I was on the uptown A train, about 2am headed to 168th Street, my stop in Washington Heights, Manhattan. I’ve lived up here, within 3 apartments for about 15 years now. I don’t quite remember why I was out that late, a weekday. Probably I was coming from a Columbia event that needed in heading to dinner with colleagues so I’d strolled over to the A train somehow and was on my fast 10 minute jaunt home.
There was a young lady seated across from me, early 20s, visibly drunk, nodding off, trying to stay awake and aware but didn’t know her alcohol limit so she kept nodding off. A row across from her was an older woman, maybe 40s, looking with concern at her and then at me because at the end of the car were 4 young man, Latino and after sitting down and taking out my book (I always have a book. If you ever see me on a subway without a book I am living la vida loca!)
I was about to reengage my book when I got to feeling that I had walked in on something.
The young guys make their way to sit on either side of the young woman and the older woman is wide eyed and panicked now. The guys are talking to the girl, poking her but she’s trying to wave them off. We stop at another stop, someone gets on, then gets off at the next stop, but each time the train is closed and in motion, the guys circle back to the young lady and the older woman looks freaked. The older woman finally catches my eye——saying something, but scared—- and I realize we both understand not just what is going on but what could occur after this. So I get up and go sit by the young lady.
“Hi, I’m Kyle,” I say in my friendly teacher voice that tells everything from dogs and squirrels to young children to drunken adults—-oh, he’s one of the responsible human beings. I say to her that I’m getting off at 168th, what about her?
She nods. 168th.
Then the group of guys comes over and I look up at them—-all of 18 and not the best historical students, nor future Senators. I give them the flat NYC Stare one develops—-that suggests—-I’m Not The One. They try to go all chummy to gauge me. I continue to stare silently at them. Then something surprising happens, the older woman gets up and comes and sits on the other side of the young lady, and stares at the young men too.
“She’s getting off at 168th,” I say to her and she nods.
At 168th the two women get up, the older woman holding the younger woman’s arm, and they exit the subway car. The guys go to follow and I get up and block the doorway.
“Oh, this isn’t your stop,” I say flatly.
Now I’m 6′1/6′2 (depending on Durango boots or not) and a good 250lbs. But most importantly, this lifetime, I’m a big man.
(Years prior at a psychic convention that a friend of my mother who attended SUNY Buffalo stopped at, while driving me back to the gated community my mother and her sister lived in in Pennsylvania mountains (did that make sense?) so we stop at this psychic convention on the way. Aura readings, psychics, Egyptian psychics, all kinds of colorful WhooWooo.
I got a reading from this older African man who did something interesting—-he put his hand on my bald head and said the flesh folds, whorls, were from the handprint of God, I had been long ago, a Vizier, a confidant to Pharaohs (which is kind of true even now in my work, I generally insist or finagle to be in charge and autonomous, or to work directly for the Head Person/VP)—-I’ve never had a conventionally smooth head when shaved.
And even more interestingly, which I’d been told before by card readers, this was my first lifetime as a man. I’d been a woman at least a dozen times before, in past lives. But to think of it like a queue line and I’d been so eager to get back to the “party” of Earth, that I’d chosen a male body, a Black male body, to be safer, so I could be freer.
That bit of WhooWooo kooky resonated deeply in me—-almost 20 years ago that I was like———”WhoooWoo Wow.”)
Back to the A Train
I stand in the opened doors after the two women exit and as the guys move and move closer to and move past me, I tell them.
“This is not your stop.”
NYC trains, especially at night, move fast and the doors open and close fast. They’re flabbergasted and I’m in the calm, cool place I get when I’m confronting something, something potentially violent but I don’t know—-ok, I do know—naturally my body, voice, intellect, assuredness—-I can be intimidating. I do things, soften my voice, am extra courteous and polite, smile and make congenial/fealty eye contact, speak and introduce myself——so that I become less directly intimidating/confrontational or bullying—-and more of confident and direct.
To thug world, it gives pause.
(Yes, I’ve had to do this in schools, with all manner of ruffians and gang members and even once to a larger Black man at Columbia who was actually dealing drugs on the phone in the back of one of my training classes. I asked him to leave—-but sign in the sign in sheet first. He threatened to pummel me. I stopped the whole class and brought him the Sign In sheet, security heard him bellowing and called Campus Police (Columbia is like a mini-fortress of private security, especially if you know what you’re looking at)—-he said he’d be outside to beat my ass.
He waited outside to beat my ass.
Columbia Police arrived and explained to him, the Black female Sergeant, that Kyle had been trying to exit him politely, give him the “day off” because he was in dangerous felony territory and we were (she now too) trying to rescue a wayward Black man rather than toss him into the system. He got her point. he still got booted out of the program. My two TAs and the class were amazed at the calm I displayed, stopping the class, politely confronting him, no shivers, no backing down.)
It is a function of knowing who I am, being myself, being Kyle and judging situations.
Back to the A Train
The guys hesitate long enough for me to block the doors, the doors to close, and the older lady looks back at me and mouths thank you and she guides the young wobbly woman up the stairs.
Now I’m stuck on the train with the WH Warriors circa 2020. But I’ve done something so crazy, holding a book, that they aren’t sure if I’m crazy or…?
“Are you a cop?” one asks me as the train pulls off. Yes, I’m now trapped on the train with them.
“You know there are cameras on the trains and platforms. It’s a big problem to assault a cop,” I point out calmly. Always teaching, like a good teacher. Artfully dodging the question/challenge/veiled threat. The speaker implies, the listeners infer. They have inferred that I might be a cop. See, teaching yet again! Right before I might be killed. Vocation!
The next stop is 176th. Train stops. I continue to block the door. It’s only a few blocks back to the 168th station on Broadway. They wait again, hesitate. Train leaves that station.
I, shifting the hyenas focus, calmly sit back down and open my book. Very Clint Eastwood calm. The gang sits across from me.
“We weren’t going to hurt her. We thought she was pretty, might want to have some fun.”
“Oh, I like to have fun too. And a couple of you….are pretty.” I throw all kinds of Fuck energy into my gaze, looking them up and down, like meat. Now the calmness coupled with the yes-homo insinuation freaks them out.
As the train stops at 181st. they actually hesitated and looked to me for permission, and I go back to my book and they hurry off of the train. Hopefully long enough, far enough away, to give the two women time to go in a thousand different directions.
I return to my book—-the little voice in my head, shaking his head mutely at this bravado display but also proud. Then I get off at 190th and have to cross the tracks and wait several minutes, for ironically the very train I was on, to come back from 207th Street and Dyckman, to take me back to my stop at 168th.
Luckily, I always have a book…now you see the logic in books, eh?
In that, and other situations, where I’ve stood up for young women, or once children, and even today when I went on out of nowhere blast screamed at a man to move out of the way of a 137 year old trembling, walking like a papier Mache doll with a cane in a hurricane man, to get out of his way, on the subway, I think about that Egyptian psychic. About glimpses and thoughts and impressions and sympathies at being a woman, around men/fools.
I think about my mother and aunts and cousins and one day daughters, and I think that I can do two things now: if I have been a woman, I chose this form to not only protect myself—-oh, many a men have wanted to knock my mouthy block off. lol
Two, that I, a man, standing in manhood—-which is responsibility, accountability and integrity—-owe it, as much as possible, to help, protect, defend the weaker, smaller, older, confused, etc. from even low level predators.
See when I pray and ask God/the Universe for stuff—-and sometimes it is literally stuff—-I had a prayer session a few days ago for an affordable laptop—-found one!—-I think to myself in my prayers and meditations—-What am I doing on Earth? In life?
For people to even deserve to ask for anything, even something as small as a reasonably priced, high performing laptop (thank you, God)——and it comes back to did I stand up when someone couldn’t stand for themselves? Did I speak up? Did I at least try to do the reasonably right thing in a moment or do I watch shit happen?
I accept having been a women, several times over, and so I accept that I on some fundamental level I know that fear, at being surrounded by predators, at being infantilized and minimized to prey, to even my own Kyle experience to being hurt/abused at the whim of another. But having been a man for 40+ years now, I can tell you the handful of times where I’ve had to interject myself into situations like the above—-it’s this cool, collected feminine energy inside that rises and roars like a protective Mother and tells my masculine bodied maleness to get ready, we have some work to do.
Insane, much to the pride and chagrin of the little Voice within me….yeah, if it came to it, even for a stranger, I’d place myself between them and harm.
(Now don’t send me roses of selflessness accolades yet—-I’m still smart enough and savvy enough, to always be thinking as I’m trying to save Newt, how to get myself out of deaths' doorway as I fight off the Alien Queen. lol)
#KylePhoenix
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