sartre in the subway

hell is other people.

a lock of his true love's hair

inside the franco: a dirty tale set on the nyc subway platform

 I thought I just saw James Franco on the subway platform. I imagined James Franco boarding my car and me saying to him, you're James Franco, and him saying, yes. And me telling James Franco I was coming to see him tomorrow night, I had a ticket. And James Franco asking me what I was doing today and me saying, going to work. Him asking me where I work and me telling him. James Franco asking me to play hooky. Cut to us sitting in a diner, drinking coffee across a table. Him telling me, this isn't about sex, and me saying, right because you have a girlfriend. Him saying, no because I'm gay.

if you must speak, please don't

Nothing tries to spoil a beautiful early morning in Manhattan like a woman yelling on the 6 train. She takes a seat beside me, her face pointed up toward her standing colleague, her mouth broadcasting something about work and funds and projects. She flips through her manilla folder filled with papers.

I am trying to read A Moveable Feast. Hemingway named it that because he considered Paris itself to be a moveable feast, an experience a man keeps with him his entire life. But I think it just shows his genius because the book itself is a moveable feast. It is a  treasure I carry around in my bag with transportive properties beyond my grasp. My copy is old and worn, with notes inside from a previous owner’s trip to Germany. There are train directions, and something about the Museum of Modern Art. It is a tiny book, and it fits perfectly in my hands.

I'm still early in the book. I just got to the scene where Hemingway discovers this woman who runs a library out of her house. He is poor and doesn't have enough money to pay the membership fee, but she lets him take as many books as he wants anyway. He is touched by her kindness and goes home to tell his wife about what he has found. They have a simple conversation about their evening plans and she says to him, "And we'll never love anyone else but each other." And he says, "No. Never." She asks him how his writing went earlier in the day and he says he thinks it went all right. I think simply, this is the type of love I want.

But the woman is still yelling. I have put my earbuds in and am listening to Philip Glass at near-full volume and I can still hear her. Not even God drowns her out. I look over and see her papers with designs on them for a presentation. Her colleague has a brown leather briefcase. They are both professors. I hear them say words like "dean," "school," "courseload." It's not just her proximity or my countenance that makes her seem loud. She is actually just very, very loud. She seems to have forgotten the most basic lesson children learn: the value of quiet.

I read the same page over and over, but I'm not actually reading. Her voice is a barrier to the deepest part of my brain where literature belongs. Not wanting to do wrong by Hemingway, I close my book. I close my eyes. I paint a picture in my mind of the man I will one day love and the walks we will take along our version of the Seine. I let Philip's repetitive piano strokes fill my mind and serve as the soundtrack for barefoot dances along water's edge.

I open my eyes and see that my stop has arrived. I put my book back in my bag. I adjust my headphones and exit.

I realize it's been a few minutes since I heard her voice.

Once outside, I see that the morning is beautiful.

treefingers

On the upstairs platform at 14th street, I see a man with a book in his bag called

How To Be An Existentialist.
I laugh out loud at his silliness.

Downstairs at 14th street, a man in monk robes comes up to me and offers me a book on yoga,
asking for change in return. 

I give him a handful of coins. 

I open the book and a card falls out with a chant on it. It instructs me to repeat the chant to make my life sublime, and it guarantees satisfaction.

I laugh out loud at its silliness.  

Magic on the 6 train

I've seen a lot of things in the New York City subways. I've seen Santas. I've seen Christmas trees. I've seen child abuse. I've seen obscenely beautiful women and men. I've seen obnoxious PDA. I've seen homeless men claiming to be war vets, their army identification tags hanging around their necks, begging people for any change they can spare. I've seen dancers and acrobats swinging from the poles and overhead handholds. I've seen models and police officers and adorable puppies. But it wasn't until this weekend that I saw a real, live magician.

He rolled onto the 6 train with his red-velvet-covered pushy cart, likely purchased from American Outlet (the Harlem version of Wal-Mart, y'all). He wore a leather jacket, top hat and sunglasses. He parked in the middle of the subway car, and when I finally realized what he was doing, an audible squeal escaped my throat. A few embarrassing things that are true about me: I prefer to eat ice cream straight out of the container. I love to pick at flaky skin patches (on myself and on others). I have been known to consume icing right out of the container. And when I was eight years old, I was completely fucking in love with David Copperfield.

Like many things in life, I can't really remember how my obsession began. All I know is that when I was younger, David Copperfield was nothing short of a sensation. He had a CBS special what seemed like every other week, he was on a shit load of talk shows, and he had a national tour that I'm pretty sure was completely sold out. I'm not sure why, but from the years of like 1990 to 1995, the entire country - nay, the entire world - was obsessed with this man. He made planes disappear. He walked through the Great Wall of China. He made the Orient Express vanish. And then - perhaps as an odd foreshadowing of the "reign of terror" that would be pushed down the collective American throat starting in the aughts - he made the Statue of Liberty disappear.

More amazing than David's illusions was his ability to make everyone believe in them. Even though all these things are clearly and indisputably physically impossible, the entire world seemed to suspend disbelief for a few years while David did his thing. As a little kid who still believed in all kinds of things that were probably impossible, I never even questioned whether what he was doing was "real" or not. I saw it with my own eyes, and I never saw any evidence that it wasn't "real," so I just believed. It's easy to argue that watching his stuff on television makes believing in it even more ridiculous, due to the high likelihood of camera tricks or the participation of actors-not-real-people; but that argument won't hold up, because I saw him live not once but multiple times**. And the most impactful of said live shows occurred when I was in the second grade, and I saw David fly.

Believe it or not, I was a very logical child. My dad was really good at math, and I can remember him sitting me down to help with my math homework a lot, and it always came so naturally to me. I always thought about things logically and made decisions based on the information I had available to me. And when David flew, it wasn't just like oooh look at me I'm "levitating" - he flew through circular hoops, he did flips in the air, and he flew inside a closed see-through glass box. It's impossible for him to be attached to the ceiling via ropes or strings if he's inside a totally enclosed space, 8-year-old me thought. Even watching the video now, I don't understand how he does it.

I distinctly remember being in the car on my way to school the next day with my mom and talking to her about how I was convinced I could fly. I had dreamed the night before about flying around the halls and rooms of my school, and having seen David do it live and in person, I just knew I could do it too. She gently talked me down, probably convincing me he legitimately had a magical power I did not possess. Kinda like how there's a reason Santa can go down every single chimney* in the world in one night, but the average person cannot. Same sorta thing.

One has to wonder if David Copperfield could ever be as insanely popular in a post-Internet world as he was in the early 90s. Someone invented the Internet around like 1990, but it wasn't a daily part of people's lives until at least eight to 10 years later - so when David was flying and making huge famous objects disappear, no one could google how he did it. He fiercely guarded the secrets to his illusions, with the very tangible result of legions of fans. But in 2010, if David tried for the first time to vanish the Statue of Liberty, would he be successful? If I Googled "how David Copperfield disappeared the Orient Express" right now, I could probably find a few sites that would reveal to me the secret behind the trick.

But the thing is - and here's the point of my post, and why I got so excited when I saw the magician on the 6 train this weekend - I don't want to find out how David did all that stuff. I know there are logical explanations behind how the 6 train magician made a live dove appear under a handkerchief, or a big, fat rabbit appear in a clear box - both things he did as I watched - but I sincerely don't want to know them. I would rather be mystified, and tap into the child inside my heart who still takes unfiltered delight in seeing these things happen.

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves why we are beautiful, and why we love ourselves, and why we deserve love from others, and as I watched the 6 train magician make pen drawings appear out of thin air on the pages of an empty notebook, I was reminded of one of my favorite things about myself: I believe wholeheartedly in magic, if for no other reason than because I want to. I believe in magic on the 6 train. I believe in it in nature. I believe in it in love. And I have my parents to thank for it.

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for raising me in a very magic-friendly house. And thank you, David Copperfield, for being one of the best performers of my childhood and helping to forever instill in me a love for not only magic, but for cheesy stares, lithe women/dancers, old-fashioned romance, über-dramatic operatic and classical music, and Peter Gabriel.

*Christian chimneys, at least
**It's totally worth noting that at one of his shows I caught a piece of rope he threw into the audience. Yeah, def the happiest moment of my young life.

Running full-speed in subways, and other pointless things

I don't understand people who run during rush hour to make it to a subway car so crowded that there's no way in hell they will fit inside. Or even if they can fit inside, at the very least it will be an incredibly unpleasant experience.  There is nothing at all pleasant about being crammed in so close with your fellow New Yorkers that you have to stand perfectly still, lest you risk having someone's hair brush your hand or their leg brush your leg or, so much worse, their breath aimed directly at your face. And trust me, at 8:15 in the morning, it ain't good.

And yet every morning, I see people run to a train car that is very clearly packed to the brim. And these people aren't, like, walking swiftly. They are running, running, running. I always wonder why New Yorkers do this. In their brains, are they thinking, "If I don't get on this exact train at this exact moment, I will be late for work!"? If so, then that's 1) flawed thinking, because during rush hour the next train will arrive - guaranteed, at least on the 4/5 and 6 lines - in approximately 90 seconds, and 2) a case of seriously fucked priorities, if they're truly concerned about getting to work 90 seconds later than they planned. (Because I think few people would consider arriving at 9:01:30 to be "late" for a scheduled arrival of 9.) Or perhaps they're running without thinking about why they're running. I think this latter option is a lot more likely, for the following reasons.

Manhattan is a city filled with people trying to accomplish as much as possible as fast as possible, usually at the expense of all logic and well-being and pretty much everything else. They work as much as possible, to make as much money as possible, to rent as nice an apartment as possible (note: I would say as "big" an apartment as possible, but let's not kid ourselves) in as nice a neighborhood as possible, just so they can spend as little time as possible in said apartment. And they spend a lot of time figuring out how to maximize the use of their, um, time; they ask themselves, What would be more worthy of my time tonight, getting drinks with a friend I haven't seen in a long time, going to a book release event with someone I see all the time or working late to finish this project so I can leave early on Friday to go to a sample sale with my co-worker*? It might sound like a long and complicated thought process, but over time, as one gets used to life in Manhattan, all this stuff becomes first nature and takes place in a split second; one synapse fires against another, and - poof - decision made.

This is how New Yorkers - myself definitely included at times- live out their lives. So why would they act any differently during their morning commute? People run for packed trains not because they've thought it through, but because it's now their default mode of existence; they're so used to doing something 100% of the time - and using aforementioned deductive system to make sure that something is worth something - that it gives them anxiety to miss the train when they know that maybe, if they try hard enough, they can make it. They lurch forward at obnoxious speeds because, their brains instantly tell them instantly, there's simply nothing else for them to do.

I, however, do not run when I see a packed train surrounded by a crowd of people at the car doors, because I have decided that this - rushing around half mindless and half anxious - is not how I want to live my life. I walk at a normal speed, because in my brain I know I prefer being 90 seconds late to squeezing into a car so tightly that the only thing keeping me standing is the proximity of other standing bodies. I also know that, in the grand scheme of my life, being a minute and a half late to work does not matter. Some people might say this makes me wise, while others - likely including a lot of my city's co-inhabitants - would say it makes me (at worst) foolish and (at best) lazy. But quite frankly if anything is so serious that I can't be a maximum of two minutes late, then that is probably a thing I don't want to be involved in. Because it probably takes place inside a courthouse or a hospital or a funeral home.

And, contrary to popular belief, a packed New York City subway car is none of these things.

*The middle option is clearly the best one here. I get to see someone I like, I get free food and drinks and I get to network with people in the publishing world. Done, done and done. I, I and I.

The day I crawled onto the NYC subway tracks to save my iPhone, or every 20something's worst nightmare realized*

If you have been fortunate enough to spend any time around me, you probably know at least two things: 1. I'm clumsy as fuck, and 2. My iPhone screen is cracked to hell from a (completely sober) tromp around Times Square this summer. And now that these two highly relevant facts are general Internet knowledge, we will proceed with the story of my morning, and mayhaps you will find said story - though still hilarious - a bit less shocking.

It's perhaps a lesser known fact that when it rains, NYC becomes CFC: Cluster Fuck Central. The trains get fucked up, the buses gets fucked up, the average commuter is practically reduced to tears from the frightening - and very real - prospect that she might drown in a sea of wet umbrellas. It's miserable. This morning was no different, as my bus was about eight minutes late. Therefore, I blame the MTA for the pseudo-tragedy that followed, and nearly made me one of those "I'm only 23 and I've had a heart attack" statistics.

After I got off my late bus, I walked to the subway and waited for the downtown train, which I'm sure was also late. (Because, from what I hear, the subway trains are actually supposed to run on this thing called a "schedule," though I have never seen any evidence of this.) As per yooj, I was listening to music on my iPhone. I really wish I could remember what I was listening to, because I'm sure it was something that now reveals itself to be super fucking ironic, as the universe tends to have a twisted sense of humor about stuff like this.

Anyway. The train approached. Naturally, I decided to pull my iPhone from the safe coccoon of my pocket so I could begin reading The New York Times daily email, because, you know, it was of the utmost importance that I read it right then. Because I always read it, every morning, and never fill my valuable time and brain space with Word Warp or Tap Tap Revenge.

The train stopped. The doors opened. iPhone in hand, eyes fixated on screen, I moved toward the open door. Then, something happened. I have no idea what. I would not be surprised if, had a photo been taken at the precise moment when this thing happened, you could literally see the hand of God reaching down through 116th street, into the subway station, and through my earbud cords, tangling them up and yanking with a malicious intent I will never understand. The iPhone tumbled from my hands, the earbuds popped from their snug homes in my ears, and the whole kit and caboodle went crashing down. Of course, this all happened in slow motion.

The phone hit the train, then the subway platform. My hand shot up to cover my mouth. (Side note: why is this such a natural human response when bad stuff happens? It's like the international sign for "OH SHIT! FUCKKKKK! SHITITITITITTTTT FUCKETY FUCK GODDAMNIT!") I said a silent, fervent prayer. Are you there, God? It's me, Meghan. Please please please no please don't let my iPhone fall into the gap, onto the tracks. No no no please.

I watched. It fell. It was gone. Heart stopped. I peered down and saw it. The screen was still lit up from where I had opened my e-mail. It glared up at me, and I could almost hear it crying: "You bitch! How dare you?! I (sob sob) love (sob sob) you (sob sob) so (sob sob) much (SOB). I looked up, into the still open doors of the train, and all the people were looking at me. Every single person on this crowded 6 train was staring at me, this poor jaded girl who had just lost her iPhone and her earbuds in one fail swoop, with her hand over her mouth. They all looked genuinely concerned and sympathetic. The front part of my iPhone case was on the train, so I reached in to grab it, and a man reached down to help me. They all scooted in to make room for me to board. But no. I waved thank you to them, and politely declined. I knew what I had to do.

The doors closed and the train lurched forward. Chucka, chucka, chucka. I looked down into the gap and saw the reflection of my still-lit iPhone screen over and over again in the frosted silver covering each subway car. Chucka, chucka, chucka, faster now. I would have taken a photo, but alas, in a brilliant fucking twist, the only camera on my person was now sitting at the bottom of the New York City subway. Chucka, chucka, chucka, faster still. Its light was a beacon of hope, on repeat. Here I am. Here I am. Here I am. I'm still here. I'm still here. I'm still here. To the beat of the train's wheels gliding along their tracks. Chucka chucka chucka. Come and get me.

The train passed. I moved faster than I've ever moved in my life. I took off my bag and put my (yes, wet) umbrella down. I jumped down onto the tracks. I grabbed my phone and the earbuds, which were still attached. I placed them on the platform. I looked down one more time. No sign of the back of my two-part iPhone case. Oh well, casualty of war. I hoisted myself back up, which was no small feat, because those rails are pretty far down. Standing in the pit, the top of the platform came up to about my chin. So I had to do that awkward move you do whenever you're getting out of a pool. Hands up, hoist up, lift one leg to the side and hoist again.

Once back amongst the living, I grabbed my phone and cradled it in my hands like a just-born kitten I had saved from certain death. I have no way of knowing this now, but I feel like I might have actually rocked back and forth, there on my knees on the subway platform. Don't fear, baby, mama's here, everything's going to be OK now. Amazingly, the screen was no more cracked than before I had dropped it. It was responsive to touch, and the home screen button appearaed to still be working. For good measure, I turned it off. It had just had a really traumatic morning. It needed to rest.

I turned it back on a few stops into my ride. It appeared to be working fine. Fuck, how lucky. The only thing I lost in this whole experience was the back of the case, which was a $5 investment I made on the streets of Harlem. Oh, and a little bit of my dignity and cleanliness - small prices to pay for a working iPhone that has made a trip to the bottom of the NYC subway.

I was planning on asking Santa for a new one this year, but now I kind of want to stay with this one forever. You know what they say about two individuals who have been through serious trauma together: they are connected for life, forged together forever, never to be torn asunder. My iPhone and me, we got this shit. We are strong. We are resilient. We are one.

And I just realized that I never fucking read The New York Times e-mail. Typical.

*It's worth noting that I wrote a good chunk of this post on the train, on my iPhone, post-drop