Subway Storytelling

"If a Los Angeleno's SUV is a culturally sterile environment, a New York subway is a veritable petri dish, swarming with life. Sometimes it's too much; sometimes the peddlers and the mooch artists and the nodding junkies and the militant nonbathers are more than one can bear, and all one wants to do is hide behind a newspaper and tune it all out. But it's life, it's the city, and in a very real sense it's why most of us live here--not for the theater, not for free concerts in the park, but for the urgent pulse of the metropolis."
--Lawrence Block

Everyone who lives in New York for any length of time has a library of subway stories -- bizarre, scary or funny things that happened to them or that they witnessed on the subway. It's inevitable when you jumble that many people together that stuff happens. I nearly became a character in someone else's subway story last summer when, stricken by a bug on the way to Philadelphia, I was trying to conceal how sick I felt until the next stop so no one would pull the emergency stop and make my fellow passengers angry. (I made it... thank goodness. No one wants to be responsible for a train delay, it's worse than being violently ill.)

The essay collection THE SUBWAY CHRONICLES won't give non-New Yorkers the history of the subways, except when it's incidental to the story. But it will give you the experience of riding it as described by many writers over many different lines. Johnny Temple's "The First Annual Three-Borough Subway Party" is a story of a non-story, because the party, despite exquisite planning, never actually took place. Patrick Flynn's "Parnassus Underground" argues that he likes his super-long commute that takes him from bus to subway to subway; Stan Fischler describes his awe of the subway as a young boy growing up in midcentury Brooklyn. Garret Chaffin-Quiray gave me a lot of fodder for my Netflix queue with a discussion of movies that have subway scenes or rely on the subway (like "The Warriors," which makes an appearance in Jonathan Lethem's piece as well).

But my favorite essay was Robert Lanham's "Straphanger Doppelganger," a chillingly hilarious account of what happens when you meet the person who looks just like you and has been going around making you look bad. In Lanham's case, his doppelganger had been taking out mysterious women, causing reports to trickle back to his wife, so Lanham decided to find the guy who "resembled some weird amalgamation of Jon Voight, circa 'Midnight Cowboy,' and the guy with the unfortunate bangs from 'Logan's Run.'" I haven't found my own subway twin, but I'm sure she's out there somewhere.