Subway Superman

“Ladies and gentlemen,” one of them begins.

Sometimes we wearily look up, unzip a purse or pull out a dollar from a wallet. Sometimes not. And as their rendition of Under the Boardwalk passes down the aisle, our mottled attention shifts back to the screen, to a half read page, to an obsessive calculation how to pay the rent with a paycheck that falls shorter every month.

It would seem those bills and coins, whether withheld or dropped into the bag, are the sole nexus between the fading singers and the jaded passengers. But perhaps our connection is more meaningful. Perhaps in considering the smooth and jagged lines of lives that momentarily have intersected on this subway line, we can reclaim something, something perhaps sublime. Something often lost in the conceptual, self-consciousness of contemporary art.

Because although these subway singers are dismissed by the short sighted as panhandlers, they are in fact the performance artists of our age when the spectacle has become not a smashed piano in a white gallery, but the singer’s own survival.

At six foot four, impeccably dressed in pressed trousers, wingtips and a Ralph Lauren dress shirt, Glenn is well known on the B-line and the 6. In summer the open buttons of his shirt reveal the blue insignia of a Superman. Not Superman, but a Superman. One of a select group of Lifers who impart their learning to younger inmates in Attica in a truly Socratic way of shared reading and discussion. Glenn has in fact served 17 years in prison and counts himself fortunate for having overturned his original life sentence after being railroaded on a murder charge. In part the joyousness of his weekday performances in encountering all these beautiful strangers is that if he had not fought back and won, “y’all would never have met me because I wasn’t ever coming home.”

And he does see us as beautiful.

Just as he sees our flaws. Having studied human nature up close in prison, he has seen the agony and the ugliness, as well as the beauty of generosity between strangers. Lessons learned daily up north—with even the mess hall being a studio for the performance artist to master his style.

In Attica the mess hall held 700 men where above their heads sparrows flew and barn owls perched on wooden rafters. Flanking them on either side, 6 officers observed the men below through telescopes, radioing any suspicious movement to the armed guards on the ground. One time peas and carrots gushed from the side of the face of man whose cheek was slit by a passing inmate. Another time a man being kicked and knifed beneath the table prompted the guards to press one of three buttons: yellow, red or green to release the tear gas at various degrees of potency. This day it was red, and men wrapped their shirts around their fists to punch out the glass in the wire meshed panes to suck in air while other men writhed on the floor. Some men passed out, but for Glenn it felt like a hand had reached into his chest and pulled out his lungs. When he saw a civilian worker had been locked out of the kitchen and knew he might be killed, he wrapped his own shirt around the man’s head and held him close to the ground. That evening hundreds of men stood in the yard covered in the white dust in the freezing cold until they were herded inside to shower before being locked down in their cells.

Glenn was commended for saving the civilian’s life. But this act— just like his clean prison record and work as an artist and counselor—had no impact on the parole board. In the same way that at his trial his career as a social worker—along with his absence of any criminal record and evidence that his assailant that night had told a mutual friend of his intention to kill—could not deflect the charge of murder or the life sentence that would take two years in a law library before being overturned unanimously by a panel of five Appellate Judges.

But even then when inmates and officers alike were certain that having served five years for a reduced charge, Glenn would be going home, he would have to remain in prison to serve another dozen years to master the performance art of survival.

Being a powerful man in physicality and will, Glenn did survive with his spirit intact—a feat for which he credits his imagination—singing to himself and in the choir, writing his memoir and telling himself stories out loud, reading the works of philosophy, history and art first introduced to him by the Supermen.

Until finally by law he had to be released into a city where he no longer knew how to board a train, where no family remained to lend a hand, where no employer allowed him to keep his job no matter how well he performed his role.

No employer except McDonald’s.

And so one night on his way to Chinatown for his evening shift, three men came through his car singing Silent Night. Naturally he joined in with his resonant bass voice and has been performing on the subway ever since.

Whether shooting twos with his partner Charles, or leading a longer line of singers, Glenn is the one dancing down the aisle, twirling a blushing tourist while her partner snaps the image. He’s the one whose good nature spills over until passengers rise to their feet to give an ovation as Glenn and his fellow performers depart.

Glenn is the performance artist whose path has intersected with our own for us to realize the beauty of the configuration of our lives on this earth, at this moment in this subway car.