9:30 this morning, huge crowd heading down to the 4-5-6 trains under Grand Central.
There’s an ugly jam-up at the stairs. The 5 has just left, but it appears to have been several minutes since a 6 pulled in, and impatient would-be straphangers are massed on the platform, contributing to the bottleneck.
Then the jam’s true culprit becomes apparent. At the bottom of the stairs, a man sits. He’s got dreadlocks and a colorful pair of boxers, his jeans way, way below the waist level. He’s sleeping on the bottom step.
The man ahead of me, a stone-faced suit, hits the guy in the back of the head as he passes. I can’t say for sure it was intentional, but smart money says it was the sort of tap a hockey defenseman gives a forward who’s camped too close to the crease.
The slumbering fool is more or less something you see every day, until I realize what, other than the bright boxers, the man is wearing. It’s the blue pinny of one of those community associations–the men (and I presume women) who are hired to wear brightly colored pinnies and sweep streets, sidewalks and subway platforms.
After the day laborer took the shot to the head, he opened his eyes, looked around, and went back to sleep.