At 10PM on the uptown 1 train I was headed home when at 23rd street, a man, drunk, got on my subway car and promptly sat directly in front of me. Ok, so maybe not directly, but he was across from me and I knew right away it was going to be trouble. He starting talking, about what I couldn’t at first say as it was a lot of words grouped together that didn’t make much sense. However it was the emphasis behind each word he spoke that made me wonder if maybe he was trying to say something important.
So I did what I usually do when I think I’m on the brink of hearing something really juicy that I’m perhaps not meant to, I kept my eyes on the book in my lap, and kept my ears open.
"What is it you want?" he asked. He was slurring really, so it sounded more like, "Whatisityouwant?" really fast and all smudged together, but I got the message. I’m not sure who he was talking to exactly, because at this point, around 42nd street, everyone who had been sitting on his side of the car was now on mine, a group of about eight of us all sitting there crowded on one side, and him, sitting there across from us alone.
"Whatisityouwanthuh?" he asked, perhaps to all of us. I look at him and then to the man next to me, my eyes leaving my book for just a moment because it seemed to me that our guy across the way was making eye contact with him. "Whatisityouwantouttalifemanhuh? You wannajob? You wannalady? You wannanicelady?" he said, and then I saw he was making eye contact with me. I looked back to my book.
He then proceeded to pontificate on things like, "Materialism," and "Capitalism," while now laying down along the seats across from us, talking up at the ceiling as though to some audience out there who really needed his help. He was actually making a few points for someone so drunk he couldn’t really keep his eyes open.
"Mayflower!" he said suddenly and sat up. At this point he was on the edge of his seat and I felt like this was it, this was what I’d been waiting for. This was what had been keeping this guy up at night. This guy who, obviously has a job, is old enough to have worked some years and seen some things and to have lived a life where it hasn’t always been easy. This is what has caused him to leave work early and head to the bar and sit there and throw his hard-earned money away on beers so that he could try to forget or make sense of this one thing that he just couldn’t seem to get past.
"Mayflower," he said again, his finger pointing at us like a teacher in front of a classroom. We all sat there as the train rattled on, some of us pretending not to see, some of us (including me) now looking straight at him, this one man in the middle of an otherwise empty subway car.
Mayflower," he said seriously. "I know ain’t from the Mayflower. Maybe you are, maybe you all come over here on that ship cause you got a purpose," he said. "But me. I ain’t from the Mayflower. No, Iain’tfromtheMayflower," he stopped and lowered his head, shaking it slowly before looking up at us again, "So," he said with what I thought was the perfect amount of dramatic affect for someone so obliterated. "Where does that leave me? Where does that mean I’m from?"
I looked back at him in the silence he’d created and wanted to tell him that it didn’t matter where he was from, surely it mattered more now in this instant that he had some idea of where he was going to (and that he hadn’t missed it a few stops back).
The guy next to me shook his head and laughed.
"Oh, yes," he said softly and nodding his head. "I knowI knowIknow, man. You gottajob you gottagetupfor in the mornin. I know," he said and laughed and leaned back in the seat and smiled like he knew something we didn’t. "I get you. I get you’re tired, I know. But c’mon man," he said and then after some thought decided to apparently really cut right to the chase and shouted: "FUCK THE JOB! WHAT IS IT THAT YOU WANT?"
We sat stunned. Satisfied and letting this sink in for a while, he smiled, closed his eyes and lay back down on the seats.
Fuck the job. Hm. Now that’s something. What is it that I want?
When my stop came he was passed out and snoring loudly. I left him there, figuring that maybe he never got around to asking himself what he really wanted until perhaps maybe today, when he had a particularly bad day at the office, and looked around and realized that he in fact somehow didn’t have anything he wanted at all. Perhaps then he proceeded to drink until he couldn’t remember what those things he wanted were in an effort so it wouldn’t hurt as bad not having them.
Whatisitthatyouwant? All I know is I hope he finds it, and that one way or another, he makes it home.
