Inspirations:
"In the Subways - Unclaimed in Death"
by
Ray Sanchez, Newsday; May 31, 2004
His voice
emanated from a boom box in a small office on the
Lower East Side. "Ladies and gentlemen, please be advised
... " His body,
meanwhile, lay unclaimed, almost forgotten, in a freezer at
St. Vincent's
Hospital in Manhattan.
Tony
Butler was a homeless man who called himself a volunteer customer
service train representative. He was remembered as the quintessential
New York
character the other night during a small gathering of transit
workers and
friends at a cultural center on East First Street. He died
alone in the
hospital on March 4 after contracting pneumonia.
"Tony
was really a symbol of living free," said Steve Zeitlin,
a folklorist
who had befriended Butler in the subway.
The
storytelling session was held at the offices of City Lore,
a nonprofit
group dedicated to urban folklore. It was attended by a handful
of train
operators and subway car cleaners, some still in blue Transit
Authority
uniforms. Aluminum trays of food were laid out on a corner
table, manna to
those who sleep in the subway across the street. Nobody was
eating.
A
couple of beers were opened, some bottles of water. A brief
toast was
offered for a 53-year-old man who once told a radio interviewer,
"You see, the
whole world is my home. That's the way I look at it."
His
world stretched along the distorted subway map from the
Broadway-Lafayette station in Manhattan to the Coney Island-Stillwell
Avenue
terminal in Brooklyn.
"I
actually don't have to worry about no freaking landlord evicting
me,"
Butler was saying on the boom box, in a recording of an interview
with Zeitlin
for National Public Radio. "The only way I get evicted
is when I die. That's
what makes it so beautiful."
A
young woman pointed a microphone at the speakers, dutifully
recording the
90-minute gathering for posterity.
"I
tell you the truth, I don't really interact with too many
homeless,"
motorman Marlon Dubois was saying. "Tony was different."
Butler
was "homeless chic," as Zeitlin put it, with a gauzy
veil on his
bald head, held on by a headband, oversized white sunglasses
and a big
toothless smile. When he wasn't dealing cards, moving chess
pieces or watching
New York sports outside the Stillwell crew room, Butler was
dispensing
directions on subway platforms or signaling train operators
when they arrived
on schedule. He reveled in beating the Transit Authority in
announcing service
delays or route changes.
"It
really offends people when they don't know where they're going,"
Butler
said.
The
subway brought order to his scattered existence. A couple
of days a
week, Butler counted on meeting Zeitlin in the subway. Transit
worker Andy
Rawlinson brought him lunch every Tuesday and Friday. "He
followed me from
station to station," Rawlinson said. A worker recalled
Butler's stern
admonition after failing to tell him she was going on vacation.
The
details of Butler's life were elliptical, recounted like snatches
of
conversations picked up on the trains. He grew up in an Astoria
housing
project. His mother had been shot to death. He worked as a
teacher. No, he
never held a regular job.
He
thrived on New York sports, often positioning himself outside
an open
window at the Stillwell Avenue crew room for a glimpse of
baseball and
basketball games on the television inside. Audio wasn't necessary.
"This is a
Mecca ... the MTA's version of Madison Square Garden,"
he said.
There
were midnight chess matches against motormen.
Of
competition, he said, "That is all the mind needs."
Butler
was also known as "The Mayor."
A
motorman envied his tax-free "alternative underground
lifestyle."
Butler
read everything, according to one friend. "He had the
time,"
somebody else joked.
"He
told me he was going to live to be 100," Rawlinson said.
"He wanted to
live."
More
than a month after his death, however, Butler's unclaimed
body lay in
a freezer several subway stops away from the small gathering
of his friends.
"After we've made efforts to try and locate family, we'll
eventually work with
the city to provide a burial for an indigent person,"
said Michael Fagan, a St.
Vincent's Hospital spokesman.
Still,
you imagined Butler singing and dancing as the sea breeze
swept
Stillwell Avenue over the weekend: the Nets and Knicks in
Jersey; Yankees
versus Red Sox at Fenway; and a pair of heavyweights fought
to a draw at the
Garden.
Copyright
2004, Newsday
Inc.
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