At 5AM, under the world of shopping malls and other edifices of commercialism and materialism of Herald Square, I was sharing a bench with a couple of German-speaking women. I was trying to figure out what they were saying. In front of me was a jaded black man in layers of dirty clothes, pacing in front of us on the yellow section of the platform, indicating the risk of falling into the rat-infested tracks.
Yes, there are rats, and I actually chased one down from the platform when got into this section of the intestines of New York. It was strangely quiet. I didn't expect that at 5AM it would be so eerily quiet in the city that doesn't sleep. Funny how stereotypes are hypes, too.
Soon enough shouting started. I wanted to mind my own business, but the eeriness of the place, the disturbing shouting, brought a slight surprise to me. I thought New York had changed. It was still one of the safest cities in the country, certainly more than the little one where I am still living in. And yet, I found myself feeling a little like when I was using the cities belly to go between school and home twenty years ago. That dreadful sense of uncertainty, fear, and frustration. I always would remember seeing a man shooting himself up with heroine one early morning when I had to take the train to school, a journey of 90 minutes each way.
I had never dared to be in the city's belly past midnight back then, and now, I did it quite often, having often, as it was the case last night, finished with a milonga. For all the years I have visited the city of my heart since returning from Europe, since the city cleaned up itself at the cost of many poor people's happiness, I have always felt safe. But tonight something was gone awry.
The voice that was screaming mostly in Spanish, and nearly all curse words in Spanish and a little English, materialized into a man in a blue sweatshirt. I didn't dare to look at his face. I remembered, sitting there in that bench one space away from the two German speakers, story of how someone, back when I was a high schooler, was shot to death because he was staring at someone in the subway. It didn't matter, never did matter, what the truth of the story was, the details; what mattered was the fear in a teenager in one of, back then, the meanest cities in the hardly the safest country in the world.
So I didn't look at his face; I had no doubt he was angry. After he passed in front of us, between the bench people and the black man pacing back and forth, the two women started giggling. Being cosmopolitan Europeans, they probably understood enough Spanish to find the delirium of this man laughable. They laughed, giggled, until the shouting returned within viewing distance. I didn't think it was funny. I was scared. But I also felt sorry for him. I always felt sorry for people who had to shout in public, especially repeatedly. I think they have a lot bottled up, and I think that a lot of people have their stuff bottled up not by their own desire, but that is how society requires of you. I mean, if you are in an inferior position in society, you are expected to shut up before those higher up.
Soon we realized the angry man was looking for someone. He went upstairs and we thought it was the end of that. But then the cursing reappeared at the other end of the platform, closer to me. He found his targets. He made no sentences; he was just spewing out words of extreme hate, simple words, nothing racist, just angry words. No explanation as to why he was angry. A young black man was playing hide and seek with him. He was just commenting, almost joyfully, at how crazy the Spanish speaker was. Then the young man came over to me. I didn't see any of this directly. Only from the corner of my left eye. I felt the young man's presence next to me. Apparently the shouting man was shouting at someone else behind the stairs. Then he reappeared alone, approaching the the young man leaning next to me.
The confrontation started in front of me. The shouting man still said nothing more, just bellowing out "Puto!" repeatedly. I didn't dare looking at his face directly. In my mind, however, I have this face of extreme anger. I think he was drunk. When he disappeared up the stairs a few minutes earlier, he tripped on the stairs. The Geman girls giggled one more time. They weren't giggling now. The bench was the scene of a showdown. When the man started throwing his arms up, touching the young man, the latter lost his playfulness and told him not to touch him. That was when I finally got up.
Why didn't I get up earlier?
By the time I had gotten up and ready to evacuate the bench, I saw the other man, also black, same age as the one being accosted, walking very fast toward the man in blue. And before I knew it, this second man shouted something at him, which I have forgotten because what happened next blurred everything out.
No, there's no drama of gunfire or anything.
The black man raised his fist. I didn't believe what I was seeing, and I didn't think of it much after it happened. I have never seen a man strike another with his bare hand. I have seen people hit children; I have even seen grown man whip another with a belt. For me, there's something different when you harm another adult with your bare hand. What really would motivate you to do that. I understand how it works with adults hitting children; I was such a child; the power imbalance makes it easier. But for one man to hit another on the temple. The sound was wimpy, the sound of knuckles on the head. Nothing dramatic. The N-train, which was not the train I intended to take, and probably not the train some of the people on the platform intended to take, arrived. And we all got in there, including the two black men who joined us without shouting, without hurrying. I didn't dare to look at their faces to know how they felt.
Along with the wimpy sound of knuckle on skull was the sound of coins falling. The struck man fell on his knees, and his change came rolling out.
I saw him after sitting down. The car I got into had a homeless man, who made the entire car his domain with his unbathed body. I was going to go to the next car, and a man sitting next to the door said, "There is another one in there."
"Another one." That's what the homeless are called. Another one. As much as I hate the reeking they leave in the subway, a reminder all too strong in my baggage of memories of high school, I felt sorry for how some of us, many of us, have been so dehumanized. I decided to sit at a seat far from the reeking homeless. I looked out and I saw the man in blue cleaning his head.
I realized he was bleeding. I knew that before I entered the train, but I was too scared and had to evacuate the platform along with others. I didn't have time to feel sorry for him, especially since I had to feel sorry for the homeless master of the car. A part of me wanted to call the police or paramedics. I remember one time, in the MetroNorth, a man felt sick and went out of the train, leaned over the rails and probably vomited. A bunch of passengers called out, though not very loudly, to the conductor who had passed them by to collect tickets, that there was a sick man on the platform, and someone needed to be notified. I thought that was weird. Why didn't people mind their own business. And equally weird I thought, why I was being so cold.
And now, again, weird, why I wanted to call for help. No one else did. This was New York. Not Connecticut where wealthy white folks took care of one another, and even took care of others. I saw the man, who was now a different person. Not only was he no longer shouting, his face was calm. I thought he would either be more furious, or crying (which was what I would have done; not really; when I got struck in New York once, I was just stunned). He was calm. He sat on the platform, now all alone, probably being watched by people on the other platform, the uptown platform, separated from the drama by two electrified rails. He was sitting there with white towels stained with his own blood, wiping his forehead with streams of redness. I had the same red streaks once, going down the back of my head when a peasant boy struck me in the back with a rock. I saw this man, older than man by a bit, sitting there, no longer intoxicated by the abuses of life, at least for a short moment, so calm. I felt sorry for him. He didn't deserve this.
But he perhaps did, if you judge him with the laws of the belly of the city that really doesn't sleep.
I quickly forgot about him. I was more on guard now. I thought about the five-minute walk from the exit stop to my parents' house. The old demons of a different New York was a wake for a bit.
Before I let my mind rest while three half-wit young, white New Yorkers blabbered about some of the most insignificant threads of their drinking and dating lives, I thought about my own invisibility. That first black young man leaned next to me without acknowledging me, without threatening me or excusing himself for being in my space. I was invisible. The invisible Asian. That is our survivalist skill. To remain invisible, and sometimes passive observers of all the racial iniquities that remain, it seems, a visible part of this New York claiming to have been reborn. And I didn't leave my seat until danger was becoming clear and present. By the time I got up the bench had already been empty; the German speakers had previously evacuated the comfort of the wooden bench. I took my time to leave, because leaving would allow "them" to see me, to betray my invisibility.
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