The Dead File: Wrong Stop

A late-night party in Brooklyn. A warm subway back to Harlem.
“Maybe I’ll just rest my eyes…”

Editor’s Note: This piece is from The Dead File — stories that, for one reason or another, were not published in a newspaper or website, but now live here in the place where dead pieces go. Enjoy.

I’D BEEN LIVING IN New York for only a few months, near 157th and Broadway, when I received an invitation to a party on the south side of Brooklyn.

It was a birthday party, but it was also one of New York’s few de facto Native American shindigs where Indigenous people from the five boroughs gather to talk, feast, and to meet other New York-based Natives.

Before long it was 3 or maybe 4 a.m. “I might just catch a cab back to Harlem,” I recall saying.

“It’d be cheaper if you caught a flight somewhere,” my friend blurted back.

I gave up the idea of a cab, said my goodbyes, and headed for the nearby D-train. It was about 20 or 30 minutes when it finally arrived. It was January, and this particular car was particularly warm. When it got moving, the gentle rocking along the tracks combined with the thawing of my body from the winter chill made my eyelids extremely heavy. “I’ll just rest them a bit,” I thought.

It felt like only a second had passed when I opened them again and noticed the train had completely stopped, the sliding doors were wide open, the pitch-black night sky had turned to a burgeoning blue-red morning, and a woman in a parka, sitting opposite of me, couldn't tell if I was a local drunk or a student who’d spent the previous night laboring over John Locke in the university library and didn’t make it home before succumbing to that oh-fuck, I’m-going-down exhaustion all nerds eventually fall victim to.

I immediately darted out of the train and soon discovered I had slept through Brooklyn, the whole of Manhattan, and wound up somewhere deep in the belly of The Bronx. This time, lost and confused, I hailed a cab.

It only took four hours to get home after I left the party, but I learned a valuable lesson that day: never just rest your eyes on the subway in New York City, and especially if you’re new to town.