John on the Subway

It was after 11:00 p.m. when we got on the subway to go home after a long day of sightseeing. The Times Square station had been hopping with activity. A cellist playing "Ave Maria," a religious group singing gospel, a group of teenagers in loud conversation. It's a 20-minute ride back to Brooklyn Heights, so I made sure to nab a seat as soon as I got on the car. An elderly man in an overcoat sat down right next to me.

"I presume you're connected to these people in some way?" he asked after I took a photo of the group sitting across from me.

"Nah, they just looked intriguing,"
I replied, then laughed and admitted that yes, they were family. My brother and sister-in-law, my nephews, and there on the end, my partner.

He asked where we were from, what we did, then as if stumbling for a wedge into further conversation, he showed me his old canvas bag. Eastman School of Music, it said, Rochester Universtiy. "I bet I'm the only one in New York with a bag like this. I wish I could get a new one, but they stopped making them 25 years ago."

He was a music teacher, he told me. Had just been to the Philharmonic, where "the piano and violin had conversed so beautifully, it lifted me to tears." He'd been doing a lot of crying that day. Had helped his neighbor up in Rochester put his beloved spaniel to sleep, bury him in the yard. He'd never had to do anything like that before, and it had torn him up.

But he had, actually, gone through much worse when his lover, David, died of AIDS back in 1993. And that was hard, so hard. He took from his wallet a faded school photo of a young man with a moustache and 70's style hair. "Nice looking," I said, and he nodded sadly.

"I knew before he did," he said. "About his illness. My brother was his doctor. He took me aside and said, 'I'm breaking ethics to tell you this, but you should know.'" I didn't say a thing to David, but when he finally worked up the courage to tell me, he looked at my face and said, 'You know.' I just went to him and hugged him. Held him for the longest time."

Normally, I'd be taken aback by such intimate disclosures from a stranger, but somehow it all felt right, like we had already been friends for years. "After David died, his parents were great to me. It could have easily gone the other way. I was much older than David." (He'd told me earlier he was 77 now.) "I still go to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania every year for Thanksgiving with them." His talking barely paused for breath. He'd moved to Rochester several years ago, back into his parents' home after they died. But he still comes down to go to the Philharmonic and to church. He was one of the founders of Marantha, the Gay and Lesbian organization in the Riverside Church in Manhattan, 30 years ago, and he was being interviewed the next day for a documentary about the church. "I bet you didn't expect to get someone's entire life history on a subway ride," he said. And before I could even reply, the doors slid open. He gave me one last smile, and stepped off the train.

Riverside Church in NYC (photo by Dave King)

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