The man in the wheelchair shifted slightly toward me, and I gasped. Oh, my God, I thought, they’ve finally cut Eggy in half.

Because of the cap and the hoodie, I couldn’t be certain, but the guy in the wheelchair sure looked like Eggy, the paraplegic who lived with his mother around the corner from my old apartment on Hoyt Street. After Clayton, my landlord’s former worker, was no longer permitted to roam freely through the streets of Brooklyn, Eggy assumed the job of sweeping up in front of my neighbors’ townhouses and moving the recycling to the curb every Friday evening. He performed his duties assiduously in all weather, and starting about one hour after he finished, he was likely to be rolling through the neighborhood thoroughly buzzed on something.

Eggy was a wraithlike presence in the neighborhood, materializing with a startling “How you doin’, Pops” to let you know he was lurking. He was prone to surprising me late at night during steamy negotiations on my front stoop with women I’d taken to the Brooklyn Inn, his sudden appearances helping them make up their minds to just go home. Once, after Eggy and I together watched a woman with whom I had been making out hail a taxi cab and leave, I asked how much of the proceedings he had witnessed. “I saw a lot, Pops,” he said. “A lot.”

My understanding is that a drug deal arranged by his brother had gone bad, and Eggy tried to protect his sibling by stepping between him and a gunman who was seeking redress. The bullet severed Eggy’s spinal cord and left him paralyzed below the waist. Because of the protective impulse that cost him so much and his slightly addled demeanor, I judged him to be at heart a gentle soul, but maybe I’m condescending to his handicap. Certainly, he could be aggressive if he wanted you to give him a few dollars and was snappish when he was drunk, especially when he and his brother hung out on their front stoop with their boisterous thug buddies, their intoxicated swagger shabby and toothless in our now thoroughly gentrified neighborhood. The young men, at least, treated Eggy with deference, which was kind of nice to see because they were the only ones who did.

Eggy never appeared healthy. His skin tone tended to be either ashen or green-hued and sometimes he seemed close to death, very frail with ugly sores on his arms, face, and head. When I’d bring him out a beer while he was sweeping up or when he’d enlist me to haul him in his wheelchair up the three front steps to his building’s vestibule, I would ask how he was doing. “Not too good, Pops,” he’d usually say. From what he told me and what I surmised, his life cycled through periods of substance abuse, illness, hospitalization, recovery, and relapse. Cruel as it sounds, the way Eggy held on made me think of a distressed plant in a college friend’s dorm room, noticed only when it seemed just about to die, and then nourished with water that did nothing but prolong its slow demise.

I was afraid for Eggy, because I had a perhaps overheated idea of how his prospects might get worse. Anyone who rode the subways regularly in the 1990s is likely to remember the man missing his entire body below his waist who rolled through the train on a skateboard. He could open the heavy doors between the moving cars, and when he entered, he’d croak: “Help. Help. Help.” It was unsettling to watch: People who recognized the voice girded themselves, while people who didn’t would first look around to see where the voice was coming from, and then look down, then look down further until their faces twisted with horror when they first apprehended and then made space for this animate torso skating by. No other spiel was required and the straphangers grabbed for their billfolds so decisively you’d think the money was on fire in their pants. It wasn’t just the testament in flesh of unspeakable pain they responded to, or the plain pathos of the beggar’s supreme degradation – it was that the sight of this half man stretched their conception of what is possible in this world. Before seeing him, I could not have conceived that a human being existed in such a state, and probably would not have believed it had I been told.

I asked a friend of mine then in medical school for an explanation of how someone could live through such injury. He chuckled at my incomprehension, and with relish related – in that cocky, shock-the-civilians med student kind of way – the grim facts of what had probably happened to the man.

Paraplegics have to be careful. Since they can’t feel anything, they don’t necessarily know if they have an infection or an abscess. If they’re on drugs, they may not care that they have a problem. What may happen is that their lower bodies begin to decay almost as if they were already dead.

My friend had encountered such a patient during his emergency room rotation, her body so rotted through that when they cut away the gangrenous flesh and cleaned her, her pubic bone was exposed. The stench, he added, was hellish. Doctors might be able to preserve vital organs if they’re intact, cutting away the lower body above the hips, shoving necessary working parts up into the abdomen, inserting a shunt of some sort to expel waste, and then closing it all up. During rehabilitation, the patient is fitted with a prosthetic device.

“And then, apparently, they give him a skateboard and a subway token,” I said.

My friend snorted, and said that if that’s how he was living, the man would soon die. “The operation is called a hemicorporectomy,” he said, explaining that it was radical, but not exactly brain surgery in its surgical complexity, more just a matter of reconfiguring the working parts. With a smirk, he added: “We’re just meat, you know.”

Maybe it sounds naïve, but I didn’t know. I didn’t even suspect. Until I found out about hemicorporectomies, the deepest thought I had given to paraplegia was during stoned, squirm-inducing late night bull sessions during my student days, when some jackass would ask which handicap I’d wish least to have. Learning about hemicorporectomies added a dimension of awfulness to my conception, as did the epidural anesthetic I received during surgery on my left knee and foot. I felt what it’s like to lose all mobility below the waist, and also heard the sound of my bones being cut through with a power saw while feeling nothing. Did the epidural experience give me any insight into the lot of someone who is permanently paralyzed? I realize it wasn’t exactly The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, so I will leave it at this – for several disconcerting hours I was unable to move my legs even with a supreme exertion of effort, and just as bad was that when I touched my cock, it felt like a measly wattle of flesh instead of what it normally feels like: the red hot epicenter of the entire universe.

When the traffic light changed, I crossed Atlantic and followed the three men, shadowing them from the other side of Bond Street. I tried to conclusively discern the identity of the one in the wheelchair. I still couldn’t quite make out his face, and wasn’t certain it was Eggy. Whatever had happened to this person, it was the worst thing I could imagine a human being who had once been whole living through. On the one hand, I liked Eggy, and if this terrible fate had befallen him, I wanted to connect. Tell him I’m sorry about what happened, or something. But what was he going to answer? “It’s okay, Pops – it wasn’t all your fault.” I was convinced I was just a few steps away from encountering someone I knew who had had the lower half of his body cut away and discarded and I was going to have to make small talk.

I was only a block from home, and wondered if I should just turn around and hide in my apartment for ten minutes. The traffic lights would change a few times, pedestrians would move along, the streetscape would recalibrate, and there wouldn’t be anyone around I knew who had been cut in half. The prospect of never seeing Eggy again, despite the proximity of his abode to mine, was not so farfetched – New York dematerializes people like that. I know, because for more than a decade I lived a block away from someone whom I dreaded encountering; yet in all that time, I never so much as glimpsed him on the street. The rub was that every time I walked past his block, I would concoct scenarios in which we met and then rehearse the withering remarks I’d prepared about our conflict. As time passed, our imagined encounter ossified into a sequence of fantasy as delineated as the memory of an actual experience. Because our meeting never transpired, to this day every time I pass his block it seems as if it is about to, which never fails to make me feel a bit ridiculous.

By not saying hello to Eggy here and now, I would be turning the streets around my old apartment into another fantasy haunted locale. Every time I passed by Hoyt and Wyckoff streets, I would imagine I was about to meet Eggy in his wheelchair with a hemicorporectomy and would worry about what I was going to say. I am, I wanted to believe, too evolved to let that happen at this point in my life. So I resolved to get the deed over with, to cross Bond Street and offer my hand to Eggy. I reminded myself that I’ve traveled in the Third World, that I have seen horribly damaged people in hospitals and nursing homes, that I have seen enough pain and suffering to prepare me for this moment. But what do you say to someone who has been cut in half?

Still wavering when I reached the corner of Pacific Street, I tried to urge myself into the crosswalk. Just then, the man in the wheelchair faced me and adjusted his iPod. He wasn’t Eggy! He looked like a lot like Eggy, but he wasn’t Eggy. God hears from me infrequently, but I never neglect to express gratitude for benign anticlimaxes, and as I thanked the deity, I felt my pelvic floor muscles unclench and my body start to tremble slightly.

I turned left when I reached Dean Street. What luck, I thought, that it wasn’t Eggy. Now I could just feel bad for the guy in the wheelchair, like a good New Yorker convey some noncommittal compassion telepathically in his direction, and be done with it.

Then something occurred to me: Maybe Eggy is dead. Why not? I would have to ask one of my former neighbors if anything had happened to him, and began to imagine what I might find out – certainly nothing good.

As I walked, I remembered the last time I had seen Eggy. It had been about a year ago, after he’d materialized behind me on Wyckoff Street and asked for help up his front stairs. He looked awful. We exchanged long time/no sees, and I caught him up on my life – I’d moved out of my Hoyt Street apartment to live with my girlfriend on Atlantic Avenue a few years earlier. We got married. We have a son now, and I’m very, very happy being a family man – the old days sure seem like a long time ago.

Eggy congratulated me, and without smiling said: “Surprises me, though. You always was a loner, Pops.”

That was a blunt distillation of my essence more fundamental and incisive than anything that had been mentioned by the many dear friends who had toasted me at my wedding. I hauled Eggy up the stairs, then maneuvered around him and back onto the sidewalk. When I looked, he was smiling, but just a little. I told him to be well, and held back my own smile until I was down the block. My bemusement changed into something else after I rounded the corner of Hoyt Street, passed my old apartment, and started thinking of the past. Gotcha, Pops, I could imagine him thinking.

Apparently, he saw a lot.

Albert Stern has told stories at spoken word venues such as Speakeasy, LES Stories, and The Liar Show. He has published two essays on this site, The Circle Be Unbroken and The Subway Game; his writing has also appeared on Nerve and Fresh Yarn. His third one-person show, Benefit of the Doubt, debuted at the Berkshires Storytelling Festival and will appear in New York in this winter.

But something about the ads in that clean modern subway car struck a discordant note. I fixed on a poster that jointly advertised the services of a neurologist and a podiatrist, which struck me as a strange juxtaposition of medical specialties. “PAIN?” read the heading of the neurologist’s ad, while the podiatrist’s side of the poster read “FOOT PAIN?” Pain from head to toe.

So I perused the other posters in the car, and noticed that nearly all the advertising unambiguously addressed physical discomfort. There were other ads promising relief from soreness of the back and feet, others that hawked painful medical procedures such as abortions, orthodontics, an eyeball operation called a radial keratotomy that I imagined was right out of Un Chien Andalou, and the dermatological treatment of warts, psoriasis, moles, rashes, tumors, and growths. Another poster read “Get Ahead of Lead,” a snappy motto exhorting subway riders to, come on folks, at least try to keep the kids from poisoning themselves. Near that, I saw an ad for lawyers who would get you cash money if lead poisoning had scrambled your children’s brains. Then there was an announcement from New York City Transit, incorporating photographs of happy youngsters and the words “Stroller Safety,” which had me imagining the unhappy convergence of smiling tykes, stroller-pushing bumblers, and the hurtling locomotives of New York City Transit.

This seemed like an awful lot of pain for just one subway car.

The sole counterpoints to the pain advertisements were those that revolved around failure – ads for vocational schools, government assistance programs, drug rehab, and so forth, all targeted at the struggling and/or discontented.

Finally, there was the one ad in the corner that promised relief from it all – a drawing of a Cossack, the face of rotgut Georgi Vodka. Ubiquitous on the subway, he winked conspiratorially the subway rider, as if to tell us: “You know you’re getting drunk alone tonight, so why not give yourself a big Kennedy pour of Georgi – the cheapest!”

Pain and failure – this seemed to be all subway advertising was about, as if there was no point in trying to reach the subway rider about any other topic. After my epiphany, I started viewing all subway advertising through that lens, and even developed a standard to guide my observations and give them a pseudo-anthropological sheen. Pain would encompass a subway ad about any of the following:

• Injury
• Illness
• Medical procedures
• Booze
• Poetry in Motion

Failure I defined as:

• Booze
• Treatment programs for drinking too much booze
• Vocational schools
• Government assistance programs
• Posters publicizing events that have already taken place
• Any New York City Transit promotion that encourages more riding of the subways.

By using this (admittedly flexible) system, I found I could classify 90 percent of all subway advertisements as being about either pain or failure. I even turned it into a game I could play with friends, kind of like the family car trip classic of trying to spot out-of-state license plates – except with the Subway Game you try to find the ads that are not about either discomfort or dissipation.

In the last decade or so, much happened to alter the subway experience – the Metrocard, investment in equipment and infrastructure, the fruits of “broken windows” policing, and the palpable fear of terrorist mass murder. During that time, someone else obviously noticed that nearly all advertisements focused on pain and failure, someone with big ideas and clout. This utopian tried to revamp the status quo by introducing colorful banner advertising, with snappy copy and eye-catching graphics that would lift a captive audience of subway riders out of their torpor.

Tellingly, the first campaign that really seemed to capture the public imagination advertised antibacterial formula Tide. The vibrant posters alerted the inveterate subway rider to the presence of the invertebrate subway rider – millions and millions of microbes swarming all over the clackety-clacking petri dishes of New York City Transit. And if our subway friend, the peripatetic Mr. Shabby, happened to be riding in the same car, for the people at Proctor & Gamble the only advertising ploy as effective would be lobbing rancid polecats into people’s apartments while Tide television commercials played on every channel.

For a few years, the marketing folks at New York City Transit seemed determined not to let old advertising reclaim the subway the way the Central American jungle overgrew Copan. During that time, one might have never been aware, for example, that torn ear lobes remained a big problem in this city. Even those ads that dealt with subway staples like pain-numbing booze were sanitized – banished was the winking Georgi Cossack, replaced by smiling, healthy-looking urbanites with 80s hair and clothes drinking top-shelf liquor in social settings, instead of alone from a shatterproof plastic bottle at a kitchen table beneath a naked light bulb.

Retailers like Target came on board, as did auto manufacturers, designers, and tourist boards eager to tell you that there were nicer places to be than on the subway. Our Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire, takes the train to work. True, advertisements from various social service agencies did touch on subterranean perennials such as drug abuse, violent crime, STDs, homelessness, domestic violence, lead paint snack chips, and other sundry Gotham vexations – but they did so in a way that implied that a positive resolution to these catastrophes could comprise something other than legal action undertaken on the victim’s behalf by an attorney named Shaevitz.

Though New York City Transit has tried to keep up with its program of upscaling its advertising, clearly there has been some backsliding over the last few years. Nowadays, despite years of bold advertising campaigns, you’re likely as not to find yourself in a subway car where photocopied flyers for a psychic in Bushwick are wedged in the sad gaps between ads for vocational schools and already-canceled television programs. Marketing glitz seems to have been a puny weapon with which fight the immutable Stygian spirit of the subways.

What, I wondered, had started the return to a state of nature? The more I thought about it, I became certain that it could only have been this 9/11 message to New York: “Doctor and Mrs. Zizmor Salute New Yorkers for Their Strength and Courage.” I know – lazy writers have counted on getting laughs simply by typing the name ‘Zizmor,’ the way comics once banked on getting laughs by saying ‘airline food.’ But think about it for a moment. You want pain? The ad was from a pimple squeezer commemorating 9/11, the most painful day in New York history. You want failure? The ad first appeared 21 months after the 9/11 attacks, and replaced the twin towers on the skyline with a dermatologist who looks like a naked mole rat and his wraithlike wife wearing a wide-brimmed hat that looked like a mushroom cloud over Lower Manhattan. You want a little more failure? The ad remained on display long after Dr. Zizmor’s widely-publicized indictment for billing irregularities.

If that ad was the equivalent of giving a recovering alcoholic the shot of whiskey that starts the downward spiral to the gutter, I’ll tell you the moment I realized that the battle had been lost. Last summer, I was sitting on the R train and noticed two banners featuring little men.

The first little man was featured in the message from New York City Transit regarding subway evacuation, which, after the bombings in London, Madrid, and Bombay, is ever on the mind of the average subway rider. What makes it special is that New York City Transit has come up with its own “Little Subway Evacuation Man” logo – a stick figure fleeing in terror as cartoon flames lap against his ass. If the logo of a little man on the men’s room door replaces the word “MEN’S,” what does the Little Subway Evacuation Man logo replace – the words “IF BATSHIT CRAZY TERRORISTS BLOW THE ROOF OFF THIS MOTHERSUCKER AND YOU’RE LEFT STANDING, RUN FOR YOUR LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFE!”? To add insult to the specter of death, Little Subway Evacuation Man even occupies the place of honor at the end of each car once held by the winking Georgi Cossack, whose friendly invitation to cirrhosis now seems a relic of a bygone era.

But it was the second little man that really got me. He appeared in an ad for the Bodies show at South Street Seaport, the popular exhibition of pickled corpses obtained in the People’s Republic of China. For a second, forget the possibility that the corpse in the picture might be the remains of the guy who stood in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square, put on display by the Red Chinese as a warning against political dissent. Focus instead on the simple fact that this was an image of a skinned and gutted human being – on display not as science, but as entertainment for the masses or maybe porno for serial killers, or maybe to remind you how you might look if you don’t run as fast as Little Subway Evacuation Man during an emergency. Not only that, there was a promotional tie-in with New York City Transit: reduced admission if you show your Metrocard!

This had to be the ultimate underground ad of all time: take the subway to see cadavers, with a discount for the working stiffs who ride the rails. In my pantheon of effective, site-appropriate marketing, it replaced the subway banner I believed would never be topped – the mid-80s roach motel ad that showed a heavyset Latina, her face contorted with surprise and disgust as she realized that cucarachas had nestled between the bristles of her toothbrush in the middle of the night.

The advertising on the subways seems more and more like a larger failure on the part of the ridership as a whole. We should be able to expect more while taking the train. Granted, the defining subway experience is being on a local train as it enters the station and seeing the waiting express train shut its doors and lumber away. The subway is a place where triumph is defined as being on the express train as it pulls away, not on the local. Where sensual pleasure is the feeling when, as you stand on a sweltering underground platform, you feel the first wisps of air stirred by an approaching train, cool on your clammy crotch sweat, and experience it as refreshing instead of the foul sirocco of PCBs and rat farts that it is in fact.

Although the subway is a place of meager pleasures, an advertiser still has a captive audience composed of millions of people from virtually every ethnic background and socioeconomic class. And yet, New York City Transit can’t sell enough positive advertising on its subways. Advertisers have largely given up on reaching this audience whose entire consciousness is focused on its own agony and shortcomings. We subway riders are people whose feet hurt, heads ache, are depressed, who have torn earlobes, thinning hair, unsightly blemishes, drinking problems, and financial difficulties, who watch too much bad television and try to sleep on sofabeds in cramped apartments.

That’s all we know on Earth and, in the opinion of advertisers, all we need to know.

Albert Stern lives in Brooklyn and performs monologues at venues such Speakeasy Stories. His previous essay on this site, The Circle Be Unbroken, was about Adam Purple and enlightenment.

It was nothing unusual—in the past twenty-five years he has pedaled by me dozens of times while making his rounds below 14th Street. A few weeks earlier, I had seen a photograph of Mr. Purple’s long-since demolished Garden of Eden in the Grey Art Gallery exhibit devoted to downtown New York in its 1974 to 1984 heyday—my youthful stomping ground. Seeing my memories getting the royal museum treatment was jarring. It made me realize that whatever happened 25 years ago had happened, by any measure, a very long time ago. So encountering Mr. Purple still conducting his business as usual was reassuring—it allowing me, at least for a moment, to sustain the illusion that maybe not so much time has really passed.

The aerial shot of The Garden was one of the few artifacts on display at the gallery that filled me with genuine nostalgia. Maybe it will take another 25 years and at least a touch of senility to alter my memories, but the East Village I recall wasn’t as much fun as people insisted it was then, and certainly wasn’t as much fun as people imagine it was now. By the time I arrived, the scene was as haughty and tight-assed (in its more-marginal-than-thou way) as anything else going on during the early 80s, suffused with a charmless obscurantism that was almost as profound a part of the downtown weltanschauung as hair gel. At The Garden of Eden, however, everyone was welcome, and I suppose that spirit of inclusion accounts for my enduringly wistful memories of it.

For those who don’t remember the saga, Mr. Purple was a hippy squatter living on Forsyth Street in the mid-1970s who, through toil and perseverance, created The Garden on several neglected plots of city-owned land. Rings of plants and flowers radiated like ripples from a yin and yang symbol, the widening circles of color meeting the right angles of the crumbling city. It was as startling a juxtaposition of nature and urban dissipation as you might have experienced if, while hiking in the Adirondacks, you happened upon Richard Hell and the Voidoids. The Garden was an against-all-odds enterprise that took imagination, grace, and commitment to pull off, all of which were supplied – along with horse shit biked in from Central Park – by the hirsute, lavender-clad Adam Purple.

In 1986, the City of New York decided it wanted to develop housing on the lots, and evicted Mr. Purple. The Garden, don’t it always seem to go, would have to be bulldozed. There were protests, there were petitions, there was litigation, and saving the Garden of Eden became a cause celebre.

Mr. Purple smiled and answered: “I’m not interested in fighting anybody. I’m interested in enlightening them.”

That stirred me. The year was 1986 – nineteen years past the Summer of Love and a decade before the yoga boom – and people just weren’t saying things like that in public without using air quotes. This was not, for example, the message of Ivan Boesky or other leading figures of the day. I tend to be a cynical person, but the notion of being able to enlighten people instead of fighting them germinated a kernel of optimism embedded in me from all the times I had been forced to watch “Free to Be You and Me” by substitute teachers. Mr. Purple’s words expressed a confident largeness of spirit that I found both idealistic and pragmatic, an approach no one could really argue against. And so I clung to it – for twenty years, I told that anecdote, shared Mr. Purple’s philosophy, and, in my way, tried to live up to it.

Despite the hue and cry, The Garden of Eden was razed, and unceremoniously at that. To say that its spirit endures in each of the myriad community gardens dotting New York City is only giving Mr. Purple his due. Likewise, Mr. Purple endures, but on the sunny morning he rode by me, he stopped his bicycle to root around in every trashcan he passed and felt with a bony finger inside the coin return slot of each pay phone. Though I was aware that this had long been his way through the world, I felt my spirit sink. I thought, ‘This isn’t how the world should be for a beautiful person.’ And for the first time in 25 years of opportunities, I felt a powerful need to connect with Adam Purple.

I introduced myself and said: “Mr. Purple, I just wanted to let you know that twenty years ago, you touched my life in a small, but profound way. It happened when they were trying to evict you from your garden…”

“Our garden,” Mr. Purple interrupted. “It wasn’t my garden, it was our garden.”

I shook my head, smiling. The man still had it.

“I was watching T.V.,” I explained, “and a reporter asked you if you were going to fight the city. You said – and this is what sticks with me – you weren’t interested in fighting people, you were interested in enlightening them.” I smiled again.

“Naaaaaaaaah,” Mr. Purple said, waving one hand. “You can’t enlighten people. Forget about it.”

Well then, that’s more like it. When an anomalous strand of experience like the enlightenment business is finally woven into the familiar grim tapestry, I am usually grateful. It makes me feel like life has symmetry, and if it has symmetry then maybe it has a purpose, and if it has a purpose, maybe its purpose is to teach me something. Upon later reflection, I tried to name one person in the last two decades whom I had enlightened. I could think of no one. I wondered if, in 1986, I should have just listened to Ivan Boesky and been done with it, and whether Mr. Purple had given me a new, more useful mantra to carry me through the next twenty years.

As we parted, Mr. Purple called to me: “Type the name ‘Adam Purple’ into your computer search engine sometime. You’ll see some beautiful pictures.” When I got home, I googled and clicked.

It was indeed a beautiful garden, more beautiful than I could have remembered.