Crazy Jamaican woman on the 4 train and it’s the end of the day. She sits in the corner facing the passengers encased in an oversized, poofy blue jacket.
“Dirty hands,” she repeats time and time again. “Been putting your hands all over your piece.”
“You talkin’ to me?!” the guy sitting next to me says. I think his reaction is a little too adamant, that perhaps he has been putting his hands all over his piece and he believes he has been found out.
“Naw,” his friend says. “Forget ’bout her. She’s crazy man.”
“I don’t give a fuck what she is. She better shut the hell up,” he says, now furious at the woman clear across on the other side of the train.
This really gets her going and she starts talking about how her, “Withcraft gonna turn your world upside down, you man with the dirty hands.”
An older man dressed in a khaki jacket and loose-fitting khaki pants then runs into the car and we are still at a standstill at Crown Heights/Utica. Already I feel like I am in a crazy house and I can’t escape. I need to take this train. At the top of his lungs, he starts explaining that he needs money for Jesus. “And don’t you know, any money you give to Jesus, I take 10%. 10% and the rest to Jesus,” he says, a sly grin on his face. Apparently, he meets up with Jesus later in the day to turn in his earnings. “Ya’ll need to accept Jesus into your hearts. This much is true. Give your money and support to Jesus and he’ll give it right back. But I’ll take my 10%. If you want to give, I’ll be in the car next door. Just come on over.” As if we will follow, dollars clenched in hands outstretched. And like that, he dashes off, a Jesus nymph of the subway tunnel.
The crazy woman wears a white scarf tied tightly across her head, big dark sunglasses, sits with her left leg crossed over right, remains silent as soon as the train begins to move and other people start getting on through the stop-starts of the train working its way down the tracks. Suddenly, she bursts into song but I can’t understand what she is saying. Her voice is muffled by the repetitive clanging of the train wheels against the crooked, rusty tracks.
Anybody that gets on hears her singing and moves to the other side of the car. People without their headph0nes to drown out her warblings simply look at one another and laugh. She is quickly marked as just another crazy person and will most likely be forgotten once they leave the train.
“I know somebody rich and famous too. I don’t blame you. I feel your aches and pains,” she says. I think to myself, if only for an instant, that she is speaking to me and it is my twisted ankle she speaks about. “I would do the same thing too. I feel your aches and pains.” She says this over and over again until the train drowns her out as we approach Bowling Green. With the overwhelming numbers of new people, she silences herself, sits quietly with her black sneakers, grooved white socks, messy and unkempt legs, long fingernails.
An older man in a London Fog walks in surrounded by four young men, short haircuts, business suits, extended cuffs and cheap but shiny shoes. The older man wears dark brown loafers well-polished, gray slacks that rest perfectly on the tops of his shoes. He wears a beige, red and white checkered golf hat, has white bushy eyebrows, kind gray-blue eyes, a shortly-cut white goatee beard, a brown cashew-shaped hearing aid under his left ear. Vericose veins on his rosy cheeks–perhaps he drinks heavily, perhaps it runs in his family. Red silken scarf adorns his neck, blue and white flowers very small, perfectly puffed out of the V of his jacket. He leans forward to talk to his boys, his followers, perhaps his students, perhaps his workers. They listen intently, lean in, crowd around him to protect him from the surging crowds, perhaps own him in a way but he smiles. He owns them right back.
The train continues, the characters are many. They are the normalities of the subway train in NYC.
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