Metro, Metro

by Marshall Moore

1.

When I moved up to DC from North Carolina back in the early ‘90s, I lived on campus at Gallaudet University for one semester. To catch the metro, you had to hike about twenty minutes to Union Station through the kind of neighborhood with an evening soundtrack of gunfire and screams. I kept my car parked around the corner from campus. To save time and reduce the risk of getting mugged or worse walking to the station, I’d often drive in the city. Although I’d visited DC before moving there and knew my way around, I couldn’t quite work out where to live after my campus residency ended. On hearing I wanted to get an apartment in Takoma Park, a hippified patch of gentrification right on the District border, one colleague sniffed, “Maryland’s for lesbians. If you have to live in the suburbs, Northern Virginia’s where the gay men are. But why don’t you just find a place in Dupont Circle like everybody else?” The thing was, Maryland didn’t share a border with North Carolina, a point I didn’t know how to articulate yet. The distance mattered. It was meant to be transformative.

This colleague and several others didn’t have cars. They lived in the city and took the metro everywhere. Sometimes buses. How to explain how terrifying I found that idea, and how alluring? My first boyfriend had lived in DC, a few blocks away from Union Station; he was also one of those Urban Metro People. I had a rattly Nissan with North Carolina plates and didn’t mind driving four hours up I-95 to see him on weekends. I was this semi-feral young blond thing with a twangy Southern accent. My four-letter words had two syllables. The boyfriend and his friends cared less about what I had to say than how I sounded when I said it. After dinners out, I’d amuse everyone present by gawking at the cityscape around us. I wanted to erase myself. I also wanted to carry on being exactly who I was.

The entire time I lived in DC, I was always on the Red Line: first the terrible flat I found in Silver Spring. Located in a quiet residential area and walkable to nothing, the place had exactly three things going for it: parking, parquet floors, and cheap rent. Silver Spring was a drab edge city then: a cluster of of office buildings, a supermarket, not much else. Like me, it wanted to be more urban than it was. But my next-door neighbor played reggae so loud the walls shook. She would shout at me when I knocked on her door and asked her to please turn it down. Then the house up near Wheaton I rented with a friend from college, a crunchy-granola art chick who confessed when we were high one night that she had once come home from a camping trip and found ants in a box of cereal she hadn’t sealed properly before leaving. There was nothing else to eat and she was hungry, so she poured herself a bowl and chowed down, bugs and all. No surprise then that she didn’t believe in flea collars: her two indoor-outdoor cats bred a nightmare infestation. We had to spray our legs with Off when we got home from work and finally bug-bombed the place when I found fleas in my bed. Then the Dupont Circle condo I shared with a Taiwanese partner a decade older than myself: he was something of a hoarder and running out of time on his student visa, and he sure knew how to forge a signature on a check. Later, the flat on 16th Street across from Meridian Hill Park that was, if I’m honest, the first place I genuinely liked. Except for the cockroaches.

My transit-oriented personal development didn’t seem to be working out. Truth be told, it was usually faster just to drive—even when it meant I had to hunt for street parking in the city center. DC was less congested then, everywhere was, and I needed the car for work. As an ASL interpreter, I might have two or three assignments during the day. The urban metro jobs went to the Urban Metro People, and those of us with cars typically got the assignments out in the suburban office parks not served by public transport, in places like Gaithersburg, Reston, and Laurel. And on a personal note, I kept not turning into the sort of urban sophisti-fag I had expected to become. Despite a succession of improvements to the stations I called home, I was always mindful of the gap. I was always the guy living a long hike from the station, verging on broke, gazing at the houses and old buildings I passed, unable to afford something better, closer. Struggling, and resenting it; driving, and praying my car wouldn’t break expensively down.

Toward the end of my time in DC, a friend invited me to join him for a night out. He’d met this great group of guys and was sure I’d like them. Dupont Circle had more gay bars and clubs then. You could hit half a dozen places and still not be a quarter done. When I showed up, he barely spoke to me. Sudden personality transplant, performative cool. Trying to talk to anyone was like taking a step toward a flock of pigeons. If there’s no food in your hand, they’ll dart away from you. I understood and wished I didn’t: I was kind of cute until I opened my mouth; I had nothing to talk about with an ambition of Washington boys who worked at law firms or on the Hill and saw every conversation as a potential career move. I ditched them at the first club we went to. No one noticed, but in typical DC fashion, some closeted diplomat or Congressman had his limousine follow me most of the way home. I declined to get in. I already knew how it would end. But… I was walking home, not driving. This was progress, wasn’t it? A form of transit?

2.

When the chance came to visit Venezuela—a guy I’d been dating wanted to go home to Caracas over Easter to attend a conference and see his family—of course I said yes. This was pre-Chavez. Things were chaotic there but not grim yet. That being said, the first thing my hosts told me when we got there was Don’t go outside alone, not under any circumstances. El Valle, it seemed, was not the capital’s swankiest district. Having already lived in one of DC’s more gore-flecked neighborhoods, I was perhaps less worried about violence than I should have been, but my hosts were adamant. As cities go, Caracas and Washington weren’t so different—handsome national capitals that could transition from astonishing to dangerous in the space of three blocks. Fittingly, their metros looked more or less the same. Similar maps, trains, station layouts. The only meaningful difference was in the tickets themselves: the ones DC’s farecard machines spat out were the size of a credit card, but their Venezuelan counterparts were about half that size. 

The Caracas metro’s three extant lines would take us most of the places we needed to go, but not everywhere. My first time riding it, a woman raced up to me and asked me to translate a letter she’d gotten from a US university. Her son was enrolled there. She was worried something had happened to him. When she thrust the letter into my hands, my friend (we’d broken up by then but remained on good terms) politely but firmly intervened. I was barely conversational in Spanish, much less fluent enough to tell her what the letter said. After that incident, we drove more: to the colonial district El Hatillo, with its bright colonial houses and shops from which I’d have bought more souvenirs if my debit card hadn’t stopped working; to the upscale district Las Mercedes for dinner and drinks at a cafe under trees bedecked with fairy lights; to Chacao and Altamira, the parts of town with mansions behind high walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass.

I napped on the return flight to Miami and the connecting one to National Airport. Nodded off in the cab. I’d have taken the metro but for the uphill hike back home from the station, with wheel-less luggage. Wheeled suitcases had been invented but on my income then, you made do with whatever baggage you already had. I dragged my bags and my ass down the hall from the elevator and arrived to find my apartment door open, the burglary still in progress. My computer was gone. Sound system too, and the TV. My CDs and a few other items were boxed up on the living room floor, awaiting removal. When the police came, they told me I’d gotten lucky by arriving while the thieves weren’t in the flat. 

I didn’t sleep for three days. I stayed with a friend and only went home to pick up clean clothes and collect my mail. That last day, the monthly envelope of checks I’d written came from Mellon Bank. Still in shock, I opened it and flipped through them. Saw one number out of order. Recognized handwriting meant to mimic mine. Called the police again. My ex had stolen a booklet of checks and wiped out my account while I was away because he had a grudge. I had to talk the police out of turning him over to Immigration: He’s gay and if you have him deported, he’ll kill himself. He made a mistake but he doesn’t deserve the death sentence. The detective assigned to my case admitted they couldn’t charge him with the burglary, just the counterfeit signature. I declined to press charges if my ex would pay me back, which he did, grumbling about how he had to borrow money to do it.

The whole time I was in Caracas, I was gawking: I’m in another country. I’m in another country. If you’re from Greenville, North Carolina, a vacation is a week at Emerald Isle on the Outer Banks. If you crossed a state line at all, it was a trip to Myrtle Beach, Virginia Beach, or somewhere in Florida; if you had a hankering for a major city, you could drive to Raleigh, Richmond, Norfolk, or DC. Despite the propensity for inertia I’d been born into, I’d somehow gotten a passport, bought a plane ticket, and flown to South America. And come back to… this. I didn’t feel particularly unsafe in the apartment, but I wondered yet again whether I needed to be living closer to a different station.

3.

Before I moved to Northern California, I bought guidebooks for insights. According to Time Out San Francisco, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) was the more heavily used of the region’s overlapping metro systems; San Francisco’s Muni Metro only served the city limits and was thus mainly used by local commuters. Knowing very little about the city despite having decided to move there, I resolved to find an apartment near one of the Muni lines if I could. The late-’90s dotcom boom meant fresh graduates were auditioning for house-shares. Six people to one bathroom in a remote corner of the City, that kind of thing. I ended up in the East Bay, not San Francisco, and despite the odds, I did manage to find a flat, a big studio apartment on the border of Oakland and Emeryville. Reasonable rent, too. MacArthur in Oakland became my home station: it was a ten-minute drive away, there was parking (either in the lot or on nearby streets), and since it was an interchange, several lines passed through. In my first year in the Bay Area, I dutifully drove over there and parked rather than facing the congested Bay Bridge. 

On one of these jaunts over to the City, I had errands to run in the Mission. BART’s network was basically a big X with one line running north-south along the suburban East Bay and another connecting San Francisco and its southern suburbs on the peninsula with distant eastern Contra Costa County. With MacArthur as a point of departure, it was a straight shot to 16th St/ Mission. Easy stroll south on Mission to the bookstore I meant to visit. And there I almost got gay-bashed for the first and so far only time in my adult life. I escaped the guy by ducking into a nearby furniture shop before he could attack me. I told the guy working there what had just happened. 

“Oh hell no,” he said, and picked up a chair and went outside to confront my assailant, who escaped down a side street.

I waited in the shop for almost an hour to improve the odds of not being murdered on the way back to the station. My hands were still shaking when I got back to my car in Oakland. I got home without incident, popped a codeine tab, and stayed on the sofa for the rest of the evening. 

About a month later, a neighbor accosted me on the sidewalk. I’d just parked. Had a bag or two of groceries plus my backpack. Didn’t feel like chatting, especially not with yet another stranger who looked angry about the fact that I existed. She demanded to know why I’d moved to this street, this building. Ever since the new owners had bought the place and begun fixing it up, all these new people had moved over from the City. Used to be, you could park on the street with no problem at all. Right outside of your own house. Now, with all these new people, the neighborhood was changing, and not for the better.

“Oh. Where am I supposed to live, then?” Perhaps not the best answer I could have given, or the kindest, but it was all I had in the moment.

“Literally anywhere else?”

In theory, living in a place where I could take the train to work would make me the sort of person I thought I was supposed to be. And here I was, still unwelcome, still driving, still incapable of making connections between the lines. 

4.

The day before I left the States for good, I sold my Honda to one of those dealerships in San Francisco that’ll write you a check on the spot. I got about $3000 for it. Went straight to the bank. Was on the plane to Seoul the next morning. My metro station, Sunae, was a long way down the Bundang Line, almost at its terminus then. Bundang itself was an upscale new suburb of the capital, but not as soulless as it could have been. Korean urban development tends to combine high-rise apartments and office towers along with more modest—five or six-story—blocks of mixed-use buildings. There were plazas and water features. Multi-story shopping malls with vast department stores that managed to be genteel and gaudy at the same time. Besides, it was Asia, so nothing was going to happen. I almost got mugged on the Madrid metro my first time there and only didn’t because a stranger on the train saw it about to happen and body-blocked the guy who wanted my wallet. My first time in Paris, I misunderstood the zone system and ended up trapped between a faregate turnstile and a closed station entrance. To get back into the paid area and exit the station, I had to break the gate. On the Underground my first time in London, a trip out to Wembley Stadium to see a concert turned into an excursion through the capital’s northwestern nothinglands because I got on the wrong Metropolitan Line train and ended up in some dimly lit place, maybe Ruislip or Harrow, full of dark houses and empty streets. I’d been to Asia enough times by now to know that except for Japan, the metros were easy. Clean. Cheap. Frequent. Nothing was going to happen.

Although Sunae-dong (dong being the Korean word for district) had most of the amenities one might want—department store, good sushi place across the street, plenty of other shops and restaurants, and a shuttlebus to the school where I worked—the closest Carrefour hypermarket was two stations away. Have you ever tried to carry an ironing board and three large bags of household goods on a subway train? If not, I don’t recommend it. Even back in the mid-noughties, Korean online shopping already rivalled what Prime customers take for granted today. But you had to be literate in Korean. Which I wasn’t. Ergo, unpleasant treks on trains with everyone staring and pretending not to.

The other issue with Sunae-dong: going to the city center took an hour and a half. If I just wanted to go up to Gangnam, in southeastern Seoul, that was an hour. The vast Coex shopping mall was worth the trip for the bookstore alone. But winters in Korea are frigid: temperatures stay below freezing at least two months each year. Fortunately (or not), Seoul’s metro trains have heated, cushioned seats. All well and good when the train isn’t jammed body-to-body with commuters. They often are. You don’t exit the trains so much as explode out of them gasping for breath and wringing wet with sweat and shaking from sudden chills in that stabby air.

Coming back from Gangnam one frozen night, I was trying to read. Mercifully, the train wasn’t full. 

“Where are you from?” slurred a male voice in English. 

I looked up. Older man, maybe in his late sixties or early seventies. Swaying. Ragged clothes. Red face. Years of alcohol had carved scarlet line maps into his cheeks.

“I’m American?”

“Wah! Very good! America… number one! You… American! Me… Korean! What is your name?”

“Stephen,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t make the connection with the big name on the cover of my book.

He carried on in this vein, repeating himself as if he’d forgotten the questions he’d asked me only two minutes earlier, until we got to Seohyeon Station, one stop away from my own. Mortified, I hurried to exit the train, then the station itself. There was about two inches of snow on the ground. Cold breaths of bitter-clean air. I had achieved a version of the erasure I was looking for: I was a skin color, a passport, a nationality. A lifelong inability to fit in ceases to matter in a place where you’re never going to fit in. Ruminating on this, I tromped through the ice-glazed snow with an odd mix of embarrassment and relief.

The next year when I saw the same man on a different train, I answered him in German and he left me alone.

5.

Much of Hong Kong was built around the Mass Transit Railway instead of the other way around; in fact, the MTR Corporation doubles as a property developer, building shopping malls, office towers, and housing estates at the stations. Fares are cheap and it goes everywhere. One of the first rites of passage as a new arrival (this also held true for tourists back when Hong Kong still had them) was buying an Octopus card at a kiosk in one of the stations. All modes of transit except taxis accept them. You can also use them at convenience stores, supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, and quite a few places. You just top it up every so often and kind of forget about it the rest of the time.

The night the 2014 pro-democracy protests kicked off, I cabbed from my flat near Tai Koo Station over to the epicenter at Admiralty. The driver dropped me off about a block from the outermost barricades, told me to be careful, and sped away. I had no idea what I might be walking into and had come prepared (I thought) for contingencies. The stinging tang of tear gas hung in the air. I’d brought goggles and a face mask, a wet washcloth in a zipper bag, a first-aid kit, a bottle of water, and a battery charger for my phone. I live-tweeted my progress as I made my way through the crowds, taking pictures of what I saw, and thought I was part of something.

Admiralty Station looked like a bomb had gone off. Protestors had set up first-aid stations. There were stockpiles of supplies, discarded signs everywhere, people bleeding. Huge banners bearing protest slogans in Chinese and English festooned the walls.

“You need to leave,” one young man said to me. “This place is full of danger.”

“I live here too,” I told him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I stopped to help a family of alarmed-looking white people who’d just emerged from the train concourse dragging large suitcases. Tourists from Australia, they had no idea what they’d just gotten into. All they knew was that their hotel was across a big enclosed walkway from the station. They’d boarded the Airport Express train at the airport, transferred at Central, and emerged in Bedlam. 

“It’s kind of all right,” I tried to reassure them. “It’s Hong Kong. It’s usually pretty orderly. Just, you know, stay back from the center of whatever’s going on. And tonight, consider room service. Use your heads and you ought to be safe.”

After that, I somehow struck up a conversation with another guy who’d also shown up to look around. A Russian from Crimea, he had seen this kind of thing before but declined to go into detail. We walked as close to the front lines as we could get, turning back where protestors had formed walls with umbrellas to repel pepper spray and tear gas. I lost him somewhere in that melee and eventually turned back and took the MTR home. 

In 2019, when the protests kicked off again, much bigger this time, the government decided to murder the city rather than stop to reflect on whether the enraged public might have a point. Because the urban fabric of Hong Kong is knit so tightly around the rail network, weaponizing the trains was the most efficient way of bringing the city to a terrified, furious halt. Early on in that season of protest, in late July, armed thugs rampaged into a train and beat commuters bloody. I had lived at that station—Yuen Long—for a couple of years. Can’t say I liked it much, too remote, but it was home for a time. Photos emerged later of a member of the Legislative Council talking with some of the gangsters as if he knew them and supported what they had done. 

Not long after that, cops shot tear gas at fleeing civilians into another station—into the station, from outside. No regard for whether they were combatants or passersby. My partner and I watched it live on TV and screamed at the screen. At Tai Koo, heavily armed cops went apeshit on the concourse, caused a stampede, and sent a crush of bodies down the escalator toward the train platform. I lived in Tai Koo about a year, just up the road from the station in a housing estate called Nam Fung Sun Chuen. Less than a month after that, more violent apeshittery ensued, this time at Prince Edward Station in Kowloon. The cops sealed off the station to keep anyone from escaping. No one knows what happened next. Rumors spread online that at least three people couldn’t be accounted for afterward. The MTR Corporation wouldn’t release the footage. This was just one stop up from my gym in Mong Kok. The whole district was a battleground, and stayed one. Station entrances all through that part of Kowloon were set alight, elevators smashed, bricks torn out of sidewalks to be hurled at the cops. As the protests intensified, individual stations, then lines, and then the entire system were shut down. It was a violent, burning dystopia no matter which line you were on or which station you called home.

The violence in Hong Kong died down after a year because legislation, the pandemic, and wholesale police brutality indistinguishable at times from urban warfare put an end to it. I left the city days after a Beijing-imposed National Security Law came into effect and essentially criminalized public dissent. People started getting arrested for social-media posts. I had a job offer in hand and a work visa in my passport. I took a taxi to Hong Kong International, not the Airport Express. Landed in London roughly twelve hours later, no longer completely sure who I was.

6.

More cities have subways than I would have expected. Everyone knows about Paris, London, Tokyo, Moscow, and New York. All the big German cities have them. So do the big Japanese ones. Back in my pre-DC bookstore-browsing days, I figured this out pretty fast. I liked the line maps in the travel guides. They’d take me in the directions I knew I wanted to go, including to other places, unexpected ones, that have metro systems too: Budapest, Athens, Singapore, Rome, Kuala Lumpur. After years of delays, Thessaloniki’s metro has finally opened; Cluj-Napoca and Belgrade have just broken ground on their first underground lines; Bristol, Graz, Utrecht, Krakow, and Chiang Mai are debating building systems their own. They will be transformational.

On the Bakerloo line, there’s a deafening stretch between Elephant & Castle and Charing Cross. Every time I pass through, I jam my fingers in my ears to block out the shriek of steel wheels on old rails. It sounds like change and horror and loss. Then the train slows down, gets quieter, stops on a platform. Passengers exit. Others throng through the narrow sliding doors. They close. We depart. London isn’t home, though. In an alternate universe, it might have been. Here in Cornwall, trains trundle along a branch line between Truro and Falmouth every half-hour or so. They run all day. I’m delighted they’re there. I rarely use them, though. I live too far from the station to walk, and cabs are expensive. Besides, I have a car now, and a UK license. Do I love driving? Not exactly. It’s stressful. But I grew up driving the back roads of Pitt County, North Carolina, and that has stayed with me. I tried being an Urban Metro Person, even achieved it in Hong Kong, and I think I’ve learned to recognize my station.

‘Pull Quote’

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‘Pull Quote’

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‘Pull Quote’

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