Escape from New York
Penn Station is evacuated and locked down. Bomb squads with dogs search the tunnels and platforms. Midtown seems otherwise almost normal which is disorienting in itself. While I am sitting in a McDonald’s eating a burger and fries and feeling very strange about it, my wife calls on my cell to say that limited service on the railroad is expected to start soon.
I immediately head for the 34th St security checkpoint outside Penn. An airliner is seen overhead and the crowd nearly panics. It is a 747 with a fighter plane trailing so I’m pretty sure this is Air Force One, not another attack. In the chaos, the crowd parts like the Red Sea allowing me to make my way right up to the checkpoint just as they are beginning to pass commuters through, one at a time, searched and tickets verified.
So it goes that I am on the second train out of Manhattan that day. The pins and needles sensation on the back of my neck does not go away until we emerge into daylight on the Queens side. I arrive home at 4PM. The weather is still maddeningly perfect. But that old Elmore James traditional is sounding in my head, “The sky is crying… look at the tears rollin’ down the street”.
A few days later when I’m ready to listen to music again, my portable CD player is still on the Savoy Brown track I was listening to on the subway that day: “Hellbound Train”. Oh, the irony in those steel rails…