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Source: ONE News -
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I knew even before I was halfway into the carriage of the E train that descends the West Side of Manhattan, that something was off.
The smell hit first: A blunt, foul aroma; the smell of human uncleanliness. Then I saw them, wrapped in a collection of scavenged garments. A woman, and a man, though you'd have to look very closely to verify that.
Their pitiful possessions stood around them, like a kind of defense, I guess, stuff piled into plastic bags, and all of it portable. They were New York's urban nomads.
Think of this as you look at the shots I'm about to offer, and please, blow the images up as wide as you can. These people seem to be hiding in plain sight. You see they have eyes really only for one another. They are disinclined to look around them, to engage with the outside world, much less make eye contact with it.
Note that the woman has different gloves. See that the male, who seems to be sleeping, has his trousers rolled up. You can't see his legs, and the bare flesh, but they looked rotten. They seemed bound up inside the clothes, inside their smell, inside their suffering.
Newspaper lies around them, on them, at their feet, a kind of covering. They are covered in news, like us, like any other Blackberry toting, cable-channel-surfing, Google-using metropolitan. It's odd to write this down, because visibly they're not like those around them.
You see people entering the subway carriage just like I did, registering, but then disconnecting their attention.
The woman ferrets in her plastic crate. The jar you see contains what appear to be anchovies. She has her things, her domestic implements. She taps him. He rouses, and looks about.
"Was I dreaming?" See the video here .
In the second video, you see the subway car door opening and closing, which it must have done five or six times as the subway train shuddered (and this is some shuddery footage, blame the cameraman) down through Manhattan's intestines.
Then we're back to them. She's pulling newspapers around herself. It's possible that, like many of Manhattan's homeless, she's mentally ill. Perhaps he is too. But he helps her pull the newspaper sheets around her legs, a version of a suburban husband and wife smoothing a duvet together, a companionable act. See the video here .
Turning to the left, another homeless man stands at the far end of the carriage. He too has his possessions around him. He's bent over looking for something. Dammit when you can't find stuff! Where did I put this? A reminder that humans like to have objects, and that those objects contribute to who we are, and give us a sense of substance, of being greater than ourselves.
You can see that, like the couple, given what he does, practically speaking he should have less stuff. But no. Acquisition. The camera pans away and you can see some young kids out for the night, talking animatedly. They ignore him, just as he ignores them, and the couple who are maybe four metres from him, and with whom he has so much, superficially at least, in common. Everyone minds their own business. The urban rules apply. See the video here .
Further up the carriage, in the last piece of video, you see two suburban woman out celebrating for the evening. You can't blame them. It's Saturday night, for God's sakes!
They're standing by the pole, wearing silly headgear with springs attached that wobble. They shout to each other. I wonder if it might be a hen's night; the second hen's night for the bride-to-be perhaps, given the age of the women, but the gusto is the same as a teenager's.
They call one of their friends over, she joins them, grasping the pole to stabilise herself. These trains really can belt along.
The homeless man looks up. He looks right at them. Perhaps he envies them. Perhaps he wishes they would shut up. Perhaps he remembers when he was like them, out, free, raucous, able to wear silly things on your head to show you're having fun.
Legible, in other words. See the video here .
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