By AA Patawaran Like a typical train rider, though I hardly am, I’ve been taught to look extremely bored and uninterested aboard any train, whether the Métro in Paris or the MTR in Hong Kong. But in the New York Subway, back in the late 90s, when I was young and crazy enough to spend New Year’s Eve freezing in below zero weather in New York, I remember being fully engaged not only with my dearest friends, who embarked on this once-in-a-lifetime adventure with me, but also with a trainful of strangers on the commute from 42nd Street station just right after the historic drop of the sparkling Waterford “Let There Be Joy” crystal ball at Times Square. TELL ME HOW TO GET TO 86TH STREET Aside from greeting each other, white and black and brown and yellow, we were also sometimes giving each other a bear hug or shaking hands or smiling kindly with warm wishes at one another. The best part, however, was when, packed like sardines in one of about eight to 11 cars per train in subterranean New York, we just suddenly broke into songs, starting with the usual “Auld Lang Syne” and then, as if in search of something we knew in common or in a tribute to our common friends, New York City’s brownstone puppet residents, we all started singing, “Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?” Apparently, one way to get to Sesame Street, as I read somewhere much later, could be to take the 4, 5, 6 trains of the Lexington Avenue line all the way to the 86th Street subway stop. Better yet, we should have taken the A, B, or the 1 and 2 lines, for which the fictitious Sesame Street subway station was said to provide service, suggesting that Sesame Street most probably would be in the West Side. Or in Brooklyn, argued my friend, a quintessential New Yorker, implying that with the brownstone dwellings in the Upper West or the Upper East costing upward of a million dollars, why would they let Big Bird park his giant nest on their front entrances? On a February 2011 trip to New York, in time for the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, I decided to take the subway as much as I could, even trying but failing to avoid the yellow cab on my way to my Wall Street hotel from the John F. Kennedy airport, if only so I could have a better view of the fleeting New York minute, now you see it, now you don’t, as it exits with the masses through the Lexington Avenue gates of the Grand Central Terminal, where a free shuttle would have taken me to the doorstep of my hotel had I chosen to take the bus from JFK. The train system is nothing simple. Unlike Manhattan’s famous grid plan, which easily gives you an idea where you are and exactly how many blocks or streets away your desired destination is, the New York underground is a maze of 126 lines traveling to 468 stations in all of the metropolis’ five boroughs. Your guide through it is a collection of codes in the form of letters, such as the A, made popular by the jazz standard “Take the A train,” a favorite of jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald, and numbers, such as the 1 train, which runs between Van Cortlandt Park-242nd Street in Riverdale, Bronx and South Ferry in lower Manhattan. On the map, which proves as indispensable as a weeklong or month-long unlimited MTA pass for both hapless travelers and budget-conscious residents, there are color codes such as yellow, which is assigned to the BMT Broadway Line, more commonly known as the N, Q, R, and lime green, which is assigned to services outside Manhattan—the G line, to be exact, which refers to the IND Crosstown line between Western Brooklyn and northwestern Queens. You also need to know whether you are boarding a local train or an express one, as the latter, serving only major transfer points or destinations, is likely to skip your stop, if it were something like Spring Street in SoHo, where the A, for instance, doesn’t stop. ON A DOWNTOWN TRAIN As in Hong Kong’s MTR, you sometimes have to keep in mind the train’s general direction or final destination, such as whether it is going downtown or uptown, whether it is Manhattan-bound or Brooklyn-bound or Bronx-bound. Oh and, especially on the infamous C train, where changes are announced at the very last minute, you must take heed of the station service legends, those bullets that are sometimes a black dot, which means the train on the track stops at all times, or the circle with a round dot in the middle, which indicates that it does stop at all times, except late nights, or the circle whose circumference is in bold, which means it stops on weekdays only. If you feel overwhelmed by all these details, you are rightfully so and you are not alone. So there’s no need to be embarrassed by your confusion: Even the most subway-trained of New Yorkers must have been lost at one point or another in that tangle of signs, codes, and legends. Especially during weekends! I suppose that the New York City Transit Authority has the mistaken notion that people travel less outside of the workweek, so on Saturday or Sunday, when you are in the mood for a long walk in Central Park, expect service changes or closure of certain stops to give way to construction or repairs or upgrades. After five days on the A train shuttling between Fulton Street and my 66th Street-Lincoln Center stop in the Upper West Side, where the fall shows for Fashion Week were held, for instance, the weekend surprised me with a whole new route system, leaving me to walk beneath the financial district for half an hour from the Broadway-Nassau Street station to Chambers Street or Franklin Street following the signs to a train that would take me to 42nd Street, where, because some local trains had suddenly gone express, I had to return several times to get the right train to go further up to 59th Street-Columbus Circle. Incidentally, around the same time I was lost in the labyrinth that was the Times Square station complex on a Saturday, a 23-year-old man from Brooklyn, whose heart was broken and whose mind snapped, was on a crime spree that began at five in the morning the day before in his home in Brooklyn, where he stabbed his stepfather 11 times, and ended when he was caught in this station right after he stabbed his eighth and final victim, a clueless stranger on the 3 train. Of these eight victims, four perished, including his ex-girlfriend and her mother, and it did send shivers down my spine, though I doubt I would have paid him any attention had we crossed each other’s path, unless, of all people in New York’s busiest station complex, which served all of 58 million passengers in 2009 alone, I could have chosen to ask him for directions. SILENCE ON A CROWDED TRAIN But then again, I could not have asked him, if only on account of his skin color. On this last New York trip, I decided to conduct a little experiment, turning only to African-Americans when I needed help. I had no agenda, except to have more interaction with them because—come to think of it!—outside of books, movies, and music, I did not know one black person in my life. I did this experiment for a little more than a week and the good news was, 10 out of 10, to think that I would choose the least friendly of them, sometimes even the homeless, I found them to be very accommodating, often going out of their way to get me answers. One of them, who seemed to be an artist, dreadlocks and all, even made a point of catching my eye from the other end of a crowded train to signal that it was my stop and I shouldn’t miss it. After this mayhem weekend, when lost on Christopher Street at four in the morning after a late night with friends, I had no one else to ask but this burly white man, all of six and a half feet or so, who was disposing off garbage in a street corner. He did not even bother to look at me. Either that, or he was very, very deaf because the street was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. He was not the last white man to ignore my pleas for help, but then maybe I was setting them up because, as part two of my social experiment, after that incident on Christopher Street, I decided, whenever any help was needed, to turn to the least sophisticated-looking white American around—a redneck or a hillbilly or white trash, if you would please pardon my French.  The results were in no way conclusive, as it was based purely on my uninformed judgment of appearances, but I am confident, on account at least of my interaction with the African-Americans, that in a place like New York, where you have a feeling you could get pushed aside in the never-ending rush, people, in general, would stop and listen if you had something to say. This was not my first trip to New York, but it was my first true taste of the subway, which proved to be as good a journey as any or, depending on your point of view and the object of your search, even a better destination, much more alive and animated and interactive, if you would ditch the earphones or the book for a while, than, say, the American Museum of Natural History. More than mere adventure, there was a sense of danger, such as when, at two in the morning, I waited for an express train for what seemed like an interminably long time at the lower level of the Columbus Circle station. The platform was deserted, save for me and a drunken mess, a heavily built black woman, who was spewing invectives and throwing up all over the place. At the back of my mind, a cab was only two flights of stairs away, but, as I wrote on my Facebook via iPod, if only to keep my mind off the possible risks, I thought I should act like a New Yorker and “have no fear, care not at all, never stare, and hold my ground.” MUSIC UNDER NEW YORK There was also art, a lot of it, that is, if you don’t keep your eyes glued on the signboards. On a train from the 28th Street-Broadway station, I let a puppeteer, a Dustin Hoffman lookalike, entertain me on the ride back to my hotel. At Union Square, I stopped, looked, and listened to a band singing the likes of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair,” Terry Jack’s “Seasons in the Sun,” and Don McLean’s “American Pie” so engagingly that judging from the number of people watching them during the rush hour, they might as well have staged a concert at the Bitter End on Bleecker Street, which plays great folk, country, and rock music for a cover charge of up to $15 on weekend nights. These musicians and performers, like the twin-looking ballerinas wearing crowns of flowers at the 66th Street-Lincoln Center station, are no mere solicitors, although I did suspect that the ballerinas were from the American School of Ballet at the nearby Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts moved simply by the moment to mimic the cast of 2005’s Rent dancing on the F train. Like their counterparts at the Métro de Paris, most performers in the New York underground have official permission to share their music in choice locations of the subway. Under the New York City Transit Authority’s Music Under New York program or MUNY, which has been in effect since 1987, eligible bands, duets, trios, and soloists are invited to a one-day live audition every year for a chance to participate in over 150 weekly performances at 25 locations throughout the transit system. Of the New York rapid transit system’s 468 stations, none could match the beauty of the Louvre-Rivoli station of the Paris Métro, replete with replicas of certain works of art found at the Louvre, but there is beauty enough in certain ceramic tile works and friezes that sometimes date back to when the subway first opened with 28 stations in 1904. Once in a while, the “Arts for Transit” program also commissions artists like the late American painter and printmaker Elizabeth Murray, whose large scale mosaic mural, Blooming, covers all four walls of a mezzanine at the Lexington Avenue-59th Street station. The soul of New York is, indeed, so ensconced in its underground attractions that in the movies, especially in movies about dreams coming true or falling apart, the subway is as New York in character as the apartment of Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly at East 71st Street in 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In trying to capture the city’s dreamlike qualities, many a movie has given the New York underground quite a pivotal role in their storylines, such as in 1998’s Great Expectations, where Ethan Hawke’s Finnegan Bell discovers the very last piece of his New York puzzle, the fulfillment of his greatest fantasies, aboard an early morning train in Manhattan or in 1978’s Superman, where Christopher Reeve’s human adversary, Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor, lives in a rich man’s high-tech playground beneath the Grand Central Station. In 2010’s Black Swan, while losing grip of her ambition, just when it has been delivered to her on a silver platter, Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers confronts multiple reflections of herself on the glass pane of a subway window as she begins her descent to the depths of depression in a world as fast, as loud, as confining as a rickety old train traveling at the maximum speed of 72 kilometers per hour. These are countless other movies that featured New York beneath the ground, such as 1971’s French Connection, where a breathtaking chase scene underneath an elevated line in Brooklyn was filmed famously without permission. Even Marilyn Monroe has to attribute part of her immortality to the subway grate that blew her skirt in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch. SUBWAYS ARE FOR SLEEPING But outside the celluloid world, even without the benefit of cinematography, lighting effects, and camera angles, the New York subway, to me, is some kind of visual poetry, with a stark realism you would associate with corroded steel, graffiti on the wall, the occasional rat the size of a small cat crossing the track, a globe lamp at a station entrance flickering at twilight, or the rumble of trains hurtling by. It is no longer as dangerous as it was in the ’70s or the ’80s or so I was told, but it still has none of that toughened glass safety barrier between the platform edge and the track that is now in place in modern subway stations in cities like Singapore and Hong Kong and parts of the Paris Métro to keep crazy, desperate people from jumping in front of speeding trains. In some perverse way, it appealed to me that each of my New York trains left it up to me to decide whether or not hurling myself at them as they passed would be a good way to reach my final destination. I enjoyed standing on the edge or sitting on a wooden bench watching the people on the opposite platform, the Wall Street types in their camel suits at Broad Street, the shopaholics in their knee-high boots at Fifth Avenue-59th Street station in mid-town Manhattan, the students with their dreamy eyes at Eighth Street-New York University in Greenwich Village, the artist types in their mojo wraparound skirts at 23rd Street in Chelsea. I found it curious, but I didn’t mind at all that not all stations would have a restroom and, in the middle of the night, in many stations, such as the Columbus Circle station at two in the morning, when I could take comfort in the presence of a station guard, no subway authority or officer would be in sight. How refreshing, too, that in a highly commercial city like New York, the only commercial nook in most subway stations, even the busiest station complexes like Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall/Chambers Street or Seventh Avenue, would be, if at all, a newsstand or a magazine kiosk and, in the ad spaces at the stations and in the trains, instead of lipstick or battery or mobile phone advertising, I noticed more promotional materials on upcoming theater performances or dances or concerts or workshops for children as well as campaigns on health, freedom, political reform, or spiritual redemption. Lost in this underground world, crushed in the swarm of commuters, confounded by the signs, tired from all the transfers, and sleepy from all the waiting, I did wish we had something as complex as the New York Subway in Manila. But our train system only began in 1984, when the first half of the Yellow Line of the Light Rail Transit ran from Baclaran in Pasay City to Central Terminal in old Manila. We would need another 80 years to be at par with the New York Subway in terms of history and in terms of having a greater number of us from all walks of life participate in defining our city at street level, below or above it, if only by putting us all together cheek by jowl in crowded trains in our daily commute to and from work or leisure. It does make sense, doesn’t it? After all, as I read on a poster in a train bound for Harlem with a stop at 125th Street on my last night in New York, “a city is only as good as its mass transit system.”   Author’s note: This article was written in 2011, first published in Sense&Style. The New York subway has since undergone major changes, but it remains the same in terms of character.