by
Paul Theroux
New Yorkers say some terrible things about the subway - that they hate it, or are scared stiff of it, or that it deserves to go broke. ''I haven't been down there in years,'' is a common enough remark from a city dweller. Even people who ride it seem to agree that there is more original sin among subway passengers. And more desperation, too, making you think of choruses of ''O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark. ...''
''Subway'' is not its name, because, strictly speaking, about half of it is elevated. But which person who has ridden it lately is going to call it by its right name, ''the Rapid Transit''?
You can wait a long time for some trains and, as in T.S. Eliot's ''East Coker,'' often ... an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about. (From ''East Coker'' in ''Four Quartets,'' copyright c 1943 by T.S. Eliot; copyright c 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.).
The subway is frightful looking. It has paint and signatures all over its aged face. It has been vandalized from end to end. It smells so hideous you want to put a clothespin on your nose, and it is so noisy the sound actually hurts. Is it dangerous? Ask anyone, and, without thinking, he will tell you there must be about two murders a day on the subway.
You have to ride it for a while to find out what it is and who takes it and who gets killed on it. I spent a freezing week in December doing little else except riding the subway. Having already ridden the subways of a dozen cities, each one typifying the city above it - the dusty charm of the Buenos Aires Subterranean, the marmoreal splendor of the Washington Metro - I wondered if the system of tunnels underneath New York reflected the city's unique neuroticism.
I like the wildness of New York. But to write about its subway I would have to penetrate that wildness. It would be like exploring the labyrinthine Mato Grosso of Brazil. I mounted a series of expeditions to discover a way through that labyrinth.
Each morning, I decided on a general direction, and then I set off, sometimes sprinting to the end of the line and making my way back slowly; or else stopping along the way and va rying my route back. I went from midtown to Jamaica Estates in Queen s, and returned via Coney Island. You can get anywhere you want i n New
York on the subway. There are 230 route miles on the system - twice as many as the Paris Metro - and there are 458 stations. I saw most of those stations. The trains run all night - in London they shut down before midnight. (The New York subway isn't the only system with 24-hour daily service; the trains in Chicago and Philadelphia also run all night.) New York's one-price token system is one of the fairest and most sensible in the world; London's multifare structure is clumsy, ridiculous and a wasteful sop to the unions; Tokyo's, while just as complicated, is run by computers which spit tickets at you and then belch out your change.
The Moscow Metro has grandiose chandeliers to light some stations, but the New York subway has hopeful signs, like the one at 96th Stree t and Br oadway: ''New tunnel lighting is being installed at thisarea as part of a Major Rehabilitation Program. Completion is expected in t he summer of 1980.'' They are over a year late in finishing, bu t at least they know there's a problem.
The subway is full of surprises. It has what are probably the longest rides of any subway in the world, the biggest stations, the most track, the most police officers. It is a gift to any connoisseur of dubious superlatives: It has the filthiest trains, the most bizarre graffiti, the noisiest wheels, the craziest passengers, the most macabre crimes.
Three and a half million fares a day pass through it, and in 1981 the total number of murder victims on the subway amounted to 13. This figure does not include suicides (one a week) or ''space cases'' - people who quite often get themselves jammed between the train and the platform.
The subway looks like a deathtrap. It's not at all like the BART system in San Francisco, where people are constantly chattering, saying, ''I'm going to my father's wedding,'' or ''I'm looking after my Mom's children,'' or ''I've got a date with my fiancee's boyfriend.'' The New York subway is a serious matter - the rackety train, the silent passengers, the occasional scream.
No one speaks except to the person on his immediate right or left, and only then if they are very old friends or else married. Avoiding the stranger's gaze is what the subway passenger does best. Most sit bolt upright, with fixed expressions, ready for anything. As a New York City subway passenger, you are J. Alfred Prufrock - you ''prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.'' Those new to the subway have the strangest expressions, like my English friend who told me there was only one way to survive the subway: ''You have to look as if you're the one with the meat cleaver. You have to go in with your eyes flashing.''
To appear inconspicuous on the subway, many people read. Usually they read The Daily News, and a few read Nowy Dziennik, which is the same thing in Polish; The New York Times is less evident, maybe because it takes two hands to read it. But the Bible is very popular, along with religious tracts and the Holy Koran and Spanish copies of The Watchtower; lots of boys study for their bar mitzvah on the F line in Queens. I saw ''The Bragg Toxicless Diet'' on the B train and ''La Pratique du Fran,cais Parle'' on the RR.
All over the system riders read lawbooks: ''The Interpretation of Contracts,'' ''The Law of Torts,'' ''Maritime Law.'' The study of law is a subway preoccupation, and it is especially odd to see all these lawbooks in this lawless atmosphere. The Transit Authority's police officers on the vandalized trains create the same impression of incongruity. When I first saw the police, they looked mournful to me, but after I got to know them I realized that most of them are not mournful at all, just overworked and doing a thankless job.
We were at Flushing Avenue, on the GG line, talking about rules for riding the subway. You need rules: The subway is like a complex - and diseased - circulatory system. Some people liken it to a sewer and others hunch up their shoulders and mutter about being in the bowels of the earth.
I said, ''Keep away from isolated cars, I suppose,'' and one of the two plainclothes transit policemen I was with said, ''Never display jewelry.''
Just then, a man walked by, and he had Chinese coins - the old kind with a hole through the middle - woven somehow into his hair. There were enough coins in that man's hair for a swell night out in old Shanghai, but robbing him would have involved scalping him.
There was a woman at the station, too. She was clearly crazy. She was saying, ''I'm a member of the medical profession.'' She had no teeth, and plastic bags were taped around her feet. I glanced at her and made sure she kept her distance. (The previous day, a crazy old lady like her came at me and shrieked, ''Ah'm goin' cut you up!'' This was at Pelham Parkway, on the No. 2 IRT line in the Bronx. I left the car at the next stop, Bronx Park East, where the zoo is, though who could be blamed for thinking that, in New York City, the zoo is everywhere?) Then a Moslem unflapped his prayer mat and spread it on the platform and knelt on it, just like that, and was soon on all fours, beseeching Allah and praising the Prophet Moh ammed. This is not remarkable. People pray or sell religion on t he subway all the time. ''Hallelujah, brothers and sisters,'' the man with the leaflets says on the BMT-RR line at Prospect Avenue in Broo klyn. ''I love Jesus! I used to be a wino!'' And Moslems beg and push their green plastic cups at passengers, and try to sell them copi es of something called ''Arabic Religious Classics.'' It is winter a nd Brooklyn, but the menare dressed for the Great Nafud Desert, or Ji dda or Medina - skullcap, galabia, sandals.
''And don't sit next to the door,'' the second police officer said. We were still talking about rules. ''A lot of these snatchers like to play the doors.'' The first o fficer said, ''It's a good idea to keep near the conductor. He 's got a telephone. So does the man in the token booth. At night, sti ck around the token booth until the train comes in.''
''Although,'' the second officer said, ''a few years ago, some kids filled a fire extinguisher with gasoline and pumped it into a token booth at Broad Channel. There were two ladies inside, but before they could get out the kids set the gas on fire. The booth just exploded like a bomb, and the ladies died. It was a revenge thing. One of the kids had gotten a summons for theft of service - not paying his fare.'' (One of the teen-agers got a prison term of up to four years for cooperating with the police; the other two were given sentences of 15 years to life imprisonment.)
Just below us, at Flushing Avenue, there was a stream running between the tracks. It gurgled and glugged down the whole length of the long platform. It gave the station the atmosphere of a sewer - dampness and a powerful smell. And there was a rat. It was only my third rat in a week of riding the subway, but this one was twice the size of rats I've seen elsewhere. I thought, Rats as big as cats.
''Stay with the crowds. Keep away from quiet stairways. The stairways at 41st and 43d are usually quiet, but 42d is always busy - that's the one to use.''
So many rules! It's not like taking a subway at all; it's like walking through the woods - through dangerous jungle, rather. Do this; don't do that.
''Last May,'' the first officer said, ''six guys attempted to murder someone at Forest Parkway, on the J line. It was a whole gang against this one guy. Then they tried to burn the station down with Molotov cocktails. We stopped that, too.''
The man who said this was 6 feet 4, 281 pounds. He carried a .38 in a shoulder holster and wore a bulletproof vest. He had a radio, a can of Mace and a blackjack.
The other day a teen-ager - 5 feet 6, 135 pounds -tried to mug him. The boy slapped the plainclothesman across the face while he was seated on a train, minding his own business. The boy said, ''Give me your money.'' He threatened him and kept punching. Finally, the plainclothesman stood up; the boy was still saying, ''Give me all your money!'' The plainclothesman took out his badge and his pistol and said, ''I'm a police officer and you're under arrest.'' ''I was just kidding!'' the boy said, but it was too late.
I laughed at the thought of someone trying to mug this well-armed giant. ''Rule One for the subway,'' he said. ''Want to know what it is?'' He looked up and down the Flushing Avenue platform, at the old lady and the Moslem and the running water and the vandalized signs. ''Rule One is - don't ride the subway if you don't have to.''
A lot of people say that. I did not believe it when he said it, and after a week of riding the trains I still don't. The subway is New York City's best hope. The streets are impossible; the highways are a failure; there is nowhere to park. The private automobile has no future in this city whatsoever. This is plainest of all to the people who own and, frightened of the subway, use cars in the city; they know, better than anyone, that the car is the last desperate old-fangled fling of a badly planned transport system. What is amazing is that back in 1904 a group of businessmen solved New York's transport problems for centuries to come. What an engineering marvel they eventually created in this underground railway! And how amazed they would be to see what it has become, how foul-seeming to the public mind.
Yet, while some New Yorkers seldom set foot in the subway, other New Yorkers live there, moving from station to station, whining for money and eating yesterday's bagels and sleeping on benches. The police in New York call such people ''skells'' and are seldom harsh with them. ''Wolfman Jack'' is a skell, living underground at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn, on the GG line. The police there give him food and clothes, and if you ask him how he is, he says, ''I'm getting some calls.'' Call them colorful characters and they don't look so dangerous or pathetic.
These ''skells'' are not merely down and out. Many are insane, chucked out of New York hospitals in the earl y 1970's when it was decided that long-term institutionalization was doing them little good. ''They were resettled in rooms or hotels,'' said Ruth Cohen, a psychiatric social worker at Bellevue Hospital. ''But many of them can't follow through. They get lost, they wander the streets. They're not violent, suicidal or dangerous enough for Bellevue -this is an acute-care hospital. But these people w ho wander the subway - once they're on their own, they begin to decompensate.''
Ah' m goin' cut you up: That woman who threatened to slash me was decompensating. Here are a few more decompensating - one is weeping on a wooden bench at Canal Street; another has wild hair and is spitting into a Coke can. One man - who is decompensating in a useful way - has a bundle of brooms and begins to sweep the whole of the change area a t Grand Central; another is scrubbing the stairs with scraps of paper at 14th Street. They drink, they scream, they gibber like monkeys. They sit on subway benches with their knees drawn up, just as patients used to do in mental hospitals. A police officer told me, ''There are more serious things than people screaming on trains.'' This is so, and yet the deranged person who sits next to you and begin s howling at you seems at the time very serious indeed.
The subway, which is many things, is also a madhouse. The subway is frightening - and what makes it even more frightening is the fact that it is so very easy for a passenger to get lost on it.
There is nearly always a bus stop near the subway entrance. People waiting for the bus have a special pitying gaze for people entering the dark hole in the sidewalk that is the subway entrance. It is sometimes not pity, but fear; often they look like miners' wives watching their menfolk going down the pit.
The stranger's sense of disorientation down below is immediate. The station is all tile and iron and dampness; it has bars and turnstiles and steel grates. It has the look of an old prison or a monkey cage. Buying a token, the stranger may ask directions, but the token booth - reinforced, burglarproof, bulletproof - renders the reply incoherent. And subway directions are a special language.
''A train ... downtown ... express to the shuttle ... change at 96th for the 2 ... uptown ... the Lex ... CC ... LL ... the local ...''
Most New Yorkers refer to the subway by the now-obsolete forms: IND, IRT, BMT. No one intention-ally tries to confuse the stranger; it is just that, where the subway is concerned, precise directions are very hard to convey. Verbal directions are incomprehensible; printed ones are defaced. The signboards and subway maps are not decipherable beneath layers of graffiti.
People who don't take the subway say that these junky pictures are folk art, a protest against the metropolitan grayness, and what a wonderful sense of color these scribblers have - which is complete nonsense. The graffiti are bad, violent and destructive; they are antiart, and the people who praise them are either malicious or lazy-minded. The graffiti are so extensive and so dreadful it is hard to believe that the perpetrators are not the recipients of some enormous foundation grant.
That Andy Warhol, the stylish philistine, has said, ''I love graffiti,'' is almost reason enough to hate them. One is warier still of Norman Mailer, who naively encouraged this public scrawling in his book ''The Faith of Graffiti.''
Displacing signs and maps, blacking out train windows and obliterating instructions, subway graffiti are deeply menacing. ''In case of emergency'' is crosshatched with a felt tip; a yard-long signature obscures ''These seats are for the elderly and disabled''; ''The subway tracks are very dangerous. If the train should stop, do not -'' the rest is black and unreadable.
There are few cars out of the 6,500 on the system in which the maps have not been torn out or defaced. Assuming the stranger has boarded the train, he (irrespective of his race) can only feel panic when, searching for a clue to his route, he sees in the map frame the message, ''Guzman - Ladron y Asesino.''
He gets off the train, and then his troubles really begin. He may be in the South Bronx or the upper reaches of Broadway on the No. 1 line, or on any one of a dozen lines that traverse Brooklyn. He gets off the train, which is covered with graffiti, and steps onto a station platform, which is covered with graffiti. It is possible that none of the signs will be legible. Not only will the stranger not know where he is, but the stairways will be splotched and stinking -no ''uptown,'' no ''downtown,'' no ''exit.'' It is also possible that not a single soul will be around, and the most dangerous stations - ask any transit police officer - are the emptiest. Of course, the passenger might just want to sit on a broken bench and, taking Mailer's word for it, contemplate the macho qualities of the graffiti; on the other hand, he is more likely to want to get the hell out of there.
This is the story that most people tell of subway fear - the predicament of having boarded t he wrong train and gotten off at a distant station; of being on the empty platform, waiting for a train that shows no sign of coming. Then the vandalized station signs, the crazy semiliterate messages, the monkey scratches on the walls, the dampness, the neglect, the visible evidence o f destruction and violence - they combine to produce a sense of disgust and horror.
In every detail it is like a nightmare, complete with rats and a tunnel and a low ceiling. It is manifest suffocation straight out of Poe. And some of these stations have long platforms - you have to squint to see what is at the far end. These distances intensify a person's fear, and so do all the pillars behind which any ghoul could be lurking. Is it any wonder that, having once strayed into this area of subterranean gothic, people decide that the subway is not for them?
But those who tell this story seldom have a crime to report. They have experienced shock and fear and have gone weak in the knees, but it has been a private little horror. In most cases the person will have come to no harm. Yet he will undoubtedly remember his fear on that empty station for the rest of his life.
When New Yorkers recount an experience like this they are invariably speaking of something that happened on another line, not their usual route. Their own line is fairly safe, they'll say; it's cleaner than the others, it's got a little charm, it's kind of dependable, they've been taking it for years. This sense of loyalty to a regularly used line is the most remarkable thing about the subway passenger in New York. It is, in fact, a jungle attitude.
''New York is a jungle,'' the tourist says, and he believes he has made a withering criticism. But all very large cities are jungles: They are hard to read, hard to penetrate; strange people live in them; and they contain mazy areas of great danger. The jungle aspect of cities (and of New York City in particular) is the most interesting thing about them - the way people behave in this jungle, and adapt to it; the way they change it or are changed by it.
In any jungle, the pathway is a priority. Most subway passengers were shown how to ride it by parents or friends. Habit becomes instinct. The passenger knows where he is going because he seldom diverges from his usual route. But that is also why, unless you are getting off at precisely his stop, he cannot tell you how to get where you're going.
The only other way of learning how to use the subway is by teaching yourself. This is very hard work and requires imagination and intelligence. It means navigating in four dimensions. No one can do it idly, and I doubt that many people take up subway riding in their middle years.
Riders even assign a specific character to each line. For some people, the IRT - the oldest line - is dependable, with patches of elegance (those beaver mosaics at Astor Place commemorating John Jacob Astor's fur business); for others, it is dangerous and dirty. One person praises the IND; another damns it. ''I've got a soft spot for the BMT,'' a woman told me, but found it hard to explain why. ''Take the A train,'' I was told. ''That's the best one, like the song.'' But some of the worst stations are on the (very long) A line. The CC, Eighth Avenue local, was described to me as ''scuzz'' - disreputable -but this train, running from Bedford Park Boulevard, the Bronx, via Manhattan and Brooklyn, to Rockaway Park, Queens, covers a distance of 32.39 miles. For some of these miles, it is pleasant and for others it is not.
There is part of the No. 2 IRT line - from Nostrand to New Lots Avenue in Brooklyn - that is indisputably bad. It is dangerous and ugly, and when you get to New Lots Avenue you cannot imagine why you went. The transit police call this line ''the Beast.'' But people in the know - the police, the Transit Authority, the people who travel throughout the system - say that one line is much like another.
''Is this line bad?'' I asked Robert E. Huber of the Transit Authority, and pointed to the map in his office. ''The whole system is bad,'' he said. ''From 1904 until just a few years ago it went unnoticed. People took it for granted. In 1975, the first year of the fiscal crisis, Mayor Beame ordered cutbacks. They started a program of deferred maintenance - postponed servicing - and just attended to the most serious deficiencies. After four or five years of deferred maintenance, the bottom fell out. In January-February 1981, 25 percent of the trains were out of service, and things got worse - soon a 30-minute trip was taking an hour and a half. No one was putting any money into it. But of course they never had. It was under-capitalized from the beginning. Now there is decay everywhere, but there is also a real determination to reverse that trend and get it going right.''
That determination may be there, but last year long-delayed maintenance of aging equipment exacted a terrible toll. In July, when an antiquated signal system failed, a Manhattan-bound IRT train slammed into the rear of a second train that had halted because of signal trouble in a darkened tunnel in Brooklyn. A motorman was killed and 135 passengers were injured.
On Dec. 15, just south of the Times Square station, a motor on a West Side IRT train fell from its bracket, snagged on a track switch, causing the car behind it to skid off the tracks and tear through nine steel tunnel supports. The derailment, which occurred at5:50 A.M., injured 10 of the 50 persons on board and tied up service on the heavily traveled route for most of the day. If it had happened an hour later, during the rush, the accident would have been catastrophic. It was the third time in 1981 t hat a motor had dropped from a moving train onto the tracks.
Feelings of foreboding notwithstanding, the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority last year ranked the New York subway system as the second safest in the country - behind the Metro in Washington. (The last passenger fatality in a New York subway collision took place in 1970 when a disabled IND train smashed into a crowded morning rush-hour train while switching tracks near the Roosevelt Avenue station in Queens. Two passenger s were killed and 60 injured.) That a spanking-new system like t he Washington Metro is not immune to fatal accidents was sadly brought home earlier this month when a rush-hour crash killed three persons and injured 25. It was the Washington system's first fatal accident in its six years of operation.
It is the obvious decay and vandalism on the subways that conveys the feeling of lawlessness. Indeed, the first perception of subway crime came with the appearance of widespread graffiti in 1970. It was then that passengers took fright, and ridership, which had been declining slowly since the 1950's, dropped rapidly. Passengers felt threatened, and newspapers gave prominence to subway crime.
Today, all the trains carry crime with them, picking it up in one area and carrying it to another. The South Bronx is regarded as a high-risk area, but seven lines pass through it, taking vandals and thieves all over the system. There is a species of vandalism that was once peculiar to the South Bronx: Boys would swing on the stanchions - those stainless-steel poles in the center of the car - and, raising themselves sideways until they were parallel with the floor, they would kick hard against a window and burst it. Now this South Bronx window-breaking technique is endemic throughout the system.
Except for the people who have the misfortune of traveling on ''the Beast,'' no one can claim that his train is much better or worse than any other.
The majority of subway crime is theft - bag snatching and pickpocketing. This is followed by robbery - the robber using a gun or knife. There are about 32 robberies or snatchings a day in the system, and one or two cases of aggravated assault a day. This takes care of many ''Part 1 Offenses'' - the serious ones.
Serious crimes in the subways ran 60 percent to 65 percent higher last December than for December 1980. That increase was not the largest for a month, said Edward J. Silberfarb, a spokesman for the New York Transit Authority police. The record was the 80 percent rise of August 1980 over August 1979, when - because of the high price of gold - there was a sudden spurt of chain snatchings. (The 15,812 felonies reported in the transit system in 1981 represented an increase of 13.7 percent over the preceding year.)
People do get mugged. I asked a uniformed Transit Authority police officer what reaction he got upon entering a car. ''A big sigh of relief,'' he said. ''You can actually hear it. People smile at me. They're relieved. But the ones who are the most pleased to see me are the handicapped people and the old people. They're the ones who get mugged mostly.''
That is the disgraceful part: The victims of subway crime, according to some transit policemen I talked to, are most often the old, the mentally retarded, the crippled, the blind, the weak. The majority of victims are women. Minorities constitute the next largest category of victim: a black person in a white area, a Hispanic in a black area, a white in a Hispanic area. Of course, the old and handicapped are also minorities, regarded as easy targets and defenseless. But cities can turn people into members of a minority group quite easily. What makes the New Yorker so instinctively wary is perhaps the thought that anyone who boards the wrong train, or gets off at the wrong stop, is capable of being in the minority.
Of course, many crimes on the subway go unreported, but this is also true outside the transit system. In one precinct, there might be 77 murders in a year, which makes the 13 in the subway in 1981 look mild by comparison. There were 35 rapes and rape attempts last year, which, while nothing to crow about, is not as bad as is widely believed (''I'll bet they have at least one rape a day,'' a woman told me, and for that reason she never took the subway).
The perception of crime is widespread, despite the fact that statistically the experience of it is quite small. The whiff of criminality, the atmosphere of viciousness, is so strong in the stations and trains that it does little good to say that, relatively speaking, crime is not that serious in the subway. ''What do those statistics matter to someone who is in a car and a gang of six guys starts teasing and then threatening the passengers?'' said Arthur S. Penn, a New York lawyer. ''Or that other familiar instance - you get into a car and there's one guy way down at the end sitting all by himself, and the rest of the people are crowded up at this end of the car. You know from experience that the man who's sitting alone is crazy, and then, when the train pulls out, he starts screaming. ...''
The most frequent complaint of subway passengers, however, is not about crime. It is, by a wide margin, about delayed trains and slow service. The second largest category of complaint is about the discourtesy of conductors or token sellers; and the third concerns unclean stations. ''Mainly the smell of urine -it's really horrible at some stati ons,'' said Robert Huber of the Transit Authority.
Discomfort, anxiety, fear - these are the responses of most passengers. No wonder people complain that the trains are too slow: When one is fearful, every trip takes too long. No matter that these are among the fastest subway trains in the world. Stan Fischler, in his enthusiastic history of the system, ''Uptown, Downtown,'' gives 55 miles per hour as the speed of an IRT Seventh Avenue express as it careens through the tunnel between the 14th Street and Chambers Street stations. The train going by sounds as if it is full of coal, but when one is inside, it can feel like a trip on ''The Wild Mouse'' at Coney Island.
The most-mugged man in New York must be the white-haired creaky looking fellow in Bedford-Stuyvesant who has had as many as 30 mugging attempts made on him in a single year. And he still rides the subway trains. He's not as crazy as he looks: He is a plainclothesman who works with the transit-police task force in the district once designated ''Brooklyn North.'' He is frequently a decoy. In the weeks before Christmas, he rode the J and the GG and the No. 2 lines looking like a pathetic old man, with two festively wrapped parcels in his shopping bag. He was repeatedly ambushed by unsuspecting muggers; he would pull out his badge and handcuffs and arrest them.
Muggers are not always compliant. In that case, the transit-police officer unholsters his pistol, but not before jamming a colored headband over his head to alert any nearby uniformed officer. Before the advent of headbands, many plainclothesmen were shot by their colleagues in uniform.
''And then we rush in,'' said Sgt. Robert Donnery, who was until early this month the squad commander of the transit-police mobile task force. (He is now a squad sergeant of what has been renamed ''the task force'' - the combined mobile and robbery task forces of 80 plainclothesmen and two detectives.) ''Ninety percent of the guys out there can flatten me, one on one. You've got to come on yelling and screaming: 'You so-and-so! I'm going to kill you!' Unless the suspect is deranged and has a knife or something. In that case, you might have to talk quietly. But if the guy's tough and you go in meek you get sized up very fast.''
The transit police force has 3,000 officers and 13 dogs. It is one of the biggest police forces in the United States and is separate from the New York City police, although the pay and training are exactly the same. It is so separate the men cannot speak to each other on their radios, which many Transit Authority police find inconvenient when chasing a suspect up the subway stairs into the street.
What about the dogs? ''Dogs command respect,'' I was told at transit-police headquarters. ''Think of them as a tool, like a gun or a nightstick. At the moment it's just a test program for high-crime stations, late-night hours, that kind of thing.''
I wondered aloud whether it would work, and the reply was: ''A crime is unlikely to be committed anywhere near one of these dogs.'' The canine squad, doing its part toward taking a bite out of crime, is headquartered on the same floor as the transit-police task force on the mezzanine of the Metropolitan Avenue station of the GG line. Last December, the bulletin board on the plainclothesmen's side was plastered with unit citations and merit awards, and Sergeant Donnery had been made ''Cop of the Month'' in May for a particularly courageous set of arrests. The motto of the mobile task force was ''Soar With the Eagles.'' A sheaf of admiring newspaper clippings testified to their effectiveness. As we talked, the second shift was preparing to set out for the day.
''Morale seems very high,'' I said. The men were joking, watching the old-man decoy spraying his hair and beard white. ''Sure, morale is high,'' Sergeant Donnery said. ''We feel we're getting something accomplished. It isn't easy. Sometimes you have to hide in a porter's room with a mop for four days before you get your man. We dress up as porters, conductors, motormen, track workers. The idea is to give the appearance of being workers. We've got all the uniforms.''
''Plainclothesmen'' is something of a misnomer for the task force, which has enough of a theatrical wardrobe to mount a production of ''Subways Are for Sleeping.''
Standing on the platform at Nassau Avenue on the GG line, Howard Haag and Joseph Minucci looked for all the world like a pair of physical-education teachers on their way to the school gym. They looked tough, but not aggressively so. They a re healthy and well built - but this day some of that was padding : They both wore bulletproof vests. Underneath the ordinary clothes, the men were well armed. Each man carried a .38, a blackjack and a can of Mace. Minucci had a two-way radio.
Haag has been on the transit police force for 17 years; Minucci, for almost seven. Neither has in that time ever fired his gun, though each has an excellent arrest record and a pride in detection. They are funny, alert and indefatigable, and together they make Starsky and Hutch look like a pair of hysterical cream puffs. Their job also seems much ha rder than any city cop's. I had been told repeatedly that the aver age city cop would refuse to work in the conditions that the transit police endure every day. At Nassau Avenue, Minucci told me why.
''Look at the stations! They're dirty, they're cold, they're noisy. If you fire your gun, you'll kill 10 innocent people - you're trapped here. You stand here some days and the cold and the dampness creeps into your bones and you start shivering. And that smell - smell it? - it's like that all the time, and you've got to stand here and breathe it in. Bergen Street station - the snow comes through the bars and you freeze. They call it 'the Ice Box.' Then some days, kids recognize you - they've seen you make a collar - and they swear at you, call you names, try to get you to react, smoke pot right under your nose. 'Here come the D.T.'s' - that's what they call us. It's the conditions. They're awful. You have to take so much from these school kids. And your feet are killing you. So you sit down, read a newspaper, drink coffee, and then you get a rip from a shoefly. ...''
Minucci wasn't angry; he said all this in a smiling, ironical way. Like Howie Haag, he enjoys his work and takes it seriously. A ''shoefly,'' he explained, is a transit-police inspector who rides the subway looking for officers who are goldbricking -although having a coffee on a cold day hardly seemed to me like goldbricking. ''We're not supposed to drink coffee,'' Minucci said, and he went on to define other words of the transit police vocabulary: ''lushworker'' (a person who robs drunks or sleeping passengers); ''flop squad'' (decoys who pretend to be asleep, in order to attract lushworkers).
Just then, as we were talking at Nassau, the station filled with shouting boys -big ones, anywhere from 15 to 18. There seemed to be hundreds of them, and with them came the unmistakable odor of smoldering marijuana. They were boys from Automotive High School, heading south on the GG. They stood on the platform, most of them howling and screaming and sucking smoke out of their fingers, and when the train pulled in they began fighting toward the doors.
''You might see one of these kids being a pain in the neck, writing graffiti or smoking dope or something,'' Howie Haag said. ''And you might wonder why we don't do anything. The reason is we're looking for something serious - robbers, snatchers, assault, stuff like that.''
Minucci said, ''The vandalism squad deals with window kickers and graffiti. Normally we don't.'' Once on the train, the crowd of yelling boys thinned out. I had seen this sort of activity before: Boys get on the subway train and immediately begin walking - they leave the car immediately, saunter through the connecting doors and walk from car to car. I asked Minucci why this was so.
''They're marking the people. See them? They're looking for an old lady near a door or something they can snatch or a pocket they can pick. They're sizing up the situation. They're also heading for the last car. That's where they hang out on this train.''
Howie said, ''They want to see if we'll follow them. If we do, they'll mark us as cops.'' Minucci and Haag did not follow, though at each stop they took cautious looks out of the train, using the reflections in mirrors and windows and seldom looking directly at the rowdy students.
''They play the doors when it's crowded,'' Minucci said. ''Look at that old lady. She's doing everything wrong.'' The woman, in her late 60's, was sitting next to the door. Her wristwatch was exposed and her handbag dangled from the arm closest to the door. Minucci explained that one of the commonest subway crimes was inspired by this posture. The snatcher reaches through the door from the platform and, just before the door shuts, he grabs the bag or watch, or both, and then he is off, the train pulling out with the victim trapped on board.
I wondered if the plainclothesmen would warn her. They didn't. But they watched her closely, and when she got off they got off, too. The woman never knew how well-protected she was.
There were men on the train, drinking wine out of bottles sheathed in paper bags. ''The winos don't cause much trouble,'' Minucci said. ''It's the kids coming home from school. They're the majority of snatchers and robbers.''
Subway crime to a large extent is schoolboy crime. While most crimes are committed between noon and 8 P.M., the greatest number of them take place between 4 P.M. and 7 P.M. For instance, Minucci said,''On the LL line, on Grand Street, there's much more crime than before, because Eastern District High School relocated there. It's mostly larceny and bag snatches.''
It was a salutary experience for me, riding through Brooklyn with Officers Minucci and Haag. Who except a man flanked by two armed plainclothesmen would travel from one end of Brooklyn to the other, walking through housing projects and derelict areas, and waiting for hours at subway stations? It was a perverse hope of mine that we would happen upon a crime, or even be the victims of a mugging attempt. We w ere left alone; things were quiet.
But for the first time in my life I was traveling the hinterland of New York City with my head up, looking people in the eye with curiosity and lingering scrutiny and no fear. It was a shocking experience. I felt at first, with bodyguards, like Haile Selassie, and then I seemed to be looking at an alien land - I had never had the courage to gaze at it so steadily. It was a land impossible to glamorize and hard to describe. It was beat up, with patches of beauty, like a cityscape in China or India - futuristic in a ruined and unpromising way.
Backed up by the plainclothesmen, unafraid, and sticking near the subway, I saw New York in a way I had never seen it before. What surprised me most, after seeing the housing projects and the desperate idleness and the rather fierce and drugged-looking people on these derelict frontiers, was that they had not wrecked more of the subway or perhaps even destroyed it utterly. Uniformed Transit Authority Police Officer John Burgois is in his mid-30's and describes himself as ''of Hispanic origin.'' He has had four citations. Normally he works with the strike force out of midtown Manhattan in areas considered difficult - 34th and Seventh, 34th and Eighth, and Times Square. Officer Burgois told me that the job of the uniformed transit cop is to reassure people by being an obvious presence. The transit cop in uniform also deals with loiterers and fare evaders, assists injured people and lost souls, keeps a watch on public toilets (''toilets attract a lot of crime''). As for drunks: ''We ask drunks to remove themselves.''
I asked Officer Burgois whether he considered his job dangerous. ''Once or twice a year I get bitten,'' he replied. ''Bites are bad. You always need a tetanus shot for human bites.'' One of the largest and busiest change areas on the subway is at Times Square. It is the junction of four main lines, including the shuttle, which operates with wonderful efficiency between Times Square and Grand Central. This, for the Christmas season, was John Burgois's beat. I followed him and for an hour I made notes, keeping track of how he was working.
4:21 - Smoker is warned (smoking is forbidden in the subway, even on ramps and stairs). 4:24 - Panicky shout from another cop: ''There's a woman with a gun downstairs on the platform.'' Officer Burgois gives chase, finds the woman. She is drunk and has a toy pistol. Woman is warned.
4:26 - ''Which way to the Flushing line?'' 4:29 - ''How do I transfer here?'' 4:30 - ''Is this the way to 23d Street?'' 4:37 - ''Donde es Quins Plaza?'' 4:43 - ''Where is the A train?'' As Officer Burgois answers this question, a group of people gather around him. There are four more requests for directions. Since the maps have been vandalized, the lost souls need very detailed directions.
4:59 - Radio call: There is an injured passenger at a certain token booth - a gash on her ankle. Officer Burgois lets another cop attend to it.
5:02 - ''Where ees the shuffle?'' asks a boy carrying an open can of beer. ''Over there,'' Officer Burgois says, ''and dispose of that can. I'm watching you.''
5:10 - Radio call: A man whose wallet has been stolen is at the transit-police cubicle on the Times Square concourse. Officer Burgois steps in to observe. Man: ''What am I going to do?''
Officer: ''The officer in charge will take down the information.''
Man: ''Are you going to catch him?'' Officer: ''We'll prosecute if you can identify him.'' Man: ''I only saw his back.'' Officer: ''That's too bad.'' Man: ''He was tall, thin and black. I had $22 in that wallet.'' Officer: ''You can kiss your money goodbye. Even if we caught him he'd say, 'This is my money.' '' Man: ''This is the first time anything like this has ever happened to me.'' 5:17 - Seeing Officer Burgois, a member of the public says, ''There's two kids on the train downstairs snatching bags - go get them!'' Officer Burgois runs and finds the boys hanging over the gate between trains, the favorite spot for snatching bags from passengers on the platform. Officer Burgois apprehend s t hem. The boys, Troy and Sam, are from the Bronx. They can't remember when they were born; they seem to be about 14 or 15. They deny the y were snatching bags. Each boy has about $35 in his pocket. They ar e sullen, but not at allafraid. Officer Burgois gives them a youth di vision form and says, ''If I catch you again, your mother's going t o pick you up from the station. ...''
5:28 - ''Hey, officer, how do I get to ... ?'' At this point I stopped writing. I could see that it would be repetitious - and so it was, dreary questions, petty crime and obstinate sneaks. But no one bit Officer Burgois. He has been doing this every hour of every working day for 12 1/2 years, and will go on doing it, or something very much like it, for the rest of his working life.
It costs about $25 - and takes about 45 minutes if there is light traffic - to go by taxi from midtown to Kennedy International Airport. For $5 it is possible to go by subway, on the JFK Express - which usually has a transit policeman on board - and the trip takes about 40 minutes (it's another 20 minutes by bus from the last JFK Express subway stop, Howard Beach, to the airline terminals). Critics of this service would like to see it withdrawn, because so few people use it. If that happens, there is another option - the express on the A line to Howard Beach, which takes under an hour and costs 75 cents.
There are ducks at Howard Beach, and herons farther on at Jamaica Bay, and odd watery vistas all the way from Broad Channel to Far Rockaway. The train travels on a causeway past what looked like sleepy villages and wood-frame houses, and it's all ducks and geese until the train reaches the far side of the bay, where the dingier bungalows and the housing projects begin. Then, roughly at Frank Avenue station, the Atlantic Ocean pounds past jetties of black rocks, not far from the tracks, and at Mott Avenue is the sprawling two-story town of Far Rockaway, with its main street and its slaphappy architecture and its ruins. It looks like its sister cities in Ohio and Rhode Island, with just enough trees to hide its dullness, and though part of it is in a state of decay it looks small enough to save.
That was a pleasant afternoon, when I took the train to the Rockaways. Out-of-season Coney Island, on the other hand, was populated by drunks and transvestites and troglodytes, and the whole place looked as if it had been insured and burned. Though it is on the other side of Rockaway Inlet, it is a world away from Rockaway Park.
The subway stations usually reflect what is above ground: Spring Street is raffish, Forest Hills smacks of refinement, Livonia Avenue on the LL looks bombed. People aspire to Bay Ridge and some people say they wouldn't be caught dead in East Harlem - though others are. The Fort Hamilton station leads to the amazing Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the IRT No. 1 to a ferry landing. By the time I reached 241st Street on the 2, I thought I had got to somewhere near Buffalo, but returning on the 5 and dropping slowly through the Bronx to Lexington Avenue and then to lower Manhattan and across on the 4 to Flatbush, I had a sense of unrelieved desolation.
Not long ago, The Daily News ran a series about the subway called ''The Doomsday Express.'' It was about all the catastrophes that are possible on the New York system - spectacular crashes and floods with heavy casualties.
It is easy to frighten people with catastrophes - much harder to convince them that decay and trivial-seeming deterioration can be inexorable. The New York subway system is wearing out, and certain sections are worn out; a large part of it looks hopeless.
There is a strong political commitment to the subway, particularly among down-market Democrats anxious to identify with blue-collar commuters who have no choice but to take the subway. But only money can save it. To this end there is a plan called the ''Five-Year Capital Program'' of $5.8 billion, which won approval from a New York State review panel late last year. The money is to be raised through M.T.A. bonds and will also include Federal, state and city grants. It will be the largest infusion of capital in the history of the city's bus and subway system, and will involve fixing and buying cars and buses, retiling and cleaning and lighting stations, restoring maps, windows and signs, repairing tracks and elevated structures - all the day-to-day things which, because they have been ignored, have given the subway and bus system a bad case of arteriosclerosis.
Vital infusions of money aside, there is still the matter of the subway passenger. Most people who live in New York act as if they own the city: It makes some people respectful and turns others into slobs - and that is how they treat the subway. ''I pity you,'' people said when I told them what I was doing. But I ended up admiring the handiwork of the system and hating the people who misused it, the way you hate kids who tear the branches off saplings.
Discomfort, anxiety, fear - these are the responses of most passengers. No wonder people complain that the trains are too slow: When one is fearful, every trip takes too long. No matter that these are among the fastest subway trains in the world. Stan Fischler, in his enthusiastic history of the system, ''Uptown, Downtown,'' gives 55 miles per hour as the speed of an IRT Seventh Avenue express as it careens through the tunnel between the 14th Street and Chambers Street stations. The train going by sounds as if it is full of coal, but when one is inside, it can feel like a trip on ''The Wild Mouse'' at Coney Island.
The most-mugged man in New York must be the white-haired creaky looking fellow in Bedford-Stuyvesant who has had as many as 30 mugging attempts made on him in a single year. And he still rides the subway trains. He's not as crazy as he looks: He is a plainclothesman who works with the transit-police task force in the district once designated ''Brooklyn North.'' He is frequently a decoy. In the weeks before Christmas, he rode the J and the GG and the No. 2 lines looking like a pathetic old man, with two festively wrapped parcels in his shopping bag. He was repeatedly ambushed by unsuspecting muggers; he would pull out his badge and handcuffs and arrest them.
Muggers are not always compliant. In that case, the transit-police officer unholsters his pistol, but not before jamming a colored headband over his head to alert any nearby uniformed officer. Before the advent of headbands, many plainclothesmen were shot by their colleagues in uniform.
''And then we rush in,'' said Sgt. Robert Donnery, who was until early this month the squad commander of the transit-police mobile task force. (He is now a squad sergeant of what has been renamed ''the task force'' - the combined mobile and robbery task forces of 80 plainclothesmen and two detectives.) ''Ninety percent of the guys out there can flatten me, one on one. You've got to come on yelling and screaming: 'You so-and-so! I'm going to kill you!' Unless the suspect is deranged and has a knife or something. In that case, you might have to talk quietly. But if the guy's tough and you go in meek you get sized up very fast.''
The transit police force has 3,000 officers and 13 dogs. It is one of the biggest police forces in the United States and is separate from the New York City police, although the pay and training are exactly the same. It is so separate the men cannot speak to each other on their radios, which many Transit Authority police find inconvenient when chasing a suspect up the subway stairs into the street.
What about the dogs? ''Dogs command respect,'' I was told at transit-police headquarters. ''Think of them as a tool, like a gun or a nightstick. At the moment it's just a test program for high-crime stations, late-night hours, that kind of thing.''
I wondered aloud whether it would work, and the reply was: ''A crime is unlikely to be committed anywhere near one of these dogs.'' The canine squad, doing its part toward taking a bite out of crime, is headquartered on the same floor as the transit-police task force on the mezzanine of the Metropolitan Avenue station of the GG line. Last December, the bulletin board on the plainclothesmen's side was plastered with unit citations and merit awards, and Sergeant Donnery had been made ''Cop of the Month'' in May for a particularly courageous set of arrests. The motto of the mobile task force was ''Soar With the Eagles.'' A sheaf of admiring newspaper clippings testified to their effectiveness. As we talked, the second shift was preparing to set out for the day.
''Morale seems very high,'' I said. The men were joking, watching the old-man decoy spraying his hair and beard white. ''Sure, morale is high,'' Sergeant Donnery said. ''We feel we're getting something accomplished. It isn't easy. Sometimes you have to hide in a porter's room with a mop for four days before you get your man. We dress up as porters, conductors, motormen, track workers. The idea is to give the appearance of being workers. We've got all the uniforms.''
''Plainclothesmen'' is something of a misnomer for the task force, which has enough of a theatrical wardrobe to mount a production of ''Subways Are for Sleeping.''
Standing on the platform at Nassau Avenue on the GG line, Howard Haag and Joseph Minucci looked for all the world like a pair of physical-education teachers on their way to the school gym. They looked tough, but not aggressively so. They a re healthy and well built - but this day some of that was padding : They both wore bulletproof vests. Underneath the ordinary clothes, the men were well armed. Each man carried a .38, a blackjack and a can of Mace. Minucci had a two-way radio.
Haag has been on the transit police force for 17 years; Minucci, for almost seven. Neither has in that time ever fired his gun, though each has an excellent arrest record and a pride in detection. They are funny, alert and indefatigable, and together they make Starsky and Hutch look like a pair of hysterical cream puffs. Their job also seems much ha rder than any city cop's. I had been told repeatedly that the aver age city cop would refuse to work in the conditions that the transit police endure every day. At Nassau Avenue, Minucci told me why.
''Look at the stations! They're dirty, they're cold, they're noisy. If you fire your gun, you'll kill 10 innocent people - you're trapped here. You stand here some days and the cold and the dampness creeps into your bones and you start shivering. And that smell - smell it? - it's like that all the time, and you've got to stand here and breathe it in. Bergen Street station - the snow comes through the bars and you freeze. They call it 'the Ice Box.' Then some days, kids recognize you - they've seen you make a collar - and they swear at you, call you names, try to get you to react, smoke pot right under your nose. 'Here come the D.T.'s' - that's what they call us. It's the conditions. They're awful. You have to take so much from these school kids. And your feet are killing you. So you sit down, read a newspaper, drink coffee, and then you get a rip from a shoefly. ...''
Minucci wasn't angry; he said all this in a smiling, ironical way. Like Howie Haag, he enjoys his work and takes it seriously. A ''shoefly,'' he explained, is a transit-police inspector who rides the subway looking for officers who are goldbricking -although having a coffee on a cold day hardly seemed to me like goldbricking. ''We're not supposed to drink coffee,'' Minucci said, and he went on to define other words of the transit police vocabulary: ''lushworker'' (a person who robs drunks or sleeping passengers); ''flop squad'' (decoys who pretend to be asleep, in order to attract lushworkers).
Just then, as we were talking at Nassau, the station filled with shouting boys -big ones, anywhere from 15 to 18. There seemed to be hundreds of them, and with them came the unmistakable odor of smoldering marijuana. They were boys from Automotive High School, heading south on the GG. They stood on the platform, most of them howling and screaming and sucking smoke out of their fingers, and when the train pulled in they began fighting toward the doors.
''You might see one of these kids being a pain in the neck, writing graffiti or smoking dope or something,'' Howie Haag said. ''And you might wonder why we don't do anything. The reason is we're looking for something serious - robbers, snatchers, assault, stuff like that.''
Minucci said, ''The vandalism squad deals with window kickers and graffiti. Normally we don't.'' Once on the train, the crowd of yelling boys thinned out. I had seen this sort of activity before: Boys get on the subway train and immediately begin walking - they leave the car immediately, saunter through the connecting doors and walk from car to car. I asked Minucci why this was so.
''They're marking the people. See them? They're looking for an old lady near a door or something they can snatch or a pocket they can pick. They're sizing up the situation. They're also heading for the last car. That's where they hang out on this train.''
Howie said, ''They want to see if we'll follow them. If we do, they'll mark us as cops.'' Minucci and Haag did not follow, though at each stop they took cautious looks out of the train, using the reflections in mirrors and windows and seldom looking directly at the rowdy students.
''They play the doors when it's crowded,'' Minucci said. ''Look at that old lady. She's doing everything wrong.'' The woman, in her late 60's, was sitting next to the door. Her wristwatch was exposed and her handbag dangled from the arm closest to the door. Minucci explained that one of the commonest subway crimes was inspired by this posture. The snatcher reaches through the door from the platform and, just before the door shuts, he grabs the bag or watch, or both, and then he is off, the train pulling out with the victim trapped on board.
I wondered if the plainclothesmen would warn her. They didn't. But they watched her closely, and when she got off they got off, too. The woman never knew how well-protected she was.
There were men on the train, drinking wine out of bottles sheathed in paper bags. ''The winos don't cause much trouble,'' Minucci said. ''It's the kids coming home from school. They're the majority of snatchers and robbers.''
Subway crime to a large extent is schoolboy crime. While most crimes are committed between noon and 8 P.M., the greatest number of them take place between 4 P.M. and 7 P.M. For instance, Minucci said,''On the LL line, on Grand Street, there's much more crime than before, because Eastern District High School relocated there. It's mostly larceny and bag snatches.''
It was a salutary experience for me, riding through Brooklyn with Officers Minucci and Haag. Who except a man flanked by two armed plainclothesmen would travel from one end of Brooklyn to the other, walking through housing projects and derelict areas, and waiting for hours at subway stations? It was a perverse hope of mine that we would happen upon a crime, or even be the victims of a mugging attempt. We w ere left alone; things were quiet.
But for the first time in my life I was traveling the hinterland of New York City with my head up, looking people in the eye with curiosity and lingering scrutiny and no fear. It was a shocking experience. I felt at first, with bodyguards, like Haile Selassie, and then I seemed to be looking at an alien land - I had never had the courage to gaze at it so steadily. It was a land impossible to glamorize and hard to describe. It was beat up, with patches of beauty, like a cityscape in China or India - futuristic in a ruined and unpromising way.
Backed up by the plainclothesmen, unafraid, and sticking near the subway, I saw New York in a way I had never seen it before. What surprised me most, after seeing the housing projects and the desperate idleness and the rather fierce and drugged-looking people on these derelict frontiers, was that they had not wrecked more of the subway or perhaps even destroyed it utterly. Uniformed Transit Authority Police Officer John Burgois is in his mid-30's and describes himself as ''of Hispanic origin.'' He has had four citations. Normally he works with the strike force out of midtown Manhattan in areas considered difficult - 34th and Seventh, 34th and Eighth, and Times Square. Officer Burgois told me that the job of the uniformed transit cop is to reassure people by being an obvious presence. The transit cop in uniform also deals with loiterers and fare evaders, assists injured people and lost souls, keeps a watch on public toilets (''toilets attract a lot of crime''). As for drunks: ''We ask drunks to remove themselves.''
I asked Officer Burgois whether he considered his job dangerous. ''Once or twice a year I get bitten,'' he replied. ''Bites are bad. You always need a tetanus shot for human bites.'' One of the largest and busiest change areas on the subway is at Times Square. It is the junction of four main lines, including the shuttle, which operates with wonderful efficiency between Times Square and Grand Central. This, for the Christmas season, was John Burgois's beat. I followed him and for an hour I made notes, keeping track of how he was working.
4:21 - Smoker is warned (smoking is forbidden in the subway, even on ramps and stairs). 4:24 - Panicky shout from another cop: ''There's a woman with a gun downstairs on the platform.'' Officer Burgois gives chase, finds the woman. She is drunk and has a toy pistol. Woman is warned.
4:26 - ''Which way to the Flushing line?'' 4:29 - ''How do I transfer here?'' 4:30 - ''Is this the way to 23d Street?'' 4:37 - ''Donde es Quins Plaza?'' 4:43 - ''Where is the A train?'' As Officer Burgois answers this question, a group of people gather around him. There are four more requests for directions. Since the maps have been vandalized, the lost souls need very detailed directions.
4:59 - Radio call: There is an injured passenger at a certain token booth - a gash on her ankle. Officer Burgois lets another cop attend to it.
5:02 - ''Where ees the shuffle?'' asks a boy carrying an open can of beer. ''Over there,'' Officer Burgois says, ''and dispose of that can. I'm watching you.''
5:10 - Radio call: A man whose wallet has been stolen is at the transit-police cubicle on the Times Square concourse. Officer Burgois steps in to observe. Man: ''What am I going to do?''
Officer: ''The officer in charge will take down the information.''
Man: ''Are you going to catch him?'' Officer: ''We'll prosecute if you can identify him.'' Man: ''I only saw his back.'' Officer: ''That's too bad.'' Man: ''He was tall, thin and black. I had $22 in that wallet.'' Officer: ''You can kiss your money goodbye. Even if we caught him he'd say, 'This is my money.' '' Man: ''This is the first time anything like this has ever happened to me.'' 5:17 - Seeing Officer Burgois, a member of the public says, ''There's two kids on the train downstairs snatching bags - go get them!'' Officer Burgois runs and finds the boys hanging over the gate between trains, the favorite spot for snatching bags from passengers on the platform. Officer Burgois apprehend s t hem. The boys, Troy and Sam, are from the Bronx. They can't remember when they were born; they seem to be about 14 or 15. They deny the y were snatching bags. Each boy has about $35 in his pocket. They ar e sullen, but not at allafraid. Officer Burgois gives them a youth di vision form and says, ''If I catch you again, your mother's going t o pick you up from the station. ...''
5:28 - ''Hey, officer, how do I get to ... ?'' At this point I stopped writing. I could see that it would be repetitious - and so it was, dreary questions, petty crime and obstinate sneaks. But no one bit Officer Burgois. He has been doing this every hour of every working day for 12 1/2 years, and will go on doing it, or something very much like it, for the rest of his working life.
It costs about $25 - and takes about 45 minutes if there is light traffic - to go by taxi from midtown to Kennedy International Airport. For $5 it is possible to go by subway, on the JFK Express - which usually has a transit policeman on board - and the trip takes about 40 minutes (it's another 20 minutes by bus from the last JFK Express subway stop, Howard Beach, to the airline terminals). Critics of this service would like to see it withdrawn, because so few people use it. If that happens, there is another option - the express on the A line to Howard Beach, which takes under an hour and costs 75 cents.
There are ducks at Howard Beach, and herons farther on at Jamaica Bay, and odd watery vistas all the way from Broad Channel to Far Rockaway. The train travels on a causeway past what looked like sleepy villages and wood-frame houses, and it's all ducks and geese until the train reaches the far side of the bay, where the dingier bungalows and the housing projects begin. Then, roughly at Frank Avenue station, the Atlantic Ocean pounds past jetties of black rocks, not far from the tracks, and at Mott Avenue is the sprawling two-story town of Far Rockaway, with its main street and its slaphappy architecture and its ruins. It looks like its sister cities in Ohio and Rhode Island, with just enough trees to hide its dullness, and though part of it is in a state of decay it looks small enough to save.
That was a pleasant afternoon, when I took the train to the Rockaways. Out-of-season Coney Island, on the other hand, was populated by drunks and transvestites and troglodytes, and the whole place looked as if it had been insured and burned. Though it is on the other side of Rockaway Inlet, it is a world away from Rockaway Park.
The subway stations usually reflect what is above ground: Spring Street is raffish, Forest Hills smacks of refinement, Livonia Avenue on the LL looks bombed. People aspire to Bay Ridge and some people say they wouldn't be caught dead in East Harlem - though others are. The Fort Hamilton station leads to the amazing Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the IRT No. 1 to a ferry landing. By the time I reached 241st Street on the 2, I thought I had got to somewhere near Buffalo, but returning on the 5 and dropping slowly through the Bronx to Lexington Avenue and then to lower Manhattan and across on the 4 to Flatbush, I had a sense of unrelieved desolation.
Not long ago, The Daily News ran a series about the subway called ''The Doomsday Express.'' It was about all the catastrophes that are possible on the New York system - spectacular crashes and floods with heavy casualties.
It is easy to frighten people with catastrophes - much harder to convince them that decay and trivial-seeming deterioration can be inexorable. The New York subway system is wearing out, and certain sections are worn out; a large part of it looks hopeless.
There is a strong political commitment to the subway, particularly among down-market Democrats anxious to identify with blue-collar commuters who have no choice but to take the subway. But only money can save it. To this end there is a plan called the ''Five-Year Capital Program'' of $5.8 billion, which won approval from a New York State review panel late last year. The money is to be raised through M.T.A. bonds and will also include Federal, state and city grants. It will be the largest infusion of capital in the history of the city's bus and subway system, and will involve fixing and buying cars and buses, retiling and cleaning and lighting stations, restoring maps, windows and signs, repairing tracks and elevated structures - all the day-to-day things which, because they have been ignored, have given the subway and bus system a bad case of arteriosclerosis.
Vital infusions of money aside, there is still the matter of the subway passenger. Most people who live in New York act as if they own the city: It makes some people respectful and turns others into slobs - and that is how they treat the subway. ''I pity you,'' people said when I told them what I was doing. But I ended up admiring the handiwork of the system and hating the people who misused it, the way you hate kids who tear the branches off saplings.
