Subway Stories
William Walker
The N train is rumbling into the station. I tell my son to stand back a bit more so that if somebody were to push him, he might catch his balance. “Obviously, always look behind you and make sure there’s not some guy talking to himself.”
“If I got pushed onto the tracks I’d lie flat between the rails and let the train pass over me,” he says. “I’d just have to be sure not to touch the third rail.”
“And hope, of course, the rats don’t chew on your ears while you’re down there.”
My son is twelve, and his middle school is in Bay Ridge. Unfortunately, we do not live near Bay Ridge. From our apartment, it’s an hour by subway and an hour back. Twice, for me, since there’s drop-off and then pick-up. Last year was my son’s first year at this school; he was partially remote, and I was teaching from home, so we only had to commute two or three days a week. This year, my son’s school and my university are fully in-person. I’m thankful for this—don’t get me wrong—but even when my wife does the drop-off, I can still end up spending over five hours on the trains. This new element of post-pandemic life is not sustainable; next year, at the very latest, our son will need to ride the train by himself, but he’s nowhere near ready.
My students are mostly freshmen and their past two years on Zoom have been mostly horrendous. They tell me they have done nothing, learned nothing. They are exhausted by boredom. They appear skeptical when I tell them I am the first person in my family to go to college, that it changed my life, and that I will do anything humanly possible to help them succeed. I lean forward and implore them about reading: just two pages with breakfast, two with lunch, and one with dinner adds up to six books a year. They stare at me distantly as if I am a hologram.
After school, my son and I step onto the N and the doors bong shut. We do not fiddle with our phones, listen to music, or play video games like the people around us. In this time, my son wants to talk. But by the time I pick him up at 2:30, I’ve taught three classes, ridden five trains and walked a trillion steps. Sing to me Muse, I beg. Whisper some tale of hope, for I feel as though my eyeballs have been cored out with ice cream scoops.
Since I am not producing conversation, my son takes a stab. “What’s the name of that guy who was in your class who had just gotten out of prison?”
“I believe the name you seek is Leon,” I say.
Leon was a student of mine several years before the pandemic. He was in his late twenties, with a sculpted physique. After our first class, we locked eyes, then he smiled slightly and gripped me with a crushing handshake. There was something oddly playful in his show of strength. He wanted to know if I thought he could write a book.
When Leon did show up to class, he spoke with emphasis, refusing to be interrupted until he’d made his entire point. I praised his intelligence and perspective, but I also told him that if he’d hand in his assignments and come to class more often, it would make both of our lives easier.
Leon shook my hand with his usual iron grip. When I winced, he smiled and said, “Strong hands are the key to surviving prison.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
At some point, my son Googled Leon’s name and discovered an array of mugshots. Depressingly, it appeared Leon had been incarcerated the majority of his adult life.
“I can’t remember,” my son asks now, “did Leon miss all those classes for being in jail the first time he was your student or the second time?”
“The first time. He said his friend hid a gun under the seat of his car. And that he needed to make better friends.”
“Were you afraid when you failed him?”
“I fear no man.”
“Yeah, right.”
At Atlantic Avenue, we weave through exhausted commuters, past the poles, benches, strollers, and carts. Then we ascend the mobbed stairwell, one slow step at a time.
A man with underdeveloped arms and legs panhandles from a wheelchair. An indigenous woman with a kitchen knife slices mangos in front of a column. I remind my son to walk with his chin up and not look like he’s trying to disappear into the concrete. “Like you’ve got things under control, baby. And don’t swing your arms like that, you look like a crazy man.” An MTA worker emerges suddenly from a cinderblock chamber, a room that could be used for kidnapping and torture. My son bumbles along, oblivious.
My wife says she rode the subways alone when she emigrated from Korea, at age ten, when the trains were dangerous. She pulls up a photograph of a spray-painted GG train from the eighties.
“Everybody I knew was a latchkey kid,” she tells our son. “All our parents worked in sweatshops or drove taxis. I don’t think Halmoni and Hal-abeoji even knew how I got to school. It probably never crossed their minds that I could’ve been kidnapped. Things were just different then. I remember Hal-abeoji sending me to the bodega to pick up cigarettes and beer for him. I’m sure I wasn’t any older than you are now.”
My wife’s mother lost her family in a bombing and was raised in an orphanage. Her father saw his third-grade teacher shot against the schoolhouse wall and shortly thereafter escaped the communist North under cover of night.
By the time I was my son’s age, I’d already smoked some cigarettes, drunk some alcohol, played with some gasoline, even shot some guns. Kidnapping certainly never crossed my Midwestern parents’ minds when they made me stand, alone, beside Randolph Road selling sweet corn to earn money for school clothes. My father, teaching me how to use a chainsaw, simply said, “You want to make sure you pay attention and not cut your leg off.”
My son is a rule follower and rules generate endless questions, the answers to which often reflect the crushing reality that I cannot guarantee his safety, that there is an unsettling element of chance in a city of over eight million people.
“If the train fills with smoke, how will I know when to get out of the car?”
“You’ll know. Just follow everybody else.”
“What if it’s dark in the tunnel and I can’t see which one is the third rail?”
“There’ll be MTA employees in orange vests. Just listen to them.”
“But what about the rats?”
“Rats don’t like people. They’ll scram if there’s a bunch of people evacuating the train.”
“What if the train gets stuck in the tunnel and there’s no reception? How will you know where I am?”
“I’m a smart guy. I’ll figure it out.”
“If somebody grabs me and tries to drag me off the train, I scream for help?”
“Screaming for help is your most powerful weapon.”
“Because bad guys don’t want to get caught, right?”
“Exactly.”
I’ve told my son how I got punched in the mouth by some kids trying to steal my bike when I was nineteen and first moved to New York. I’ve told him how my buddy Herbie cracked a guy in his eye with a Heineken bottle that time in the pool hall; how Raymond landed in Rikers for harpooning a man through the cheek with a pen; how my sister got hired as a dog groomer and was fired and back home within an hour and how, years later, I still cannot get her to laugh even a little about it. My son loves to hear about the time I was twenty-five and sleepwalked out of my Brooklyn apartment in my boxer shorts, in February. These stories. They’re what I have to give.
I need my son to know that, should fate call, there’s savage survival in his veins, that the majority of predators out there are pathetic goons who pilfer laundromats in Sheepshead Bay, and that our DNA didn’t stagger this far to get taken down by the likes of those. If some scumbag grabs you, you plug a plastic fork into his eyeball, if that’s all you got. You clench your teeth and twist that bitch until he ponies up the key to his homemade dungeon.
I ride the N train with my son, who might look like a 75-pound kid with a Johnny Ramone bowl cut, but is the blood of my blood. I want to grab his hand and make sure he hears what I’m telling him. Yeah, sure, we might look like nobodies in this town. We might even be nobodies, but Odysseus was the motherfucker who made it home. Remember, Odysseus? He was the baddest of the bad. He wasn’t like Achilles just out there flexing his muscles; Odysseus was slick.
And if Wordsworth was right, that the child is the father of the man, then, like Telemachus, every day, after school, I’ll be awaiting your arrival.