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Last week, uptown 1 train, 50th Street. Taking up fully half the doorway and immovable as an oak is a prim middle-aged lady. She doesn’t make the slightest move to slide out of the way of the dozen people who have to frantically scramble around her in the five seconds before the sadistic conductor sounds his little warning bell as a polite notice that the least-aggressive amongst us is about to get bisected by closing doors.
The fight to burst through this narrow space yields a micro-Pamplona. Bags are caught on belts. Shoulders ram into skulls. Ankles get tangled like twigs that have just been raked together, although we’re all jammed in so tightly that there’s no room for anyone to fall to the floor.
There is grousing and oof-ing, possibly some mild hemorrhaging. All of this to gain space on a train that, we realize in a sweaty daze once we’re aboard and have separated our bodies into discrete life forms, is mostly empty.
As punishment for the lady, I reach into my extensive catalog of dirty looks and deliver one of my favorites (No. 31, the Cheney). She maintains a look of tranquil innocence that betrays no hint of the savagery she has just unleashed.
Call this a victory for feminism, I guess. Normally when you try to enter a train, it’s a guy the width of a love seat who is planted in the doorway, as if he’s a bouncer and the train is his personal club on rails. Sometimes two of these rhino-dudes stand side by side, and you have to turn to your narrowest angle (shoulder first) and try to slide between the two mounds of flesh. And when you’re trying to get off the train, it’ll be like fighting your way upstream against the tide of humanity trying to board before anyone’s gotten off.
Scenes such as the ones I describe are happening thousands of times a day, every day across New York — the Big Grapple. Why? How hard is it to get away from the doors? The city is stocked with people who advocate for community programs, vote for ever-increasing collective action at the local, city, state and federal level — then step one inch onto the train and instantly turn human roadblock against their neighbors.
Yes, yes, I know: You grew up in New York in the ’70s, didn’t you? Tough guy.
Do tell: You were robbed every day on the way to school, then murdered each afternoon on the way home. Man-eating anacondas roamed Central Park, there were citywide blackouts every Tuesday and Saturday, and people who lived in housing projects in the South Bronx used to fire cannons at passersby below. No one is disputing that New York City could be, and used to be, much worse.
But is “no longer all that likely to be stabbed” the standard to which we all should aspire? We’re supposed to be the capital of the world, A-number one, top-of-the-heap — a “luxury product,” in Bloombergian parlance. Couldn’t we do a little better?
Nobody is making you live here. You could be in Missoula. Hell, you could live in an ordinary suburb in the single most densely populated state, New Jersey, and still enjoy 10 times the personal space we get in the city.
But here square feet are so precious, your body is like a car would be anywhere else. Would you drive aboard a ferry and stop on the ramp?
To be a New Yorker is to sign a social contract: You live here because this is the biggest possible stage upon which to show off your individuality, but in return you agree to a minimal base of shared values and behaviors.
One: Pause to let the tourists take pictures of each other. Two: No eye contact on the subways. Three: If someone’s rushing for the elevator you’re in, pretend to hit the “doors open” button.
A city of 8 million can’t function unless we’re all at least minimally aware of the presence of many, many others. That means not stopping suddenly on the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue and creating a six-pedestrian pileup. That means not riding your bike around the narrow jogging patch circling the Central Park Reservoir. That means understanding that texting in a theater is as polite as screaming during a wedding.
Yet there’s something especially barbarous about the subways, something that makes otherwise highly civilized people re-enact “Game of Thrones.” Maybe when human density is close to being maxed out, the momentary desperation for a few square inches of space to call our own means we might all just as well be wearing furs and carrying clubs. And yet somehow we persist in thinking that it’s those awful Texans who are knuckle-dragging yahoos.
kyle.smith@nypost.com