alms

Male panhandlers in the subway are easy to pretend to ignore. But today a middle-aged black woman hobbled her way onto a crowded subway train. One of her eyes was screwed half shut and she had the most tragic and hopeless and crazed expression of anyone I'd ever seen in public. Light blue clothes hung off her body like ill-fitted hospital robes, and a single key was tied to one of the drawstrings, perhaps put there by someone who feared she'd lose anything that wasn't securely attached.

"Won't somebody please help me?" she uttered, and it was somewhere between a plea and a wail.

"Won't somebody please help me?" she said once, twice, thrice. Her cries, quivering with desperation and resentment and alarm, were identical down to the slightest inflection. A well-dressed young asian woman held out a dollar bill, which she accepted silently. She then made her way down the aisle in the opposite direction. I was unwilling to decide if something particularly horrible had happened to her today or if this was simply her routine.

The last time Andrew and I were headed to Penn Station, he was accosted by an angry young man who wanted to start a fight. "You stepped on my shoe and you didn't apologize. You were too busy looking at your pretty girlfriend. You're a tourist, huh? Somebody should teach you some manners." The strangest things happen on the 1-2-3. We came into the evening light on 7th Ave, but for a while I walked around Midtown South with a sadness headache, unable to forget the voice of this haunting, haunted woman.