Tuesday February 20, 2007.
Tuesdays are very hectic for me. I have class from 8:40am-1:00pm immediately followed by a six-hour shift at a cafe in Center City where I serve coffee to fancy business men. The coffeehouse is currently becoming a franchise and I am standing in the middle of this transition, very much put out. But that's another story. Today's story is about the many subway rides I endure on Tuesdays - this Tuesday in particular.
Around 1pm, I was descending the slippery, grimy stairs of the Orange Line at Cecil B. Moore amidst a throng of fellow Temple students I will never know. Through the thick din of dozens of voices I heard a woman conversing loudly with what I thought was another person. Perfect timing would reveal, however, that she was just boisterously conversing with herself; as we both reached the turnstile simultaneously.
She halted, briefly blocking my path, so I halted too. Then, with a contemptuous look back at somebody, maybe nobody, she hopped over the turnstile. A starling buzz blared from overhead to alert the SEPTA drone that someone skipped out on paying. The drone lazily peered out through the smudged glass that enclosed him and did nothing more.
The woman, dressed in over-sized, mis-matched mens clothes and a backwards baseball cap, had vanished on the crowded platform. I walked in the opposite direction and settled down on a cold, more-diseased-than-I-want-to-know bench and was thankful for my iPod: The mute button to my annoying crowd.
So there I sat. Waiting, waiting, waiting. When the Southbound train finally arrived I slipped in to the car huddled in the tight security of other people's shoulders.
I sat down, my thumb idly whirring the click wheel to find a suitable song when I heard it: that shrill voice shouting at no one...no one we could see anyway. She had entered my car and as our train steadily rocked down the tracks, she swaggered down the aisle. "EXCUSE ME CAN I SIT?" she cried, though there were many available seats. She slumped down across from me as I discretely lowered the volume of my earbuds so I could better hear her.
"I ain't never sold nothin'. I ain't ever sold MY pussy for money. I ain't a hoe! I won't suck ya dick!"
I turned the volume back up. My mute button. But I continued to watch her and the people around her. A woman with a kind face kept gazing around the car, her eyes wide, as if to make sure other people were hearing this. Occasionally she smiled and shook her head, as if it was a child who didn't know any better were speaking.
I intermittently phased in and out of her soliloquy; the unsteady orange plastic floor her stage, the ugly fluorescent bulbs her spotlight.
"I pay my own way! I pay my bills! I pay my rent! My family don't help me, my family don't love me. DON'T MENTION MY FAMILY! It's just me! Just me!"
Her words resonated in the silent car. I could connect her dots a little now and I felt sorry for her.
By this time a young woman had entered the car with her young daughter in a stroller. Two contrasting visions, parallel before me. I glanced back and forth from the toddler, smiling and safe, to the tormented woman still raging on. It was like watching this woman's life in fast forward. An innocent child to a battered adult, all because of circumstance.
To cover the woman's shouts and incessant references to genitalia, the young mother began to sing the Barney theme song.
"I love you, you love me." ... "They ain't never loved me! Never helped me!"
Their words clashed until the the train stopped at City Hall, where the woman exited, but not before calling someone in her way a faggot. Some people laughed - astonished or uncomfortable, or perhaps relieved that she was gone. I thought about her for a while that day. I felt sad. But more importantly, I hoped that mother would keep on singing that song to her daughter.
