What Made Me Turn Around?

I get off work at 9 p.m. and often decide to walk toward home.  Usually it’s when I get on the phone to one of my sisters because we have a lot to say to each other and it takes longer than the six blocks to my station to get it all said.

This happened the other night.  I was talking to my sister Margaret about everything we were both doing and I passed the Columbus Circle Subway Station and kept on walking. 

As usual that time of night I take the busiest street so I can talk and be around a lot of people.  Big city, bright lights are good.

Where does that plan always lead me but straight through Times Square, in my opinion one of the safest few blocks in the world.  The area is dizzyingly bright and crowded with regular people all gawking at the sheer ostentatiousness of the commercial center of the universe.  I can slip through like a breeze in a wheat field.

This night was no different.

I continue to 42^nd Street where I head toward the Bryant Park station.

Down I go and wait for the train.  It’s probably 10:30 by this time.

The train arrives and I get in the last car.  The seating arrangement on this particular train is 3 seats in a row and two perpendicular to those, like the letter “L” with other “L’s” back to back down the car’s length.

I take a seat among the three on the wall, the one closest to the bottom of the “L”.  Seated there is a man I wonder about.  Because of the seating arrangement his knees are almost touching my right thigh so I take a quick look at him to see if it’s cool to be sitting so close.

The first thing I notice is that he’s very thin and pale. He’s wearing a sleeveless shirt which allows me the opportunity to study his many tattoos.  Quite a few New York Yankees logos; the script, the NY, the baseball with the Uncle Sam hat, he might’ve had a few more but I had to be a little circumspect in my inspection of him.  A pretty big Cross, and The Doors logo. He had a lot of artwork.

He was wearing a blue NY Yankees ball cap too which was hiding his face as he was bent almost double over an E-book pad which he was reading from intently. It looked like he was reading a novel. His hair was buzz short so I could see that he had a band-aid on either side of his neck, like maybe he got sliced, or maybe new art.

He had shorts on and on his feet were those Vibram rubber barefoot shoes, you know, the weird looking ones with five toes. 

I didn’t know whether to be intimidated by him or marvel at him. If I had no manners I would’ve taken a photo of him because he was so worthy of one.  He was an incredible mixture of culture, and interest, and street, and thought, that I was absolutely intrigued.  He is the only person in the world that looks like him I am sure.

He kept his head down in his reading the entire trip to West 4^th where I got off. 

I hit the platform and headed to the exit but before I got too far from the train I could’ve sworn I heard my name called behind me. I turned in time to see him get off the train.  For the first time I was able to see his face.

With total incredulity I saw that it was my friend Mike who runs security at my workplace.  He sits downstairs and makes sure all is well for everyone in the building. He looks over to see me and gives me a big smile and we end up talking until his transfer train arrives to take him home to Brooklyn.

Mike had just come from The Bronx where he had seen the Yankees play the Royals.  We talked baseball, work, his book which I want to say was le Carré or de Mille (Dean Koontz!), the band-aides which turned out to be a little medical procedure, and mostly enjoyment in that sheer happy happenstance that we were sitting leg to leg on a night that we came from disparate ends of the city and without plan, without clue we picked the same line, same car, same seat.

What a town.

Oh, and I don’t know what made me turn around.  Mike said he didn’t call my name.