1 train, 11PM Sunday

A woman walks on the train wearing thin old clothes, but clean. She passes her eyes up and down the aisle before launching her speech, which begins the way of each jolting train pitch: Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for the interruption. She goes on to explain that she is hungry, has nowhere to sleep, is trying to provide for her little ones. That she is looking for a job but cannot find one. A man begins shouting back at her, loudly enough for the whole train to hear. At first he offers the usual epithets: Get a job. Leave us alone. I heard this story from you last week.

The woman continues, doggedly avoiding his glare, but her detractor grows louder. The woman informs the train that she was just like us, that she never thought she would be begging on the subway, that she would gladly make use of anyone's leftovers or candy bars. The man begins shouting louder: I heard this last week, get a job. Another man shouts back, says let the woman talk, don't you have a heart? The man does not seem to. No one is buying your crap, he says. They defend you because they've never heard you shill before. Last week you were blind. The week before you had one leg.

Finally she locks eyes with the man: And I suppose you gave me yours then, two weeks ago? And it has only just grown back. Generous soul.


Having collected a meager handful of change, the woman storms off at the next station. The yelling man gets off with me on the Upper West Side, and I climb the stairs to the street behind him. He walks with a limp. His legs are swollen and pocked -- I have seen this before only on homeless men and women, who cannot get their medication or basic nutrition. The man hobbles down the street in black jean shorts and a black shirt which do not look dirty except from very close, and re-cocks his bright white baseball cap atop his head, the brim flat and strong and new.

***

I walk home and think sickly of my own discomfort. We ask our government to care for people like these two so that we can ride the train undisturbed; so the veracity of their suffering is someone else's to decide. We do not care that this woman eats, so much as that she stops asking us for food. Let her go to a beuareu, an agency, a line. Let her be cared for and out of sight.

It is amazing to me that the rich do not want this too, do not want the poor off the street and train and out of the way. It would cost no more than landscaping: a surface level renovation at most. But the rich do not ride the trains and do not walk the street, and there are no poor behind wrought iron gates nor at the top of office buildings. Is this why the middle class votes blue? To help those who need it, and thus delineate ourselves as those who do not. To vaguely support the bringing up of others and never again feel its sharp discomfort.

This is what free speech means to so many: the right to beg where one pleases. The right to talk back to beggars. The silent desire of two dozen train riders for silence, for peace, for keeping dignity and disgrace safely under wraps, elsewhere.