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"Time is there and it’s not there," he said. "If they stopped all the clocks and watches in the world, it wouldn’t matter. It doesn’t mean anything..."

Photo: Martha Cooper

Steve Zeitlin is executive director of City Lore, 72 East First Street, New York, NY 10003; steve@citylore.org.

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For the B, D, F, and N trains, it’s the end of the line. The subway cars snake around the bottom of Brooklyn like a viper around a snake charmer’s neck at Coney Island’s Sideshows by the Seashore, visible through the windows. Trains from the four lines sit side by side in the station, adjoining the Coney Island Yards. A urban oddity of idiosyncratic architecture arches across the lines of track, and atop the unusual bridge stands the Stillwell Avenue Transit Authority Crew Reporting Center. It houses two pool tables and nine orange tables with built-in stools. Bronze signs declaim a code of good behavior: Shirt Cleaned and Pressed; Hat Straight and Clean. Above the tables glows a television set. The third game of the Lakers vs. the Philadelphia Sixers 2001 NBA finals is just getting underway. Tony, a homeless man, travels the distance of the city to watch his sports heroes on that television set from outside, on the bridge. He piles up his belongings and sits on the bags. Barred from entering, the sound all but inaudible, he strains to watch his heroes fight over a basketball. One train operator considers "the Mayor," as he is known, "not a bum but an 'alternative lifestyler.'" When Tony heard that, he marveled at the way English provides alternative language that can take the sting out of words. "It’s like 'assassination,'" he said. "That’s a big word, with a huge amount of spelling—and it sounds so much better than "murder.'" He debriefs me several times a week about the latest scores as I stand on the subway platform on Second Avenue, keeping me informed about whether the "Mailman" delivered or the "Diesel" roared the night before. "You see, sports is what makes man, man," Tony said. "You have a challenge, and you have your skills. And you try to hone your skills to win the championship. And watching guys like Shaq and Iverson meet the challenge is very stimulating to the mind." The day I went to visit Tony at his post outside the rec room on Coney Island, I eyed a train curving into the station as, looming over it, the Cyclone roller coaster parodied its motions. Within my line of vision, the Wonder Wheel rotated in a kaleidoscope of motion set against the blue Atlantic. On the bridge, bounded on one side by the ocean and on the other by the sea of Brooklyn rooftops, were six garbage bags, and beside them, Tony the Mayor—fast asleep. Like the city itself, Tony doesn’t believe in sleep. "I just drop off now and then," he said. I’m under strict orders to wake him up whenever I catch him dozing off. "I dig what I’m doing—the only thing I complain about is the weather. A few times I had to refuse to freeze to death." With the game just getting underway, I left to buy Tony a slice of pizza, returning to find a cop hassling him about being on the bridge. Tony compromised by putting all his possessions (except for the bag he sits on) on the subway platform, where he could keep an eye on them. Ten minutes and forty-five seconds was left in the first period. The Sixers were trailing, the shot clock was winding down. But for Tony, time is a funny thing. "Time is there and it’s not there," he said. "If they stopped all the clocks and watches in the world, it wouldn’t matter. It doesn’t mean anything. That’s what’s so amazing not about basketball but baseball—they managed to invent a game without a clock. It’s measured in outs and innings. That’s why it has such a hold on this country’s imagination. That’s why they call it the National Pastime." Mythic time. Tony takes all his shopping bags to the laundry and begins a new life when "Major League Season" gets underway. Back in basketball time Tony finished his pizza. Shaquille O’Neill dunked the basket at the buzzer, and in a brazen move Tony balled up his plate and napkin, reached over and into the rec room from which he was strictly forbidden, and slam-dunked the paper into the Transit Authority waste basket. "How long have you been coming here, Tony?" I asked. "Huh! What did I tell you about time? It doesn’t exist. Time exists for people like you who live by the clock." Then he summed up his philosophy of life. "I’ve got from now on," he said. Behind us the Wonder Wheel was turning—the lights of the soon-to-be-no-more World Trade Towers were clicking on. The motormen watched the clock, rushing in and out the door to their scheduled shifts. Tony was still on his green bag, straining to see the screen inside the rec room. He was the ultimate outsider, I thought, a symbol of poverty and homelessness in a global age, hassled by the authorities, gazing from afar at the world of material possessions—attempting to watch a television from forty feet away. An F train left the station. I glanced up, past the trains and the amusements to the sunset over the water, smiling to myself with the realization that Tony is hardly that—he’s not a symbol for the homeless or for anything else. He rides a different set of tracks. As the F train curved around Lower Brooklyn, passing in front of the Wonder Wheel, I imagined it switching tracks onto the Cyclone behind it, rising up on the wooden coaster’s tracks, then careening madly across the skyline. I imagined a big clock in the rec room transmuted into the face of the Wonder Wheel, turning for pure pleasure. What is time, anyway? A turn of the Wonder Wheel, an inning, a train schedule, a sunset? Through it all, the homeless man on the bridge is straining to stay awake. He wants to catch it all—from now on.

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