The night started after a day filled with writing deadlines and then rushing to the Bronx for work in the afterschool program. It led me back home to grab my guitar for a show at The East village and then to a train platform, waiting for the M train—the little train that often can’t, or won’t, or is broken, under repairs or delays—the train that never seems to be on time and on Saturdays takes the day off.
I was running late to Manhattan where at 9pm singer/song writer Patrick Di Primo invited me to play a few of my songs on stage with him. On the platform a half dozen people alone or in groups waited, casting anticipating glances towards the direction of tracks that promised an eventual train.
I’ve been working on only rushing to the station and building a mindset of tranquility once I arrive. Since we are all one missed train away from breaking our schedules it is natural to eagerly look down the tracks for that first glimpse of a trains light. But in a city this busy there is little point in that, trains come when the do, no amount of anticipating their arrival will lessen the wait.
The train-waiters threw similar glances to the bum on the platform who was meandering from group to group, mostly ignored, sometimes shooed and always moving on to his next target.
He walked up to me and pointed to my guitar case and pantomimed a strum. He asked me to play as song for him, but I pointed to the track and told him the train was coming any minute. He started to walk away and the returned and asked me for fifty cents. His toothless smile came very close till it was inches from me. Gently, I laughed and pushed him away. “You need to give people personal space, otherwise they won’t want to talk to you.” He nodded and backed up a step. I reached into my pocked and found about sixty cents in change and handed it to him.
“It’s going to rain tomorrow, “I told him. He had other topics on his mind, “when storms level Oklahoma, New York steps in and helps, but when storms hit New York. . . we’re all alone to help ourselves. . .” He trailed off as his eyes followed a handsome woman who passed. He sent a growling catcall in her wake.
I wondered what the world looked like from behind his eyes. I had spent that afternoon in a Bronx school program and maybe was still in teacher as I delivered a mini lecture on the topic of calling after women’s booties on subway platforms. “People don’t want to be called after like that.”
He nodded like, “yes of course, I totally get it now.”
Then we heard the M train acomin’, rolling down the track, it’s headlight triggered a sense of deep release for those waiting. The bum shook my hand, “You’re a man among men.” He told me. Sixty cents of alms for a compliment of that caliber is a steal.
With the train door still open, he called after me from the platform and pointed to himself. “Samson,” he said. I pointed to myself, “Luke.” He smiled and nodded and a train whisked me away to the Lower East Side.
After the show I found myself on the L train, headed back to Brooklyn. I was not sure I was headed the right way, so I asked a guy in a suit if this side of the tracks was Brooklyn bound. Yes, yes, he nodded with bespoken confidence. Once inside the train I realized I was going the wrong way and got out at the next stop.
The guy in the suit who had given me bad directions got out too. “Oh, man,” he said, “I am so sorry.”
“No worries,” I said, “Another train is coming.”
We introduced ourselves. He was Conner, from Florida, in New York training for the finance firm he worked for. Based on the time, past 11pm, it was safe to assume he’d enjoyed some nightlife after his training.
It would be twenty minutes until the next train. So to kill time, I took out my guitar and starting playing in the echoing acoustics of the subway: “Every city has a soundtrack / Everybody has a city/ This ones filled with old, young, poor, hipster and pretty”
This station off the L was particularly run down, with grime on the walls, rats scurrying about the rails.
An Italian couple stopped for a little bit to listen and asked me where my dish for tips was. “I’m not playing for money,” I said, “Just playing to play.”
When the train arrived Conner sat next to me and we talked. He passed me earbud from his iPhone with me, and we listened to a band his cousin played in—a song thanking heaven for jack Daniels number seven. From that recording I imagined a tavern in Florida where this song must make the barroom swoon. Then he showed me a picture of his nine-month old daughter and told me about how much he loved her and how everything changed when his and his girlfriend had her.
Instead of going home, I stopped by the Goodbye Blue Monday and ended up hanging out in the patio, meeting new people and hanging out and playing music with a group of a dozen Belgians who had known each other since grade school and took a trip every year.
As so many New York nights tend to, this one ended later than I’d planned. On my way home a taxi passed and I waved it down. A $7 cab fare seemed infinitely better than walking a drizzly mile.
The driver was Guzman, from Senegal. He asked if I had been to Africa and I told him that I’d spent the first six months of the year in Kenya. “How did you find the women there?” He asked me in standard taxi driver speak, revolving around sexual exploits, diving into whatever lewd anecdote you might be able to offer to break him out of the monotony of a Brooklyn cab driver’s night. My time in Kenya had been quite monastic, so all I could offer was a kiss in Mombasa with a woman from South Sudan. I kept out the part about her living most of her life in Norway.
“So you like African women then/” he asked, continuing to poke for sexual details.
I turned the question back on him, “What kind of women do you like?”
Based on previous conversation, his answer surprised me. “I think it does not matter. All that matters is love. If you love someone it does not matter what color or kind of woman it is, so long as you love her with everything.”
I agreed and he dropped me off at my doorstep and I unbolted the lock of my apartment and hung up another day.
I was not sure what I was writing about when I began this. If you’re still with me a thousand words later, I guess the picture I am trying to paint is how human a city as large as New York can be. Every day, if we are open, if we allow, is filled with unlikely human connections, many fleeting, with people that will likely never be seen again. But we can reach out to them, talk to them, or walk briskly on a closed train bordered only by our own life.
We walk next to people in our world, people we know and those we have not had the pleasure yet of meeting. They are behind every cash register, waiting on every table, and their lives are filled with secret dreams, aspirations, hopes, doubts, longings, losses, angers, everything loved for and lived for.
