Traveling With the Masses

Nov. 26, 1997

This year in New York City a law was passed requiring taxi cabs to play a recorded message every time the meter is started and stopped. This means that just as you are telling the driver your destination you must either shout to be heard or wait for some celebrity — usually Eartha Kitt or Jackie Mason — to finish advising you about seat belts; later, when you’re about to wish the driver a nice day, you have to endure a reminder about taking your receipt. You hear the same recordings over and over, month after month, the same dull joke told exactly the same wa,y time after time after time.

I grumbled about this to a cab driver yesterday, an Asian guy with a pretty good command of broken English. “Think about me,” he said. “I hear him [Jackie Mason] five hundred times a day.” I laughed and he continued, grateful for a chance to get this off his chest. “I didn’t use to think much about him,” the cab driver said. “But now, if I see him sometime I want to run him over.”

Another amusing thing happened later the same day as I was riding the subway. But first you need a little background. Every subway car has two copies of the subway map, one posted at each end of the car. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when you want to look at the map there is someone sitting right in front of it. This is true whether there are 50 people in the car or just three of you. No one knows why, but people gravitate to the one seat where they stand a good chance of being in someone else’s way, even though that seat is no better than any other seat and no one enjoys a stranger breathing on your neck while they try to figure out that damn confusing map.

A certain etiquette has grown up around this. When you need to look at the map you kind of ease up to it with an exaggerated squint, giving the seated stranger a few moments of advance warning that you’re coming in close, and why. Seeing them get the hint, you say, “Excuse me, I need to...” or “I’m sorry, but...” and that is enough. You don’t need to finish the sentence.

The seated person then smiles a little or gives a sharp nod or stares straight ahead as if you don’t exist — depending, as in many things here, on a variety of economic, racial and personality factors — but in all except the rarest cases the seated person will then lean sideways a little, mostly at the neck, and wait for the map-reader to finish with “thank you,” “thanks” or some vague grunt or sigh, all of which mean, in this circumstance, the same thing.

In this irritating, difficult, overcrowded city it’s what passes for a Hallmark moment. Two strangers conducting a necessary transaction with some degree of mutual courtesy.

Of course, this puts two strangers — sometimes wildly mismatched strangers — in what feels and looks like the moment before the exchange of a kiss or some intimate secret. It’s uncomfortable for everyone in the vicinity.

Now, it’s acceptable, when you’re the person blocking the map, to scoot into an adjacent empty seat as long as you make very, very clear that you are doing it out of sheer courtesy. It must not be implied that the map-reader seems dangerous, smells bad, or has made an unreasonable demand. All of this May seem overly careful, but that’s the way certain things work here. We all know the drill and everyone but the biggest assholes cooperate. Everyone needs that map sometime.

So you will sometimes see a passenger move to the next seat to make the map fully available to someone, but you never see what I and the guy next to me and the guy zeroing in on the subway map saw yesterday. The woman who was sitting in front of the map — an attractive woman with long, exposed legs crossed in a ladylike way — instantaneously slid two seats down with no apparent effort on her part. It was as if she were seated on a magic carpet and gave it a mental signal to relocate her.

“You didn’t have to move that far away,” said the standing stranger, surprised.

“I didn’t mean to move that far,” said the woman, equally surprised.

What had happened was, the train had lurched forward at the exact moment when the women began raising her hips to edge sideways. Inertia did the rest.

It was so peculiar — such an exuberance of courtesy, and so magically rendered — that the four of us could not help looking at one another over and over and laughing. The woman was a little embarrassed and got off at the next stop — Maybe for that very reason. The standing guy, long finished with the map by now, said to me and the fellow seated next to me, “Who says New Yorkers aren’t polite.”

We couldn’t get over it. Every few seconds one of us would see it again in our minds and laugh. That woman, sitting there in a proud ladylike way, suddenly issuing sideways, and the man at the map straightening up in surprise, thinking for a moment he had done something terribly frightening. A moment like this can make New York seem sweet as a summer carnival, and the feeling can last for days, even weeks. Four or five incidents of this quality can make for a pretty good year. 

~ Email to Linda Beaver, Nov. 26, 1997