The subway’s steely arms shove an unwelcome smelly embrace at outsiders. But New Yorkers inhale train rides for the somnambulant buzz of diving tunnels. Necessary fumes for the day’s duties. On the rides uptown to Collegiate high school, I either dozed, wrote assignments hastily on a bent paper, or looked emptily for signs of human life. A former co-worker of mine once said he thought oxygen was released in the cars to lull us to sleep on our daily trips. Could be. But I have more reasons to be subdued than a concentrated chemical dose.
Manhattan is the center of the world, some say. For me, and the other people raised in the outer boroughs, Manhattan is the money vessel. People buy and sell objects at incredible rates, and if you’re lucky, you can be in on the trade. Sure there are thriving industries in the other parts of the city, and upstate, and in New Jersey, but Manhattan’s got those billions of fresh paper duckets, and none too many touch human fingerprints.
The train provides a magnetized driver for our affairs, shuttling people into the money pit, spitting them back home after a while. To call it an iron horse is a misnomer. If anything, the train is a slippery worm or an underground snake compressed into the area of its tunnel. The rides I take now differ significantly from those early journeys to prep school. I learned from the morning ritual of stamping up from my basement room, entering the bathroom with a puffy and regretful scowl, zipping up my shiny down coat, and looking out to see if the bus was coming at 6:15, that diligence without purpose is just habit. My habit was going to school, and I despised it. I had no idea when I formed the habit, but I knew it wasn’t my imagining. Even on the best days, with the most enlightening lessons inherited from those stodgy halls, I could only discern some alien routine being impressed on me: the inevitable click of fastening to work. It started on the train, where the commute lightened complexions as I went toward Manhattan and darkened as I went away from it.
Manhattan keep on makin’ it.
Brooklyn keep on takin’ it.
On the 17 bus ride, Canarsie turned into East New York through split homes and half suburbs. That was the kind of improvised community contained in those neighborhoods, mostly immigrants stuffing into sizable but affordable digs. Two-story houses were sliced in half to fit twice the people, dividing comforts and budgets for at least a glance at the Dream. Hearing the neighbors’ indiscreet fights, I padded reality with surrounding music like Biggie Smalls or Jay-Z. I slipped out the door expecting to run for the bus, transfer to the snake at Yard Avenue and pop up on Swanky Street. Not a bad price for my education, I thought, because a few hours of commuting outside of my bodily space, my mental sanctity, could prepare me for the world’s shiniest bullshit. But it had the opposite effect. Often I narrowed in on the nobility of the countless black women I saw in nurse’s scrubs dragging their feet on the way home to a mortgage from a care facility. Or I’d see workers with paint matted jeans drooping their eyes and holding their belt straps. And we’d all be headed in the same direction to the illusive city. What was so marvelous about this city that it brought everyone’s reserved labor to the surface? That even with fatigue rising from beneath our collars, sleep hanging on our brows, we flocked to it? Besides the ability to buy things at all hours, and catch a bus on every corner, I held the city’s supposed convenience up for questioning.
The economy of colonial powers has always relied on the willingness of workers to come to the center of trade. Whether the draw of commerce is real or not, the money flashes like so many faulty traffic lights. It is the perfect diversion from a rotting, grease-filled grid of streets. City dwellers find examples of vitality in the rodents creeping between subway tracks, and in their oily fur we hear our beating pace. The blood of ten million mammals is the city’s secret treasure, not the money. With that blood coursing rapidly, and our minds mesmerized by the indistinct murmur of choppy train wheels clacking over bridges, we are tossed in a bubbling cauldron of fecal gumbo. Money is the root of earthly possessiveness. When blood and money mix, I feel the alchemy of human betrayals descending on my spirit. But I cannot reject money as much as I strive to reject its pull to one way of life. The value of any place may be in its nearness to an original source. The New York Dutch colony sprung up out of the spirit of trade that already lived there before settlers arrived. As an outlet to the Atlantic Ocean, and the midway point between the Great North and the stretching coastline, Manhattan is geographically fixed where people will always plant. But if the people are only a part of some artificial groove to get that paper, the location will change permanently. New York City is my city, but no longer my home. Home is where the heart is, and New York hasn’t preserved the heart of its first incarnation. In its place is a struggling machine that emulates the human qualities we all need for survival.
I’ll take the A train to listen to the ghosts of all the workers who came through those tunnels.
