Subway Story
I gave money to a stranger on my way home from work tonight, which I never do.
If you live in New York and you're a straphanger like me, you're no stranger to being solicited for money on the subway by a homeless or hungry person. When you take the same trains, you often see the same people. There’s one petite woman who I always see on the number 2 train, who walks through the cars and says in a fragile, Tourette's afflicted sort of way, "I’m sorry to bother you-can you spare a quarter-25 cents-sorry...I’m sorry to bother you-can you spare a quarter-25 cents-sorry...”
There are also several people I always see on the subway who were once homeless but are now working for the organization that helped take them out of a hopeless situation. They wear identification tags and they carry a box of food - bananas, sandwiches, juice - and a collection jar. They give the same speech; they've been trained well.
But tonight there was a man who I had never seen. He stepped onto my train carrying a gigantic black duffel bag and an oversized milk crate on his back. The bag was filled with sweatshirts, pants, and shoes and the crate was filled with all kinds of food and beverages. I could only imagine how heavy the load was. This tall wide man, who had to duck when stepping on to the subway car, did everything he could to set his things down gently so as not to disturb the passengers. Then he spoke in a voice that was like a cross between Barry White and Wolfman Jack. He said that he wasn't homeless, but that he had been. He wasn't part of any organization, but that he had spent much of the last ten years of his life carrying clothes and food that he had paid for with his own money or gathered through donations, and going from subway to subway in this way, long before anybody else was. He never stuck to the same trains, but moved around on all the different lines citywide.
He was serious and dedicated, but funny. He said once someone on the street gave him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, for which he was grateful, but he didn't have anything to drink. "Ever tried to eat a peanut butter sandwich without a beverage?" he asked. "If homelessness don't kill you that might about do it." He reminded passengers during his speech that homeless people don't usually plan on being in the situation they end up in.
"Do you think when they're little they said, 'Mommy, when I grow up I want to be homeless'?"
There was nothing that felt staged about what he said or what he did, nothing preachy or didactic. He seemed true; just got up everyday, got his stuff together and did it.
I rarely give money to people begging on the subway or on the street. I’d rather give food if I have something on me. But something about this man made me smile, and like the woman next to me and a couple of passengers across the aisle, I found myself digging in my pocket for a stray dollar.
When he'd collected all he could, and after he'd supplied an older man who looked awfully hungry with a banana and a soda, he slung his black bag filled with clothes over his shoulder and his food crate over his back without so much as a grunt. As he walked toward the sliding door that lead from one subway car to the other I heard him say in his Wolfman Jack voice, "They say that real people do the real thing." And with the clanging sound of the catch on that car door, he was gone.
