Riding the rails

It’s 3 a.m. and I’m on the N train two stops away from Coney Island.

I’m spending all night in the New York City subway on the lookout for public masturbation and beat-boxing mariachi bands—funny stories I can use to amuse my three or four readers. I also just wanted an excuse to finish “An Anthropologist on Mars” instead of doing homework or telling drunk people about my winter break. In a more cosmic way though, I’m looking for a journey.

Staring out at the battered billboards that mark NowhereLand Brooklyn, I try to ponder significant things: Where am I going after graduation? What am I meant to do? Who do I want to be?

All my life I thought that, with an exceptional education and the love of a few good people, I’d arrive at these answers. I expected my life’s calling to announce itself one day like the conductor over this subway PA telling me the train’s done for the night so I better get off at Coney. Her voice is insistent, all-powerful—the voice of a fantasy guru. But at 22, riding the subway at dawn to the most sketch-tastic places this side of Queens like an idiot, I really have no fucking clue what I’m doing.

I was in high school on my first solo trip to New York and for some reason obsessed with the idea of getting a chocolate buttercream cupcake from Magnolia’s while I was in the city. Blame SNL Digital Shorts and pop culture. I took down my host’s cell phone number and disappeared into the roar of an incoming train.

I remember that first subway ride alone—asking strangers at Columbus Circle if we were in the Village yet, pushing my sweatshirt sleeves down to my hands to touch the pole, bouncing on the balls of my feet, plastic tourist map in hand. I had no idea where I was going or what I was doing or whether or not I really belonged in this city. But I was giddy at the prospect of making my own way here. I wanted New York to mold me, to receive its character and direction through osmosis.

That hopeless, naïve teenager would be crushed if she knew that five years and innumerable New York City cupcakes later, she’d still be riding the subway aimlessly into the night. What the hell is wrong with you, she would be asking me.

I survive the outer dregs of Brooklyn and discover that there is a colony of lost souls who ride the subway back and forth through the night—some just to get out of the cold and sleep, others said just because. One man told me the movement and regimented schedule help him “think out problems.”

That’s exactly what I want, I think. To think these problems “out” and away. To leave all of my trepidation and insecurities on the Brighton Beach platform and then flee into the night, back to Manhattan.

Sick of my hopeless cerebralism and without seeing any sex offenders, I decide to call it a night. I take the Q, and let me tell you now that it is one of the finest nocturnal subway rides you will ever experience.

One second I’m staring out the window as the train leaves DeKalb station, feeling sorry for myself for graduating with an Ivy League degree, awesome friends, and a fierce desire to do too many things. The next, my entire consciousness plunges into this gorgeous series of bright paintings by the Brooklyn artist Bill Brand. The mural, which runs along the right-hand side of the Manhattan-bound Q, is animated by the movement of the passing car.

It’s disarming. Transcendent even. Especially when I emerge from the tunnel and find myself atop the Manhattan Bridge, seemingly amidst a thicket of skyscrapers.

For a minute I forget what a privileged, neurotic bitch I am and I feel utterly blessed to be exactly where I am. But alas the wonderment fades as 20 drunk people pile into the car at the first stop in Manhattan.

You should know by the way, that even with a sense of enlightened urban zen, 4 a.m. is still a shitty time to transfer to the 1 at 96th. I look down the tunnel for 17 minutes before the light comes in around the bend.

Leah Greenbaum is a Columbia College senior majoring in English. Slouching Towards Somewhere runs alternate Fridays.