The 35 bus to Randall’s Island is always a trip. Young athletes heading out to the soccer fields bump up against damaged older guys (chiefly) heading back to the Island’s Odyssey House Drug Treatment Center, the Manhattan psychiatric hospital, and a homeless Shelter. The two sets of riders seem like they’re from different planets. Peaches and pathos?
I’ve been taking the bus irregularly for a few years—my kid has been on a couple of soccer teams that play on various Randall’s fields—and I’ve never seen a sign of conflict between the two American cohorts. Contacts between them tend to be marked by a slightly exaggerated politesse that covers a down low tension. Though there are often one or two fellows who talk loud throughout a trip. That volume sometimes hints at a certain dullness—an incapacity to fully take in other people’s presence. In other cases, though, it testifies to a kind of exteriority that’s something close to the opposite of stupidity. There are guys on the bus whose story-telling seems amped up by an instinct for self-revelation that’s pretty central to the human condition. Last time around I heard one rider explain to a new buddy how he was from Bed Stuy and everybody in the neighborhood knew he didn’t give a fuck when he was coming up. He wasn’t out to underscore glory days. He was surely chastened now—it had been 10 years since he’d been in jail—but he wasn’t running and hiding from his younger self. He had a sense of his own history. And maybe even a ghost of a chance, with a little help from…who? [Hold that thought.] His self-awareness seemed like a gift, especially when his storying ran in counterpoint to dead reps from another guy—headed back to Odyssey? —who locked on a mad plaint about the Bus Driver. Convinced that driver had taken a wrong turn, he started off muttering, before getting loud—“that driver’s wack, he’s smoking crack…that driver’s wack, he’s smoking crack…that driver’s wack, he’s smoking crack…” It wasn’t the driver who seemed to be cracking up…
Somebody who knew this rhymer without reason jollied him out of his paranoia just before we rolled down the true and only ramp to Randall’s.
I tend to sit in the back of the bus which is where Randall’s lifers go. Athletes usually cluster up front—sometimes with their parents (or nannies). I keep an ear out but my eyes are usually down or gazing out the window. I don’t read as I almost always do on the subway, but I don’t engage either. That’s to say, I’m not much different from travelers in the front of the bus, heading for games of their lives…
Sports used to be a realm where the whole body of the people rubbed up against each other. But most of the action on Randall’s Island has a pay-to-play dimension. Players and their patrons/matrons tend to be imperial middle class-bound. Kid-athletes on that bus are getting a lesson in what it’s like to be a person of relative privilege in America now. You may have to, very occasionally, ride with poor and hurting people. But you won’t be playing with them. Just keep your head down…move on.
The ruling modes of America’s gamesmen and women trickle up and down. A clip from comic Dave Chappelle on Ohio’s heroin crisis hints at un-obvious reasons why empathy is out. Chappelle jokes Ohio is Native American for “land of poor white people” and zeroes in on how they love (“…I mean fuckin’ love”) heroin. Encounters with desperate addicts become grist for Chappelle’s comedy, which is a thousand thought-miles away from Richard Pryor’s felt evocations of addiction. (Pryor’s own and others’.) Chappelle teases you into thinking he’s prepping for a humane Pryoresque stretch. He recalls the crack epidemic he and his homies lived through in the 70s and 80s, noting similarities between ghettos then and Ohio now. The heroin crisis “reminds me of us”: “All that shit they talk about on the news about how divided the nation is. I don’t believe that. I feel like the nation is getting a real good look at each other. I even have an insight into how the white community must have felt about the black community going through the scourge of crack…” That’s the set-up for his flip-off: “Because I don’t care either. Hang in there whites. Just say no!” The fuck-you in Chappelle’s back pocket isn’t the moral equivalent of snark. His cool brutalism carries serious social comment. Only a simp would complain about his refusal to forget white America’s obliviousness to black people’s pain.
Still, there’s nothing counter-cultural about his comedy. He’s on the bus.
We lost a politician last month, The Honorable Elijah Cummings, who seemed to have always sensed we could go in a more sympathetic direction: “America, we’re better than this” became Cummings’ mantra in recent years. And I’m just now reminded Dems just lost their most empathetic candidate for the presidency. When the Don learned Beto had quit, he rushed to mock the “dog” who’d offered the most direct moral challenge to Trumpism. But I was struck too by James Carville’s hard swing at Beto. Carville dismissed him as a guy who could hit the hell out of a double A fastball, but couldn’t handle a major league change-up. Maybe Carville’s right. It could be that Beto lacked talent. But I think he was out to change the game. Hubris? I suppose, but I’d blame America-the-unimagining first.