Passing Time with Strangers

I have long since resolved to always have a book on hand whenever I take mass transit.  The trouble I have with my eyes on the sidewalk triples when I'm placed in a cramped car with a work wearied legion.  So my eyes stay glued to the page, except for the occasional busker, hammer fight, or drunk-girl late-night throwdown.  

This really just gives my peripheral vision a great work out.  I'm able to read and process what's on the page while still taking in small glimpses of my surroundings.   I get to wonder for a minute why a girl in head-to-toe make-up wouldn't paint her fingernails.  Or like the time I was reading Franny and Zooey on the A train back from SOHO-- in the olden days when I lived in the tippy-top of Manhattan-- and attempt to keep my eye on the page even though a crew of high latino gay twenty-somethings decide to populate the seats around me and just stare at me. This one was bizarre enough to make me wonder 1) am I also high? 2) do gay latino twenty-somethings usually travel in packs? 3)why is Mrs. Glass in the bathroom with Zooey?  

There were also the kids with the camcorder on their way to the beach who took the time to turn the camera on each of the other passengers and narrated their assessment: Here we found her, fresh from the milk carton-- about the skinny midwestern girl with Manic Panic hair passed out with her head against the window; Powder-- about the pale bald man sitting next to me; Clark Kent-- about me; Chef Boyardee-- about the fat man over-flowing the seat perpendicular to mine, my knee was inescapably nestled into his warm soft thigh... and on and on.  And no one said a thing back to them. 

The pack of gay latino guys stayed on the train for about eight stops-- no short amount of time to be stared at.  The girl with the unpainted nails stayed on for one stop.  I got off of the train before the beach kids.  The people disappear, along with the imagined scenario that explains them. 

Eyes on the Sidewalk

Community is what happens with your eyes when you walk down a busy sidewalk.  It may seem appropriate to look at your fellow pedestrians, but this can lead to brief, intense eye contact that may or may not have a life-threatening edge to it.  Looking is not recommended for all neighborhoods.  Most of the time you will find the bland expression of a body in transit.  Other times you can find some sublime little in-roads into the lives of total strangers.  

The supercilious, the doomed, the cantankerous, the lost, the famous pretending to be nonchalant. I can cast expert side glances and take in the full amazingness of a man in a lavender linen suit with matching hat without fully acknowledging that the man exists. The city can be downright hallucinatory without the occasional confrontation of eyes.  It is good to be warned off by the occasional bloodshot set or to be staunched entirely by people who are weeping openly on the city's sidewalks. 

Searching stranger's faces is an odd preoccupation. It may be a way of humanizing the otherwise anonymous millions I live beside.  In some small towns, eye contact is not only expected on Main Street, but should normally be attended by a greeting: a smile or a wave hello.  Here, the eyes are almost too much.  Thankfully when you are in public in New York, you are also alone.  There are just too many people to keep track of and the sidewalks are so regularly scandalized by freak-outs that people maintain the general law of live and let live, so long as their space (or sense of fashion decency) is not invaded.  

More frightening than the bloodshot daggers, which normally speak of a day of unending frustration, are the eyes that void their neutrality and suddenly want to be friends.  Every now and then an eager little glance is shot back from the pedestrian crowd, happy in a schizophrenic kind of way, intense and entreating, "Friend?" A total stranger? Either a small town soul bursting with naivete or the more likely predator scouring the streets for the small town soul to prey upon.  Whenever I come across one of those, I normally walk on so much the faster and ensure my expression has switched to neutral.  I'll scan the sidewalk for gum or the skyscrapers for cracks and plow ahead.