IRT stories
#1

“Coming though…. coming through” in a shrill voice spoke the very large clown walking down the aisles of the IRT. He held a bucket and his costume was too small.
An angry clown he was but his appearances were as common as the graffiti  & tags that adorned the subway cars. When I was a teenager it was the height of the homeless in Manhattan.  I knew the few who were released from Bellevue, seldom returning, and found their way up to and past 96th street.  The very tan woman with the crew cut was also angry. She spoke to herself and it was best to keep one’s gaze down when passing. The one time I can recall my mother taking public transportation; we were all on the 104, still the Broadway bus, so was this tan scraggy woman with a crew cut.  Those of us who lived uptown knew her, like the clown on the IRT, but she wandered Broadway.  We sat in the back of the bus. She was there too.  My mind has a slow motion memory of this woman picking up a discarded, mostly eaten Milky Way bar and smashing it onto my mothers shoe.  This is not why my mother was never again on public transportation but I imagine it supported her reasons.  It was hard not to laugh. My mother was furious.
Some of them were frightening, like the white man in burlap. I remember how his hair and beard grew to be so thick and long. He seemed to be one of the wanderers who never went back in again. That was happening in the ‘70’s. They let the ill people out, unready, unprepared and never took them back.  He was the only one I would cross the street to avoid. The IRT was warm so many of these people found their warm seats and familiar company, sometimes begging, sometimes sleeping.
The old black man who came in with a beautiful strong voice, “I am NOT a dirty dog….” and on he went explaining his misfortune, could we help.  There was the comb player. He said nothing. He would enter the subway car and play his combs.  Percussion using the floor and rhythm by magnificent comb playing using his mouth and hands.  He accepted donations. The one to avoid, which has me smile as I remember, was the young man who would enter a subway car with his large white-framed sunglasses and an instrument case. He would never walk through the cars as most did, he would exit and run to the next car. I could tell these things, where a person was coming from, if they moved between cars and how.  I grew up taking the IRT everywhere and was sensitive to every nuance of passenger and surroundings.  I was fortunate to know him. If I spotted his entrance I would walk quickly to the next car, the one he had previously come from. There were others like me. This man would remove a trumpet from his case and place the instrument to his mouth, all passengers waiting for a serenade, and then blow a hideous high-pitched sound that had everyone covering their ears.  He asked for nothing.  He gave us his tirade. 
We had an amazing spoon man on the Upper West Side. Maybe every funky urban area has one as I’ve heard this from other people. My guy was an elderly man. He got down on his knees and played his spoons with the expertise of a Julliard trained musician.  I saw him do this on the train and on the street.
Inside alcoves of buildings that had no doormen, I’d stepped over my share of homeless.  They tucked themselves into brownstone basement entries with many blankets and some saved goods.  A supermarket shopping cart pushed by an old white women, I remember, brimming with stuff, all kinds of stuff. 
In my memory they are so alive, each with a distinct personality and place in my history. They are probably all quite old or dead by now. They disappeared when I vanished from adolescence.