatest kindness. It was kind of embarrassing. I had done nothing — apart from take 12 seconds to notice the people around me. Now, if I'd told him to transfer there for the A, C or E train, that would have been something

He stepped aside, the doors closed, separating him further from us, and the train lurched into motion.

Busted

On the F train home from work today, I noticed a woman sitting not far from me across the aisle. She was accompanied by two men about her age. There wasn't enough room in the car for them to sit together, so all three of them were on separate pieces of seating.

I was trying to get a good look at the woman's teeth, surreptitiously, as one does on the subway, distracted by the jagged and unaligned row in her lower jaw and the horse-like protrusion of the upper row. She was talking and making faces in conversation very freely, unashamed — and why shouldn't she be? Still, I did have the word "snaggletooth" on my mind. Not a personal judgment, right? Just an observation. Just feeling lucky — or, rather, just being aware of her misfortune.

One of her friends, who was sitting nearer to me on my side of the car, gestured toward her, and she extended her foot toward him. He tied her shoe, and she lowered her foot again.

The old man directly across from me turned his head away from them. He had been watching them interact, smiling at the guy tying her shoe. I looked back at the two, and saw how they were looking at each other, how they spoke. Of course! They were a couple. The old man was on to it. And I was noticing the wrong thing completely all along. There was much more to say about the shoe-tying than about her crooked teeth.