Piercing white hot treble hiss gushes from sterile iPod earbuds, pumping out deafening volumes into the passive, helpless skulls of my fellow commuters and fracturing my focus as I attempt to read a self-imposed requisite of at least thirty pages from my fifth book of the month and year.
A young black woman with a white puffy jacket and a hard face in the two-seater to the left of me emits R&B songs that I don't recognize. I repeatedly fantasize about berating her about hearing loss after each song fades out, but I know better than that because this is the motherfucking subway and I'm a fucking native New Yorker with survival instincts. Considering the grim outlook of the U.S. economy and how crowded this damn car is, it would be just my luck that my agitated outburst would at last spark Charlie Manson's prophesized, long gestating race war, any desperate exclamations of my Cuban heritage going unheard as my glasses shatter, spilling fragments into my big brown pleading eyes.
More and more frequently, I worry about passing for white, a condition which has served me well in life thus far. The way I see it, it's just a matter of time before my luck turns against me and every racially insensitive joke I ever laughed at or told transmutates into karmic retribution. I think about this almost as much as I worry about going to prison and getting sodomized and pimped out to the other inmates. I am never going to prison. I will swallow fucking cyanide if I have to.
After a while, another woman in a long black coat sits next to me and I begin to experience a dizzying sensation as her tinny snares and hats clash arrhythmically with those of the woman on the left. Disorientation starts to set in when a thirty-something Latino male plops down next to her, the unmistakable clamor of reggaeton drizzling down his earlobes like thick, dramatic horror movie blood. I pray silently among the cacophony for my stop to come but instead we are delayed due to a sick passenger at 42nd Street Times Square. I am assured by the grimy, muffled speaker above me that we should be moving shortly and that we should be patient. Only minutes earler, this same politely authoritarian voice advised me to keep an eye out for suspicious packages and activity from my fellow passengers. Instead of figuring out whether or not to trust this fourth simultaneous assault on my senses, I turn back a page and consider how late I already am for work.
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