You step into the subway car and you are in a room with forty strangers who have agreed to go in the same direction. Nobody talks. Nobody makes eye contact. Everybody stares at the floor or the advertisements or the dark window that shows them their own reflection. The subway car is the most crowded lonely place in New York City. You are surrounded by people and you are completely alone.

I played guitar on the subway. Between stations you had three minutes and in three minutes I could play a song and pass the hat and get off at the next stop and do it again. The acoustics in a subway car are terrible. The wheels scream on the rails. The brakes hiss. The doors bang. But the music cuts through because in a subway car any sound that is intentional is a miracle. People looked up from their shoes. That is the highest compliment a New York audience will give you.

The subway car at two in the morning is a different country. The rules change. People talk. A man sings gospel in the corner. A woman sleeps across three seats and nobody wakes her. A kid dances between the poles and his friend plays music from a speaker and they are performing for five people and five people is enough. The late train is the only honest train because everybody on it has given up pretending they have somewhere important to be.

Every subway car is a museum of handwriting. Scratched into the glass. Written on the walls in marker. Tagged on the ceiling in paint that nobody can explain because no one saw it happen. The graffiti on the subway was not vandalism. It was a newspaper. It told you who was here and when and what they wanted you to know. JULIO 176. LADY PINK. SEEN. They wrote their names on the city because the city never wrote their names on anything.

The new subway cars have cameras and digital screens and air conditioning that works. They are clean and quiet and efficient and they feel like a hospital waiting room on wheels. The old cars rattled and leaked and the lights flickered and the seats were torn and you could feel the whole car shaking like it was alive. The old subway car was alive. It moved like something that had opinions. The new one moves like something that has been told to behave. I miss the car that had opinions.