Tonight, I had gone to a panel on "The Global Financial Crisis" in the basement auditorium of the architecture building. The panel consisted of two university economists who were off in the ozone and a Sandhurst-educated Pakistani bureaucrat from the International Monetary Fund who actually made sense. The questions from the audience were pretentious, self-serving and directed at the two professors, who answered in kind. I ducked out before the end.

Tom Baxter-Gordon, who works at the Department of Employment, left with me. We walked across campus, down the steps past the statue of Alma Mater and through the 116th Street gate onto Broadway. Tom lives in one of those far-out Brooklyn neighborhoods whose name starts with a "B" and sound like it could be in a bucolic part of England - Brighton or Bathgate or someplace like that. So I joined him on the subway for the three stops. We left the wide-open night upstairs and descended into the city that never sleeps. It just runs less frequently.

We could hear a downtown train pulling into the station as we approached the turnstiles. I poked through my overcoat and around my jacket, fumbled in my pants pocket - the left on, the right is for coins - and found a token. Tom forgot which pocket to poke in. He's usually very methodical, but tonight he just kept shifting his briefcase and his gym bag back and forth and never quite got a hand free.

"Stop shifting, for chrissake," I snapped at him. I hate to miss a train in the evening.

I drove back into my token pocket and fished one out for Tom. We filed the tokens in our respective slots and pushed through the turnstiles, breaking into the white-collar subway sprint, rounding the railing and hurtling down the stairs to the ring of the warning bell, charging across the platform as the doors were closing. Tom managed to slip his briefcase and part of an arm between the closing doors. Sometimes that works, but not tonight. The conductor graciously opened the doors for an instant, and Tom's arm decided not to go to Brooklyn without us.

No one else had missed the train. The newsstand was closed and the platform deserted. On the furthest bench, three shabby-looking men were sprawled out, trying to settle in for the night.

I leaned out over the tracks, looking north, and saw the lights of the next train. "No problem," I told Tom. "There's another one at 125th Street. It'll be here in a minute."

It wasn't.

Students, professors, laypersons in campus drag began coming down the stairs in clumps. We had hit the "last-evening-class" crowd commuting home from Columbia.

I took another look uptown. Same lights. "They must be holding the train," I informed Tom and reassured myself. He gave me the native New Yorker's "I'm-out-of-my-borough" look.

"Shouldn't they announce what's happening?" he asked. Tom knows as well as I do that you don't want to know what's happening when they're holding a train.

I looked uptown again. No change.

Then it hit me. I'd fallen for the oldest trick in the Transit Authority's book, the specially-hung yellow platform light, beaming downstream, lulling aspiring passengers at the next station into thinking that help is on the way.

It was time to make that old wait-or-walk decision. I waited Tom and I talked about that all City bureaucrats talk about three months after an election. When would the new Mayor and his new appointees "get it"? Tom had started under Koch and had no big basis for comparison. I came in under Lindsay, so I could tell him what good times in City government were like. At random intervals, I looked up the track to reassure myself that the 125th Street station was still shining its little light on us. It was.

I reconsidered my wait-or-walk decision. It was a close call, but I waited. Tom faded out as I visualized my walk home. Just as I reached my building, the warm yellow headlights and perky red route number of our train rumbled into the station.

The usual crowd was there. Some of everything except those with inherited wealth and those under six. There were empty seats, but I wasn't sitting down for three stops. Tom was changing to the express at my station, so he chose to stand by me.

Now you know how it is when you get on the subway. It gets to be a reflex. You case your car for potential trouble. If it's there, you make the move-or-stay decision. If it's not, you settle into your newspaper, your John Grisham or Danielle Steele, or, if you're lucky, whatever's there to ogle. There was no there there tonight, so Tom and I kept talking. They've pulled him off field research and assigned him to work with "clients."

First stop, 110th Street; some people get on, some people get off. It's still pretty much of a Columbia stop, grudgingly shared with the rest of the city. Tom and I go on talking. He's started looking for another job. He tells me he applied for something with the Forest Service in Washington. They've called him for an interview next week.

"I can't believe the Forest Service needs an urban anthropologist," says Tom. The train gives a warning shudder before it moves out of the station.

Then we hear it. That metallic "whizz-(pause)-whizz-click" sound, the friendly warning sound of the subways. It's the sound of the door between the cars opening and closing. It heralds a panhandler or a fundraiser, a freelance entertainer or a salesperson, some teens or post-teens looking for fun or trouble. On this line, it's usually panhandlers. Six of them came through my car on the ride home from work this afternoon. But you never can tell.

I feel the atmosphere in the car tense up a notch. No panic, though. I don't look, that's not cool. Tom is facing the end of the car they came in through, and he's cool. We keep on talking. The train picks up speed for the short run in 103rd Street. I kid Tom about being an anthropologist. I didn't even know they worked outside Melanesia and museums until I met Tom.

Now we're at full speed. Tom's end of the conversation is speeding up too. He's looking alert and his brow has an extra furrow in it. But he doesn't signal, so I'm cool. "Jennifer isn't too keen on moving, but it would help my career to do some time in Washington..."

I'm only half listening because I've heard it all before from a hundred bureaucouples. Besides, I might need that other ear for whatever's about to happen on the car. Nothing heavy, probably, but by now it's a habit.

"...and my job really sucks, so why not?" I know his job sucks. Tom is one of the unlucky ones who kept his job with the city. so now he gets to visit whatever big company has just down-sized and counsel men over fifty who have just lost their fountain-pen-and-private-secretary sinecures on how to find a job in a computerizing world. I probe Tom's eyes for hints of what might happen, but all I read there is "something." The last thing I expect is a poor imitation of a fart.

Well, it got the car's attention. I turned part-way round and looked over my shoulder. There were two of them, regulation winter uniforms of scuffed leather jackets over gray hooded sweatshirts. One held an improvised kazoo to his lips, the other a coin-battered paper cup.

It's hard to imagine being held up by a fart. Two male tenors got us off the hook. The emotional pressure in the car collapsed as the men in the gray flannel hoods broke in to a rap plea for funds, starting with de rigueur assurances along the lines of:

"We ain't got no knife,
We ain't got no gun.
We're just riding 'long with you,
Tryna give you some fun.
We ain't gonna rob
And we ain't gonna steal.
We're just tryna earn some bread
To get an honest meal."

It's the standard disclaimer. The car relaxed, but the phony fart had already broken the ice. Tom asked, "Do you really think they would shoot someone?"

It's hard to tell with Tom sometimes.

The gray flannels switched from the commercial to the feature, assailing our ears with a rapid-fire rap version of Elvis Presley's "Jailhouse Rock." They were still going strong when we stopped at 103rd Street. It's a low volume station by this time of night, so they kept on singing, rounding into their coda as we picked up speed on the way to 96th Street. Their captive audience relaxed as they reached their finale, but I had the feeling that it wasn't a paying crowd.

I had another feeling, too. It was down in some subcranial basement that I rarely swept. Tom knows that feeling better than I do; I'm an economist. But is was my feeling, so I just let it flump around down there. I generally don't like upstart feelings, although this one seemed harmless enough. It was flumping to a gentle rap rhythm.

The duet split up to solicit both sides of the car.

"Spare some change, lady?"

Left, right, moving efficiently around the standees. The passengers had stopped talking.

"How about it, buddy?"

Halfway through the car, only two "clinks" of coins going into the cup. Their voices were taking on an edge. " You like the son, man?" Another "clink." Slim pickings, and we were next.

Now I usually give money to panhandlers, Maybe because I worked my way through graduate school as a caseworker. Anyway, I still had some change in my pocket, and the old crackhead I give my last coins to on the way home hadn't been around lately. so I turned toward the gray flannel tenors. The flumping feeling turned, too. I poked into my right pants pocket and scooped out the day's change. The hoods sensed a mark and moved in on me.

But I was in control now, and I looked them in the eyes. The train sped down the slope to 96th Street. I punched my fistful of coins toward their cup and chanted in their faces:

"Now, I'm so grateful
For not getting shot,
That I'll give you all
The change I've got."

Well, you could have heard a knife drop. What I heard was my coins hitting their cup and an agonized shriek as the train braked for the station. It didn't quite drown out a snort from one rapper and a guffaw from the other. A relieved round of laughter rolled from passenger to passenger up and down the car.

I turned back to Tom, who was grinning his subsurface grin. "I didn't know you could do that stuff," he said.

He started to say something else, but he stopped when he saw the rappers coming back towards me. Before Tom could do anything, the cupholder jabbed me in the shoulder and said, in passing "Past cool, dude. You wanna join up with us?"

The train stopped. I shook my head. They grinned and we nodded professionally at each other. Then they turned and started towards the next car.

Tom and I got off the train and said good-bye. I left him on the platform, waiting for the express. I climbed the stairs back to Broadway and headed home. It was a tempting offer, but it's not my line of work.

Jacob Toby | Tributes & Memorials | Yale '62 Home