Take The D Train
The Bronx-bound D train stops at 59th Street and then goes nonstop to 125th, a leisurely stretch lasting nine or 10 minutes. On a Tuesday night a few weeks back, riders on the second-to-last car of a D train had just settled in for this uptown-express run, Columbus Circle sliding out of view, when a shrill voice screamed out from the front end of the car, shattering all hopes for a quiet little jaunt. "All right, here we go! Hi, ladies and gentlemen. How y'all doin'?"
The speaker, a Puerto Rican kid in his twenties, stood looking down the length of the car at the black and brown riders and the few scattered white ones, all of them wearing that stoical puss reserved for the subway's hucksters and panhandlers. Dressed in black sneakers, black shirt and pants, the kid gripped a pole in the middle of the aisle and leaned out from behind it to make himself seen.
"My name is Crazy Jay," he screamed on, "and I'm not here to preach to you about God and then go smoke crack with the money you give me. I'm not here to sell M&M candies for my basketball team. I don't have double-A or triple-A batteries or DVDs for $5. I'm here to sell one thing and one thing only. I have used pregnancy tests for sale, ladies and gentlemen. You can choose from negative or positive. Fellas, you can skip the Maury show."
Jason Ramos, to give his full name, does the same opening most every night on his way back home on the D or the 4. Home is a fourth-floor apartment in the Bronx, two short stops above Yankee Stadium. At minimum, the ride takes a good 30 minutes, and Ramos, an aspiring stand-up comic, uses that time to showcase his act.
Most untested comics play to other green comics (at open-mic nights) or to family and friends (at shows known as "bringers"). Ramos knew nothing of these training grounds when he started doing sets on the subway two years ago. The warm, fuzzy claques enjoyed by his brethren have formed no part of his own initiation.
At his Tuesday-night show a few weeks back, after his thoroughly chilly reception, he garnered one isolated laugh at a time with a few Michael Jackson jokes and jokes closer to home. ("How many people here have roaches? Stop lyin'! You're on the D train on the way to the Bronx. Some of you motherfuckers got cockroaches on you right now you don't even know.")
Things warmed up after 125th Street. This is when Ramos dares his riskiest material-and not one off-color word to turn a hair.
"You know what's the worst place you can sit at on the train?" he shouted. Over time, he had come down to the middle of the car, but he now scrambled all the way back to the front and stopped in front of a well-groomed middle-aged white man seated with his back to the subway map.
Ramos continued: "The worst place you can sit at on the train is in front of the map. Because everybody wanna lean over in front of your face." With that, Ramos dropped himself bodily on the man and yelled out in a falsetto, while pretending to read the map, "Where can I catch the shuttle train?" The man smiled stiffly, and the whole car howled.
Later, the subway again provided a gag. As the train neared the stop for Yankee Stadium, Ramos called out, "Hundred Sixty-first Street. White people, last stop!"
Ramos got off two stops later with a total of $15 in tips. This is his average take for a set. For the last few years, the bulk of his income has come from a different arm of the arts: Ramos is a member of a break-dancing troupe that performs five afternoons and evenings a week. When Ramos comes home on the train at night, it's after the dancing, which takes place in Midtown.
On this night, it so happened, he hadn't come from dancing but rather from the last meeting of an introductory workshop at a stand-up comedy school on Eighth Ave. Ramos had paid for the month-long course with 425 one-dollar bills. His head was now filled with thoughts about craft, and his shop talk had taken on a new sophistication.
"To me, the stops are like the red light on stage," he said, speaking in the apartment he shares with his mother. "The red light tells you, all right, you have this much time left before you gotta cut. I look at the stops, and I know three or four stops ahead of me before I gotta go. I know that's about three minutes I got."
The course where he learned to talk with such savvy was taught by Steve Rosenfield, a guru of stand-up. At one point Ramos, citing the master, said with a heavy sigh, "Steve says keep it clean, but I don't know. It's a dilemma for me. People on the train, they love the raw shit."