Chapter Seven
My relationship with the subway began before I was born. My pregnant mother rode it frequently because she had already learned Subway Lesson 1: when the subway runs smoothly, as it does most of the time, it’s the most efficient and affordable method of getting around New York City.
A destination on the same side of Manhattan is a straight shot on a local, with the possibility of catching an express along the way. One of my earliest experiences of Murphy’s Law occurred at a station where I had to decide whether to wait for an express or take the local that had just pulled in. A local makes more than twice as many stops as an express. If I got on a local, inevitably the express roared by while the local was slowing down for one of the stops the express didn’t have to make. If I got off the local at the next stop and waited for an express, three locals would come and go before the next express showed up. By guessing wrong and arriving late time and time again I learned Subway Lesson 2: the only way to catch an express is to leave early enough to make the entire trip on a local.
After I achieved public recognition, friends and family members counseled me to stop taking the subway. But I didn’t take their advice because I, too, had mastered Subway Lesson 1. Anyway, people on the subway rarely recognize me, and when they do, they either know I don’t want to be bothered, or they think, That’s not her. She wouldn’t be takin’ the subway. With few exceptions, New Yorkers tend to be matter-of-fact about celebrities. One day I was part of a crowd rushing from the 1 train at Times Square to catch a crosstown shuttle when a well-dressed man in his forties strode up alongside me. Without missing a step, he said, “Carole King! What are you doin’ takin’ the subway?”
Keeping up my own stride, I answered, “Same thing you are. Tryin’ to get from point A to point B!”
I was one of the last to squeeze into the shuttle before the doors closed. The well-dressed man didn’t make it, but as the train pulled out, its metal wheels screeching around that first long curve, I saw him smiling. I’d like to think it was because he appreciated my answer, but it was probably because he had just seen another shuttle pulling in.
The subway is most useful during rush hour, when it’s especially difficult to get a taxi. Change of shift for most taxi drivers is at 4 p.m. I know this because of all the years I spent trying without success to get a taxi to pick me up between 4:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon. On the rare occasion when a driver stops and admits you—which he will do at that hour only if your destination is directly on the way to his company’s garage—it’s a mixed blessing. It’s rush hour. Delay is inevitable. Surface streets are filling up with commuters’ cars headed toward bridges and tunnels. You have eight minutes to get to your daughter’s dance recital downtown, and where are you? Sitting in traffic at a dead stop, watching the meter tick up waiting time while trains are racing unobstructed below you. Five minutes later, seeing that traffic hasn’t moved, you think, This is ridiculous! I’ll get there faster if I walk. You pay the driver and exit the taxi only to find that it’s starting to rain.
When the weather is bad, it’s remarkable how similar taxis are to birds in a flock who change direction all at once. When the “Off Duty” light of every taxi in Manhattan goes on simultaneously with the first drop of precipitation, you’d best have either an umbrella or a MetroCard.
The subway is a fascinating place to people-watch. I spent many hours in the fifties and sixties on what was then called the BMT.* During the forty-five-minute ride between Sheepshead Bay and Times Square I often passed the time making up stories about the people around me. In the late fifties most of my narratives went as far as my imagination would allow. This woman with the red-rimmed eyes has just come from losing an argument with her husband. That man with the tortoiseshell glasses hates his job. The gaunt woman in the brown coat is on her way to yet another doctor to see if this one can cure what all the other doctors have told her is an incurable illness. The man grading papers is a teacher. (Duh!) The man sitting in front of me is an inconsiderate boor. Why? (And here’s where imagination stops and reality kicks in.) Because I’m on my way to the city, I’m visibly pregnant, and I’m hanging precariously on to the strap above him while he, an apparently healthy adult male, is studiously reading the same page of the New York Times over and over. I can almost hear him thinking, If I make eye contact with her, I’ll have to give her my seat, so I’m not gonna look at her.
And he didn’t look at me. Not once.
There must have been a coffee factory under the Manhattan Bridge. I never found out where it was or if it even existed, but I will forever associate the aroma of roasting coffee with the V and M shapes of the painted brown steel braces framed against the sky as they did the important work of holding the Manhattan Bridge together. The journey across the bridge gave Manhattan-bound commuters ten minutes of daylight before the train descended into a tunnel beneath the cobblestone streets of the city.
Observing my fellow riders, I began to see a pattern. Some days everyone looked good to me. The fellow with the early-morning grumpy face whose ratty trench coat needed cleaning might have been handsome under other circumstances. I saw beauty in the countenance of a college student who was frantically trying to clamp a bunch of papers back into her aptly named loose-leaf notebook before we arrived at her stop. And in the full-moon face of a heavyset woman with several chins whose burgundy-colored pumps appeared too small to contain her feet, let alone her entire weight, I caught a glimpse of the slim, attractive girl she had once been.
Other days everyone looked ugly. I viewed the group of teenage kids playfully shoving each other as a bunch of juvenile delinquents planning to rob the woman standing next to me, or worse, me. I was annoyed by the tall woman with flaming red hair and mismatched rouge who was stinking up the entire car with a corned beef sandwich that she was eating on the fly. At the time I didn’t think about the possibility that she might have had to skip breakfast so she could get to the electric company in time to pay the bill. And the word “ugly” categorically defined the slightly balding middle-aged man pressed up too close against me with his coincidentally roving hands. (“I was just trying to keep her from falling,” he might have said, had he been asked.) At first I felt violated. Then I became defiant. I was not going to be a victim. I jammed one of my spike heels hard into his ankle. The man gave a muffled yelp and quickly took his hands off me.
I’m not sure exactly when I figured out that the way I perceived others on a given day was a reflection of how I was feeling. I do know that rather than revealing itself in something like an Aha! moment, the realization was subtle. It came to me gradually, like… Ohhhh… right.
That realization was Subway Lesson 3, which turned out to be the basis for my first subway song, “Beautiful.” And rather than it being a conscious thought about which I intentionally sat down to write, it emerged on its own. And because “Beautiful” is one of those songs that came through me, I was unaware of a professional detail about the song until a fellow songwriter pointed it out: there are no rhymes in the chorus—unless you count stretching “will” into “weel” as a false rhyme for “feel.”
You’ve got to get up every morning with a smile on your face
And show the world all the love in your heart
Then people gonna treat you better
You’re gonna find, yes, you will
That you’re beautiful as you feel
As a songwriter, of course I would have put rhymes in the chorus. As an instrument, I never noticed.
It’s been years since I rode a BMT train, and subway tokens have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, but I still believe Subway Lesson 3 to be as true as it was the day I learned it. I still believe that everyone is beautiful in some way, and by seeing the beauty in others we make ourselves more beautiful.