Walk out into the world newly expanded.




Sun 8/3


Catching the A train at 125th St. on my way to a fool's errand. A little white haired lady comes in after me and a middle-aged, overweight man gives her his seat, gets up and stands in the aisle holding on to a pole. Then a young man, maybe 18 or 20, slim and wiry, yells at him,

"Get your fat ass outa my face!"

The man turns so his body is facing away from the guy. This does not resolve the situation. They go back and forth. The guy wants him to move completely away, and he is speaking in a loud, threatening voice,

"Get the fuck outa my face!"

The man blubbering and trying to appease the youth, "But I turned away from you," he pleads.

The guy stands, faces the man and says, "I asked you to move. You are disrespecting me."

He blubbers on.

The ancient male ritual of power and dominance is on. The guy gets in a fighting position, one leg in front of the other to balance himself in the moving car, and still the man does not move away.

PAFF, a right straight to the nose, the hand held with its palm facing the floor and the fingers folded at the second joint. He dances forward on his right foot as he delivers the blow.

The man's glasses are broken and he's bleeding. PAFF, another one to the forehead. He drops to the ground.

This is happening three seats from me; some women are screaming for the guy to stop, others are looking for signs on the wall telling them how to reach the conductor. I want to get out. How can I get away? I look out the window trying to figure out where we are. The 86th St. station travels past my window. Since this is the express train it will not stop till 59th Street.

The men grouped at the opposite end of the car, thankfully, have chosen not to interfere, undoubtedly influenced by the guy's two buddies. We are at a standstill. No white knight conductor is going to come to our rescue. There are no words on the intercom system addressing our situation; we are on our own to handle it till we reach 59th Street. I have no sympathy for lard ass sprawled on the floor in front of me. He's broken the first rule of aggressive encounters: You do what your assailant demands. If he says move; give me your money; drop your pants; you shut your mouth and obey, say the police. His playing the victim has put us all in danger.

Since he dropped to the floor of his own accord rather then from one of the blows, the woman on my right surreptiously leans over to see how serious his wounds are. One take-charge woman says that EMS will be waiting at 59th St. to take care of him whether he wants them to or not. She is wiping the blood off his face with a handkerchief. The white haired old lady, who had taken the man's seat, impervious to violence at her age, is talking to the guy, hopefully not casting blame.

Finally, we arrive at 59th Street, and I am out of there, on my way to the hospital to see the neurologist who is going to explain the findings of the EMG and MRI that were taken for my numb leg. While waiting to see him, I grab a New York Press that someone has left behind. Its headline shouts, "HARLEM: IT'S A HARD-KNOCK LIFE." Within is a story about a Euro American woman who was knocked on her ass and had her pocketbook taken as she walked out of St. Nick's Pub, a jazz bar on Sugar Hill, and now she's trash-talking the whole African American community. The robbery was done in full view of the people inside the bar, and her assailant didn't even bother to run away afterward. The man had cheated her in the past, so she knew the score. He just casually walked off turning to laugh at her. No one at the bar came to her rescue or wanted to lend her a cell phone so she could call the police, and no one had seen a thing when the police questioned them.

I begin to see more and more that these stories with their racial overtones have nothing to do with race. This woman, Susan Crain Bakos is a sex journalist whose last NYPress story was "A White Woman Explains Why She Prefers Black Men." Ms. Bakos goes to a bar that has a bad rep playing her disrespectful little sex games and expects that it will not be challenged.

"What's a woman like you doing in a dive like this?" say the cops when they get there.

Looking for trouble, I'd say, just like the man on the train who kept his mouth going while his assailant was preparing to smack him. If only you would love me, respect me, they seem to be saying to the most inappropriate of subjects.

When the neurologist finally sees me I learn that he has not seen the MRI or EMG reports and tries to cover it up by mouthing banalities. If only you would love me, respect me.



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