How To Look And Feel Like A New Yorker And Not A Tourist

Part Three: On Escalators

Some of us prefer to stand, and we do so on the right. Some of us prefer to walk, and we do so on the left. Walk on the left, stand on the right. Always. No exceptions. If you’re interested in eliciting a nasty, nasty response from a fellow New Yorker, try standing on the left side of the escalator. I was once obediently standing on the right side of an upwardly bound escalator, and glanced (without looking, mind you) backward at the folks standing behind me, all of us making our slow, effortless journey to the train platform above. All of us heading. Heading to the office. Heading to the park for lunch. Heading to the bar. Heading home. I enjoy seeing the many different people all around me and musing about their lives:

“What is that dude listening to? Because he seems to love it, and perhaps so would I.”

“This person a few stairs back, the one with all of the hoola hoops: is she a professional hoola hooper? Cause I’ve never seen that before.”

“Hey that girl’s wearing a Radiohead t-shirt. Maybe I’ll strike up a conversation with her on the platform: ‘So, In Rainbows, eh? Yeah, great album. So, uh, got plans for Friday?’ Smooth is a word I use regularly to describe myself.“

“Ah, Look at this: fanny pack, Macy’s bags, I Love NY t-shirt… classic Tourist.”

“And then there’s this guy reading the New York Post. Something deep within me wants to hand him the New Yorker, or the Times, or even the Metro. Oh, but what’s that about Tiger Woods? If this guy could hold that page a little higher, that would be great.”

I love these moments of escalator surveillance. Taking time to imagine another person’s life helps me more deeply recognize the connectedness of humanity. This can similarly be done on the train. But I like the experience better as I look down the escalator, because I like to think of myself as above people, and to experience it physically only enhances this notion in my mind.

Anyhow, that’s neither here nor there. One day*, during one such imaginative reverie, I noticed a Tourist blatantly, but unwittingly, standing on the left side of the escalator, about 7 steps below me. Behind the Tourist I could see a herd of New Yorkers, all recently de-trained, all heading places, all stampeding relentlessly up the left side of the escalator. The leader of the pack, making the most of his escalation by taking the steps two at a time, neared the unsuspecting Tourist, and without so much as pausing his iPod and removing his earbuds to say excuse me, drew his umbrella from his shoulder bag, and whacked the Tourist square on the left shoulder. “Walk on the left” the New Yorker admonished emotionlessly. The Tourist, muddled and disgusted, moved as far right as he could, and after the New Yorker had passed, looked appealingly at the rest of us, as if to say, “Can you believe this guy?” We all returned the look: “Well, yeah, what do you expect?” This is New York, folks. City of tough love.

*This story is a fiction.