Smartphone…Dumb Man

On Saturday afternoon when the Number 1 train pulled into the Van Cortlandt Park terminal—its last stop—I was alone in the rear car with two sleeping homeless men. They served as somnolent bookends—one on each side—for what would thereafter be the lead car on a return trip into Manhattan. Yesterday morning—Sunday—I entered the first car for the journey downtown. Lo and behold, I encountered a pair of sleepers with similar seating habits. They were not, however, the same two men I had shared space with a day earlier. In fact, one of them was not homeless at all.

This wasn’t exactly a Columbo deduction on my part. The guy had a guitar case alongside him, headphones in his ears, and a smartphone on his lap. From the looks of things he was recovering from a hard night of partying. Before the train even took off, the extraordinarily sound sleeper’s phone fell to the floor. The thumping sound didn’t affect his siesta one bit. I briefly considered approaching him and rousing him from his slumber. But his peculiar Muhammad Ali posture gave me pause. In the end, I decided to file away this moral dilemma under “Let sleeping drunks lie.”

Eventually, as the train wended its way into Manhattan, it got increasingly crowded. Numerous passengers glanced over at the sleeper in their midst—the one with the phone at his feet. People sat next to him and across from him. All remained silent. I kept a vigilant eye on the subject to see if and when he would regain consciousness. Would he experience that important moment of clarity? The young man stirred from time to time and even put down his dukes, but never once opened his eyes—at least while mine were fixed on him.

At some point he rejoined the living. I can't say if the woman I spied alerting him of his valuable possession in harm’s way—on the floor—nudged him awake or he awoke on his own. Nevertheless, I watched him react to the news with an exaggerated, frightened double take—right out of the Hollywood playbook—as he swooped up his phone and put it in his jacket pocket. Apparently, the guitar-toting subway rider didn’t regard that moment as a wake-up call. He promptly returned to the Land of Nod and continued his journey to nowhere—or South Ferry in this instance.

Perhaps the drowsy commuter would have been better off waking up to no smartphone and, too, no guitar. He would have at least learned a valuable life lesson. If his sleep requirements weren’t met when the train reached its last stop—South Ferry—and he headed uptown again, he might have found himself an underground crime statistic and learned that lesson after all. Maybe then he’d think twice about getting stupefied beyond the pale and riding the subway back and forth—and back and forth again—with belongings of value there for the taking. Subway conductors make regular announcements nowadays of the importance of being fully aware at all times of one's personal possessions. This weary traveler was Exhibit A of somebody being fully unaware. A guitar solo is in order.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)