Lots of people sleeping on the 4 train today. More than I’m used to seeing. Maybe they stand out more because it’s Saturday and less crowded, or maybe it’s because I switched subway cars twice on the ride downtown from 59th Street, this exposing myself to more of the homeless’ slumber.
I have never so much as lain down on a subway, or gotten much more comfortable than propping my feet up, which I don’t think you’re supposed to do. I once peed onto a subway platform when the train was at a station and the doors were opened. The conductor saw me and tried to scold me but mostly she ended up being conciliatory, saying “When you gotta go you gotta go.” This may have been New Years Eve, or it may have been just some random night in 1990-something. The subway was empty at the moment. I was with a friend who immediately reacted aghast when I flipped out my junk and just started pissing hard and far. I knew then and know now it was a wrong and inappropriate, selfish thing to do but my memory of the robustness of the piss stream confirms in my conscience that I really, really had to go.
Yeah, it’s been on my mind all these years. Uh huh. I pay my fare, unlike a lot of people, and I try to be the best straphanger I can be, even without the straps. I do often feel like it’s a team effort, riding a subway car. But that’s just a figment. There is no team. No one cares about anyone but themselves.
A friend texted me to ask if I knew anything about the closure of Rainey Park in Astoria. It reminds me that I rarely visit my old haunts anymore. Who has time? I did happen to know that Rainey was closed, for a year, as happened some years previous when they closed the park for a full fucking year just so they could put in a bike path.I used to get to Rainey Park 4 or 5 times a month, I guess. I don’t really know how often I went there but it was a frequent destination. I love the waterfront, even if you only get at it from a discrete distance. The shit people dump into that area is often surprising. For years there was an old payphone which had its coinbox torched. A lot of shopping carts from the neighboring Costco. I used to dump my old dead hard drives in there just to give myself something to check in on when I went to that park. I quickly realized the folly of this when I witnessed a kid climb the fince and step down onto the river bed where he picked up my hard drive and took it home. In the moment it seemed shocking but that reaction faded. It stands to reason that someone who sees a shiny object in the river might be interested enough to pick it up. I had no owrries about the content of the drive, even though I was certain that it was unusable anyway. But if this kid somehow had forensic skills to summon content from dead hard drives he would have found a whole lot of piano music downloaded from Usenet. I seem to remember there being a conspicuous quantity of Glenn Gould audio on that drive.
