New York, I love you-but you need some help.
By: Tenaja Jordan
Tags: Helping Others, Homelessness, New York City, Subway

This is a dispatch from the borders of class consciousness, and a fraught love note to my city: today I was assaulted by a homeless man. On the way into the city for some casual errands, I was accosted by a homeless man on the way down the stairs into the Atlantic Ave Q train platform. I entered at Barclay’s Center, and was in the overpass between the mezzanine level and train. He was at the top of the stairs, and wouldn’t let me pass. He said some things I couldn’t understand, and when I tried to move around him he blocked my path and became more agitated. He towered above me by about a foot, swaying back and forward as he yelled. I didn’t turn around and go back upstairs because I didn’t want to expose my back to him in his agitated state. I heard a train coming, and figured if I could wait a few seconds the people coming up would disperse him and I could go on my way. But as the train pulled into the station, he lunged at me and began punching me with both fists. I threw my coffee at him (I’m perpetually with a coffee), blocked with my forearms, bobbed, weaved, and screamed at the top of my lungs. Some people came up the stairs, and a man and a woman I didn’t know put their arms around me and rushed me down to the platform. In classic kind-but-not-nice NYer fashion, the man mansplained personal safety to me (“ya gotta go for the eyes hon, and kick, okay?”) and the woman told me that the attacks had been happening more frequently, I was right to scream, and none of it was my fault.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been assaulted in the subway or by a homeless person, but it was the first time in a while. It had been over a decade since a homeless man put his hand under my skirt, squeezed my butt, and demanded a kiss on my way to a job interview. Or the time a homeless man pinned me to the counter in a Dunkin Donuts and wouldn’t let me go until I gave him silver change. Or any of the times men whipped their penises out and jerked off in front of me late at night on the train home from school. This isn’t an issue of neighborhoods either. I was groped coming out of the Bleecker St. 6 station, pinned to that Dunkin Donuts counter in southeast Queens. I thought about all of those experiences as I sat and rode into the city, to carry out my errands. I wondered if things were actually worse or if I’d just forgotten how bad they really were.

It’s been years since I regularly commuted, for work or school, and during the pandemic I’d ridden the train only a handful of times over brief distances. I remembered that, since the spring of last year, the subway continued to be closed over night for sanitization and thought of what that regular displacement must have done to the city’s homeless population. It’s winter, which means that forcing them out of the subway and into the street must force them into the cold for hours. My errands-exchanging a leather jacket at a department store and picking up my ready-to-grill Valentine’s Day steak dinner-began to feel more frivolous and unnecessary. I could’ve just stayed home.

Sure, none of this is my fault and bad things happen. I don’t have to take responsibility for them. But I’m the kind of person who extends community even to those who hurt me, on the basis of our shared humanity, and yes, the kind of person who wonders about the wellbeing of her attacker. I am struck by the concessions we regularly make as NYers: we routinely ignore the plight of the homeless but readily step in to support our fellow straphangers. I want us to do better, and I am frustrated with myself for becoming so disconnected. If I’m being honest and applying the skills I’ve worked hard to develop in therapy, a part of me feels more comfortable worrying about others than I do identifying as a victim.

It took several layers of process-worrying about my attacker and hoping he got help, going over what I could’ve done differently, feeling guilty for having the resources to take cabs for the rest of the day-to unfix my face and get to the place where I could acknowledge and sit with my feelings. I got home in the afternoon, buried my face in my partner’s chest, and cried. He listened as I went over everything again and talked about the fear I felt. A deep fear that I hadn’t previously known, despite years of commuting home from school or work late at night and working in some dangerous communities and situations. It is awesome and tragic to think of what we can accept when we must. I remembered the mantra that got me through those years, said to myself for myself: “Imma be fine. Nobody can fuck with me. This is my city.” I haven’t needed to say that to myself for so long, and I don’t know if that’s made me stronger or weaker.