Gestures

My commute, when I was teaching, was a breezy twenty-five minutes underground, straight up the line from my downtown stop.  These days it is a bit more athletic, combining a bus ride and a short walk after taking the subway.  Then I test and put on my scrubs.  I never found the need for a car, and living in the centre of the city I have access to anything I want, a short walk away.

I recall that line in Dancer from the Dance, when Malone returns home to Ohio for Thanksgiving and is asked by his youngest niece, "Why don't you have a car?"  For is it not true (still true?) that an urban gay man is usually not in possession of one?  Maybe things have changed and I've missed the boat, to excuse a pun.  I remember my Mexican students telling me that if there are five people in a family there are five cars.  And that the Japanese and Koreans would buy another vehicle only three or five years after purchasing a new one.  Here we tend to hold onto our cars for a decade.

Transit seems to keep you healthier, there is more walking - and the unbidden expectation of the arrival of a bus, streetcar or train keeps you on your toes, so to speak.  Transit is also eminently a social experience, the very reason why some loathe it, I suppose.  There are always others around you, sometimes with foul odours or manners, or worse.  Lately the subway here has become dangerous.  Since the pandemic it has become something of a wild west, with violence and brandished weapons making the news.  Just ten years ago it was rare for the homeless to be seen on it, certainly less occasionally than now, where it seems to have been overtaken by people sleeping across seats or staking out a corner to jumble their soiled possessions together.  The pandemic has overburdened or broken social structures and infrastructures.

I was on a subway car some years ago at the start of the work day rush hour, and the car was packed with people.  I was sitting, and next to me, a man standing there with his zipper open, fully down, with the dramatic flourish of the stem of a white buttoned shirt poking out between the teeth of his zipper.  It was unmistakable to me because his crotch, sitting where I was, and his height, being right next to me, afforded a perfect view.  I was, in what is fashion parlance, face to crotch point.

We stopped at an interchange and most of the people packing the car left, giving up their seats to the remainder.  My man took a seat about 4 metres from me.  There the poor fellow sat, yet completely oblivious of the fact he was flying low.

I had to signal him.  It is something of a urge, to uphold the social contract.  Beckon, warn, advise.  I did my best to establish eye contact, but he would just not look at me.  I wondered how he could be so blind as not to see his glowing white shirt poking out of his middle bits, but he did not.

Finally he looked at me, and without thinking, for he seemed to have caught me off guard, or I thought I had scant time to warn him, I looked him straight in the face and then pointed at my crotch with a sharp index finger jab.

His eyes widened, and I realised he had not understood what I had been trying to communicate.  It had become, all of a sudden, very awkward.  He got off at the next stop, whether he had to, or had thought a quick exit from my presence was a wiser move, I'll never know.  I do hope that once he got to work someone mentioned something to him.  I can see him now, wandering a broken landscape, with his white shirt sticking out from the seat of his junk, the idiot.

Last week I saw another guy with a low zipper and, leaning in confidentially, said, "Man, I just want to let you know you're flying low."

"Oh, thanks, Dude, I appreciate it .."