Unless you've been living under a rock you're probably aware that New York has this quaint little system of tunnels known as the "subway". These tunnels have trains inside them, and they criss-cross the city thus enabling its inhabitants to get around with relative ease. Dirty, rickety and yet (to my Australian eye) incredibly efficient, the subway is the great leveler. If you live in New York you will almost certainly have to use the subway at some point in your day, whether you're a high-falutin' businessman, a too-cool-for-skool hipster, or the crazy man who was on the train with me one evening last year and spent the first half of the trip over the Williamsburg bridge ushering invisible people through the door adjoining the carriages, and the second half with his pants around his ankles talking animatedly to his penis.
Now, this might be revealing too much of what ticks around inside my head, but I can't help but consider some of the trains I usually catch to have distinct personalities. I have always done shit like this. When I was a kid I thought that numbers, letters, colours and even days of the week had "personalities" and I either liked or loathed them based on their traits, and since no one told me this was nuts until it was too late I still have vestigial flickers of emotion when certain characters pop up. The number "6" for example, still seems to be a selfish little shit of a number, Sundays are miserable and the letter "E" is so common but thinks it's sooo fucking good, slutting around all over the place. The number "11" however still feels exciting and different, ripe with possibilities, deep green fills me with joy and calm, and one of the highlights of my day is being able to legitimately handwrite a capital letter "Z". So flamboyant, yet still elegant (like me).
Anyway, as I was saying, since I have managed to carry this lunacy into my adulthood, it didn't take me long to begin to associate certain trains with particular emotions. How could I not? Each train is designated with either a letter or a number, and then most of these trains are grouped with two or three others into particular colours, a perfect storm for a neurotic someone like me to indulge in a bit of crazy while waiting on the platform. My favourite is the "M" train, one of the helpful bright orange trains. It obligingly whisks me each day between the Marcey Avenue stop near my house to West 4 near school via the Williamsburg bridge, giving me an awesome view of the city and reminding me that I'm in freaking New York. My day is always brightened when I get to catch one of the rich, royal dark blue trains, the "A", "C" or even the "E" (despite its slutty ways). Alas, such opportunities for me are rare, like getting to ride a camel, so I relish them when they crop up. Then there's the "L". The "L" is the James Dean of trains, a loner grey, a rebel. From the Lorimer Street station near my place it stabs into the heart of lower Manhattan with cool arrogance, and doesn't give a fuck what the other la-di-dah trains think, with their fancy routes all over the place. I want so badly to be friends with the "L", but it'd never talk to me.
Of course every story needs a villain. Some villains are oafish, stupid brutes, others are dorky little clerical jerks who think they're doing good but screw everything up, whilst others are tortured souls who can coolly assert that their noble end justifies their wicked means. But the villain in this insane cast of enormous metal actors (am I laboring the metaphor? Probably. But shut the hell up) is the worst kind. This is the Iago from Othello of trains: superficially appearing to be helpful, loyal and friendly, but you realise too late, too late, that it hates you and has been plotting maliciously all along to destroy you and everything you hold dear, that its most treasured dream is to dance amongst the smoking wreckage of what was once your life.
I am, of course, talking about the "G" train.
The "G" train.
I loathe the "G" train.
On the surface it seems to be a perfectly lovely train. It runs the length of Brooklyn and Queens. It doesn't need to show off and hang out with the other lines in Manhattan. "G" is a kind letter, a motherly letter, one that helpfully finishes things off with a graceful little curl. This train is a lovely calming green colour, one that suggests it could take you peacefully to the moon if you so desired. Even the stations on the "G" line feel welcoming, more like waiting inside a tiled cathedral than a subway station. But that's what it wants you to think... it wants you to let your guard down, to unthinkingly meander into its open craw, whereupon it will snap shut its doors like a Venus Fly-Trap and will take you God-knows where.
It will whizz through the station that you were intending to get off at for absolutely no reason at all. It will shut down without warning and force everyone off in the middle of nowhere at ten o'clock at night. It will decide it's tired and not run for weekends at a time. You'll wait for half an hour for a downtown "G", while across on the uptown platform trains will arrive every freaking five minutes. This trend is, of course, reversed on the return journey. Any plan involving me catching a "G" train will be given serious reconsideration. The promise of free gold bullion would not necessarily be enough to lure me onto this insidiously fickle asshole of a train. The worst part though, the absolute worst part, is that it is the only train that runs the north/south length of Brooklyn. AND IT KNOWS IT. It sits there, smugly grinning in its beautifully tiled lair, taunting you, knowing that as much as you try to avoid giving it the satisfaction of stomping down the subway stairs, waiting for an eternity for it to show the hell up, not being 100% sure that you will even arrive at your chosen destination, you cannot evade it forever. As inevitable as God's final judgement on mankind, eventually you will have to ride the G train .
In other news, it's hayfever season. I think that the antihistamines are stronger here than they are in Australia.
