The Schedules of Others

I got off the train about ten on a Thursday night. It had been another of those trips that ended with me waking up at Coney Island. I'd been able to get back to where I belonged, and now all I wanted was to get home and sleep in a prone position.

As I approached the stairs, I heard a voice. "You've had a long day." The voice wasn't in my head. Instead, it had come from the stranger walking close behind me. I turned, and saw that the voice belonged to a small Indian man. He must have seen the weary question in my eyes.

"I saw you down here this morning," he explained. "You were catching the six o'clock train, going in the other direction."

There was an immediate flash of paranoia-had he been following me?-but it quickly faded. It had indeed been a long day, technically speaking. For me, anyway. I smiled weakly at him and headed up the stairs, then home.

Of late, I'd been listening to an audio version of On the Road while going to sleep at night. Wasn't liking it as much as I wanted to. Maybe it was that David Carradine was doing the reading for some reason. I don't know whether he was drunk during the recording, or if, for economy's sake, they decided to do one take only, no matter how badly he flubbed a line. In any event, it's not terribly inspiring. Beyond that, though, I've never latched onto On the Road. Not even when I was 19 or 20. I was certainly a fan of the Beats (most of them, anyway), but that book never grabbed me, despite several attempts. I'm not sure why.

I wasn't pining for the kind of freewheeling lifestyle Kerouac was describing (is that sort of life even possible anymore? I doubt it) so much as feeling some regret for so often locking myself into air-tight schedules.

I've come to identify a bunch of people I encounter on a regular basis whose schedules (for whatever reason) are as tightly regimented and Germanic as my own.

After seven in the morning and before ten at night, these people get lost in the crowd. Outside of those hours, though, they're easy to spot. It takes a few sightings, but once you've picked them out, they might as well be wearing sandwich boards or waving flags.

These are the people who prefer to operate during off-hours when streets are empty, sidewalks and trains quiet, and it's possible to move and breathe like a real human being.

It goes beyond that, though. These are people who, like me, have their days timed out to the minute. Not only do I pass them on my usual route every morning, I pass them at the exact same spot every morning. A certain tree or a certain corner. It took me awhile to notice that.

There was the slow, quiet old man who used to walk his two slow, quiet, white-muzzled dogs down the east side of the street when I was tapping my way in the other direction. Then he was only walking one slow, quiet, white-muzzled dog. I haven't seen him in a few weeks now, which makes me wonder. They're swell dogs.

Then there's the elementary school janitor who, every morning about 30 seconds before I reach that spot, pulls his car into the school's driveway and parks before getting out to open the gate. Every day he pauses long enough to allow me to tap past before getting back into his car to pull into the schoolyard.

There's the jackass on the subway platform who insists on standing just two or three feet away from me, no matter how empty the rest of the platform might be-then insists on shoving past me to get on the train first.

There was the ear-splitting subway preacher who used to recite the same sermon on the same car of the same train at the same time every morning. I only lost him by getting into a different car at a different time.

These are all people who, like me, arrive at the subway platform at the same time and stroll down to wait by the same post, or the same mark on the wall, or same broken tile. Because that spot, see, means they'll be getting off the train right where they need to in order to make the commute as convenient as possible. That's what most of these tics boil down to: convenience. Just doing what you can to get through it all as smoothly and painlessly as possible. Maybe for them, as for me, that means avoiding as many people as is possible.

(I'm sure there are as many other excuses out there as there are people who give them-but that's the excuse that works for me.)

Or maybe these others don't need to give excuses. Maybe they're not even aware that they're doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time every day. I know recognizing my own pattern for the first time back when I was 19 or 20 led to some serious ugliness. Ugliness followed the second time I recognized it, too. And the third.

I think it's kind of interesting that, for as often as these others and I see each other and pass each other we never say so much as "hello."

The old man with the old dogs said hello once or twice, and I said hello back to him. He seemed very sad. Then it stopped. Maybe he felt the same fear that I did-that if we kept it up, it would become an obligation.

Which makes me think all the more that we are all out there at those empty hours for pretty much the same reason. And sad as it is, I'm glad for that.