It wasn’t the sirens. It wasn’t the alarms or the strobe of red light flaring against a sleeping city.
It wasn’t even the man collapsed on the floor of my train, lips slack, the color gone out of his skin like a tide receding. No, what undid me was the quiet afterward.
That winter night, I stopped the train at the platform as protocol required, keyed out, radio in hand and made my way to the trailing car. I found the man unconscious, his companion kneeling beside him in frantic disbelief. The evidence — needles, foil, the sour chemical reek — was all there, as it always is.
I followed the instructions we all know by heart: check for breath, check for pulse, check for signs of life. He had one. Just barely.
This wasn’t new. This was becoming ritual. I had imagined trains as vessels of order, of precision — steel-bound promises running on time. Instead, I found myself driving a shelter. A triage center. A dim, clattering corridor of last resort.
Back at the break room, I told the others. “Probably just wanted a warm place to pass out,” a colleague said without looking up. And he wasn’t wrong.
This is what it had become: a moving refuge for the discarded. Those too sick, too high, too cold, too far gone. They boarded without fare and without malice, most of them. And we — the drivers, the operators, the ones who still believed in timetables and track switches and clean fluorescent platforms — we bore the brunt.
Alarms blared at random intervals. The emergency stop cord yanked not out of panic, but curiosity or confusion, sometimes spite or to simply be recognized by a world that had passed them by. Delays cascaded like dominoes. And always, I returned to the cab a little more frayed, a little more unmoored.
So yes, the irony was sharp, almost comical. When I was called into the manager’s office and told I was being let go — for failing to run on schedule — I almost laughed. Not out of disrespect, but recognition.
How does one maintain a schedule when the job requires you to stop, literally and figuratively, to deal with overdoses, breakdowns, psychic collapse? How do you keep to time when you’re forced to become both conductor and caretaker, when the cost of returning to the rail is a few stolen minutes to breathe, to collect yourself, to remember what part of the city you’re even in?
Those minutes, those necessary silences, were not inefficiency. They were recovery. They were sanity. And they were, in the end, my undoing.
“Egress there, sir,” the security guard said as I walked out of the yard that once held my dream.
A dream not crushed, but dismantled piece by piece, like an old train car scrapped for metal. A dream damaged, yes. But not dead. Just waiting, maybe, for a different track.
Slice of Good Ol Boy Life 
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