Jim Carroll, best known for his junkie memoir The Basketball Diaries, died Friday at 60. (Funny, he looks so healthy in the picture.) A poet, musician and author, Carroll shot to worldwide fame after Leo DiCaprio played him in the Basketball Diaries film in 1995.  

The book came out in 1978. In this passage, Carroll boards a Metro-North train to Rye to escape the summer heat in Manhattan. He enjoys the trip with some help from heroin, cough syrup, beer and pot.

Summer ‘65

I’m sick of the city heat and all its bullshit so I throw my sneakers and a bathing suit into my little airlines bag and take the train down to Grand Central to catch the rush hour express for Rye, N.Y. to visit old friend Willie Goodbody who moved up there a year ago and has a nice scene going for himself. I can’t resist hitting the drug store in the station for a bottle of Codeine cough syrup to make the train ride more peaceful and I get a bottle and a can of beer at the deli with my fake draft card and go downstairs to the men’s room to slug it down.

As usual, at this time (5 p.m.), the place is packed with all the executive fairies peeking at each other’s thing and pulling off all along the long row of those piss machines; I pass that by and put a dime in the turnstile and pick out a toilet stall where I can drink up in private. So I’m sitting on the seat in one slugging down the horrible tasting stuff and god damn it, this fairy’s head is looking up from under the barrier of the next stall and he’s there reaching his hand out at my c***! I let fly a clean kick right into the queen’s mug and I think he got the message. Shit, if a cop came along, I’d be in a lot more trouble than him if he saw I was doing medicine. I finished up quick, can’t get away from them fags anywhere these days.

So I get on the Rye train just in time and get a seat. It’s a fairly quick ride; this is the express so we don’t gotta stop at all of them cracker towns on the way, just about three stops and, as the song goes, “I’ll be there,” clean air and cool water. By the first stop the Codeine is hititng and, good lord, I feel loose. Of course since I’ve been fucking with junk too much lately the head ain’t that heavy, but it’s better than I expected.

Then we pull into Mt. Vernon and I figure it would be nice to do up one of the reefers I brought along, so I sneak calmly into the john and do one up real quick. The shit is smoking. I get paranoid about walking back to my seat without cracking up looking at all them executive creeps in uniform with their little fedoras and them dumb little cases they carry that usually got nothing but a pencil in them every time I see a dude open one.

Finally I figure I gotta make my move and the minute I open the door I could swear that everyone in the car turns right around and simultaneously focused their eyes right on me like they all had x-ray vision and could see what I was doing the whole time I was in the john. The paranoia was so heavy I thought they were all gonna heave me off under the tracks or shit. It seemed an hour walking down that aisle back to my seat and then I just huddled there, pretending I was reading but secretly scared shit and goofing on all them at the same time. I ain’t doing that again unless there’s some fellow freaks on board.

[Editor’s Note: The above passage appears as a lone paragraph in the book. Unless you’re hopped up on cough syrup, pot, booze and smack, I felt it’s easier to read broken into a few paragraphs.]

Come fall, Metro-North will experiment with a train that goes from Westchester to Giants Stadium in time for Jets and Giants games.

Metro-North and New Jersey Transit are calling it “direct service,” according to Journal News, but boy, is it a circuitous route. The football trains stop in Rye and Larchmont, then venture through the Bronx, down the Hell Gate Bridge into Queens, and west into Penn Station. From there, NJ Transit takes over, guiding the trains to Secaucus, where another train provides a 10-minute hop to Giants Stadium.

The round-trip looks to be about $22.25.

Metro-North will try the football trains for the handful of 1 p.m. Jets and Giants home kickoffs. The railroad calls it a “huge experiment.” It doesn’t say how long the trip will take, but hopefully it’ll be less than the 1 hour, 45 minute drive we experienced from Hawthorne to Citi Field Friday night, all of 24 miles away.

[image: NY Daily News]

The May issue of Westchester Magazine has some fun with a look at Westchester in the year 2020–a county with a lower level on the Tappan Zee bridge for trains, residential areas built around transit, county-sponsored cars on-demand, and maybe even an 18-mile tunnel from Westchester to Long Island.

The first element of the Westchester-of-the-future package asks ”How Will You Get to Work in 2020?” While it seems everyone in my neighborhood who works drives to  some corner of Westchester each day, reporter Eric Lebowitz says car commuting is actually trending downward in the county:

According to county data records, most recently updated in November 2008, fewer of us used our cars to get around in 2006 than we did in 2000, 67 percent vs. 71 percent. During that same period, 8,000 fewer of us drove to work while the number who walked to work increased from about 17,000 to 24,000. From 2003 to 2007, Metro-North ridership increased almost 10 percent, and Bee-Line ridership rose almost 7 percent from 2006 to 2007. More than 20 percent of us now use public transit as our primary means of getting to work.

County Exec Andy Spano says he’s keen to stem the flow of residents into Westchester, and would prefer they take up residence in downtown areas that are pedestrian-friendly and centered around Metro-North stations, such as White Plains and New Rochelle (ah, the eternal promise of a New Rochelle utopia).

He’d like many newcomers to move to the county’s major downtown areas because they provide easy access to mass transit and are within walking distance of restaurants, pharmacies, hardware stores, etc. Newcomers might consider buying a condo in New Rochelle or White Plains, which have two of the busiest Metro-North stations in the county.

“It’s all about quality of life, and the quality of life relies on the pattern of development in Westchester,“ says Commissioner of Planning Jerry Mulligan.”

That 18-mile tunnel, meanwhile, would run from Rye to Syosset, Long Island and relieve considerable stress on the Throgs Neck and Whitestone Bridges. Opposition from those in the affected areas will be a major hurdle.

A certain hotshot reporter with a certain hotshot publication is looking for people who park/wish to park at Rye’s train station.

I need to find someone who is on the waiting list for a permit in
Rye and/or someone who has a permit but doesn’t use it every day. Any
suggestions?

If you know any such people, please drop Trainjotting a line at trainjotting@gmail.com

The much-feared gap between train and platform claimed another victim early this morning, as a woman tumbled under the platform in Rye (more like Whiskey & Rye) around 2 a.m. New Rochelle Man Mugged… I mean the Journal News…has the story.  

Lucky for the lady, who presumably is very, very thin, the conductor saw her fall and evacuated the entire train. The woman said she didn’t want medical attention (”I’m f-f-f-fine,” I believe she stammered. “Leemeee alone, I jus wannasleep.”), but she was taken to Westchester Medical Center for observation.

The poor riders–the true victims in this exchange–waited 35 minutes for the next train.

Why do I get the feeling CT Rider was one of ’em? 

I spotted a few thigh-high tykes on the train this morning, and remembered it was Bring Your Kid To Work Day (formerly Bring Your Daughter To Work Day).

That got me thinking: If yesterday’s Great New Haven Line Debacle had happened a day later, or Bring Your Kid To Work Day had happened a day earlier, what sort of mess that would’ve created.

For starters, the already jammed platforms would’ve had dozens more bodies, however small. Already irritated parents would’ve been extra-protective of little ones being crushed between irate passengers or getting shoved a little too close to platform edges for comfort.

Parents would’ve had to explain why trains were flying by without stopping. And once a train did stop, imagine the sight of parents and their offspring clamoring for a few square inches on a jammed train, some poor kid cheek to cheek with some guy’s arse all the way from Rye to Grand Central.

Perhaps it would’ve soured parents on the whole Bring Your Kid… concept for years to come, not to mention the kids themselves–yes, a whole generation of moppets might’ve decided that that commuting thing Dad or Mom does just isn’t for them.

Speaking of parental units, our own father, himself a former commuter with decades’ worth of war stories, is in town. We’ll tap him for a few of those stories, to be shared tomorrow.

Rough week for our New Haven line brethren. First, a train jumps the tracks in Grand Central, leaving several hundred commuters stuck on the train in the bowels of Grand Central. Then several trains bypassed Mamaroneck and Larchmont this morning after a car hit a train in Rye, leaving commuters waiting…and waiting…and waiting… in the 15 degree weather.