I no longer ride the train often myself; I have turned into the person who waves off their children as the children roll a suitcase onto the train and then, “standing clear of the closing doors, please,” disappear westward. But as a teenager in the 1980s and during my career as a New York City magazine editor in the 1990s, I was on the train all the time.
I’ve always preferred it to the bus, partly because the train doesn’t smell of toilet antiseptic and partly because the view, as you rest your head against the plexiglass window to watch the suburbs whirring by, fast-clicking images like an old-time silent movie, is more interesting — instead of the miserable homogeneity of the flow of black S.U.V.s and white pickups on the Long Island Expressway, it’s backyards and railroad crossings bisecting all the main streets of Long Island, glimpses of dogs chained to trees, girls with backpacks forlornly waiting in schoolyards, sudden outbursts of honeysuckle thicket and wild roses on the chain-link fences of Freeport, Merrick, Bellmore, Wantagh. . . .
The train was actively fun when I was a teenager riding to and from New York City on my highest, most exciting adventures (as when I was permitted to accompany my older brother and one of his disreputable friends on a trip to see the Clash play at Bonds in Times Square, or the time an eighth-grade friend and I went in on the train to buy punk-rock records and vintage plastic go-go boots from Flip on Eighth Street in the Village.
Once I started boarding school, at 15, I’d take the chartered coach down from Massachusetts and catch the L.I.R.R. home for the last leg, forcing my way through the crush of commuters and weekenders in the bar car, ordering a gin and tonic, and standing there in the bumping and pressing crowd, swaying, holding the sweating cocktail in one hand (clear plastic cup), smoking a Camel cigarette with the other, straddling my duffel bag, which was on the filthy, sticky beer-splashed floor. Once, at maybe 16, I met a blond-haired tennis pro in the bar car, who was so bold as to walk me home up Main Street after we had debarked on Railroad Avenue, and while I never saw him again, I remember him strolling beside me in tennis whites, past the old Tennis East store, feeling as if I was not only very sophistiqué, but must be even better looking than I had thought.
The old coaches on the Montauk branch were superior, in my opinion (an opinion that won’t surprise regular readers of this column who already know that I tend to like anything old better than something new). The cars that the L.I.R.R. retired in 1998 and 1999 were single-level, not double-decker, and there were lots more of them, making the train a lot longer, and it was a whole journey of discovery to walk the length of the train to see who else was on it that day, jostling and stumbling and reaching to steady yourself on the seatbacks. The seats were torn vinyl over foam rubber; I remember green and I remember red, but I don’t know which color the vinyl actually was, it’s muddled in my memory.
The best thing about these old cars — diesel coaches that dated to the 1950s or early 1960s — was that you could flip the direction of some of the seatbacks to create a four-seater space, with the riders facing each other. You pushed it over with a squeak and a thunk. This was called a “walkover” seat, I believe, and it facilitated the jollity of teenagers traveling in packs who had just swallowed watery $2.50 gin and tonics.
I’m sure when the current double-deckers go, nostalgic riders will mourn them, but it won’t be me.
We felt free to prop our combat boots and black-checkered Vans skate-punk shoes on the seat opposite. Today you can no longer put your feet up on the seat opposite; it’s considered antisocial. I understand this change in mores clearly counts as progress — an improvement in what’s socially acceptable, kind of like how it is no longer acceptable to throw your Charleston Chew wrapper on the floor of the cinema and leave it there as the credits roll, as we also did back in the dirty old days — but I still, honestly, secretly, resent having to keep my feet on the floor. (I’ve noticed in recent weeks that social media algorithms think I want to watch short-form videos taken surreptitiously by outraged Long Island commuters who, using their iPhones to record the shocking scene, have caught other railway passengers disgracing themselves by propping their nasty shoes on an empty seat. The algorithms seem to know who I am.)
Some of the most fateful rides of my life were on the L.I.R.R.
I think sometimes of the snowy, snowy day in January of 1996 when I rode the train into the city for my first magazine job. The snow came down hard and fast, blowing a whiteout, thick drifts covering the steps to the station platforms. I was on a very early-morning train, the first train, the milk run, from East Hampton to Penn Station, and so much snow accumulated an hour or so into the ride that the train got stuck on the tracks. We sat for a long time in still and silence, and the power went out, and we had nothing to do but wait. After a long while ghostly figures were seen wavering through the whiteout of snow, holding torches (actual flaming torches); they disappeared on foot ahead and used the torches to melt the ice on the tracks. I was a half-day late for my first job, starting at Hachette Filipacchi as the copy chief of Mirabella. This was before cellphones and I was unable to call the office to warn them, and just sat in the car, in the silence of the snow.