Have you ever slept in a New York City subway? I never imagined I would be in this position either. To find myself sleeping in a New York City subway. To find myself homeless. Before I moved to NYC, I arranged to live in a nice apartment on Bronx Park East, across the street from the New York Botanical Garden and Bronx Zoo. I also booked three nights in a Times Square hostel, so I had a place to settle while building the framework for my new life in the city. Despite my various attempts to reach out to who would be my landlords I never heard from them again. During my first weeks in New York, I lived in hostels. Every week I moved into one a little less nice than the previous week's hostel. The last hostel I lived in was a plywood box with a padlock and an outstretched nylon netting for a roof. I knew then that I needed to start putting money aside if I wanted eventually to get a place for myself.
I set out to find the best and safest way to live on the streets of New York City in the meantime, after several ideas and a trial run or two I realized the most cautious option was sleeping in subway stations. The stations expressly, not the trains themselves. The reason is every New York City train that runs throughout the night skates through parts of the city I wouldn’t want to be caught unawares in. I would have preferred the trains otherwise. Meanwhile, I was working, I helped open the now-defunct Barnes & Noble Booksellers at 86th and Lexington (New York’s Upper East Side), so I kept the two rolling suitcases that housed everything I owned in the breakroom at Barnes & Noble and wandered the streets of New York at night. Another conscious decision I made was to sleep only, roughly every 36 to 48 hours. I knew the little sleep I would get would be sound. When I wasn’t working or spending time with friends I was walking the streets, absorbing New York City in a uniquely personal way.
As you might imagine, sleeping intermittently in short, sound intervals every 36 to 48 hours is hard on memory. I don’t remember much about those months of being homeless in New York City, but there is one thing I do remember, a memory as clear as if it happened yesterday. The evenings before I opened the store, I liked to sleep in the 86th Street subway station. Walking down into the station, when the steps open up to the northbound platform there’s a wooden bench against the wall as you look to your right. Subway benches are never exceptionally comfortable because they have notches built into the seats that 1.) separate the bench into individual seats, and 2.) make lying on the bench too uncomfortable to endure. I learned to suffer it, uncomfortably. Some stations have vents or storm drains that spill, controlled into a drain system below the stations.
I was sleeping on the bench in the 86th Street subway station, my shoulder and hip were numb from the prolonged pressure of my weight pressed firmly into the wood notches. A soreness and numbness that I had grown accustomed to, like calluses on my fingertips formed by brass guitar strings. It was late. I hadn’t been bothered, it’s uncommon to sleep through the night without being kicked awake by people in blue. Something woke me up, a car passing overhead, the stir and whirlwind of a passing 4 train, the slap of coffee cup sleeves and leaves coming to rest on the mosaic station floors and walls after being awoken by the wind or passing train, a nightmare perhaps, I don’t know, but something woke me up. I opened my eyes, looking up and through the vent in the station ceiling. The cool air was thick, and damp with the morning humidity. Everything was blurry at first, artificial light, the drone of streetlamps above, and the night beyond the city.
I wear glasses and when sleeping on subway benches and floors I put my glasses into the breast pocket of my brown, corduroy coat, and hoped I wouldn’t turn over in the night and crush my one pair of good spectacles. Something in the night sky caught my attention even though I was half asleep, I found my glasses and put them on, and there in the night sky above New York City was a single flickering star, one single star in the shadowy blanket of night. The light of the rest of the stars was absorbed by the torches of New York City, but not this one stellar echo that found me asleep on a bench in the subway station in New York City. I never again saw the stars in the night over the city, that was the first and last time. I looked up at it for a long time and fell asleep, the star was the last thing I saw before the train woke me up a few hours later.