The Train to Soho
“Ooh, Jerry’s looking sexy this evening.”
Jerry is. He’s a distinguished gentleman in a linen suit who just stepped off the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He moves with the measured self-assurance that comes from a large fortune and final divorce. Grey beard and old world charm. I wonder how he got here in life; if he was ever unlucky and discouraged, or always knew destiny was leading him to wealth, ease, and the company of two lip-injected, twenty-year old escorts.
My evening has not been as successful. I was in a loud bar, sketching in a notebook, and hoping some of the well, if scantily, dressed women nearby might talk to me. Neither of us make the first move. They drink and dance, and I drink and observe. That’s what I do. I watch life happen to other people. Chance encounters, upward mobility, opportunities, connection – life doesn’t touch me. I sometimes wonder if I’m invisible, a glitch in the video game who fell through the cracks. I haven’t talked to anyone all night.
I’m walking down the streets of Soho, chewing on a cigarette for the aesthetic, trying to make myself feel better. Black and white Chanel ads painted on the side of brick buildings watch from above.
That’s when I pass the cafe. What captures my attention is not just Jerry and his companions; it’s everyone else. Seated outside in several large parties are the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen. Ivy League boys in jackets and cardigans, young Keira Knightleys in eyeshadow and evening dresses. They are radiant under the gold light, and I feel my heart shatter.
Visions of dazzling rooms I’ll never get let into.
This is Shangri-La; a charmed world, set apart. A wave of dysphoria pours down the streets of Soho and washes over me. Not just because I am (and likely will always be) denied entry to this world. But because I have no illusions about it. I believe in my bones that in the infinitesimal chance I manage to be a part of this world, it will not fill me. It is temporary, fragile, and overshadowed by as many problems and concerns as any other world.
It’s not heaven. There is no heaven for us here. It’s just a mirage, like the Chanel ads, promising a life we all want and no one lives. Desperate, aching desire for what is not and can never be ours.
I’m not at the top and I ache to be, even as I wonder if it’s worth inhabiting. I have so much privilege, so much going for me, and yet so much is still denied to me. Imagine how much is denied to those less privileged. There are so many who have far less, and I ache for them, too.
On the curb not a dozen steps from the cafe is an old, homeless man. Inarticulate and alone, his body jerks in strange spasms. No one sees him next to the Lamborghini parked on the street. That’s the spectrum. None of us signed up for the life experience we got. We inhabit the world as it presents itself to us. How much is choice and how much is chance, I’ll never know. But there is strata in even the freest corner of the world. A social, aesthetic, and economic pyramid with few at the top and many at the bottom.
This train carries losers and winners, this train carries whores and gamblers.
It’s not a simple matter of free will and hard work to climb from one’s current life experience to a better one. Life is violent, short, and unpredictable. Dark destiny from which we can not recover may strike any of us at any moment. If we’re lucky, we get to fight against impossible odds to climb to a more beautiful world that will never be enough.
Existential angst has me by the throat and is pulling me down. I need to make it back to my room; I need to make it to bed. I walk to the subway and head uptown. It’s late at night, but the cars are full. Public transportation has not attended carefully to the working class, the poor, and the souls of black folk who ride north at night.
This train carries lost souls. This train carries broken-hearted.
Are some life experiences better than others? And if so, why are they inaccessible to all but the privileged few? Or are all lives essentially the same? The same troubled wandering in the dark, trying our ignorant and incompetent best as we wait for the inevitable Something to kill us. What’s the real difference in the end if we are the Rich Man or Lazarus?
Will faith be rewarded? God, I hope so. We don’t have anything else, and some nights, not even that.
You just get on board, you just thank the Lord. This train.
J.
P.S. I have dispensed with asterisks and footnotes for the sake of visual cleanliness, but I quote a couple songs here: Beautiful Ghosts by Taylor Swift and more extensively, Land of Hope and Dreams by Bruce Springsteen.
May 23, 2023