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Link
Yaco! We don’t live
in the United States, we live... You can always tell an out-of-towner. Just look at their feet. If they were the hands of a clock, it would be ten minutes before two o'clock. They're splay-footed, I tell you! They are so used to driving from mall to mall in their suburban mid-western lives that they never learned to walk properly. New Yorkers walk with their feet pointed decisively forward. This is a shlepping town. Schlepping and walking. You have to walk and walk and walk. When I first came to new York, I felt as if I were in everybody's way. Now I feel like everyone is in MY way. There are some types of pedestrians that particularly annoy me. for instance, there's the weaver. That's the one who can't walk in a straight line. No, they're not drunk. They just lack the sense of purpose most of us walkers have. Weavers usually walk slowly, and are often, shall we say, wide-bodied, or carrying luggage, or pushing a pram. You can't pass them because they usually anticipate which side you're going to make a move for. Why can't people walk on the right. Yeah, that's right! Just stay on the right, like car traffic. Then we wouldn't have to do this complicated two-step tango every time two meet head-on and can't decide which side to move to. The transit authority should paint white lines down the middle of their pedestrian thoroughfares to guide the walking traffic. Then we could have pedestrian traffic cops to give tickets…Uh-oh. Now I'm sounding like the Mayor. Then there's the pedestrian walker I call the thinker. That's the one who stops in the middle of the sidewalk to consider his/her life. A good time for philosophy, chum. Worst of all, there's the single-lane walker. That's the one who walks straight down the middle of the sidewalk, not making any attempt to keep to one side on these tiny Village sidewalks, to allow on-comers to get by. Yep, there's walking and then there's commuting. There's even slang for the suburban mainland crowd that commutes in for a wild Friday night-the B and T crowd. That's bus and tunnel for those in the know. My pal, the sculptor-or is it sculptress?-Chris Linder is not a B & T person. She works and plays in the Village but, like many struggling artists, can't afford to live here, so she commutes. She likes to go out dancing till dawn and then return home to Queens to walk her dog, before she heads off to work again. Whew. That's a lot of commuting. She has shared a few of her commuting experiences with me: A man gave me his seat on the subway. I was surfing, riding the train wave. That's when it's too crowded to reach a pole but not crowded enough to hold you up-when there is nothing to hang on to and you hope the conductor won't stop short and hurtle you through the crowd. You have to bend your knees, stay loose and try to remain vertical through the rolls and pitches. It takes a certain amount of balance and concentration. So this man pulled on my sleeve and gave me his seat as he got off. Nice. I don't have a foot fetish. Somehow, one morning, I couldn't help but stare at a pair in front of me. I regularly check out people's shoes on the morning subway ride. Some days I just want to avoid eye-contact in such close quarters so I look at shoes. Shoes tell you a lot about people. The predominant shoe color on the subway is black. I could tell those toes in these particular shoes had seen a lifetime forced into pointy-toed high heels. The big toe was pushed over at a funny angle toward the center of the foot. The next biggest toe was crammed in between the big toe and the other three. The other three were grotesquely curved and overlaid successively over each preceding appendage. The toenails were painted a dark blood red. The shoe that encased these toes was made of thin black straps, fifteen of them. The straps were woven together in the center and continued up over the instep. The train pulled into the 49th street station and I had to pull myself away, 49th was my stop. Walking down the stairs to the N train platform at 59th and Lex can give you the creeps late at night. You never know what waits at the bottom-good news or bad. At 4 a.m. on a Thursday morning, I was surprised to find a large transit crew scrubbing the walls. They stood in the tracks and dipped wide scrub brushes on long handles into buckets of soapy water and scrubbed the tile walls over and over. Another worker came along, wearing an orange vest and carrying a pressure hose, and he rinsed the walls down. Whenever the foreman signaled a train arrival, the men scurried up wooden ladders to wait on the platform. When the train left, they repeated the process. I saw them wash the same section for 30 minutes. I once thought I saw the seven dwarfs at 77th and Lex. It was 2 a.m. on a Wednesday morning and I waited for the downtown 6 train. I heard whistling and looked up the tracks…and there were seven men and they walked down the middle of the subway tracks. They wore the signature orange vests and funny hats of subway workers and carried picks and shovels over their shoulders. As they went, they whistled a merry tune. They were the very definition of jaunty. From my elevated position, they looked shorter than average. As the 6 train approached, I realized they had no ladder. To my surprise, moments before the train pulled into the station, they stepped quickly over the scary part that can electrocute you and positioned themselves between the steel pillars. Once the train had pulled out of the station, they continued on their merry way. Another tale of the N train. The evening had been enchanting. We wanted to catch the last car on the N train home. We were hoping the last train would be empty. We wanted to be alone. No such luck, there were nine people, counting us, in the last car. A small, skinny, scruffy old man came in through the door of the preceding car and started to sing. The singing was awful. Another passenger, a big guy, weighing in at about two hundred and seventy-five pounds, told the singer to shut up. The vocalist replied that it was a free country and continued to wail. They yelled at each other, "shut up or I'll kick your ass," and "I'll sing if I want too." The big guy jumped up and threw the skinny guy into the seat opposite us and started to pound him. Everyone on the train looked the other way. I couldn't help my self, I jumped up. I started pulling on the tee shirt of the pounder and yelled, "Stop, stop!" My date then peeled me off the big guy, peeled the big guy off the little guy, and got everyone separated. I proceeded to tell the pounder, standing up to him in my little cocktail dress, that he should be ashamed of himself. My escort, much wiser to the ways of the subway than I, ushered me into the next car. To my surprise, the singer followed us and tried to pick a fight with my date. I then realized that all the while the singer had been cruisin' for a bruisin' and I had spoiled it for him. Everyone on that car had seen this immediately. Everyone except me. Link Yaco has written comic books for several publishers. He is currently working on a couple comics-related paperbacks. He has been a copywriter, technical writer, newspaper journalist, and magazine entertainment writer. He has a Masters' degree in Telecommunications and was a technical manager at MIT for five years. Link lives in West Greenwich Village with his wife, Susannah, a Senior Vice President at an independent film company. Check out his web page here Visit Link Yaco Home Page COPYRIGHT 1999 LINK YACO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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richard e. schiff,
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