I have one dollar and seventy-four cents. It’s an amount that, these days, is a boolean zero: two dollars is the new one dollar, and anything less is functionally nothing. A while back I started just throwing pennies away. I thought about putting them in the garbage disposal to pulverize into weird shapes, but I figured the return on investment would be very poor. My new apartment doesn’t even have a garbage disposal and, yesterday, when I tried to buy a sweet potato so I could poke four or five holes in it with a pencil and stick it in the microwave, the self-checkout added an extra dollar in taxes and fees.

This is the reason I jump the turnstile on my way home from work. I’ve done it about ten times this week, and I have four more until payday. I generally try not to do these things. Not that I’m above stealing, God forbid, I had my sweet potato after all, but more so out of The Reverence for public transit.

A sole employee is picking at something crusted to her neon vest. She keeps sighing, picking, and blinking, hard, as if trying to coax a sneeze or re-center a rogue contact lens. She stops to watch as I catch my ankle on the machine, and when I look back, she’s on a walkie saying things like “fare evasion.” I give her a fully unfounded, deeply dirty look. What would she get out of this? A commission? But I can’t blame her. She has The Reverence too. I pick up pace down the escalator.

As I reach the bottom, a corvine-looking police officer crests the top, her box-black hair gelled and slicked into the world’s scariest tight pony. It isn’t intimidating, necessarily, but it certainly is scary. Scary the same way as a watermelon might be, if crowned with its hundredth rubber band.

“Hey!” she belts. “Young man!”

I glance at my tits and step onto the Howard-bound Red line. The doors close as she reaches the bottom. I’m sure they’ll open again, but due to distraction or laziness or lack of The Reverence, they just stay closed. She stares another reprimand through the benzene-frosted window, and I return a look that I hope conveys some grainy vignette in which I reach through and rattle her by the shoulders.

“Does this matter to you? Does this really matter to you?”

But I know she’s just doing her job, useless as it is. I know we don’t, and won’t, and can’t see level. And that’s fine, so I blow a kiss and imagine distracting her by throwing a paperclip or finely-polished spoon.

An ex-lover boards and sits in the sacred corner seat a stop later, sinking into a hummock of headphones and legs. I do not notice this. I’m drawing a picture of ditch asparagus.

Asparagus, like mint and chives, lemongrass and echinacea, or any of the other Top Ten Snazzy Roadside Botanicals, is readily available after a spring rain in areas of runoff. “Lots of nutrients in those ditches,” a friend said, plopping a pile of the stuff on my counter last May. Corner-seat lover doesn’t know about ditch asparagus. Corner-seat lover knows so much else, though. How to make you feel pretty despite a double. Where to get cheap biryani and find cool DIY shows. How to cover your mouth, gently bite the back of your neck, and help you forget when you’re Just So Unemployed.

I feel their look only after the seat empties. I think that look must be tearful now. Tearful across the platform, at the top of the stairs. I wave at it, all eyebrows and a handful of paper, in a way that I hope says, “Oh, I’ve only just seen you! I’m sorry I broke it off. I was dealing with a lot. I still am, even though you can’t really tell from the way I so contentedly draw asparagus.”

This bummer grows mechanically. It notches, slow and incremental, clicking and dragging and popping like it might start stamping out oblong commemorative lament pennies. Like it’s always been there, in the corner of the museum gift shop. The man in the black hat who refuses to look you in the eyes. The woman who nearly spills a bag of old books as she passes, muttering, “You and all your friends,” she says. “All of them,” she says. A man on the street who wants to grab at your legs, a man at work who loves when a boy’s ass looks like a girl’s. A man on the train says he’ll kill you, as in really kill you, says he’ll just “pump you full of bullets” and you’ll be dead. A man at the club starts choking you while you kiss, and you don’t like it. You don’t ask for it. A man on your screen calls you a terrorist and your corner-seat lover does not know telepathy.

So you cry about it on the train. You try not to, of course, you grind your teeth and press your tongue to the roof of your mouth. You look straight up, open your eyes wide into the rattling LEDs, and breathe deep the plasticine flecks. But you cry. You make awful, heaving drags toward the floor.

Dragging and dragging from Fullerton, to Addison, to Sheradin. People come and go, but a man across the car stays fast asleep. He could very well be Exhaustion itself: legs extended, face pressed hard into the window, eyes darting beneath sanded lids. His arm is slung over a faded denim backpack, and the more I look, the more he seems sun-bleached, as if he’s been forgotten on a Floridian dashboard, under mounting piles of parking tickets and the occasional stretch of cloud. Still, there is an unmistakable smile on his lips, between snores and brakes screeching and passersby tripping over his undone shoelace. Perhaps this is his first good nap in days. I’m jealous. I’ve sobbed myself into one of those moods where everything is a mirror.

I’m mentally scrubbing his filthy high-tops when he wakes. He yawns, blinks, and smacks his lips sweetly before settling on me. I am suddenly aware of the tears, blotting them with my sleeve. A styrofoam cup rolls impatiently to the door. He smiles.

“Aw man.” He moves the backpack into his lap and scoots forward. “Big girls don’t cry, man, right? Big girls don’t cry.”

I chuckle a wet brushed snare, and wipe more snot on my sweater. “Trying not to.”

He laughs. “Yeah, man. Yeah. I know. Big boys don’t cry either.”

A moment passes, and he asks if he can make a call on my phone. I tell him we’re almost at my stop, but he’s welcome to get off with me.

A harvest moon simmers above the platform. I remember reading that there’s something special about it this year, as there often is with meteorological events, but I can’t remember. To me, what happens in the night sky isn’t my business to predict, just enjoy.

I hand him my cracked phone, which wears a dirty pink plastic Sailor Moon case. He looks funny as he dials, furrowing his brow. I imagine the waterlogged speakers producing toy bitcrushed beeps with each tap. I watch his eyes fill with something cloudy, like day-old agar. He brings it to his ear.

“Hey Mama,” he says softly. “It’s been a while Mama. I know. I know it’s been a while. Are you still on 42nd?”

I wander to the edge of the platform and kick an unopened soy sauce packet. It lands between the rails. I frown.

“I saw Michael Jordan on the news, Mama. He said Kobe Bryant was a hero, Kobe Bryant died, did you hear that, Mama? That was a few years ago. I love you, Mama. I won’t smoke no more weed, Mama. I’ve never been on the opiates, Mama. I love you.”

He’s silent for a while, then, and paces the length from the stairs to the sticker-mâché’d pillar, which he picks with surprising precision. I sit on the bench and tap a bossa nova into my thigh.

“I’m with my friend right now, Mama.” He smiles. “He’s beautiful, he’s a drag queen. He’s beautiful and a king and a queen and he’s beautiful. He lent me his phone. Ain’t that kind, Mama?”

His voice drops something small and calcified into my penny machine. Like a little shard of plastic. I can feel it rattling around. I smile so wide that I burst into tears.

“Oh, man, oh–Mama? Are you still on 42nd? 42nd and what? Okay Mama. I love you, Mama.”

He puts the phone back in my hand and wraps me in a hug. He smells like the train. He smells like years, like tiled floors and dead leaves and the pier in Brooklyn where I’d walk for a smoke when my bathroom vent wasn’t working and nothing else was either.

“Have you ever been to Berlin off Belmont? There’s lots of drag queens there.”

I shake my head and sniffle a weak smile.

“You should check it out, man. God bless you, man. God bless you.”

He trots down the broken escalator, whistling.

I go for a walk a few days later, and learn that Berlin closed in 2023 after forty years in business. I heard it involved union busting. There are a few other spots nearby, a historic lounge that had been bought up and covered in minimalist design and QR codes. Another is mostly empty. A man outside the Uptown Theater is sleeping on a putting mat. He tells me the Grateful Dead played there three times. The marquee reads “1925 to 2025, not for today–but for all time.”

I return home to my first paycheck, and immediately spend it on vintage T-shirts I plan to mutilate. When I throw them in the wash, the machine starts hemorrhaging water into the apartment and I spend the rest of the afternoon on my hands and knees drying and scrubbing and making phone calls to people who know far more about these things than I do. When the plumber arrives, I wear one of my new old shirts. He finds a penny stuck in the pipes.