W A N D E R L U S T

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The agony, and the ecstasy, of New York's subway system

C O N T E N T S My Private Wanderlust By Don George, Editor Ibiza: A Navel Voyage By Karl Taro Greenfeld - Books on the Mediterranean - Getting there Mallemaroking runs amok By Simon Winchester - Books by Simon Winchester D E P A R T M E N T S Postmark: New York By Dwight Garner Passages: "Waltz at the End of Earth" By Paula McDonald Table Talk - Readers' Tips and Tales E A R L I E R Welcome to Wanderlust Don George, Editor Isabel Allende Jan Morris Pico Iyer Peter Mayle Amanda Jones Tim Cahill Postmark: Paris

BY DWIGHT GARNER | my best friend in New York -- let's call him Linus -- is an urban paranoid of the old school. He loves Manhattan, in a romanticized, Gershwin-on-the-soundtrack way, but it doesn't take much to wig him out. A maniacal cab driver, a particularly menacing homeless person, an unnoticed hair in his grilled salmon steak -- nearly anything is enough to send him scrambling back to the relative safety of his Upper East Side apartment. Linus is particularly obsessed with subways. When he climbs into a New York subway car, Linus' rule is to never sit down -- he wants to be mobile in case of a Japanese-style Sarin gas attack. If he brings a magazine to read, he first rips the address label from the front cover, lest Hannibal Lecter find his copy of the New Republic, hate the editorial, and track him down. In the small address book he carries in his front pocket, Linus protects his friends by printing each of their names and telephone numbers in a code so complex that even Interpol couldn't crack it. He's a kind of Jerry Seinfeld in extremis. I've been thinking a lot about Linus while I've been in the subway lately, particularly now that many of the cars are plastered with aggressively ominous ads for something called Keri "anti-bacterial" hand lotion. (Linus hates germs.) "You are the 423rd person to touch that pole today," one Keri ad warns. "The last guy holding that pole was named Sal Monella," cracks another, sounding a mildly racist note. I've been thinking about Linus because while he will do almost anything to avoid a subway trip -- he'll take cabs, buses, long walks -- I've recently found myself riding them even when I don't have to. Even when tricky transfers are involved. Even when I could just as easily walk the six or eight blocks to where I'm going. My growing passion for New York's subways doesn't have much to do with the fact that they are cleaner and safer than they've ever been. (During Rudolph Giuliani's tenure as mayor, subway crime has dropped significantly.) I am in love with them, I think, because as New York becomes increasingly sanitized and gentrified -- Disney is taking over Times Square, SoHo is brimming with Gap stores and an Imax movie about New York seems to be as popular with tourists here as the city itself -- the subway is one of the last places where the city feels genuinely alert, racially mixed, edgy, engaged. It's impossible to descend the station steps without feeling, as Alfred Kazin put it in his book "A Walker in the City," a heady "sense of discovery." Because I'm rarely out at clubs at 2 a.m., the subway is where I keep tabs on budding fashion trends. (My current favorite: the glossy lipstick boomlet, which makes women look as if they've just eaten a bucket of fried chicken and forgot to mop up.) As someone who's professionally involved with books, 20 minutes in the subway is worth hours among the hard-core slackers in Barnes & Noble when it comes to finding out what people are really reading. (Here's one subway-inspired prediction: Terry McMillan's run as a bestselling author is just beginning.) And while I'm very happily married, the subway is also the best place in New York to fall (fleetingly) in love: Who is that woman in the back of the car, her hair wet from the rain, buried in a well-worn Iris Murdoch novel? What does she do? Where is she going? In his book "722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York," historian Clifton Hood spins out some fine anecdotes about how the subway has occasionally (and wrongly) been scorned as a somewhat crude mode of transportation. When Edna Woolman Chase, the editor of Vogue in the 1940s, learned that one of her editors had tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a subway train, she was shocked -- shocked! Chase summoned her other editors to her office and denounced this déclassé stunt: If we must kill ourselves, she sniffed, "we take sleeping pills." These days the uptown morning trains -- particularly the A and E lines, which I seem to ride the most -- are brimming with Vogue, Elle and Harper's Bazaar editors, tall, lanky, black-clad women who cause the dazzled accountants on board to spill their hazelnut coffees all over their dress slacks. When out-of-town friends arrive in New York for a long weekend, the subway is one of the first places I take them. I can't help it. Three of my favorite things to do in Manhattan require a trip underground. Here they are, in ascending order of expense: The $1.50 Roller-coaster Ride The next time you're in Manhattan, try this: While you're waiting on the platform for your subway to arrive, walk to the very front and board the first car. If you're lucky, and your view isn't obstructed by a pack of stoned teenagers in Tommy Hilfiger jackets, you'll be able to stare out of the front window as the entire underground rushes past. The train's powerful headlights reveal a world you only half suspected existed -- abandoned stations, crisscrossed tracks, antiquated mounds of garbage, a glimpse of what appear to be underground dwellings. (In her 1993 book, "The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City," Jennifer Toth documented the lives of hundreds of people she found living below ground.) For a truly exhilarating ride, skip the locals and grab an express train. Even better, hop on one of the lines -- say, the F train to Brooklyn -- that occasionally travels above ground. It's easily the most fun you can have in this city for a buck and a half. The Single Grungiest Bar in New York This is a hotly contested category, no doubt about it, in a city where half the watering-hole toilets look like the inspiration for that now-infamous scene in "Trainspotting." But "Siberia," a Russian-themed vodka bar that's located down inside the 50th Street subway station on the 1 and 9 lines, feels special. Tiny, grimy and adorned with faded Soviet-era political posters, this place is a magnet for hard-core drinkers. (One of the regular bartenders, whose name is Venus, literally sneers if you order a beer.) If you wonder where all the hookers have gone now that they've been driven away from 42nd Street, a lot of them seem to be here, where they mix with the slumming editors of George and Elle, who occupy the upper floors of the Hachette-Fillipacchi building directly above. The last time I was in Siberia I spent the evening talking to a prostitute named Norma who, when she finally realized we weren't going to be leaving together, settled for bumming a few cigarettes instead. The Single Greatest Restaurant in New York More hotly contested territory. But if you were to tell me that I was to be banished from Manhattan at sun-up tomorrow morning, I'd spend my final evening at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. Established in the mid-19 century, the subterranean Oyster Bar is a kind of culinary cathedral -- a grand but unpretentious public space with a massive dining room, classic counter seats for commuters in a rush and a wood-paneled bar. The waiters at the Oyster Bar seem to have been born there. Even better, the selection of oysters is huge and impeccable, and there are dozens of great white wines available by the glass. Late last summer, when my wife and I came into a small (and utterly unexpected) inheritance, this is where we went to celebrate. A bottle of champagne, a few dozen malpeque oysters, some seafood stew and a pan roast, and everything seemed entirely right with the world. Too stuffed to stagger back up into the sunlight, we climbed aboard the subway and rode contentedly home. April 8, 1997 Share your New York stories in the Wanderlust section of Table Talk.

W A N D E R L U S T

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