THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 43
anything waiting for us in the outer
boroughs. It was like a slightly more
grown-up version of “The Goonies.”
Only, our treasure? Was knowledge. And
our Sloth? Was a guy on the subway
who looked like Sloth. And look at
that...he’s unzipping his pants.
“Hey-y-y, you guy-y-y-ys!!!”
The upside of having an hour-and-
a-half commute is that you can get a
lot of homework done on the way home.
(And on the way to school in the morn-
ing you can cram for all the tests you
didn’t study for the night before.) There
were also many days when homework
and studying were disregarded in favor
of extremely juvenile and dangerous be-
havior. Like doing “dips” on the chain-
link ropes between two moving subway
cars. Or seeing who could run across
all four subway tracks to the platform
on the other side without “touching the
third rail” and “dying.” Or tying your
friend’s hands to the subway pole and
then “pantsing” him so that he was naked
and couldn’t pull up his pants. And then,
if a stranger on the train tried to help
him, you’d yell, “He’s touching that kid!”
Really smart, cool stuff like that.
There were scarier moments, like
when a group of older, much stronger
teen-agers followed us off the train late
one night, jumped us, and broke my
friend Pete’s nose. Or the time when I
was standing on the corner of Hous-
ton and Bowery and watched a man
step into the street and get hit at full
speed by a city bus, and his body basi-
cally exploded in front of me. That was
very, very disturbing, and I can still close
my eyes and picture pieces of him lying
on Houston Street. But it’s also New
York, so fifteen minutes later you just
move on with your day.
I was always on edge when I trav-
elled home alone late at night. I was
very conscious of never smiling, because
I was afraid that if I smiled someone
would punch me. I actively tried to look
sad, and, in keeping with my living-in-
my-head approach to life, I would in-
vent awful things that had happened
to me to tell a robber so that he would
feel guilty and then not rob me. Like,
I expected a robber to say, “I’m so sorry,
Colin. I was going to steal your ten dol-
lars, but after hearing that your cat killed
your sister I cannot in good conscience
take your money. In fact, here’s five dol-
lars from me. In memory of your sis-
ter, Noxzema.”
When the subways weren’t empty
and scary, they were loud and crowded.
I got used to reading and focussing
while standing in the hottest, sweati-
est corner of the train as a panhandler
screamed about Jesus coming back to
Earth to send us all to Hell, and would
we like to hear a song about that?
It was actually great preparation for
“Saturday Night Live,” where on any
given Saturday someone in the crew is
yelling about a technical problem, the
musical guest’s forty backup dancers
are arguing with an actual llama that
just took a dump near the craft-service
table, while a cast member is crying in
a dressing room because his sketch got
cut after dress rehearsal. And I’m stand-
ing in the middle of all of this with a
script for a sketch that airs in fifteen
minutes, thinking, What’s a funnier way
to say “front butt”?A
nd then there was the boat por-
tion of my trip, which is always a
funny element to sprinkle into a com-
mute. No one has ever transferred from
a city bus to the subway and thought,
There should be a boat ride in between!
It may sound glamorous to arrive in
Manhattan every morning via ship, but
it was not.
The Staten Island Ferry is the bus-
iest passenger-only ferry in the world,
with twenty-five million riders a year.
By my own unofficial calculations, it
also holds the record for Most Exposed
Public Rest Rooms (they are somehow
designed so that any passersby can see
the entire bathroom, all of the stalls,
and every single drag queen fixing her
makeup in the mirror), as well as the
record for Most Dead-Eyed Business-
men Staring at the Sea Considering
Whether to End It.
Riding the ferry was not a “yacht life
style.” The bins under the seats were
marked “Life Jackets” but should have
been marked “A Hundred Rats Live
Here.” The ferry is known for its amaz-
ing views of the Statue of Liberty, but
it’s also a great place to watch a raccoon
eat a passenger’s leftover meth. And,
look, the raccoon is reading the New
York Post! Cute!
There are many questions that come
to mind while riding the Staten IslandFerry. Questions like “Why does the
donut store on the ferry sell twenty-
five-ounce cans of Foster’s Australian
beer?” Or “That Russian woman just
threw a stroller off the back of the ferry—
is that something I should report?”
In the evening, after the subway and
the ferry, getting on the bus on Staten
Island to finish my commute felt like
a relief. I was almost home, and every-
one on the bus seemed to be resigned
to a communal defeated silence. It’s as
if we were all thinking, We live in a
place full of cars, yet we’re riding a bus.
Let us never speak of this to anyone.
The bus snaked its way up Victory
Boulevard, which is dedicated to the
American triumph in the First World
War but also showcases the modern vic-
tory of having a Golden Krust Jamaican
beef-patty restaurant share office space
with an H&R Block. It was the heyday
of the Wu-Tang Clan then, and every
day my bus passed by an official Wu
Wear clothing store.^2 Then one day the
store vanished, replaced by a pet shop.
But the new owner was either too cheap
or too big a fan to take down the giant
“W” from the Wu Wear sign, so he kept
it and named the store Walking Dogs.
Then we passed my Catholic church,
with an enormous banner over the door
reading “ABORTION IS MURDER! ALSO,
WE’VE ADDED A SPANISH MASS AT
1 P.M.!” And, as the bus crested the hill
by Clove Lakes Park, I could look back
and see all of Manhattan in the distance.
I felt the sense of accomplishment that
comes with completing any journey,
even a daily commute by land, by sea,
and by underground rocket toilet.
Even now I’m always more produc-
tive when I’m travelling; I know the
journey itself is getting me somewhere,
and that frees my mind to be creative.
There’s a reason it took an American
to invent the rocking chair: even when
we’re sitting still, we like to feel as if
we’re in motion.
I would get off the bus every night
at the edge of a cemetery full of stray
dogs that chased me up the street to
my house. Eight hours later, I would
wake up and do it all over again. (^2) One of the great joys of my professional life was
making a movie with Method Man, who told me
he would never leave Staten Island, because it was
the only place in America where he could get
pulled over and the cops were actually excited to
see him.