(Originally
published 10/22/18)
On
Saturday afternoon when the Number 1 train pulled into the Van Cortlandt Park
terminal—its last stop—I was alone in the rear car with two sleeping homeless
men. They served as somnolent bookends—one on each side—for what would
thereafter be the lead car on a return trip into Manhattan. Yesterday
morning—Sunday—I entered the first car for the journey downtown. Lo and behold,
I encountered a pair of sleepers with similar seating habits. They were not,
however, the same two men I had shared space with a day earlier. In fact, one
of them was not homeless at all.
This was
not exactly a Columbo deduction on my part. The guy had a guitar case
alongside him, headphones in his ears, and a smartphone on his lap. From the
looks of things, he was recovering from a hard night of partying. Before the
train even took off, the extraordinarily sound sleeper’s phone dropped to the
floor. The thumping sound did not impact his siesta one bit. I momentarily
considered approaching him and rousing him from his slumber. But his peculiar
Muhammad Ali posture gave me pause. In the end, I decided to file this moral
dilemma under: “Let sleeping drunks lie.”
Eventually,
as the train wended its way into Manhattan, it got increasingly crowded.
Numerous passengers glanced over at the sleeper in their midst—the one with the
phone at his feet. Riders sat next to him and directly across from him. All
remained silent. I kept a vigilant eye on the subject to see if and when he
would regain consciousness. Would he experience that bewildering moment of
clarity? The young fellow stirred from time to time and even put down his
dukes, but never once opened his eyes—at least while mine were fixed on him.
At some
point he rejoined the conscious world. I cannot say for certain if the woman I
spied alerting him of his valuable possession in harm’s way—on the floor—nudged
him awake or not. Nevertheless, I witnessed him react to the news with an
exaggerated, frightened double take—right out of the Hollywood playbook—as he
scooped up his phone and put it in his jacket pocket. Apparently, the
guitar-toting straphanger did not regard that moment as a wake-up call. He
promptly returned to the Land of Nod and continued his journey to nowhere—or
South Ferry in this instance.
Perhaps
the uber-drowsy commuter would have been better off waking up to no smartphone
and, too, no guitar. He would have at least learned a valuable life lesson. If
his sleep requirements were not met when the train reached its last stop—South
Ferry—and he headed uptown again, he might have found himself an underground
crime statistic and learned that lesson the hard way. Maybe then he would think
twice about getting stupefied beyond the pale and riding the subway back and
forth—and back and forth again—with belongings of value there for the taking. Nowadays,
subway conductors make regular announcements of the importance of being fully
aware at all times of one's personal possessions. This weary traveler was
Exhibit A of somebody being fully unaware.
A guitar solo is in order.
(Photos
from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)
