Everyone Down There
The first piece I needed to write, it should’ve been brilliant. Instead I kept coming back to the U-Bahn.
It’s not somewhere you’d tell someone to go. You never say I’m hitting the subway this weekend, it’s incredible.
You definitely don’t have those moments where someone looks you in the eye and the whole world opens. It doesn’t smell good—and by good, I mean I don’t think it’s ever smelled good. It’s just a place where everything shows up.
Millions of tracks, cars, people. And always the same voice: Stand back from the doors.
We miss them anyway half the time.
The panhandlers are the thing. The guy with the dog, the one with the sign, the one rattling off his pitch. What do you do? Smile? Give him money? Give everyone? Look away and act deaf? They want cash, sure. But some of them also want you to see them, to react to what they just said. Or maybe they don’t want that at all, because repeating the same line in a voice that sounds like it’s been used up—that’s maybe when you especially don’t want eye contact. I’ve never found the right response. Money makes people smile, but I can’t pay everyone. I don’t have enough for myself anyway. And yeah, some people have it worse. One eye, one leg, holding onto a dog because it’s keeping them up. That’s genuinely shitty. But then something flips in you. Your fingers start itching. That thing where you look at something small and pitiful and you just lock up. That’s what the U-Bahn does to me.
One afternoon the car was barely full. Just some guys playing Beatles covers, doing their whole cheerful thing. Then a man gets on from one side, a woman from the other, both heading toward the middle, toward us. Felt like a scene. All these separate faces from separate trips, suddenly in one place. The ticket inspectors came through but got stuck back with the musicians—had to get them to stop playing before they’d show their tickets. So they completely missed the guy standing right in front of me.
He has no idea he’s about to get caught. He just lifts his coat and there it is—something small and scared of the cold—and tucks it back when we hit the next stop. Where his pants were, I’ll never know. They were still somehow on him. I was so thrown that all I could think was: I pulled out my ticket for nothing. The inspectors never made it to me. So what was I even paying for?
I still think about it. I want to know what would’ve happened if they’d reached him. Would he have had a ticket? Is getting caught the whole thing? Next time I’ll ask.
That’s my U-Bahn story for now. Waiting for someone to tell me what your face is supposed to do in these situations. What you’re supposed to look like when the train shows you everything.