How and Why
I lied to them. “Skylar is allowed to go visit his sister in the city. If I can’t go where my friends go, then I’m not going to school.” At 13, if a kid can’t spend the day in Manhattan unattended by his parents — then why are we even getting out of bed in the morning, anyways. Twenty years later, this “wisdom” has begun to ring like the absurd adolescent thought it is — precisely correct — in spirit, and not in practice.
Skylar and I sat at the train station, eager to find out why “visiting his sister” felt so damn important to us. It was clearly the day on which our young lives hinged — this much was obvious — though, what substantiated that clarity remained mysterious, even for years beyond that day.
If the initial train ride from Larchmont to Grand Central Station could have been less eventful, I would have had no idea how. Harlem 125th looked about as innocuous as Pelham — and Rye, for that matter. The peeling, laminated runner that extended from cabin to cabin looked like an old man’s teeth, and stunk far worse. Every passenger on the train looked busy, either intentionally or otherwise, and kept to themselves.
Once at Grand Central, the magnitude of the labyrinthine intricacies of the subway station occurred to us, in an instant, while staring at the monolith that is the central hub’s information booth. Having gathered our best guess of where to head, we tramped down the four times wide staircase into the lower tunnels amidst a sea of commuters. Our collective shoes hit the tile and echoed like sandals on stone. The entirety of the hurriedness reverberated inwardly towards us, as if the building itself was calling out an unspoken desire to rebel.
Everyone shuffled, hustled, and ran in a straight sequential line. The city of art, industry, and individuals marched single file like lemmings towards a cliff. Nine million people, focused intently on only where they would sooner be with their next steps.
In transition, I glimpsed his hidden-in-plain-sight path from mine. The staircase leading down to our second subway pressed particularly close to the cabin cars. The cement stairway, covered in what I hoped was mold, functioned as a vomitorium to the sardine-seating-style subway cars ahead. Coming down those stairs and peeking over the edge of the path, I wondered why a fraction of the train wasn’t in use.
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“How come everyone just packs in over there? Why doesn’t anyone go back to the cars behind the stairway?” I shouted to Skylar, over the commotion.
“Are you kidding me? The train is here, who cares? Those cars are probably broken, or they don’t open — just come on.”
“The lights are on …”
“Dude!”
It only took a single early step to the left, onto the moguled yellow rubber, indicating caution before the cabin cars. Instantly I had been separated from the cluttered stream vying for position. The train began to fill, as it prepared to leave. I stepped across the threshold, not even a total walk of 10 yards from the first cluttered cabin past the stairs.
There, sat the man whose path I saw; a king. His throne, a construction of newspapers, had been formed into a full sized bed. Several seats were missing; he had spent time there. A hot plate, piles of loosely organized clothing. He wasn’t homeless, he made a place for himself there — where no one thought to look, and anyone could have.
I could hear Skylar screeching at roughly the same pitch as the departing train. As the doors closed in front of me and I turned to see my panicked friend, I noticed the Christmas lights adorning the edge of the ceiling.
