Back of My Neck Getting Dirty and Gritty

With the summer approaching I got to thinking about what summer was like in NYC. Like the U2 song "New York", the heat in New York often got so oppressive that walking about outside was like walking around a city with a hairdryer constantly in your face. The hot smelly breath of the city would wear you down.

Going out in the city in the evening very often did not offer up any kind of relief. In fact, sometimes the humidity would linger on into the evening such that you could break a sweat by simply walking around from bar to bar. Sweat began to gather often in as little as a couple of minutes. Among the most brutal places to be in the summer in New York was the subway. When I lived there and probably at a few select stops today - there is absolutely no ventilation on the platform. The heat is a step above the aforementioned hairdryer and is more like an oven. After a night out in the humdity, a hot wait for the subway ride home was the last thing I wanted. Since I was simply too cheap for a cab uptown I decided I needed to develop a strategy for how to better take the subway home in the heat of the summer.

Since I often went out downtown and lived on the Upper East Side I usually took the 6train home from Astor Place. Astor was a hot station just like any other but it did have something that many other stations did not which was the ability to see when trains are coming from a short set of stairs leading to the street. So what this meant was that essentially I could watch for the train from the relative cool of the stairs without having to wait on the hot steamy platform. The idea here was that when the train came you would bolt down the stairs, slide your Metrocard through the turnstile (hopefully without the dreaded "Please Swipe Again" message) and then quickly cross the platform and get on the train home. This strategy worked maybe 60% of the time greatly limiting my exposure to the unbearable heat of the subway. But as for those failed attempts representing the remaining 40% of the time - my Metrocard would fail to be read correctly by the turnstile forcing me to keep swiping while the subway pulled away or (even worse) I would get stuck behind someone whose Metrocard wasn't being correctly read who had been doing the exact same thing as I. This kind of coincidence really got me chapped such that I would almost audibly curse out the person in front of me.