Mainlining.(CITY DESK)(new york)

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LAST year the Metropolitan Transit Authority announced that you will soon be able to use your cell phone in all 277 underground subway stations, even the ones that are a hundred feet deep in granite. Tunnels are supposed to be out of service, out of consideration for subway riders, but that too will no doubt change. Then you will be free from any interaction uncontrolled by yourself.

I rode 24 miles on the city's rails one day, back and forth from the Bronx to Wall Street, with a lot of business at either end. The amount of time I spent in transit threw me together with an unusual number of random fellow passengers.

The first stop of north-bound commuter trains after leaving Grand Central Terminal is 125th Street in Harlem. Two decades ago I went to 125th Street to hear Jesse Jackson speak, and afterwards I was the only white face heading home. "You sightseeing?" a passerby asked. Now most of the faces getting on at 9 A.M. were white. The pioneering gentry, as is so often the case, are gays. Soon the neighborhood will be as light as Adam Clayton Powell. On the East Side, 125th Street is also close to Spanish Harlem, and there two youngish Mexican men got on. They did not seem related, for although both were short one was quite a bit smaller than the other, almost a boy but for the leanness of his look. No construction workers these; more likely some restaurant's kitchen crew, though if they were heading to a regular gig, wouldn't they have been familiar with the train schedule? When the ticket taker, a middle-aged black man, came down the aisle, he found that they had off-peak fares, though we were still in rush hour. The smaller Mexican man acted as the negotiator; he spoke English badly, which was evidently better than his friend, who spoke not at all. Patiently the ticket taker made himself understood. He told them that they were to get off at the next station and wait half an hour for the first off-peak train. Time and futility are the taxes laid on ignorance. The rate is often low, but the transactions are numerous. The smaller man wore a Yankees cap, the silent man a cap that said I LOVE JESUS.

At my stop in the Bronx a man was vomiting off the platform. I did not notice much about him for it is not polite to look. He was not acutely ill, for he stood sturdily, and he had enough sensibility to vomit off the back edge, against the embankment, rather than onto the tracks. It was not privacy, but it was the best he could contrive in the circumstances. The only time I threw up in public was before singing at a resort, after the dinner that had been laid on for the entertainers. The wines had been various, and the business manager of our singing group had distributed cigars the size of chair ...