Of the 8 million stories in the Naked City, some of the best ones are underneath the ground.
So are some of the worst. I’m referring, don’t you know, to stories emanating (bubbling up?) from the New York subway system.
Everyone has at least one to tell from their time in the nether regions of New York’s MTA. From my years in the city back in the ’50s and ’60s, I recall a dancing man on the GG train in Brooklyn whose face had been burned and was entirely covered over with scar tissue. Another was the “Mad Peeper,” so named by me because of the odd “peep peep” and “peep pop poop” noises he loudly emitted, for reasons known only to himself. A messenger by day, by night he walked the streets of Manhattan and rode the subways, peeping, popping and–well, never mind.
My most memorable subway story was of a very beautiful, extremely well-dressed woman whose arms were full of Christmas packages when her high heel caught between the planks of the wooden platform at the Grand Central Terminal subway stop. She went flying face first and her packages scattered. Rather than help her, people just walked on by, trampling on her and her packages as she struggled to get up. I remember being appalled at this callousness. “Why won’t anyone help her?” I asked myself, incredulously, as I passed through the exit–only then realizing that I had walked on by myself.
In this vein, inspired by an idea from actress Rosie Perez, the HBO cable channel asked the MTA to provide a compilation of subway stories they’ve acquired from riders’ actual letters and calls over the years. The MTA produced a thousand of them, and from that HBO culled 10.
These, starring Perez and a whole subway train full of gifted, very New York actors, have been filmed and strung together in a single cable TV movie, called simply “Subway Stories.” It comes to the home screen Sunday at 9 p.m.
“They’re real stories,” said actor-clown-performance artist Bill Irwin (“Fool Moon,” “Eight Men Out”), whose story segment is called “Subway Car From Hell.”
In this tale Irwin portrays a street performer carrying an outsized Australian didgeridoo musical instrument, plus hot dog and soft drink, who struggles mightily to get aboard an overloaded subway train.
He’s repelled at the first doorway, and then a second. Finally, just at the last moment, he notes that the first car of the train is completely empty! He rushes to it and aboard, only to discover in the most unpleasant olfactory manner possible that there’s a reason for that.
“It was based on real life,” Irwin said. “When I first came to New York in 1982 I once couldn’t get on a subway. And then I saw a just wonderfully brightly lit car — all to myself — only to step in and find that the stench was overpowering.”
Irwin’s HBO didgeridoo player was hurrying to another subway station to begin his day’s work as an underground street performer. They are visible in great numbers on the MTA now, as they have been for years on the Paris Metro.
“The notion of a guy, a street performer who can’t get to work on time, was an idea we all loved,” said Irwin, who once was one himself, making $25 a day. “Street performers are business people and commuters like everyone else. They have to get where they’re going, make their day’s money and get home again.”
Irwin’s segment was directed by Jonathan (“Silence of the Lambs,” “Philadelphia”) Demme, who is also executive producer of the film with Perez.
In a segment called “Red Shoes,” written by prize-winning playwright John Guare, Christine Lahti stars as a woman who is either an aggrieved victim of a subway mugger or the perpetrator of an outrageous con. Jerry Stiller stars in another about a stock market tipster riding the rails who may be a con, or a riches-spreading fairy godfather.
In “Fern’s Heart of Darkness,” Chicago’s Bonnie Hunt plays a visiting tourist adorned in provincial pink who gets locked in a New York subway station overnight and in the morning finds herself taken for a bag lady.
There are romantic stories in this mix as well. Mercedes Ruehl is a mysterious, seductive older woman who has what amounts to a here-and-gone subway car affair with a teenage boy she comforts after he’s beaten up by bad guys.
And in “Love on the `A’ Train,” Perez plays a comely straphanger who is engaged in a rubbing and touching but no-words-spoken amour with a handsome yuppie every morning at the same time on the same train. When he finally musters the courage to speak to her–well, you see it. (Don’t try this on your own subway! These are true stories but I guarantee you will go to jail, or worse.)
In all the years since, I’ve often wondered what might have ensued if I, then young and single, had stopped to help the fallen beauty with the Christmas packages. We could be summering this very minute at, say, her Newport place.
Then again New York being New York, the boxes could have been filled with severed heads.
