You reach into your pocket and you feel it before you see it. Round. Brass. A hole cut through the center like a coin that lost its middle. The subway token. Fifteen cents when I first rode the train. You dropped it in the turnstile and the turnstile let you through and that was the deal. One token. One ride. Anywhere in the city. The richest man in New York and the poorest man in New York paid the same fifteen cents and sat on the same train and went to the same places. The subway token was the most democratic object ever invented.

You could hold a subway token between your thumb and your finger and feel the whole city in your hand. That small brass circle was a key to five boroughs. Coney Island. The Bronx Zoo. Yankee Stadium. Washington Heights. You did not need a car. You did not need a taxi. You needed one token and the city opened up. A kid from the Lower East Side could ride to the top of the Bronx and back for thirty cents and see more of the world in one afternoon than most people see in a year.

They changed the price. They always changed the price. Fifteen cents. Twenty cents. Thirty-five cents. Fifty cents. A dollar. A dollar fifty. Every time the price went up the city said it was necessary and every time the price went up somebody who was riding the train to work could not afford to ride the train to work. The subway token kept getting more expensive but the subway kept getting worse. That is the only business in the world where the product gets worse and the price goes up and the customers have no choice.

The token booth. You remember the token booth. A person sat inside a bulletproof box and sold you tokens and made change and answered questions and knew which train went where. That person was the information desk of the underground. You walked up to the booth and said how do I get to Brooklyn and the person told you and you dropped your token and you went. They replaced the token booth with a machine. The machine does not know how to get to Brooklyn. The machine does not know anything. The machine takes your card and gives you nothing back except a beep.

They killed the token in two thousand and three. Replaced it with a card. Then they replaced the card with a tap. Now you wave your phone at a reader and a gate opens and nobody touches anything and nobody talks to anybody and the entire transaction is invisible. But I still have a subway token in my pocket. I carry it the way some people carry a rosary. It does not get me on the train anymore. It gets me somewhere else. Fifteen cents. One token. The whole city. That was the deal and it was the best deal New York ever made.