Subway
Series
Lesson
One: The Meaning of Charity
Having
attended Catholic schools for thirteen years, I was taught repeatedly the
importance of faith, hope, and charity, charity being the
greatest virtue of all. I lost my
faith at about age 14. Hope
consisted of wishing for material things and cute boyfriends. But I did believe in charity
whole-heartedly. An incident that
happened while in my senior year of high school, changed my
understanding of the term and revealing it to be facile and shallow. In 1968,
my senior year in high school, I was returning home to Brooklyn from a part
time job in Manhattan While standing
on the subway platform one evening, I noticed a long-haired blond guy, filthy
and homeless, rummaging through the garbage and eating things he had picked out
of the trash. I pitied him. Here was a chance for me to practice
what I had been taught and what I considered an essential part of my moral
code.
After
considering his situation and checking my cash situation, I decided to buy the
blond a hot dog and an orange soda from the Nedick’s on the platform. Not wanting to embarrass him by handing
him the meal, I put it down on the unoccupied bench, and began to walk past
him. As I did so, I said, pointing
to the food and drink, “Those are for you.”
“What?”
he shouted. “Who the fuck told you
to do anything? I didn’t ask you
for shit. Who the fuck do you
think you are?
He
then proceeded to take the hot dog and soda and, cursing, flung them across the
tracks so they splattered and slid down the filthy tiled wall at 42 Street.
“Fuck
you. Who needs your charity? Fucking asshole,” he said.
Mortified,
shocked, and crying, I walked up the stairs to get away from him fearing his
violence would get physical. I returned to the platform down another stairway
where he couldn’t see me. When the
train pulled in I got on it and went home.
I
will never forget this incident because it taught me about charity. Even though I had tried to avoid
looking like a do-gooder and had kept my gift secret from anyone else, not
desiring admiration from on-lookers, the blond homeless man didn’t want
charity. Maybe he didn’t want to
feel minimized, emasculated, or pitied.
Perhaps he was just crazy. I got a powerful lesson in the delicate and
complicated quality of charity and in the nature of humans. But I have been
told that charity rewards the giver, even if the gift given turns into an
orange and mustard-colored mess dripping down a subway wall. I still am proud
of having tried to help a hungry person.
But the wisdom I got from this incident was best stated by Mark Twain in
Pudd’nhead Wilson: “If you pick up a starving dog and make
him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between
a dog and a man.”
Subway
Series
Lesson
Two: Death Commute
It
was 1976, during rush hour and I was on the subway going to graduate night
classes at Brooklyn College. The
#4 train was crowded, but not stifling so. I heard someone yelling, “Ouch!” and “Stop!” and “Hey, why
are you stomping on my foot?” I
looked down the train and saw a young white man, the only other white in the
car besides me. He was trying to
hold onto the pole in the middle of the jostling car. As he strained to maintain his grip a large African-American
teenage girl was hitting his hands with what looked like an umbrella. She was laughing and taunting him by
saying, “You a punk. What’s the
matter? You afraid? That
hurt? Ha ha! Look at this cracker jump! Look at the white boy shit his pants.”
From the other end I could see him flinch as the girl stepped on his feet, one
at a time, or stabbed at them with her umbrella, His face was flustered--red and panicky. No one but me even looked at the
scene. When the train doors opened
he flew out.
The
doors closed and I was frightened, chastising myself for not dashing out of the
train when I had the chance. I
knew she was going to come after me, and she did. From the corner of my eye I saw, almost in slow motion, her
head turn, her eyes scanning the car for someone else to hound. Her gaze was robotic as were her
movements. I thought I could hear the clicking of her neck as she turned to
pinpoint her next victim. I know
that laser beams did not, in reality, shoot out of her eyes, but she homed in
on me and I froze in place. When
she made eye contact with me, she smiled--a demented leer, and raising her
umbrella, screamed out, “I’ll get you now, you fuckin’ white bitch. I’ll fuckin’ kill you,
motherfucker.” She pursed her lips
together and shook her head, determined to do what to her was necessary. I could not stop staring at her as she
progressed through the train, scaring people out of her way, her umbrella
raised like a spear, cursing about “killing that white bitch.” Even though not one person on the train
looked up, avoiding eye contact with the madwoman, there was a sense of danger,
of insanity. I could feel the
tension in the car. She finally
came face to face with me. I considered fighting her, shoving my book bag into
her or raising it to protect myself, but my arms were limp with terror and my
body was petrified. I noticed that
the umbrella was not an umbrella at all, but was a walking stick about three
feet long, with black carvings, its metal end sharpened to a spike. She had the stick poised and aimed
exactly at my forehead. I stared at the point and immobilized, pictured what
the wound would look like in my head—a clean, round hole gushing blood. She pulled her arm back to propel the
stick with force when four men jumped up simultaneously, forming a wall of
defense between me and my attacker.
One man said to her, “You gotta calm down, Sister. Go sit down. This lady here didn’t do anything to you. Now go sit down. Relax.” She looked deflated and confused, yet still coming at me, so
intent was she on her goal. The
men had to use considerable force to keep her from me. The train was pulling into a station
and I felt hands on my shoulders turn me and gently push me out the doors onto
the station. “Go ahead,” I heard
someone say. “Best you get off
here.”
I stood on the platform as the train
with my would-be killer pulled out.
I stood, surrounded by people,
but unable to move, to speak, to do anything. Colors swirled around me that came from people’s coats and
bags and hats as they entered and exited subway cars or walked past me on their
way in or out of the station. It
was several minutes before I could walk again. I, legs shaking and unable to
speak, got on the next #4 and went to class as planned. As harrowing as my encounter was with
that girl, I was grateful to the men who came to my defense and saved my
life: gallant knights who stopped
a monster in her tracks.
Subway
Series:
Lesson
Three: If You See Something, Say
Something
While reading the NY Times today, I came across an article, “A Brooklyn Mystery Solved: Vandals Did It, in 1959” By James Barron about a missing statue, “Angel of Music” that had once stood in Green-Wood cemetery. Richard J. Moylan, Green-Wood’s president recently found out that the statue, which he thought had been destroyed by a tree falling on it, was actually damaged by vandals in 1959. The interesting thing to me was Mr. Moylan’s response: “Vandalism, that shocked me. I guess I thought that was a different time and people were better then. If I had heard it happened in the “70s, that I could have understood. New York City was really in the dumps. But the ‘50s?” I have to agree. The ’70s were dangerous years: Son of Sam, the Blackout, car and house robberies, muggings, killings, graffiti, unemployment, flight to the suburbs.
Around
1975 or 1976 a French teacher from Brooklyn College was murdered on the #4 train
on her way home from teaching. She
was set upon by two men who knifed her so many times that she bled to death
there in the subway car. I don’t
remember if they raped her first.
I remember that people left
the car once the men began attacking the teacher and people on the platforms
saw what was going on and avoided that car, getting on another one instead. Not
wanting to get involved in a crime in progress, the “Kitty Genovese Syndrome,”
seemed to be more prevalent in the ‘70s then it is today, especially since we
all have cell phones and, even if we don’t want to risk getting involved in a
murderous situation, can at least notify the police.
But
the detail I remember clearly from that incident was that the police said that
when they found the French instructor’s body, they had to literally pour blood
out of her boots in order to transport her body on the stretcher. It was a shocking crime and perhaps
emblematic of the bad old days of New York City when crime was rampant because
the city was on the verge of bankruptcy and the mayor, Abe Beame, instituted
major cuts in the city’s budget, reducing municipal payroll by 65,000, police
included.
Two
nights after the murder, I was on the same subway line again going to graduate
classes at Brooklyn College. As I
had done throughout high school, college, and then graduate school, I studied
on the subway--a procrastinator’s last minute attempt to squeeze a week’s worth
of work into forty-five minutes. I
was intently reading something that was due for class that night and was
unaware of my surroundings, especially that the subway car was empty except for
me. Without warning, a shadow blocked my light and, at first, I didn’t have the
courage to look all the way up. I
was petrified. There, right in
front of me, holding onto the passenger strap, was a six-foot-four black man,
in black jeans, a casual brown winter jacket, gloves, and a woolen cap on his
head, covering his ears and most of his forehead. His crotch was on the level of my eyes and his legs swayed with
the motion of the train. He stood
so close to me that his pants occasionally brushed my own. Would the coroner be pouring my blood
out of boots later that night?
I
kept my eyes on my book, although I couldn’t read a word. My body and mind went into survival
mode, and came up short. There was
no way that I could escape from this man.
After about five minutes, he said in a low tone,
“You’re all alone with me on this train. Do you know that?”
I nodded without looking up.
“You’re a college girl?” he asked.
I again bobbed my head up and
down.
“You read the newspapers, College
Girl?” he said.
I said I did.
“Then you know that two night ago,
on this very train here, a professor was killed? On this very train you’re on all alone?”
“Yes, it was terrible,” I said.
“How would you like to wind up like
she did?”
“No,” my voice managed to say. “No. It was
horrible. I feel sorry for her.”
“Then get the hell up and go into a
car with other passengers in it.
Preferably one with a conductor,” he growled. “For a college girl you sure are stupid.”
I looked up and from under his coat
he took out a police badge. I
could have wept with relief and gratitude that he took the time to teach me
self-protection and awareness. but more importantly that he wasn’t going to
kill me. I was embarrassed and
tearful. When the train stopped he
escorted me into another car and he went to sit at the far end. A few minutes later, he got up and went
into another car, leaving me rebuked and humbled, but wiser.
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