The idea, the promise of sleep became sleep itself long before the train reached young Sam’s stop. When it did, he was far away in another place, a place where work, love, happy hour, all came together as he wanted them to, but as he slept, in fact, one more thing, his journey home, had fallen apart.
When he awoke the train was nearly empty. No more of the young kids, his fellow Williamsburg compatriots. They were gone and all that was left were poorly dressed and tired Brooklynites–of questionable ethnic origins– heading home to the far reaches of the city. He began to get nervous, the train gave no indication of what stop they were approaching. He wanted to ask someone, but they stared at him like one does who barely speaks English. Sam realized that he had fallen asleep and rode the train to another planet.
“Broadway Junction”
When the train stopped at Broadway Junction, Sam left with the few others, though where they were tired, he was terrified. He followed them up the station’s steps, trying to disappear into them, trying to make those who had been on the train with him his gang. But as they reached the street, everyone but him dispersed, leaving him alone in this foreign land.
The streets were dirty, even by New York standards. Heaps of trash, of newspapers, of plastic cups, of beer cans, lay strewn on the ground occasionally being blown in circular motions by the wind. The shops, none of whose names Sam recognized, half of them were bolted shut, with the steel drapes firmly and irreversibly in place, as if they were never raised. There was no Starbucks, no Dunkin Donuts, no Bank of America, nothing which he could recognize, but instead independent shops selling god-knows-what all named after their proprietors, with Spanish subtitles beneath.
All he had to do was cross the street and go home, a street with few cars in it. He walked slowly to the cross walk, groups of men, black and Hispanic, stood around with no stated purpose, stopping to stare at him when he came by. He reached the corner, where an old defeated lady watched him, and he waited for the light to change. The whole place began to have a different smell than anything he was used to. He crossed the cracked street, feeling more exposed in the middle then he had felt on the side. What was this place?
He reached the other side, and it’s entrance to the station home, which he ascended with something of a run, or maybe a skip. And safely home he went to Williamsburg, leaving the New York, that wasn’t New York.
Have you considered Subscribing to all of this madness?
