When the train skips my usual stop, I start counting, trusting I won’t get down to one before I can exit the underground and be on my way.
It doesn’t stop.
I realize that the train isn’t even on the track near the platform. There’s no way I could get out. The bag on my shoulder suddenly gains ten pounds. Sweat beads my neck. The collective breath of these accumulated strangers putrefies.
The train skips the next stop, then the next. Finally, people begin to grumble aloud. So much for thinking it’s just you, that your ipod has condemned you to ignorance, that you must have missed an announcement. No. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, for there wasn’t any damn bell. No announcement. Silence. Ignorance doesn’t equal bliss.
I could be angry, but I have nowhere to go and only a faceless bureaucracy to blame. Man, some things in this city are so difficult. How can it take an hour and a half to travel two miles? Why does it take trips to three different grocery stores to get basic nourishment? The little things, which are ultimately the atoms, the building blocks, of the big things could be so much easier anywhere but here.
Someone says the train will stop at 145th Street. No one asks questions. How long has he been on the subway to have received such highly classified intelligence? Or is he one of them? Stammering tourists are looking at maps, dumbfounded, “Oh, God. We’re in Harlem.” They start to really miss Omaha and Plano.
The crowd gushes out of the sliding doors at 145th. People scramble for the exit stairs, clutching their bags desperately. One tourist asks which stairs she should take to go up. The MTA worker says they both work. On the downtown side of the tracks, I realize I’ve never seen so many white people in Harlem.
The man who exits the train, gangsta walking like he’s in no hurry but you better be, confirms this with a scowl that says, “What’s all these white folks doin’ up in here?!”
The tourists are freaking out. The locals are inconvenienced and aggravated. I’m a denizen of both worlds, laughing, shifting my bag to the other shoulder, and marveling at how I still want to be here. How I can’t wait to tell you.
I guess the lovely gent hadn’t heard of a little thing called “gentrification.”