Sep 16th, 2008
This ain’t no train
This ain’t no train!
This is a ten-carriage condominium, and I live here to hide from my wife.
If yo’d seen her you’d know why.
That lady is three-eighty-nine pounds, and that’s on the weekend!
She so fat she wears size sixty-four jeans.
Her ass is so big it’s like she got twelve stomachs…
Twenty stomachs.
Damn!
This was a little bit of street-poetry from a subway ride in New York. It’s not from the guy in the photo above - he was just a photogenic sight (and the guy with a guitar on the far platform made it seem like I was taking a photo of a busker, not stalking random passengers - otherwise I’m not that good at getting candid street-photos).
I was on the subway train heading uptown from lower Manhatten towards Harlem, fairly late at night. The coaches rumble and grate, and the usual mixture of strangers keep their eyes from meeting and keep to themselves. Many of the faces on this train were black, as is often the case on the subway, but I wasn’t exceptional in being white either.
There is so much noise from the motion of the train that any other sounds generally get ignored, but gradually I became aware of a voice forcing its way through the wall of sound. I thought for a while that it was a workman’s radio or walkie-talkie, as there were a couple of guys in fluorescent vests and hard-hats in the coach. But they began looking around too, and eventually we realised that there was a man - middle-aged, black (just so you know), and slaloming from hand-rail to hand-rail - who had given himself the job of entertainer to the train.
Everyone resolutely ignored him, but he made it hard not to smile to myself. He didn’t seem drunk, or intoxicated on anything more pernicious than ego, but he managed to make his voice travel through the whole length of the train carriage.
I made sure I remembered some of his spiel and wrote it down as soon as I got off the train and back to my hostel. Gasp, yes in Harlem. No, I didn’t know that was where the hostel was before I went. Yes there are lots of black people there. No I didn’t get shot / knifed / mugged / jumped /inducted into a gang / sold drugs or preached at. I didn’t even hear any jazz being played on a sax by a soulful skinny black dude in red and white spats on a street corner. More’s the pity. In the evenings there were often groups of women sitting on folding chairs on the sidewalk in front of their apartment buildings, and posses of young guys in baggie basketball clothes and blinging neck chains (much like young people from Lewisham to Wolverhampton, but these guys are the ones all those are imitating) standing talking to them. I did overhear the odd “fo’ sho’” and reference to one-another as “blood” and “bro”. How splendidly quaint and authentic.
At one point I was walking along one such street in the dark, on my own, looking rather like a tourist with my shorts and backpack and sunhat and camera and map and soda bottle and inflatable Statue of Liberty… OK, maybe not that bad, but I was pretty white. Then there was a whistling-squeal sound followed by a crack and smash. Was that squealing tyres and gun shot? A drive-by shooting?! It didn’t sound more than a few hundred metres away. Then again. Hmm. No, actually, it was a few fireworks.
And a couple of miles away downtown there are sights more like this:
How shiny.
