The train doors don’t open for me. The conductor makes us commuters walk to the front door and climb on single file so we might all tap our cards on the console. “This train is no longer free,” he says over the speaker, “please come to the front and pay your fare.” The train has never been free but that’s not really the point.
I board the green line, Boston’s surface level trolley, around the same time each morning, dutiful in my desire to be five to ten minutes late to work on purpose. So it’s usually the same conductor prodding the same screaming, struggling train down Commonwealth Ave each day. I know his voice but not his face. I’m always climbing onto the train through the back doors, not to dodge the fare, just to beat the dutiful schmucks to one of the open single-seaters. I don’t hate people or anything, it’s just that there was this whole pandemic that happened and I’m trying to keep my air to myself.
I pay $90 a month for my MBTA commuter pass, meaning limitless taps, limitless rides, I only need to remember to renew it each month. So it doesn’t matter if I make my way to the front to tap my little card, I’ve already paid my dues to the public infrastructure gods. And most of the people I ride the train with are in the same boat as me, corporate 9-5ers offering up their $90 on the first of each month at the altar of the Charlie Card Kiosk so they might never have to think about the digital dollars and cents stored on their piece of plastic.
Of course amongst us monthly riders, there are always going to be a handful of people along the route who slip on without having paid any money to any piece of plastic for their long, inefficient and always unpredictable train service. Those people are the target of this one conductor’s crusade, his insistence that the train can no longer be free, not for anyone. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume this new order was handed down to him by someone higher up who watches profit margins on white screens and cries themself to sleep knowing the MBTA will never be a reliable or consistent form of public transit unless it milks poor people for all they’ve got.
This one conductor has been doing this for a few weeks now and I’ve detected a consistent and not so subtle undercurrent of apathetic rage in his tinny speaker voice. A sense that he feels personally wronged that anyone would ever board his train (he owns it, surely) for free. For free! What kind of free-loading, welfare state, morally bankrupt society have we devolved into? The cost for me in the end is minimal but sufficiently annoying: all the riders boarding single file up front rather than through all the doors means all of us are tapping, some people are fumbling coins into the console, everything takes much longer on an already long train ride. The cost for the poor is money. Nothing is free.
I owe thousands upon thousands of dollars to a company I know nothing about, that is continuously changing names, changing hands, because they gave me money to go to school and obtain a degree I do not use. That is the only purpose of this company, to give out money and then ask for an exponential sum in return. For the rest of my life, I will be shoveling my invisible bills in a dozen directions and I will never own property. If I wanted to have kids, I would have no choice but to kill myself.
I spend what little money is mine on books and food and nothing else. One concert a month breaks the bank. My therapist is encouraging me to travel but I already pay $1080 a year for a train that only takes me downtown where every sandwich is $15 and then back home where an iced coffee costs $10. I don’t even drink alcohol. I don’t even own a car. When I hear a car owner talk about the insane amount of money they funnel into gas and repairs and monthly payments, I do not understand how any of us are surviving. I am reserved in my leisure expenses and I am hardly hanging on.
Our poverty costs us. I am bound to my couch each weekend where nothing costs any money. Unless of course I want to watch any particular movie which I can rent for a whopping day for $20 or purchase permanently for $22 unless the licensing changes and then it is whisked away from me like a parent snatching up a kid’s toy gun. Even boredom costs money. I want to smoke some weed so that staring at the ceiling does not turn me volatile and lucky for me there are seven apps for ordering weed and a single nugget only costs as much as the CVS receipt of delivery fees and taxes.
All of the money I make is not mine. All of the ways in which I do not spend what I don’t have locks me into a daze of anti-socialism and joyless masturbation on dirty sheets because a load of laundry costs $6 to wash and the broken machine soaks the bedding to the bone so I have to pay another $10 for two hours of drying.
At least listening to music is cheap. Only $10 a month for all the music in the world (oh? they raised it to $11? sure, why the fuck not) and this cost ain’t so bad as long as I don’t consider that the money I pay does not go toward the artists I love, artists who are just as poor, whose art shape my days, who are extorted and mistreated by the very streaming service I subscribe to. Well, the problem is I do consider it. I consider the cost of everything.
So you bought cheap clothes to dodge the pricey big brands and now you’re swimming in microplastics, tossing loose threads to the endless landfill.
So you downloaded a budgeting app and the app tells you where to shop and now your wallet is 90% credit cards you can’t pay off.
So you can’t afford to visit the doctor and your knee keeps swelling to disrepair, now you can’t work for money no more.
So you poorly parked your car and an orange slip wants to see you in court.
So you wanna be environmentally friendly.
So you’re trans with body dysphoria.
So you’re black in public.
So you’re fleeing one oppressive regime for another.
So you wanted to shoot the evil man and now he’s gonna be president.
The costs keep racking up and nothing gets any smaller. There is no joy in the money-numbers. The money-numbers are all I think about because I will die if I don’t consider the consequences of every money-number transaction.
What is free? Love? I give out my love for free? No, I’m expecting something in return. This makes me feel ugly but it’s what I’ve been taught. I give out my love for free and I feel something has been wrenched from me. All I’ve got is my love, how could I just give it all away? I talk it out in therapy and would you believe that this costs me as well? This healing, too, is a luxury item.
This train conductor is coldly cruel but at least he is right. There are no free rides anymore. Not for anything, not anywhere. This newsletter is free but you could upgrade to a paid subscription if you wanted to and then I could subscribe to your patreon or your onlyfans and we can push the same invisible bills back and forth with one another and feel we’ve earned something.
I can make my peace with that, I think. I am deluded against any notions of massive revolution so small ones will have to suffice. Care placed thoughtfully in open arms. Wrinkly bills in the tip jar. At the local artist market stocking up on art prints I don’t need. All of these things have their monetary cost but the money knows nothing of the spirit.
The spirit does not think in terms of profit. The spirit has no use in hoarding necessities. The spirit calls out, just let them on the train. we’ve all got somewhere we’re trying to be. The common struggle is a sad thing to bind us together but it’s less sad when we allow that togetherness to be. When we’re all broke by design, what we offer one another is the only way to wriggle out of the framework.
My friend drank too much and she can’t stop hugging me. I take three trains to the top of the state to sit in my discomfort with someone who understands me. Nothing works and everything is expensive and the world expands to incomprehensible size but there are people I exchange love with even though the exchange is uneven. All we can do is sit in the muck with others who know the muck all too well and lament the muck. This is a sort of prayer to wash the muck away.
When the money isn’t real, what we do with it is.
I walk to the front of the train and tap my card for someone who can’t afford the ride. Looking out for each other has its cost, of course, but the cost of not caring weighs much heavier. When I place my own soul on the scale at the inconsequential end of my life, I hope it is unburdened by dollars and swollen with love.
Till then, I walk to the front of the train.
jw
this was so wonderfully written. i think about the fact that everything is expensive and there is never enough all the time. comparing myself to students who’s parents paid for their apartment and their degree wishing that were me too. money and the lack of isn’t talked about nearly enough and it’s lonely. thank you for this piece. <3