Going through old piles of writing…this, from 1988…yes…1988….it feels like i have written forever and forever and forever , and my stacks of old writing tell me that feeling has a basis in reality……….
The Road to Riches 7/7/1988 Thursday
(on a stained, wrinkled page from a legal pad of pink, blue- lined paper written in black ballpoint ink)
As I descend this morning from the busy morning sidewalk to the Broadway and 104th street subway token booth in this steamy summer time, I am met
abruptly with a wall of warm, too-often-breathed air that is like a tight -fitting wool glove or sweater against heat-prickled skin. At first my lungs don’t believe the insult , the stoppage of fresh free-flowing air, but then…as i do with everything else in New York City, I adjust and soon, the stultifying subway atmosphere seems all too normal.
I see the rush-hour token line, long with people full of regret for not getting their extra fares last night on their way home from work when there was no line. Smugly, I put one of my 4-left-for-the-week in the turnstile slot and am on my way…to what?? No subway insight and the downstairs platform is even more of an oven crowded with people.
One day, I vow, I will never take another subway.
A car with a courteous driver will pick me up in air-conditioned comfort and that Anglo-Saxon English -accented driver will soothe me with a bottle of cold icy water and a radio station playing my favorite classical symphonies. No need to speak because he knows where i am going. To my tv studio to shoot my tv show…..but right now….
Summer time in the City turns me into everything I despise in others.
I decide to wait on the upper platform because it is slightly cooler , though because i cannot miss the train when it finally does come, i actually wait on the stairway, a few steps down. I lean on the railing and this brings me eye-level with a grocery shopping cart stuffed to overflowing with newspapers, old clothes, bottles and bags. I have intruded into someone’s bedroom, it seems.
I look around and finally see, huddled in a dirty, white-tiled corner, the obvious tenant of the cart/apartment: a middle-aged woman who does not seem like she has been on the street for very long at all…she exudes a semblance of order and cleanliness.
I wondered what her story was. How she got there. What her family was like. How she found her shopping cart. ….and what determined its contents. She wasn’t begging. She was watching.
At that moment, from below, a jazz trio started its morning offering. They WERE begging , but their music was really lovely. Excellent jazz, in fact. And I am caught by the contrast of the squalor I see and the beauty I hear.
Because of the music, I almost regret when the #1 train pulls in, but I am glad for the release my lungs feel as they breathe in the air-conditioned cool of the crowded car.