It’s not as glamorous as Duke Ellington would lead you to believe.  I’m writing this while stuck on the A train.  I get a lot of my writing done here.  One of the only advantages of travelling on the MTA is you can tell amazing, horrible stories of trying to get home tantamount to the Odyssey – monsters included – and other New Yorkers will believe you.  But I suppose things could be worse.  I could work for the MTA, passing out the pitchforks.  You put over two million people – no, not people, New Yorkers – on a system and there are going to be surprises, many of them unpleasant.  And there you are wearing the uniform.  Over the years the conductors have used their microphone for:

1) Philosophy: “Get on or get off. It’s that simple.”

2) Advice: “If you don’t stop holding that door, you and everybody else on this train are gonna be late for work and they are gonna be mad – at you.  Now I’m fine with it.  I’m already at work.”

3) Physics lecture: “Take your foot out of the door. You weigh 150 lbs.  The train weighs 400 tons.  You will move.”

4) Mathematics instruction: “As of this morning you are all paying twenty percent more for your commute.  You should all give yourselves twenty percent more space.  There is a train right behind us.”

5) An appeal for the brotherhood of man, “Ladies and gentleman, when something goes wrong with the railroad, don’t get all in the conductor’s face.  I didn’t do it!”

6) More philosophy on the morning commute, “Ladies and Gentleman, sometimes it just doesn’t pay to get up in the morning. There is a woman gone into labor and we are not moving for some time.”

Hard to believe, but it used to be much worse.  It is those halcyon days when there were two hundred and forty violent crimes a week that photographer Willy Spiller records in all its grittiness in “Hell on Wheels.” , sadly out of print. It was a time that the MTA suffered from years of neglect and seemed to be on its last wheels.  Sounds familiar?  The city itself was falling apart.  The blackout, looting and rioting of forty years ago laid waste to great swaths of the city.  There were no man’s lands of burned out buildings and wreckage that ran for blocks and blocks.  But the city, and the subway, rumbled on.  Finding a car with air conditioning was so rare many, like me, chose to ride in between the cars where there was at least a breeze – the breeze of a dragon with halitosis.  The cars were so crowded sometimes the only way to get on and off was in between the cars.

Then then there was the graffiti. It was everywhere; covering the windows, the subway maps, the lights. I am aware of the popular mystique of graffiti as an art form, and I admit that some of the pieces were quite impressive,

but most were not,

and they did lend an air of lawlessness to the whole system.

The guns, knives, drugs, broken glass, and racial tension provided the actual lawlessness.

Then along came Koch, and rule of law was eventually restored.

Now we just have crappy service.

Far Rock A train approaching Broad Channel Island.

While you are stuck on the train it is hard to appreciate how much better for the planet your mode of commute is then driving.  The subway car I am on will one day become part of a reef.

Nonetheless this endless adventure is tiresome.  I have been stuck in the system on this hot steamy night, on one lost train after another for over two hours.  My essay is done and here I sit.