The Token Thief

Bystanders on the platform see it as just another spark, its noise making them flinch, its light making their eyes squint, but I know that there is more beyond its shine, that every time a blue spark is born from the merging of a train and a rail track, a story is shared, a special moment goes by. My spark was the train and The Thief was my blue.

I entered the Franklin Street train station on the 1 Train line at around 12:45 AM that evening. It was one of those cool “all you need is a sweater” night. The city was extra calm, the buildings extra tall, and the sidewalks slow as if there were no belt underneath my legs forcing my feet to follow the New Yorker way of walking. One out of the two MTA vending machines flashed a “No Bills” warning while the other continuously added zeros to my desired two dollar amount; so many zeroes, in fact, that at one point I was close to purchasing a two-hundred dollar Metro Card. The smell of construction and beer filled the platform as the train pulled in, sparks cushioning its halt.

I was sitting on the wooden bench of the platform-twirling the loose ends of my shirt, feeling the small gusts of winds that poured into the tunnel from the subway grates above, when the train slowly pulled up to the station. I waited for the couple that had shared the platform with me for that half hour to board the train, but they did not, so I squeezed by into the un-air conditioned subway car. Six people sat scattered throughout the subway car as I walked in playing with the flimsy Metro Card I had bought. The subway seat colors stretched to see past the body that rested on them. I began my ritual of asking myself “who should I sit next to” as I walked through the boxcar. “Boy do I hate using those,” said a man of about forty years old pertinaciously as I took a seat . “Great Ana,” I thought to myself, “way to pick up the crazy man as your train buddy.” He looked as if he was from a nineties music video dressed in grungy ripped jeans and a plaid shirt. His five o’ clock shadow blended in nicely with the expression that waited for a reply. “Well imagine having to lug around tokens enough to last you a month,” I answered as I thought of a quick escape plan. He rested his hand on my shoulder, and just like that I stayed. To this day, I ask myself what made me shift my body and speak to this man, what made me think this ride is going to be different instead of reacting to his strangerly touch. Perhaps it was the fact that I thought he could be reading my mind and therefore it would not be smart to let him catch onto my negative brain waves, or maybe most importantly, it was because it was not his hand that had that control but the message in his eyes; his eyes were wide open as if they were looking to tell a story. “I was one of those infamous token suckers actually,” he said earnestly.

“Token Sucking,” as he explained, was a scheme in which token slots located at entrance gates were jammed with paper so that later on in the day someone could illegally retrieve tokens. “Some guy or gal would come and drop a token into the slot and when the gate would refuse to open they would have to go and spend another of them tokens to enter at another gate. I’d come out of my hiding spot and press my mouth to that bad boy and suck the token right out. There’s a whole art to it,” he said in voice determined to convince us both of the fact. By this point, he was sketching a diagram of the scenario on a napkin, using a pen he borrowed from a woman sitting beside us. I sat in amazement as he went on to explain that booth attendants began covering slots with substances such as soap to dissuade such persons from token sucking. “One motherfucker put chili powder, but that only stopped me for about five days,” he said proudly.

I asked him if the rise of the crack trade in 1989 had anything to do with token sucking and he rubbed his hand on his neck. “We’d get $50 dollars worth of tokens a day, that was enough for us.” I caught his light eyes staring at the same trail of train trash that my eyes had wandered upon during the awkward silence. I wondered if he too was trying to decipher where each object had been before it got to its meandering position throughout the subway car. We were each like those pieces, our minds substituting the trash with people and our thoughts with stereotypes. We talked for a while longer as he told me the story of the first time he tried the technique and almost swallowed the token. I could just imagine a younger version of him: the grime and dirt of the token slits stuck on his white skin and the skin of his fellow suckers. The few others sitting next to us on the train had stopped their discreteness and now made no efforts to hide the fact that they were eavesdropping; one girl slapped her partner’s leg for whispering in her ear while the former token sucker was talking. “Things were good, but my buddies and I knew we’d have to think of other ways to make money once that Metro Card talk came around,” he said pointing to the Metro Card that was still in my hand. His body shuffled continuously in the seat, so often I was sure the seat’s orange shade would fade by end of the ride.

As the train began to pull into 50^th Street, he pulled out a tattered wallet and fumbled through its insides and with a smile, placed in my hand a small token. “I got this the day before they were discontinued. My last suck,” he said elegiacally. He stood up with a grunt and pulled his duffle bag from under his seat. “Keep it. I don’t need it any more.”

That is when it occurred to me: the purpose of the train. This man had told his story zealously for the past ten subway stops, rarely pausing to take breaths in between sentences. He told me that he had only told this story twice; once to a girl he dated who had a token collection-“she thought I was a god” he said proudly-and a second time to me. “You’re the only person that has spoken to me on the subway in years,” he said nostalgically, his mouth twitching as if it were trying to take advantage of the opportunity to speak all it could. I placed the token into his hands and asked for his name. He stood facing the doors thinking for a brief moment until he answered, “Write me down as The Token Thief.” The doors opened and as I looked through the small window he ran over to the entrance gate, leaned over the edge of the turnstile and placed his lips to the now bolted shut token slit. As the doors closed, his head emerged and waved the token I had placed in his hand, its reflection in the eyes of everyone on the train. Strangers smiled in one of those rare moments of unity.

I never bumped into The Token Thief again, even after the time I tried to take the train at the exact same time secretly hoping to hear more. As I sat alone inside the train that night, with no subway trash, commuters or characters to ride with me, I sat contemplating the notion behind the metal boxcars that ride along the four hundred and sixty one miles of subway rail track. Strangers meet on the subway, but had I known how it was almost certain that we would not see each other again perhaps I would have qualified that moment as being special. I still have not lost that sense of wonder about the subway forwhile the congestion might dominate individuality, the stories of those who look for interaction are the ones that make the up the spirit of this grand City of Anonymity. My link to my city is as simple as the transportation that gets me around, and it is the people riding the subway, sharing their stories, and shaping mine that define the place for me-the place where I can contemplate. I hear rail noise outside the train and stories on the inside. I see life moving past the doors that asks for them to stand clear, stories bustling to get out, like sparks in the air. Just like The Thief and just like me.