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by REBECCA
FOSTER
Some calculate weekly time wasted in transit—the hour
poorly spent in a leather interior rushing others on the highway
home, the confinement, the crumbling free time, the missed sit-com.
I've had an indifference for subway-waiting, and an optimistic
expectation for New York's anonymity. Cars are underground galleries
of faces and habits, private behaviors made public, sleeping,
lipsticking, leering in the early morning hours, a license for
uninhibited peeping—the dependable hoo ha of performers,
flying political opinions, preachers, drifters, disciplined
children, octave over octave. Of
late the musician from W4 has become mobile, carrying an amplifier
in a backpack, strung by cord to an accompanying guitarist from
car to car. They wear socks with loose mouths in their waist-bands,
which I feed whenever I hear a song called Baby can I hold
you. In his station are small pockets of national guardsmen
with their guns slung diagonally, serious and jovial, forcing
and inviting eye contact to bridge the worlds of new-york-rush,
new-york-fashion-risks and the flexing of a uniform, with stagnant
anticipation. The drum band at Jay Street is preceded by a thin
line of vested NYPD poking heads into doors at High Street. People
as always are moving from short shrouded stations to tall multi-tracks
with and without awareness of the city's mood. And at some points
grated light drops in as it must every sunny day, making it
easy to forget which number has been assigned to this one, and
the people elsewhere, going about their daily circuits, planning
their next twenty-four hours, stepping into routines, or abandoning
them.
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