Ta Da Dum Bing – a story by Michael Henson

The L train had stopped at the Lorimer Street Station on its way from Manhattan back to Brooklyn when the young man sensed a sudden excitement in the car. He raised his eye from the book he was reading as a full-size stand-up bass sailed past. In moments, a trio of Mexican musicians had set up in the middle of the car.

He nudged his girlfriend “Look,” he said.

She looked up, nodded, then turned back to her newspaper. She was born in the city; such a thing was nothing new.

The three musicians wore crisp white Stetsons, black bolo ties, black jeans, and white shirts shining with starch. The car rocked and rattled, but the bass player and a guitarist played in perfect time and sang in perfect Mariachi harmony while the third walked up and down the car with a basket, gathering tips.

The young man dug into his billfold, pulled out a couple dollars, and stuffed them into the basket.

His girlfriend raised an eyebrow. They were at the sad, ragged, falling-apart, about-to-break-up end of things. Nothing he did was right.

“They’re buskers,” he said. He knew what the eyebrow had been saying. “They’re not beggars,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

The beggar, he reasoned, is just a hapless, sorry-looking, raggedy, probably addicted wreck of a human being, a breed that had gotten even sorrier over the years.

Back when he was a green, country kid from Ohio, he found the New York beggars annoying, even scary. Always the hand reaching out, always the game, always some kind of hustle. But at least back then they had some hustle. A man might sidle up to wheedle for change. A kid might offer to shine his shoes or try to sell him a two-day old issue of the Times.

But they were gone. And the squeegee men threading through New York traffic were gone. The old in-your-face panhandlers seemed to have fallen into some weird depressive state. Now beggars sat with their crudely lettered cardboard signs – Homeless Vet or Unemployed, please help. Humbled, meek, pitiful, they spoke only to mumble thanks or God Bless if someone dropped a coin in the cup.

What happened? He wondered as he passed a man sleeping on a grate or a woman huddled beneath the wings of a statue, how had they all become so pitiful? How had they lost that last bit of drive? Was it some change in the law? Was it the heroin? Was it some crippling form of crazy?

His girlfriend once asked him, “Why do you get all gimlet-eyed every time you see a homeless guy? Can’t you just ignore him like everybody else?” He wished he could. But the sight of a beggar set something off in him. The beggar disgusted him and it showed.

But a busker was another thing altogether. The busker provided something to the public–a moment of entertainment, a bit of song or dance, a musical break from the hassle and grit of the city, a bit of relief from the hurry-and-wait, hurry-and-wait that was how you got from one place to another in New York. In the midst of the madness of the subway, the bus, the jostling sidewalks, and the crowded sea of cabs, the busker provided a moment to separate from the crowd and breathe. He admired the artistry and he admired the stamina that it took to get out there and perform in the raw, open world.

Years ago, back in Ohio, he had climbed up out of trailer park poverty. He respected people with hustle and grit. So, whenever he saw a busker, he tried to pause, to pay attention, and to give the striver a boost. At different times, he had given a dollar or two to classical cellists, folk guitarists, Peruvian pan-pipers, doo-wop quartets, women with big, brassy R&B voices, women with bird-like operatic voices, drummers, deejays, and dancers. Some of them were concert level performers, hoping against hope to make it big, trying to kick-start a career. He could relate to that. He was trying to kick-start a career of his own. So he tossed a dollar in the basket or the guitar case or the coffee can or the hat as someone passed it around. And that felt right; the buskers had earned it.

Just like these mariachi musicians on the L train.

By Grand Street, Gracias, gracias, the show was over. The basket was piled high with dollar bills, everybody was happy, and the band was set to move on. But before the three could exit the car, a group of teenage Israeli tourists begged them, please take their pictures with them. Please. Please. A selfie, por favor. Finally, one stop later, selfies taken, basket piled even higher, gracias, gracias and smiles all around, the bass player tucked the bass under his arm and the band hustled off to the next car.

*

Weeks later, early in the morning, the young man was on the L train again, to work this time, from Brooklyn into Manhattan. Things with the girlfriend had ended; he was back to sleeping on his cousin’s couch. But he still had his job. He had a presentation to make in mid-town, and he carried a mid-sized portfolio by its handles. It was a sweltering August day; the humidity on the street was already at dishrag level. The car was packed shoulder to shoulder. But he lucked out after First Avenue when a woman left the train and he was able to use the nearby pole to swing into a seat right by the door.

He set the portfolio at his feet, pulled the Times from his pack, leaned back, and, braced by the weave of pipe metal that bounded the end of the row, he started to read. At Union Square, the last stop before he had to get off, a woman in a vest entered the car and dropped immediately to her knees.

She was just the other side of the weave of pipe metal. He could have reached through and touched her. It was a strange thing to do, to kneel down in the car like that. But he was enough of a New Yorker now that he was used to strange things. The people closest looked at the woman side-eyed and tried to ignore her.

A voice over the PA called out Stand clear of the closing doors and the door closed behind her. As the train clicked into motion, the woman pulled two red sticks out of an inner pocket of her vest. She raised a stick in each hand and beat the sticks together over her head.

Pok!

Pok!

Pok!

The sound was gunshot loud; the people around her turned and backed away, so that the woman had a clear half-circle of open space as a stage and half the car for an audience. The young man was jammed tight in his seat.

In a husky voice, the woman began to chant,

Got a little entertainment before your arrival.

It’s just something I do, for my survival.

Then with her sticks she laid down a beat on the floor.

Ta Dum

Tadada dada Dum.

Ta Dum.

Tadada dada Dum.

She hit the pole between them –

—Bing!

Half a dozen passengers shuffled back to give her even more room. In her gravelly voice she said, “It’s just a little change to you, but a meal to me. Any little bit of change will help.”

Then she stood, with her open palm extended.

She was a tiny woman, almost a miniature, not even five feet tall, and very slim. She had dark, bushy hair that framed her head like a halo or a helmet; her skin was the color of sand. She had delicate features, as if her bones were the bones of birds. In spite of the heat, in spite of the crushing, mid-August, sweat-box humidity, she wore a wintry, insulated vest over a dingy, dirty-green t-shirt.

Was she a busker? Or just another sort of beggar? She looked thrown together in a strange and shabby fashion. There were those dirty clothes. There was that weird, wintry vest. Her sticks did not look like regular drum sticks; they looked like sawed-off pieces of an old broomstick. Her beats were random; her rhymes, he thought, were lame.

It ain’t no joke,

I’m mighty broke.

She leaned down to rattle the sticks against the floor

TaDum TaDum Tadada dada Dum

and stood to hit the pole,

Bing!

As the train shot through the tunnel, she chanted more rhymes, hammered out more beats. Still, no one offered her any money; no one reached out a dollar or a dime. Finally, she directed herself to the passengers one by one. “Anything you can spare, folks, anything, any little bit of change will do.”

People were hanging from the bars and clinging to the poles, but there was still a little ring of separation around the small woman. The people looked away; they shrank from her as if she were diseased.

And maybe she was. For look at her! The woman was more than slight; she was more than small. She was gaunt: bare-to-the-bone, anorexic-crackhead gaunt. And there was that vest. What sane, healthy person would wear an insulated vest on a day like this? The vest was prodigiously dirty, velvet with grime. It seemed to ripple with microbial life. The woman’s hair was a thicket of shrubbery twists, a medusa-coiled, earth-colored snake nest. And that odor. Did he imagine that faint odor –redolent of his trailer-park childhood—a compound of motor oil, stale tobacco, sweat, and vinegar?

Her knees were like a pair of tiny skulls. Her emaciated skin-and-bone arms were jointed by little knobby elbows and marked by sores that might have been erupted needle marks or cancerous lesions. The delicate bones of her face and hands told him she might once have been a woman of surpassing beauty. But something had gone terribly wrong. Some terrible thing had happened in this woman’s life and turned her into something at once trivial and repellent.

With her back to the door, she was inches from where he sat. He did not want to look too closely, for fear of what might be crawling in the collar of her vest, or of what might be nesting in her hair. The car lurched and rocked and sent her into a stumble that brought her just an inch away from falling over onto his lap.

Yet she was nimble enough to right herself. She took both sticks into her left hand and held out her right, then turned from one passenger to another and continued in her speaking voice, “A little bit of change, if you please, I need to eat.”

One after another, the people of the car turned away.

To avoid her, they crowded ever more closely together. It was elbows on every side.

The voice of the conductor squawked across the PA to announce the Sixth Avenue station. The young man tried to get up, but felt himself pressed into the seat. From the left, the string of poles at the end of the row pressed against his side, from the right, the corner of a woman’s purse pressed against his temple. A sudden fear rose in him, irrational and all-consuming, of entrapment and suffocation.

Just then, the woman’s gunshot-drumsticks knocked together three more times:

Pock!

Pock!

Pock!

and the woman’s hoarse voice called in a chant,

Come on people, give the man a break.

He’s got an appointment that he needs to make.

The red-stick woman pointed her broken broomstick toward the face of the woman with the purse. She, and the rest of the crowd, found the space, somehow, to back away so the young man could stand.

He stood, he muttered thanks, slipped past her through the space she had created, and stepped off the train, carried forward by the crush of people getting off at that stop. The voice from the PA called out

Stand clear of the closing doors.

The young man stood clear of the closing doors and reached for his wallet for a dollar to give the woman. But a second crush of people had shouldered past him onto the car. Before he could reach her with his dollar, the doors of the train had closed. The woman and her sticks were now on the other side of the glaring glass.

He could not see her anywhere in the car.

It was as if she had never been.

A click and a hum and a hiss of the air brakes releasing: the train rolled off.  The young man stood alone on the platform and watched the red lights of the last car course down the long dark tunnel. The empty air smelled of dust and electricity. He stared until the lights of the train disappeared and he felt in the soles of his shoes, in his ankles and his knees, the earthquake rumble of the next train coming.

Michael Henson

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay – legs and feet in the aisle of a subway train in monochrome.