The Subway Chronicles by Jacquelin Cangro

Author:Jacquelin Cangro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

I became a regular customer in 1978. That year I began commuting most of the length of Manhattan, a one-hour ride from Brooklyn to 135th Street, to attend Music and Art, a famous public high school. The A train out of Hoyt-Schermerhorn was now my twice-daily passage, to and from. My companion was Lynn Nottage, a kid from the block I grew up on, a street friend. Lynn was from a middle-class black family; I was from a bohemian white one. We had never gone to school together in Brooklyn—Lynn had been at private school—but now were high school freshmen together, in distant Harlem. Lynn had the challenge of getting to school on time with me as her albatross. Some mornings the sound of her ringing the doorbell was my alarm clock.

We were students not only of Music and Art but of the A train. Our block felt in many ways like an island in a sea of strife, and Hoyt-Schermerhorn was a place where the sea lapped at the island. Lynn and I had a favorite bum who resided in the station’s long passage from the Bond Street entrance, whom Lynn called “Micro-Man,” not for his size but for the way his growling complaints boomed in the echo chamber of the station like a microphone. One day Lynn screamed theatrically: she’d spotted a rat behind the smeared glass of the mezzanine-bakery’s display counter. I quit buying doughnuts there. Downstairs, we’d fit ourselves into jammed cars, child commuters invisible to the horde. The trip took an hour each way, long enough going in for me to copy the entirety of Lynn’s math homework and still read four or five chapters of a paperback. (I’d read another third or so of each day’s book at school, during lunch hour or behind my desk during class, then finish it just as we pulled into Hoyt-Schermerhorn again on the return trip. By this system I read five novels a week for the four years of high school.)

Lynn and I had habits. We stood in a certain spot on the platform to board the same train every morning (despite an appearance of chaos, the system is regular). Most mornings we rode the same subway car—the conductor’s car. Had we been advised to do this by protective parents? I don’t know. Anyhow, we became spies, on the adults, the office workers, tourists, beggars, and policemen, who’d share segments of our endless trip. We took a special delight in witnessing the bewilderment of riders trapped after Fifty-ninth Street, thinking they’d boarded a local, faces sagging in defeat as the train skipped every station up to 125th, the longest express hop in the system. Also, we spied on our own conductor. The conductor’s wife rode in with him to work—she’d been aboard since somewhere before Hoyt-Schermerhorn—then kissed him goodbye at a stop in the financial district. Two stops later, his girlfriend boarded the train. They’d kiss and moon between stops until she reached her destination. Lynn and

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