Musings: One loud cell call turns LIRR car into a stage
When you step into an LIRR train, expect the unexpected. Credit: Newsday / Drew Singh
Cellphones aren't just for private calls anymore. They are devices we carry into public places, expecting others to adjust.
I realized this one afternoon on the Long Island Rail Road heading toward Penn Station when a stranger's voice cut through the car.
"I was out drinkin' with my boy Elmo," he said, loud enough for half the car to hear.
I had been reviewing notes before heading into the office. I am a psychologist, and I felt the familiar reflex to quiet things down, to put some frame around what's spilling. On the train, though, I was just another passenger.
The man looked to be in his 20s, with a beard and fitted jacket, an earpiece hooked along his cheek. He spoke easily, as if the rest of us were incidental.
"She keeps saying the baby's mine," he said. "Now it's all love and money.
"She doesn't even know my real name," he said. "She calls me Flame."
Still talking to the same woman throughout the call, he shifted topics to a friend just out of jail, then to another who had been killed, without changing tone, as if it were all part of how things go.
Around him, the mood in the car shifted. A man across the aisle lowered his sunglasses. A teenager paused mid-scroll. A woman near the window flinched.
No one spoke. The car had given itself over to him. It was hard to tell whether it was curiosity or caution.
At Jamaica, the doors opened. He stood, smoothed his jacket, tapped off the earpiece, and stepped out.
The atmosphere changed immediately. Flattened. Quiet.
I have spent decades listening to stories like this, but always behind closed doors, where I provide the structure, and the story arrives shaped by it. On that train there was no structure. Just people absorbing what had been said.
Later I thought about why it lingered. It wasn't that anything was missing. Flame's story was not missing anything. It was too full.
There is plenty of phone chatter on the LIRR, and most of it fades. This one did not. It was too vivid to ignore, but not enough to make anyone intervene. So we listened, we looked away and waited for our stop.
Harvey Lieberman, Rockville Centre
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