Summary: I went to seminary at Union in New York City, uptown, across from Columbia University. My parish at the time was St. Luke-in-the-Fields down in Greenwich Village, so I spent a lot of time underground, sitting inside the IRT subway train, shuttling up and down Manhattan. At first, I hated the hellish, metallic din of the thing, but eventually I learned to appreciate it: it helped me to blot out my surroundings. Like every other transplant in the city, I found myself overwhelmed by the ongoing assault that is life in New York. I learned to avoid eye contact, to cultivate a demeanor of stoical self-containment: remote, cold, preoccupied. I wanted to appear tough, to make people think twice before messing with me, but I consciously avoided any look of hostility so as not to provoke anyone. I found one of the best ways to keep people at arm's length was to mutter to oneself incessantly; it was guaranteed to generate a wide berth of at least two or three feet to either side. When someone would approach me for a contribution or to proselytize for a cause, I would tell him--in German--that I could not speak English! Always my aim was defensive: to insure I got from one end of the island to the other without being robbed, punched, stabbed, molested, cheated, or conned. To avoid making myself vulnerable, I sealed myself off from all unnecessary human interaction. To every neighbor I made myself a stranger. One hot September afternoon I happened to find myself seated across from a grimy, homeless drunk. He would nod off, tip over to the left, bang his head on the seat, and immediately spring back to life, only to nod off again. At 72nd Street three muscular teenagers came strutting into the subway. Two of them flopped down on the seat next to the drunk. As the train began to move, the drunk began to tip, right into the lap of one of the teens. The kid reacted angrily, shoving the drunk back with unexpected violence. The drunk grumbled and gropingly thrust his arms forward, as if to ward off the blows he expected to follow. The third and largest teen, who had been standing by the subway door, suddenly flew into an acrobatic spin, whirling his foot around in a furious karate kick to the drunk's head. Teeth and blood spewed everywhere as the poor man went sprawling to the floor. No one moved. No one spoke. The seats were packed, but no arm shot out to break his fall, no voice was raised against his assailants--mine included. A tall respectable man in pinstripes, a robust matron in her Sunday-go-to-meeting best, a bearded gay man wrapped in black leather, a young actress intently studying her script. All of sat stark still, averting our gaze or staring with a kind of fixed detachment, as if watching it all on video in our living rooms. The three teens, flush with adrenalin, slapped high fives and whooped and hollered. At the next stop they strode off to assert their manhood elsewhere. The drunk, dazed and bleeding, groped his way back to his seat on his hands and knees. He touched his mouth with his fingers and stared at the bloody smears as if it hadn't yet dawned on him that it was his own blood. Then he glanced at the man in the pinstripes and he glanced at me. For the first time I could read something human in his eyes. "I know," they said, "I'm only a drunk." There was no anger, no rage, only a sort of deep, weary resignation. He didn't expect any better from us.
