Secrets of the New York City Subway

It's a little-known fact that all the trains are haunted.

Photo by Harry Gillen on Unsplash

I met a stranger on a train from Virginia to Texas about twenty-five years ago. We talked for hours. I was practically broke, afraid of flying, and in no rush to move back in with my parents in Austin, so I bought an Amtrak ticket with my credit card and took my time.

It was a long two-day journey on a diesel-electric locomotive. I bought a couple of magazines and read them both twice within the first few hours of the trip.

I told myself train travel was an opportunity to meet interesting characters. I told myself that’s what writers are supposed to do — and he was an interesting character. Tall, lanky, long black hair. Elegant. He introduced himself to me in the observation car, which had big windows and comfortable swivel seats.

From the observation car, you could watch the trees, fields, and industrial rubble for miles and miles. America is an undead colossus, a shambling corpse of a nation held together by train tracks like stitches.

He bought me bottles of beer and pre-packaged hamburgers that the attendant behind the snack counter would microwave until they were soft and hot. When I announced I was moving to New York City, he said I was taking the long way to get there.

He told me stories—entertaining stories. I have no idea if he was lying to me. The train is a perfect place to pretend to be a different person. He said he was French. He was on his way to work on his Ph.D. in Art History in San Antonio. He had grim opinions on organized religion, having been a member of one in a previous life. He could have been flirting with me, but more likely, he was just bored.

When he mentioned he’d lived in Manhattan for a few months, I lit up. I wanted his advice and he gave it: Never make eye contact on the subway, never ask for directions, and never get off at the wrong station if you can help it.

Then there was this story: He used to venture into the subway tunnels underneath New York City when he was a student at a Catholic seminary to feed the homeless, who were mostly addicts and sufferers of untreated mental illnesses. On one occasion, he was instructed to go deeper into the tunnels but to wear a clerical collar because the people who lived in the endless darkness were less likely to attack a priest. He agreed and slashed at the shadows with a flashlight for hours until giving up and returning, his bag of sandwiches and fruit still full. 

I didn’t believe any of it—urban legends. Morlocks? Mole people? Please. But he didn’t seem to care what I believed. Shortly afterward, we found our way to our seats, each far away from the other.  

At one point in his tale, he said these unfortunates were lost but he didn't sound like he meant it in the spiritual sense. No. They were lost as in they’d somehow found themselves in sunless depths and didn’t know how to get out. A wrong turn was made, maybe. And they’re still down there, blinking in the darkness.

***

It is a little-known fact that the New York City subway is haunted. Of course, the Metropolitan Transit Authority would never admit this. It would scare off visitors and their money. It’s a secret that only we subterraneans know.

If you live in this city long enough, eventually, you’ll step onto a train that takes you back in time. If this happens to you, whatever you do, don’t step onto the platform at the next stop. No matter what you see or what happens, stay on that train until you get where you were going. It can take a long time to find your way back again.

I made that mistake recently. I was on a downtown 1 train earlier than usual on my way to interview for a job I wouldn’t get. The sun had just risen. Save for a few night shift folk just trying to get home, the train was mostly empty. I was committed to my phone with its direct connections to all the information in the world, but by chance, I looked up, and there I was, 20 years younger, passed out drunk on the seat across from me. Or, at least, a young man who looked like me was sprawled out on a subway seat, a splatter of vomit on his shirt. He looked peaceful. I looked peaceful.

I could tell that I, or he, or we, were sleeping off a real banger of a night. I remember those mornings after—the reckless hours. Barroom boilermakers, fights in bathroom stalls, failed erections on unfamiliar futons. Pandemonium in a paper bag.

A young woman’s tragedy is that the world asks too much of her, and a young man’s tragedy is that the world doesn’t ask enough. I shook my head in disgust. I am older than I think I should be. When I go to my meetings in church basements, I’m not one of the old-timers, but I’ll be there soon enough, stirring my coffee and nodding along when some kid talks about getting loaded and dynamiting his life. Time usually travels in one direction, forward, until the end of the line. So the spectacle of me, younger, or someone who looked like me in my twenties, soused and pathetic, made me angry.

I was angry that I was ever like this boy: anxious and ambitious. Chubby. But we survived, didn't we? We never toppled onto the tracks, though one time we fell down the stairs that led to the N/R; we were in a hurry and buzzed—spraining our ankle. We spent so much time underground, riding up and down Manhattan and into Brooklyn and all the way to Coney Island.  There is an old Zen koan that time spent fishing is not time taken out of your life and I feel the same way about trains.

***

A car is freedom and responsibility. A plane is speed and incredible, shrunken distances. But a train is none of these things. It safely races, single-mindedly, from A to B while gently rocking its passengers to sleep—a benevolent robotic centipede. I have taken trains cross-country. I have ridden trains in London and Chicago and Los Angeles and Boston and Washington D.C. I love trams and monorails. Commuter rails.

Most of all, I love the New York City subway.

The New York City subway is a living room. It is a magic carpet. On occasion, a moveable sewer. And yes, there are times when it is hell’s waiting room. I have cried on the R train. I have had a first kiss on the L. I have laughed on the 7 as it thundered toward a baseball game.

It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. There are 472 stations and 840 miles of tracks and I have spent approximately 17,000 hours of my life riding it. The subway can go as fast as 60 MPH unless you’re late for work. It is crowded and loud. It never arrives when you want it to and then it takes its sweet time getting you where you want to go. The entire system is 120 years old but feels older, a ruin past its prime. The MTA is a 19th-century idea of the future.

There are times the subway makes me want to scream. Like when the trains stop, for no reason, in the tunnels, or crawl from stop to stop, or never show up. It's true that the subway is a test tube on wheels and, once, I watched a man in a suit suck the meat off one chicken wing after another. He left a pile of bones behind. 

During the summer, the subway platforms are so hot you feel like you’re wearing a coat made out of tongues. Sometimes, when bored on the platform, I watch greasy rats scurry along the tracks and think, “Hey, free zoo.” People beg for money and food. Tourists wander around confused. Elbows stab left and right. I don’t make eye contact, and I don’t give directions. I try to avoid wet surfaces. New York is the center of the universe, and, like a peach, the universe rots from the inside out.

The subway doors chime bing-bong before closing and now and then, especially when I’m exhausted, I’ll sing along. “Bing-bong.”

Once, drunk, I woke up on a train that had stopped at a station because of a vicious fistfight between two men. I was on the wrong train heading into a part of the city I was unfamiliar with.

This must have been between 2 a.m. and dawn. During those weird hours, you’re likely to see anything: a half-naked accordion player counting quarters, a shadow eating a potato like an apple, a skeleton in a trenchcoat.

They punched and pushed each other out of the train and back into the train, and out again. A woman sitting across from me turned to the woman next to her and said, loud enough that I could hear it, “If this was two white boys, the police would be here by now.” Her voice was sad. She was right. I stumbled off the train, carefully avoiding the two combatants, and it took me the rest of the night to get home. Everyone is born on the wrong side of someone else’s tracks.

And so, on the 1 train, barreling underneath Sixth Avenue, I watched myself flinch in my stupor. I felt like standing up and slapping myself awake. “You don’t know what’s coming,” I’d shout. “We wasted so much time.” But I said nothing. I just stared at this young man—a stranger—intensely until he stirred, his whiskers twitching. His eyes weren’t crowned with wrinkles like mine. The thing about haunted trains is you never know who’s the ghost and who’s alive.

When confronted with a creep who stares, you have two choices. You can fight them—karate chops and cursing—or get off at the next station, and that’s what he did. Without thinking, in an almost panic, I followed him, slipping through the doors as they shut. My heart raced. I wanted to tell him things work out, more or less.

John DeVore is an award-winning writer and editor whose funny/sad memoir about grief, friendship and jazz hands, Theatre Kids, is now available.