Audrey Hepburn with Curves 

I don't play with my phone on the train.

Don't look at it, don't hold it, don't play games with it or listen to music on it. I don't flip, don't fiddle, don't send, don't swipe, don't type, don't text, don't even check it. I just zip it into my pocket and leave it there and that's the way- uh-huh, uh-huh- I like it.

 In fact I like keeping my head up and looking around and while I may not always enjoy it, the blasting cacophony of subway platforms, tunnels and trains and the crackling PA babble of indecipherable announcements along with the frequent in-car spiels from the seemingly endless stream of panhandlers looking to make an honest buck-"Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen...god bless you and I'd just like to say that I'm not a drug user or drunk..."- almost never bores me and I'm almost always charged with a very welcome anticipation of one form or another as I clock the action or lack thereof.

 Guess you could say I like to watch. 
And I don't mind listening.
  
Somewhat strangely I am almost always alone in this anticipatory glee. 
Now we all know that everybody likes to watch but when it comes to the pedestrian spectacle of NYC public transportation, it would appear that this universal tendency towards voyeurism is not endemic to these huddled masses.
Or maybe every one's just afraid to make any kind of direct eye contact with the offhand lunatics roaming our seedy underworld labyrinth.

So what you generally get instead is a lot of grown men playing video games, a lot of grown woman working their keyboards and cameras, a lot of teenagers jacked in to whatever is currently trending them into the future and almost everyone over the age of five with their faces buried deeply and stubbornly in their screens.
This vaguely disturbing apathy towards your fellow Man- and your own personal safety- does not, however, hinder my own enjoyment in any way and actually allows for an even greater freedom to observe, to evaluate, to appreciate and to imagine. 

Because that's one of my favorite little games that I play to entertain myself on the cheap ride to everywhere.

I look at people and I imagine...


Where is she coming from?
Where is she going?
What does she do?

Who is she?

Of course men are included in this curious pastime but they always seem uncomfortably much like myself with their uneven appearances and harried attitudes coordinated to their surrendered spirits so they tend to come across as borderline comatose and that's just not quite as interesting. 
Or to put it more bluntly- How could anyone be interested in a grown man in his forties playing World of Warcraft?

But NYC woman...now they clearly put all of their best effort into their public appearances, no matter the audience, and all praise to the subway gods for that most scintillating of gifts that comes with a price tag so cheap it almost embarrasses me to enjoy the show. 
Almost.

Case in point- 
3ish on a fairly typical summer afternoon.
I hop on the "R" after a round of grocery shopping looking only slightly better, I hope, than a homeless bag man riding the subway rails. I got a large, loaded courier strapped over one shoulder, I'm hauling an even larger vinyl luggage sack crisscrossed over the other and I'm toting a cloth bag stuffed full of fruits & veggies in one hand to balance myself out, leaving me one hand free for self-defense maneuvers. As an urban man of a certain age (that age being- Old) I'm something of an anomaly. 
Most men of my station in life strictly use automobiles or woman for this sort of duty but I myself relish handling grocery errands with an almost childish joy that might be embarrassing if I ever got around to giving it any real thought.

Suffice to say, I am not the picture of a prosperous gentleman of my generation as I carefully, along with my cargo, hover in and over then slowly descend my overloaded frame into an open seat of a half-full car of old ladies slowly working their way to the relative safety of home along with jailbreak high-schoolers preparing for take-off into their totally unknown.

Then Audrey Hepburn glides straight into our mundane, mutually disinterested arrangement and splashes some sparkle to the washed-out grey of our commuter setting.

Of course I wasn't hallucinating, this was not the actress/icon from the 60's. No, this was a real woman in the very real flesh and she was working it like a waitress on a Friday night in the trendiest set in town- All seamless hustle, concentrated business and all flow, all the time.

She was petite but packed with sharp lines and smooth curves in all the places a man would pick if he'd built her. And if she wasn't dressed for men then I didn't know who she was dressed to please, but please she did. She had black jeans that were so snug they had to be fitted and tiny black pumps with just a little too much heel to be called comfortable. Her top was a clingy knit jersey and black to match with a mock turtle neck that set off her slender neck. Her jacket was dark blood red and made of some type of embroidered material that looked expensive. Her accessories were jangling everywhere- a formidable necklace, a sparkly watch, bracelets swallowing both wrists- and they all had the look of items that fell off a truck but did nothing to distract me from her dream of a face and the tight, tasty swells of her body. 

Then she took her seat across from the relative harmlessness of me and I got an even better look.

Her skin was a wonder of pale perfection. Like her namesake her bone structure was so fine, so carefully chiseled that its porcelain delicacy cautioned you to handle it with great care should you be lucky enough to get the chance. Perhaps it was touched by foundation but it was the type of undetectable make-up that must've taken a long time and lots of practice to perfect. And she'd perfected it.
And, perhaps as a nod to her fashion doppelganger, she planted a pair of large, black oval Chanel shades across her delicate features to lend her an impervious air of inscrutability and otherwise hide her eyes from her public. 
Her dark black hair was pulled back tight, however, into a careless ponytail that at once accented her striking beauty and also revealed a certain calculated maturity to her girlish facade that said-

I've seen it all so...don't be too afraid to approach...I won't bite...

The lips were a plump, generous slash of dark red with the mouth just on this side of business, which is what it announced with a sphinx-like serenity that offered exactly zero answers to her mysteries.
But the body...
That was around the way and bulging with bedroom definitions and promises, promises.
The curves said-

Come closer...I'm ready to ride...

Then she whipped her baubled, bejeweled phone out from her purse, tapped it a few times and, seemingly dissatisfied with the news, stowed it away as if bored by the results.
I dove eagerly into my game as my eyes pored over this portrait of feminine perfection that defied explanation even as that body trumpeted its arrival.

How old was she?
She could've been 25 (and certainly no less) or she could've been 35 and glowing with a studied, cultured, carefully nurtured loveliness that was rooted in heavenly genetics and hard won aesthetics. Or maybe she was just a snaky vampiress from across some ocean carefully slithering through our daytime underground but too well nourished to pick any of us hoi polloi as her prey. At the moment...

Married?
No (and no rings), but well cared for by someone as she perhaps had expected to be since the very first time she realized her power to enthrall, to captivate, to pull men's eyes to her with only her most minimal effort required. Or maybe just a tiny bit of pale flesh flashed if she wasn't up to the minimum effort.

With children?
Absolutely not. Her attentions were undivided and the casual but careful selections of her presentation hinted that she had plenty of time to think and plan and play with her looks without any needless interference or selfish distractions.

What did she do?
A tough one.

At this time of weekday she was obviously no 9-5er yet her wardrobe suggested she'd planned her effect even for such a joyless commuter journey as the one we were both currently sharing. Too petite for a model and too self-possessed for an actress, the Arts did not appear to be her thing and/or maybe her ego wouldn't allow it anyway.

Student?
No.
This chill goddess was damn sure of where she was going and seemed damn positive she was well on her way despite any present circumstances.

GF/Mistress? 
Maybe.
She had the well-cared for sheen of a woman who knows exactly how to butter her own bread- but never has to pay for the butter- and if she was a mistress then her Daddy was a Player and he was keeping her mostly comfortable and mostly content. Mostly.

But, I thought, maybe she's just an extraordinarily striking, if uncommonly common, single Italian Princess on her way back to her family's five-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath, slapped together McMansion in Dyker Heights loaded with faux columns and littered with security cameras in every cranny. Maybe the subway was just her slummy getaway to check on how all the peons are forced to travel only until Daddy either fixed her car or bought her a new one.

Maybe she was just doing us all a favor...

But 86th flew past and we were both heading to the end of the line so I fiddled with my focus while she sat as still as an ivory sculpture come to breathing life.
She popped up first at the last stop and I took my time re-strapping my body into my baggage then positioning myself for optimum viewing pleasure. It was a view.
She had the type of tight, taut apple-shaped ass that was juicyripe but not ample in any way. The gentle curves suggested it was packing just the proper amount of generous jiggle, however, if you could only get past the jeans. This was the light at the end of my tunnel as I followed it out to the stairs then the street with my eyes wide and my mouth shut, I hoped.

Gymnast?
Maybe years ago before those curves sprouted but those years were gone and the curves were a luxurious replacement.
No...
The delicate but precise balance and power of her graceful, unhurried stride said- Dancer- and the message was a heart aching one to witness. What type of dance I didn't know but she flowed through the grime and into the sunlight while I galumphed behind her loaded down with a new kind of weight.
Then as we both hit the air with her heading South and me North, she paused and plucked her phone from her purse as I made a show of re-adjusting my bags while stealing my final look.

The call must've went through and she replied in a language I didn't understand, something Slavic (maybe Czech or Polish or even Russian) but her voice, which was as fine a lilt as you could've hoped to match to her form, was on the border of reproach, not a bark exactly...but she was not entirely happy with the other end of the line either.

So she was maybe a Princess of her own brand but not the Italian variety, that was for sure and she was no shrinking violet either.

Then her voice rose in intensity even as the sound faded and she danced away down the street to her GF/Mistress options which, I imagined, were always in negotiation.

I trudged back to my cave obligations, everything set in stone.

Shall we dance?
Not this time...




Next Time- A Hip-Hop, K-Pop B-Girl