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System | Jan 07 2002

My system is this. If I’ve made it to China Star when I hear an approaching J train, I run for it. If not, I let it go.

So I was a good 100 feet short of China Star this time, which meant letting it go, only I was late, having left late, so I hesitated.

What to do? Danna, my dinner date, might very well be late herself—not late late but late, which is partly why I left late: my feeling that Danna would likely keep me waiting.

Problem is, Danna is unpredictable: sometimes she’s late, sometimes not. Or perhaps she’s late more often than not, but only ten or fifteen minutes late when she is, which to some people is not late enough to even count as late, although neither does it count as being on time, exactly.

My point here is that if I let the train go, I would be stuck waiting the fifteen minutes or so until the next train, which, together with the fact that I had left late, would put me solidly in the late late category, which is to say later than Danna, which is something that I would feel pretty shitty about. It’s not the being-later-than-Danna part that would bother me, but the late late part, or that coupled with the being-later-than-Danna part. Basically I have a rule that it’s fucking rude and selfish to keep other people waiting; although admittedly that rule is it not stated in the traditional form of a rule. (Another such rule of mine: people who don’t help their friends are scum.)

Of course I’m being misleading when I speak of “letting the train go.” My system is born of experience. If you run for the train from some point before China Start, you haven’t much chance of catching it. Basically you need everything to break your way in that case, and even then the odds are against you. And here I hadn’t even reached the dumpster! Never have I tried to run before reaching the dumpster. It would be lunacy, really.

On the other hand, why not try? Would it be so terrible, so shameful, to run for a train and miss that train and have the people who just got off that train look at you like you’re ever so slightly a loser? Why not run anyway and thereby put yourself in the position to possibly catch the train if the train sits in the station a little longer than usual, perhaps because some kids are fucking with the doors?

It took me perhaps two seconds to weigh these things in my head, the pros and the cons, and then I took off, swinging my bag from my back and tucking it under my arm, running back style. As I did this, I consciously chose to carry my bag under my left arm, anticipating the need for my subway pass, which I keep in my front right pocket.

At Marcy and Broadway, I turned right, taking a wide line around the corner deli for fear of colliding with eastbound pedestrians. Then I dodged two homeless guys having soup outside the chicken place and made a bee-line for the stairs.

I was wearing, I should say, my long winter coat, which is not ideal for running, the extra material flapping wildly behind me. Not that there was anything to be done about that.

The stairs to the J are across from the hairdresser, a mere ten stores or so from the corner. They’re made of metal, the stairs are, with a metal railing, and they head up, not down, as the J is elevated in Brooklyn.

The moment I saw them, the stairs, I realized that I should have swung my bag under my right arm, not my left, because I was going to need my left hand free to grab that railing and turn myself around. Realizing this, I switched the bag back to right arm, as running backs do when they want to keep the football away from would-be tacklers. This cost me some fraction of a second, for I am not practiced, as running backs are, in this maneuver, and needed to slow a bit.

About fifteen feet from the stairs, I slowly a bit more, but not much, then grasped the railing with my left hand and swung myself, coat flying, bag held out from my body, onto the stairs, which, if it is not clear, headed in opposite direction from the one I had been running.

Whoosh.

The stairs are broken into two sections, separated by a brief landing, and these sections are long, perhaps twenty steps each, with poor footing, the grooved metal worn to smoothness from decades of traffic.

I went full out, taking two steps at a time and saying the word ATTACK! in my head, over and over. (It’s a cycling thing: you “attack” the mountain.)

At the top of stairs, still running, I slipped my pass from my pocket. The train, I saw, was parked in the station, doors open; some of its former passengers had reached the turnstile.

My only chance, if I had one, was a perfect swipe. Sadly, though, I’m a lousy swiper and often have to try it three or four times before it works. I don’t know why this is, that is, what I do wrong, but the fact is, it’s unusual for me to get it on the first try.

I had been thinking about this on the stairs, preparing myself for what lay ahead. The train, I knew, was already in the station (I could hear the doors open as I climbed), so I knew I had to cut corners, if corners remained, to have any chance. Thus I resolved to skip the part where you wait to see if the swipe has worked, and to instead push the turnstile and keep running. If the swipe didn’t work, I would smash into the turnstile, which would no doubt piss off the booth person and might even hurt, but this was a chance, I decided, I was willing to take.

I should say that getting the pass out was not as simple as it sounds, for the pants I was wearing are a little tight at the entrance to the pocket. Of course I would have gotten the pass ready on the stairs (I usually do this at China Star!), but it seemed that I needed my arms free to stay balanced as I climbed.

Oh, and then I had to turn the pass so that it was oriented correctly for the machine, there being four different ways to orient a pass, not counting numerous crazy ways.

Both of these things, getting the pass from my pocket and orienting it correctly, went perfectly, ten on a scale of ten, my years of subway riding serving as inadvertent training for this moment.

I swerved past an outgoing passenger, angled for the end turnstile, swiped the pass, and pushed.

It gave.

Baby.

Ah, but just then the train door closed half way, then three-quarters way (this part was happening in slow motion), then seven-eighths way… and still I kept running, thinking that sometimes that door re-opens before it closes, it’s a quirk I’ve never understood, a little glitch in the system, maybe it’s something the conductor does, or maybe it’s just a mechanical hiccup… and then it happened: the door opened again, and quickly closed.

Between opening and closing, I was in.

A woman facing the door gave me a big smile (she had witnessed the dramatic last few seconds), so I smiled back.

My impulse was to run through the train, high-fiving all the passengers, maybe waving my bag like a flag, the whole compartment stomping its feet in unison and whooping it up.

Instead I sat down and removed my scarf.