A pair of legs

Last Friday morning I felt tired and weary as always, although a little moreso than usual because of a late-ish night involving alcohol consumption. Walking down the subway platform toward my regular waiting spot—three or four steps past the pay phone, which in turn deposits me precisely in front of the staircase at Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum roughly 45 minutes later—all I could think of was how much I hoped to get a seat on the train so I could nap away some of my stupor.

Now a few feet before the pay phone—which by my calculations maybe one person has used in the past three years—comes the trash can, a somewhat imposing and battered black vessel where 2/3 subway riders deposit their miscellaneous crap.  It is a heavy object, rounded at the top, and it would look suggestively futuristic if it didn’t look so sad. In other words, it’s your basic New York City subway trash can. Today, though, there was something different. Today a pair of legs was sticking out from behind it.

Seeing a pair of legs while wallowing in a pre-caffeine, self-pitying stupor is fairly startling. I suppose it shouldn’t be; this is New York, and weird things are everywhere. The legs, as it turns out, were attached to a sleeping homeless man, and that shouldn’t be surprising either; if there’s anything New York has more of than weird stuff and food carts, it’s homeless people.

At this point I’d like to interrupt myself to say that in many ways writing about homelessness feels like walking into a trap made of preachiness. Citing statistics can seem trite (but I’ll do it anyway: on February 4 the NYC Department of Homeless Services counted 37,374 people without homes, and some say that number is still an undercount). Everyone knows this is a problem in our city, as well as our country (and world); we see homeless people all the time. We hold our noses or look away from them when they enter our subway cars begging for money. We pass them on the streets, glancing at their cardboard signs long enough to make out the words “help,” “food,” and “AIDS” but not allowing ourselves to linger and read the entire message. We overhear snide comments about them, or we see others give them a dime, a dollar, or the occasional meal. They are a fixture of our city—and this is precisely the problem.

It’s almost mind boggling to think that 8 million people could be so inured to the fact of more than 35,000 other people living among them without permanent (or often even temporary) roofs over their heads. How did we get to the point where seeing a homeless person is just a part of the daily routine, like buying coffee and commuting to work? A better question: how do we fix it?

I’m not really sure how to answer that, and this doesn’t feel like the right place to try. But I suspect it would help if the next time you see a homeless person, even if you avert your eyes, you take a moment to fully process what you’re averting your eyes from. If every time a New Yorker passed a homeless person on the street she thought deeply about what that really meant, there seems a chance she might be moved to do something about it. (If you don’t want to give money or help directly on the street, there are plenty of organizations—Coalition for the Homeless and Urban Pathways are good places to start.)

That pair of legs in the subway station was stretched out and covered in two pairs of dirty jeans, with crusty sneakers to cap them off. They sort of reminded me of a bizarro version of the stockinged legs of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, after she’s crushed by Dorothy’s house. But in reality they were attached to a living man, who had made his bed beside a trash can and was dozing heavily on the dirty ground while person after person made a face and walked by.