Angels on the Platform

Sleeping on a subway is like floating through space. You’re hurtled towards an unknown destination without moving an inch, flashes of light occasionally curtaining your eyelids in between the stretches of inky emptiness. Lying on the back-aching, creamsicle-colored seats is the closest you’ll get to anti-gravitational suspension, one of the few things that you vaguely remember happens in space (it’s hard to know these things when you never got past the tenth grade and astronomy was an eleventh grade luxury). The other passengers-- middle-aged moms taking their kids to the zoo or vanilla businessmen on their way to another mind-numbing morning of meetings-- are like those space rocks that float in and out of your limited attention span: as long as they don’t touch you, they’re not a threat.

To be honest, I never really sleep on the subway because sleeping requires unconsciousness, which I have trouble attaining with all those sensory experiences around me, but if I pretend that I’m asleep, then usually people leave me alone. Usually.

Pretending to sleep also makes eavesdropping a lot easier. Most of the time, the other passengers’ conversations float through one ear and out the other. Every now and then, though, they have something interesting to say. You would be surprised at how much you can learn from random conversations if you take the time to listen. They are certainly a change of pace from the endless number of (stolen) borrowed books that I’ve read to pass the time.

On this particular afternoon in January, however, I wanted to drill a nail into my head. The tourists next to me were yapping non-stop about all the sites they were excited to see. Tourists are the worst. In their mind, New York City is like Disney World, where magic and happiness are in abundance, and nothing could ever be wrong. God forbid there be a young man in an oversized flannel taking over not one but two!! seats because he has nowhere else to go and the subway is the closest thing to a magic carpet that he can afford.

After about 30 minutes of their head-ache-inducing yapping and annoyed glances, I decided to get off at Grand Central to scrounge something to eat.

The station was crowded, of course, but crowded was good. Crowded means lots of half-eaten lunches tossed into the trash cans for me to finish. If I was lucky, I’d find a Magnolia cupcake (those things are freaking enormous and hard to eat by yourself). Speaking of the devils, I saw a CUNY kid toss half of a chocolate one (still in the box!) into the trash across the corridor. Maybe the day wouldn’t turn out to be so bad after all.

I made my way towards the trash can, but a 30-something woman, wearing nothing but patched-up overalls and a tank-top despite the weather, beat me to the punch. Her explosion of tangled, honey blond curls gave her kind of a crazy look, but the rest of her was small and soft like an American girl doll. I weighed that I could probably wrestle the Magnolia cupcake from her without too much effort. Instead of grabbing the chocolate pastry, though, the woman placed a soup can on the ground in front of her and began to sing.

She was awful. Like not even mediocre, but truly, unbearably awful. Her pitch was off, her high C cracked harder than my old man’s left hip used to, and her voice sounded like it was coming out of her nose rather than her throat.

It took me longer than it should’ve to recognize the song because her voice was so bad. It was Thriving Ivory’s “Angels on the Moon,” a song that my mom used to sing to me in a voice that felt like moonlight radiating around the room. After the towers fell, she couldn’t bring herself to tell me how my father was crushed underneath the debris of this unforgiving city, so she told me he was an angel on the moon instead. I like to think that my mom became one, too.

It was hard to remember the sound of my mother’s voice over the abomination coming out of this woman’s mouth. I should’ve just grabbed my cupcake and booked it out of there before my eardrums exploded, but I found myself unable to look away. The woman had no talent, that was abundantly clear. Her performance, on the other hand, was surprisingly mesmerizing. With her arms wide open and her head held high, she poured all of her emotions into the song and suddenly I felt like I was watching myself sing.

Just like me, she had lost everything that grounded her in the world. She was letting life drag her around without a real destination, anywhere would work really, as long as there was food and a place to sleep on the other end. She had learned to ignore the disgusted looks, the degrading comments that passerbys didn’t even bother to whisper, the molding sandwich that served as Thanksgiving dinner, and the despairing feeling of having no one to share it with.

The woman was half-way through the song when I joined in. Her eyebrows shot up in surprise, but she didn’t stop. I was no Sinatra either, but in the moment, I didn’t really care.

The lyrics came flooding back to me instantly:

“This is to one last day in the shadows

And to know a brother's love

This is to New York City angels

And the rivers of our blood

This is to all of us, to all of us.”

I moved next to her and the two of us sang out to the Grand Central subway stop crowd as if we were center stage in Carnegie Hall. If Thriving Ivory heard us attempting to harmonize on one of their greatest hits, they would probably boo us, like the group of scrawny Brooklyn teens did during the final chorus. I had no trouble ignoring them, though; I hadn’t felt this awake in a long time. I held the last note for as long as my lungs would let me because I didn’t want the song to end.

When it finally did end, the one other kind soul who did actually stop to listen gave us a sympathetic nod and tossed a five dollar bill into the soup can before moving on with their life. My singing partner turned to me with a dimpled smile stretched across her face.

“Nice work, team,” she said in a slight Southern accent. “Wanna do another?”

I matched her smile and plucked out the five dollar bill from the can.

“How about we grab a slice instead? I could use a break from this space.”

“Onwards and upwards we go, then,” the woman responded, and just like that, my anti-gravitational suspension fell.