All I seem to have to talk about these days:
Today I saw this.
This is what I said to whomever.
I felt such and such about either of those.
When I was at WVU, while we were desperately trying to retain whatever the hell they were teaching us in between our dating dramas and binges (pizza, video games, exuberance, etc), we were persistently, habitually, ritualistically asked by the enigmatcally frazzled Jerry McGonigle-
"What about this?"
I've heard it since called a 'check in' or 'I did, I saw, I felt' or, in some circles, a 'safety meeting' but, in my head, in my humble jumble of education and life experience, that first one, that simple, impossibly open ended interrogative
"What about this?" Is what you ask after something important happens.
I think I just saw something important.
The 9-5 commuter subway is a mystery world to me, still.
We all sit, ignore the vagrants and beggars and go about our working class business, trying to distract ourselves from our proximity and the moments of our life we're losing to our transit choices.
Eye contact is discouraged but not out of the question; outright engagement with a stranger is a rarity to be avoided for the sake of making easy and Quiet everyone's morning commute.
And, for your sake as well as ours, don't make us notice you.
I like to read.
It was the usual, quiet, safe morning when he sat down.
He took a seat next to the door and was almost completely lost behind his standard-issue, metal mesh handcart: maybe it was painted red to match his coat, or maybe to match his mood, but radio flyer red it was no matter the dichotomy of aesthetic intent v. narrative significance..
Quiet and small, he sat behind his little cage instead of in it, while the rest of us sat in our city-sponsored cage, waiting for an escape into sunshine.
I can't tell you much else of what he was like before the girl bumped his cart with her suitcase.
until that second he was just one of the crowd; unnoticed by most and soon to be forgotten by all.
And then like a foolish, unwitting child at a derelict zoo, this sorry girl rattled his cage.
This first words were just noise, because i wasn’t really listening.
Children are told that there is a value difference between hearing and actually listening.
through the admonishing tones of their disgruntled and discriminating parents they learn by contrast: “I know you heard me, but are you Listening to me?”
I wasn’t listening to any world but the one of my subway-commute playlist.
Until she yelled back.
Suddenly a solitary outburst of unjustified rancor (‘Don’t bump my fucking cart, bitch! Apologize!’)
had become something else. suddently we were overhearing a conversation.
A scene.
I shit you not, ladies and gentlemen, but i thought i was watching a piece of poorly rehearsed street(car. A streetcar named claustrophobia) theatre.
It was impossible how quickly the escalation happened.
And how psychotically intense the exchange remained for as long as it lasted.
It was just a poorly paced acting excercise, because they were shouting for WAAYY too long.
Ten minutes.
They were spitting bile at each other for over ten minutes.
A little man, --
we all see him now, and measure him: a presumably african-american black man with long braids and a red hat to match his red coat. as is fashionable, his dress is oversized to his build, and even with that allowance of anatomical ambiguity we can all see that he is short of stature and slight of build. a high toned, almost youthful timbre to his voice and rhythm makes everything he says, every hateful, angry syllable sound like a lame joke delivered in the hazy air of a closed door, sneaky-cigarette-smoke-out. just another lost kid talking trash in between pink lunged hacks, lurking in the locker room during seventh period. Maybe he's so angry because he's tired of people thinking he's just a punk kid telling stupid jokes.
--near screaming (he’ll get there soon enough) at a young woman also of a presumably african american descent. she could have been no older than twenty, let’s call her a cool nineteen, and there she stood, meeting intensity with intensity, finding her practiced tactic of strongly worded rational explanation lost on a personality we are all coming to see is unhinged and careening towards some kind of major metropolitan meltdown.
Railing against people, and how he doesn't give a fuck and all this while she is standing, feet planted, unbending against the gale force wind of his tirade.
She's demanding that he treat her with respect because she is a student, and she is getting an education, and she's smarter than him and she won't just please, miss, sit down because we're all watching now and there's something in his eyes that no matter how hard i try i can't really believe that he's faking it anymore.
He sat, planted in the seat he claimed as his bully pulpit, his wire mesh-throne of indignation over a petulant nation of rude train people who bumped his fucking cart and wouldn't apologize.
And we just watched.
Sir Terry Pratchett has a running theme in his Discworld books that the city rabble of his fictional city of Ankh-Morpok love a free show, and there we were, the city rabble of my dream home, watching a co-ed, freshman-year David-ess try to slay her own personal goliath-in-miniature. she had no sling, and the only stones she slung were slang and sticks, breaking no more bones than if she'd kissed him.
and finally, as he reached out to her, as he finally touched her, we realized that they weren't pretending.
he wasn't pretending; he actually was a brain-fried manic who would lay hands on a girl for buming his cart.
she wasn't pretending; she really thought it was a good goddamn idea to get in a shouting match with a lunatic on the subway.
and now we had to start pretending; pretending we knew what the hell to do.
she was standing in front of me when he touched her so i don't know if he struck her or just grabbed at her, but suddenly the cocophany of the preamble was gone and the only sounds were the grunts of exertion as he attacked, the sigh of panic she attempted to retaliate, and the intake of group consent as we moved.
before i talk about this next part, i want to make abundantly clear that i was not thinking when i did anything. the moment i felt the shift in the room/car/air/whatever, i moved and i did what made sense. he was surrounded on all sides and suddenly he was being held back, all i had in front of me was a young woman who had just been talking about her future, promising her promising life yet to be lived,and she was angry, enraged, and diving into the brawler's braying of a batshit black dude.
So i grabbed her. i grabbed her by the waist and i pulled her back and fell into the seating bank I'd just lunged out of (i think i even had the presence of mind to apologize to the dude who's lap i landed into) and started talking.
because what's the one thing a situation like this needs but more fucking talking.
softly, quietly, i'm trying to calm her down
"miss, i know, miss i'm sorry, please, i understand but i need you to stop. you need to stop. you're going to school. you cannot get in trouble. miss, do you hear me?"
nothing. just words, just the kind of meaningless prattle that comes out of a panicked brain when something NEEDS to be said. but, alas, substansive contributions to the moment at hand are not the stuff of adrenaline fueled panick-prattle.
before i ran, full tilt out of one of the scariest subway ride of my life, i made eye contact with her.
i saw, for the first time, the honesty of this young lady's Fear, real fear, at what could have happened if he'd hurt her.
if he'd had a knife.
or a gun.
i left her, standing still, while the men who had him restrained were calling for the police, and i ran up the stairs, desperate to be far away from that place, because i couldn't think about anything but the look on her face when she actually stopped and started breathing again.
i think she saw that, in a second, she was put at the kind of risk it took a quartet of pro-active working class professionals to pull apart. she almost got herself, and anyone in that cart, seriously injured.
and we said yes to that, as we say yes to everything in this city, because it is what it is.
we have no alternative; we watched their exchange until it was something we all understood.
violent.
i've asked my dear father (Doctor of Psychology, Dr. Jonathan Stevens in the HOUSE) what this kind of social contract means and he suggested that people in groups are often directionless in times of criseis until someone takes control and guides the group.
violence is someone trying to take control away
which was enough to get my ass out of my seat.
This crisis paraliysis is largely caused by the weighty expectation of social norms.
we do not act as we feel we probably should because we know that it is expected that we not act at all.
No one in that train moved or said a word until he got violent because we were too scared of the passing disapproval of a stranger.
Ironic, then, that a listless anti-social, someone with no appreciation of the nuanced delicacy of social norms, might have been the very best person to handle that very delicate situation.
maybe that's what i'll do next time i see imminent social catastrophe brewing on the subway
"excuse me, sir?/miss? i'm trying to read my book. could you please be quiet?"
...
anyway
i don't honestly know if there's a point to me telling this story other than i felt compelled to tell it.
this is not me progressing as an artist, an actor, or even a new yorker.
this is a scared man/boy/person coming to realize that i cannot control when life decides to do some stupid crazy shit, and sometimes that crazy shit's gonna land in my lap...and then it's gonna hurl me into someone else's lap while i hold on for dear life.
but i do trust, now, more than ever, that no matter how deeply i dive into my little imaginarium, i am never alone, and these people, this world of strangers... and stranger still: we've got each other's backs.
There's another theatrical touchstone, another mantra i learned, and this one is more recently added to my emotional lexicon.
I learned it from the unstoppable Symmonie Preston.
I'll end with her words, so simple in their delivery, and so sure in their meaning, and so persistently validated in my everyday experiences with people, even at the worst of times:
"If you fall, I will catch you"
Thanks for reading.
