subway race and what down and out smells like

It is de rigueur and more than a little cliché to move to NY and write about the subway. But, I’m going to. I hope to avoid hackneyed subway commentary by focusing on some hilarious details of train riding as well as the larger contributions that the ol’ underground iron horse makes to the city that never sleeps. I have decided that a lot of the ways that New Yorkers are, and that consequently New York is, are determined by the subway and the socio-political atmosphere thereof. Let us examine. New York is racist. Applying my subway theory logic, we can look critically at said racism and at least begin to understand it if not fully adopt it for ourselves, which is tempting but to be avoided; best not to become a bigot if you have the chance. I tend to think about Racism and prejudice a lot, as anyone who has been keeping up with the under currents of this blog knows, and now that I’m daily immersed in what appears to be a fossil environment of racism on the Upper East Side, its really on my mind. For the last week I’ve been helping Judah do some receptionist hiring, writing want ads, screening resumes, doing initial interviews etc. All part of my greater plan to make the assistants hate me! Remember? I’m still on it! We sit together, he and I, in the hot cramped, miserably disorganized Israeli definition of an office downstairs and look over the resumes people sent to us from our Craigslist ad. If he thinks that the person might be black, for instance they went to a certain school or live in an undesirable borough, he tells me to erase the email. I told him I think that is disgusting, makes me feel sick and btw is totally illegal. He said he would agree (yeah right!) but Chaim doesn’t like to hire them, thinks they wont be able to know how to deal with their bougie UES clientele. I can’t really argue with him, maybe they wouldn’t, but maybe they would! Who knows? I know when people of color are good at something they’re usually better at that thing than anyone else is. But I wouldn’t want to hire a black person in this salon for their sake; I would never want them to have to experience the kind of racist comments that occur in the salon, the underlying feeling that they’re not right for the job or the weird nanny tension of three or four West Indian ladies sitting waiting for their little blonde charges to finish having their hair done. That’s another thing I really didn’t understand when I came here. I would be assisting, and I would see a woman (it didn’t really occur to me yet that she was black and therefore might as well not have hair) sitting on the bench where clients wait for shampoos or for stylists to be free. So I would see them and think, I wonder who they’re here to see??! Should I get them shampooed? So I would ask, and they would invariably look and me like I was totally out of my mind. I’d say “Well, can I get you some tea or a (poorly foamed) cappuccino?’ Only to be met with refusal accompanied by the same look of total amazement. Then I would see them leaving with a little kid who had just gotten a haircut, and who either had a white dad with seriously powerful genes or had been adopted from a Russian orphanage. It took me a while of turning my head to see into baby carriages on the Upper East Side to realize that all these West Indian women were nannies for the wealthy Jewish women who felt now was the socially appropriate time to have children, but can’t fit parenting into their busy social schedule. Just the other day I was shampooing an older Jewish guy. We were making shampoo chit-chat, I had done his wife’s color last week so he felt like we knew each other, bless his heart. So he says “I’m doing good, my daughter has a second date with this guy this weekend and he’s great!’ Me (guileless;) “oh yeah? What’s great about him” him; “well, he’s white and he’s Jewish! What more can I ask for?” Me (in my head;) “ A god-damn lot! Howard Stern is white and Jewish and I bet you wouldn’t want your daughter dating him…” Me (in real life;) “Oh yeah? That’s awesome.” Him (confident he’d found a friend;) “Yeah I’m just so glad she stopped dating the wrong kind of guy, that this guy seems perfect.” Me (knowing and dreading the answer but powerless to stop myself from asking;) “What defines the “wrong” kind of guy?” Him (totally unashamed to say it) “Blacks.” Me; “Wow!” Him (backpedaling hopelessly;) “I like them (!), I have all kinds of friends (all kinds of wealthy Jewish friends,) but as far as dating goes, aside from being a male and a female I don’t see how you could have anything in common.” Me (wondering about if I could crush his skull with my bare hands during his conditioner massage, and silently retracting everything I’ve ever said about how interracial relationships are too hard to be worth it and pointless to attempt;) “Actually I think black people and Jews have more in common culturally than Jews and Goyim. Can I get you a cappuccino?” So. On the other side of the coin, lots of people still hate Jews, and they feel ok talking about it since for the most part we aren’t exactly economically marginalized. As per my earlier theory about racism and subterranean commuter society, lets look at the train! Train-taking Jews (which until that hyphen could have been confused with a Jew Taking Train, which is a whole other topic) either travel in groups, arguing loudly in a language that to the non-Semite sounds like an oncoming bout of asthma, a dog eating chicken bones. Discussion could be about Midrash, your husband’s best friend’s unmarried daughter or the exorbitant price of kosher meat, all bear the same level of intensity. Or they’re alone, rocking and reading from a small book that I always assume to be Torah or Mishnah or something but could just as easily be a Hebrew romance novel, or the screenplay of Mrs Doubtfire in a fancy binding. On top of this unique behavior, they don’t look well at ALL. Their intense scholastic tradition seems to have come at a price: the complete neglect of the body. Almost all Chasids on the train are considerably overweight, a fact which is exacerbated by the amazingly unstylish and ill-fitting clothing that the holy one, blessed be he, commands his chosen people wear in public. A word to the wise, whether devout or secular: if you’re shaped like humpty dumpty, avoid loose high-waisted pants and suspenders. I won’t even mention the wigs and “nude” hose. Their eyesight is uniformly poor in all cases, at all ages. As if the vision of their children is destroyed prenatally by parents reading 8-point Hebrew text 12 hours a day. The pasty Ashkenazaic skin tone belies a lifestyle long on slow-cooked food and fluorescent lighting and short on fresh air, leafy greens and exercise. It makes perfect sense that a large group of people that insists on sticking to socially unrecognizable customs and keeping completely to themselves would end up being generally disliked. Plus, if you block the subway isles with strollers full of bawling, under-disciplined red-haired kids enough times, and pretend you don’t notice that no one can get by cause you’re so busy rocking back and forth filled with the holy spirit, people are gonna start to hate you, even if Madonna thinks you’re the coolest. It’s just human nature. Speaking of people thinking Jews are cool, I had the unique (to me) experience of being cornered at a party by two hipster converts to Judaism, (actually one guy hadn’t yet converted but was so enamored with Jewishness that he felt it was just a matter of time) as they told me how lucky I was to really be Jewish, even though I told them I wasn’t really religious. It was like they thought my blood was cool! “Like, both your parents are Jewish? Cool! You probably think we’re so weird!” And I did! They had both grown up catholic; the woman a beautiful Filipina girlfriend of one of the stylists at my job and her friend, a handsome gay man who came to NY from LA to be a musician. I have heard people talk like that about many different things, being black, being a dancer, being a Sufi, you know cool stuff () but never EVER being Jewish. It was bizarre, I know being funny is cool, being smart is cool, being wealthy is cool, there are things that Jews generally are that people think are pretty enviable but I have never heard of people wishing they were Jewish. You can have it! Take my anxiety, please! And my mom’s too while you’re at it! You woulda thought the coolness would wear off living on the Upper East Bank. No examination of racism would be complete without checking my own prejudices and the cultures that push the buttons of my lower nature. As I have acknowledged before, My personality doesn’t seem to mesh well with the cultural habits of east and southeast Asia, work I have to do admittedly, but again the train’s close quarters exacerbate even the slightest distaste into a full blown dislike. On Sundays, the F train from Church, and probably before, to Jay Street/Borough hall is completely packed with Chinese people. Where the hell are they going, I’d like to know?!?! China? Did I accidentally get on the Beijing bound F? “This is a Great Wall bound F train, next stop Li-Zhen province, standclearatheclosingdoors.” What all-Chinese event is happening in Downtown Brooklyn at the crack of dawn on Sunday mornings? I have to be at work at nine thirty so, to make sure I’ll be on time, I’m on the train by 8: 15. Weekend trains are as dependable as the starting time on a Pakistani wedding invitation. Now, its nothing personal against the Chinese, but I wouldn’t care who you were; at eight fifteen on a Sunday morning if you’re speaking a language at a high volume (and I think the intelligibility of Chinese depends upon being spoken at a high volume) that sounds like different sizes of whirring drill bits intermittently hitting an aluminum frying pan, I’m going to feel resentful and probably wish you would disappear. There are other reasons for what I have perceived to be a pretty pandemic (no pun intended) anti-Asian sentiment here in New York City. Most prominent is this; despite the approach of Christmas, thanks to a totally morally reprehensible and opportunistic media, most of us dependants on large-scale public transit have our heads filled, not with visions of dancing sugar plums but rather of what our demise would look like after contracting the dreaded Bird Flu. Every day you hear or see headlines in the bullshit tabloids that pass for newspapers over here, that with the high rates of travel from outlying areas of Asia, the Avian flu could spread from the three dead geese on the shores of lake Zhi-Shui (that despite the widespread panic seem to be the only known Avian Flu fatalities) to a global epidemic of unforeseeable proportion. I don’t care how non-mediated you are or how much you don’t fall for these yearly pandemia scares, ‘cause no one could be more out of it newswise or in more plague possiblity denial than I am. The fact is that Chinese people seem to have, per capita, more racking coughs, more uncontrollable viruses and less propensity to cover their mouths (They really don’t do it! Its wild! Just coughing away with no conciousness of the reality of airborne viruses. Maybe the covering of the mouth is just a false sense of security perhaps but when someone is hacking their last, squished directly next to you, it seems like the least they could do) makes even me wish that there was some other, non Chinesey way to get where I’m going. THE UGLY TRUTH!! Added to which I have the memory of my Fung Wah bus trip back from Boston where some young bleached out yellow blonde Chinese ASSHOLE guy was playing Chinese pop music (which is CRAP! Absolute CRAP. Sounds like a team of drum machines and local Karaoke veterans won a week in a recording studio to record 80’s tech-pop b-sides in mandarin,) on one of those hand-held tape players at top tinny volume. It was killing me! Despite the extremely irritated looks exchanged between my African American neighbors to the front back and sides, no one said anything to him! I couldn’t believe it, I was about to turn around and curse him out from six rows ahead but his batteries ran out. Asshole. That kinda set me off on this whole noticing the Chinese lack of regard for public space thing. I remember my aunt’s girlfriend once told me after a trip to China that she could understand why there was such a difference in the Chinese and the American conceptions of good driving (she’s very diplomatic, used to be a nun, probably doesn’t want to give up her hard earned place on the right side of the pearly gates.) She said that China is so crowded and there is so little room for each person that they don’t have anywhere near as large boundary zone for personal space, nor do they see things as moving in straight lines, which explains the difficulty in lane changing and left turning. That’s fine, just cover your mouth when you’re in the final stages of succumbing to the Avian flu on the train. By the way, I was talking about all this unpleasant racist shit on the phone with my sister, trying to decide if it was too nasty to air to the rather liberal and PC readership, which it may well be, and my mom whispered that if we are going to talk about this sort of thing, than we have to use the land line, and not the portable phone. I think that both answers the offensiveness question and some others yet to be asked on the topic of paranoia. Please refer back to the “the Neighbors” episode. What’s the fear here? That The Chinese Anti-Defamation League may have tapped our phones and is, as we speak, recording the conversation and planning our convictions and well-deserved bamboo/water torture sentence? That they’re going to impose a vengeful trade embargo and we’ll be responsible for a wordwide shortage of rice, backscratchers, shotglasses and undershirts? What it must feel like to be that worried about what people will think. It can’t be good. Homeless people. On the train you really find out what down and out smells like. In Seattle you walk, or even drive, by people sleeping on the street and feel a twinge of sadness or guilt. Maybe you give them your leftovers and you keep it pushin’. Never do you have to walk into a 6’ x 25’ box and have to scan the place for the source of the stench. I had NO idea at all what so many people who don’t have a place to clean themselves, and have conditions that may or may not interfere with the body’s ability to heal, smell like. I am not making a joke here, I really didn’t know. It is AWFUL. It’s gangrenous. If you walk into a crowded train car and there appear to be a bunch of unoccupied seats in one area of the car, don’t even bother walking over there. More than likely someone is stretched out over three seats and all the adjacent seats smell far too rancid to occupy. People totally ignore the person, and the smell and just move to the other side. It’s very strange. Last night I sat down and noticed there was a guy asleep across one of the three-seat panels who had puked several times over the barrier and against the door. A really weird looking African American man who, in a perfect world where health care was accessible to all might have been better able to regulate his thyroid production, got on and started reading hustler in the seat across from the puker. I was surprised he sat there, considering. He got up to get off the train and stood right in the bile and didn’t even notice when his heel slipped leaving the car. So alarming and so, so gross. Once I was across from a homeless man taking up five seats, sleeping on a standing room only train. He was passed out, snoring, and mumbling and totally impervious to all the dirty looks and angry energy he was getting for taking up so much room. Suddenly, after being asleep for at least 45 loud and crowded minutes, the conductor says this is York street, or whatever, and the guy wakes up, like he has somewhere to be, says “Oh shit!’ gathers up all his bags and blankets and dashes off the train. Bizarre. The first few weeks I was here I was totally amazed by the sleeping on the train. People must be SO tired to fall out as fast as they do. Little did I know; that’s two hours of rest I could be getting every day! A few weeks ago, I was dozing off on my way home when I was awoken by a group of mosquitoes with tiny guitars and shakers sitting on my shoulder and singing mariachi songs. At least that’s what I thought it was, actually this Mexican guy, who had sat down next to me and was listening to Mariachi music on his headphones so loudly that it woke me up, yet he was sound asleep and drooling. In a large part, New Yorkers’ lack of compassion for anyone but the wealthy comes from having to deal, in a very up close and personal way with everybody’s nasty personal habits and problems. The moneyed elite are an exception since they are so monetarily blessed that they can keep their smells, arguments, coughs and prayers to themselves. It’s on the hush, just between them and their driver, and possibly their nanny. I also choose my books more carefully when I know I’m going to be reading on the train. Everyone else, who is also trying to avoid staring shamelessly at the people around them, invariably checks out what you’re reading. So you don’t want to be seen reading anything really corny. Plus, especially at night, you want to project a hard image. You want that “don’t even think about talking to me, much less mugging me when I step off the train into the deserted station even though there isn’t anything I can do about it if you do” kind of look. I wouldn’t have thought about the effect your reading choice could have on this until I was reading this bell hooks book called All About Love, which has a large sub title that reads “ A warm affirmation that love is possible.” So there I am on the F at 1 am, trying my Seattle, car-having best to look hard, while at the same time broadcasting my secret fear that love may not be possible and that I want to read an expert’s assurance that it is. That does not work. Affirmations about love: not hard. In an effort to appear cool, literary but not too obtuse, I started reading Still Life with Woodpecker, a Tom Robbins novel. What dreck! I can’t believe how popular his writing is! It was all about a princess of some imaginary eastern European country, exiled to Seattle (of all places) and some outlaw (the cooler word for criminal) who wants to blow up a sustainable development conference in Hawaii but ends up getting drunk and dynamiting a meeting of the UFO Believers of America. It was inane and after 50 pages I purposely left it on the seat when I got to my stop. Hanif Kureshi (Buddha of Suburbia and Gabriel’s Gift) makes for a good subway read, not so complex that you can’t pick up where you left off and compelling enough that it makes the time go by quickly. Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenedies was fantastic, subway or not. Jonathan Frantzen’s novel The Corrections is amazing. I think it might actually be perfect. Just the right balance of depressing minutia, and sweeping universality. Great characters, great plots. A real, grim picture of the American Caucasian psyche; born in the 50’s, surviving today in the Midwest. Get it on tape if you must, you can listen to it while you wait to get through Husky traffic on Montlake! Of course now that its winter, reading is out and knitting is in, sweetie. Everyone who is anyone is knitting on the train. It’s like a seasonal virus that every woman within a 50 mile radius of Williamsburg all contracted at the same time. I’m sure book sales are plummeting. Barnes and Noble yarn section?