Substacks

The Boys Who Surf Subways McCaffrey Blauner

Published

11 months ago

September 2, 2023

A subway surfer rides the 5 train on March 16, 2023, in the Bronx. (David Dee Delgado via Getty Images)

In early August, a riot broke out in New York City’s Union Square: thousands of kids, mostly from the outer boroughs, threw smoke bombs, lit fireworks, broke windows, stomped on cars, and climbed street poles. They were in full break-shit mode.

When I saw it happening on my iPhone, their age struck me. Pubescent, with smooth faces, maybe a splash of acne, riding the massive testosterone high that is adolescence through the humid late-summer doldrums.

The powder keg of a hot New York City is rife with this sort of stuff—young people hungry to fight, make some noise, prove their cojones or courage or whatever. It’s just a question of who or what is going to set it off.

In this case, it was Kai Carlo Cenat, the 21-year-old Twitch streamer-slash-YouTuber pledging to give away PlayStation 5s to anyone who showed up at the square. By 3 p.m., an hour before the giveaway was scheduled to start, it was teeming with loud, sweaty, excitable kids, and soon, the chaos gave way to pockets of violence—shoving, fighting, overturning police barricades, destroying other people’s property, disorder engulfing order.

Cenat was ultimately charged with inciting a riot, and police arrested 65 people—30 of whom were under 18.

The respectable classes—the people, mostly white, who have money and live uptown or in the suburbs—tut-tutted about the whole thing on X, formerly Twitter, or Instagram, or wherever respectable people tut-tut about things now. They objected to the broken glass, the umbrellas of the hot dog stands that had been smashed or pummeled. The mess.

That’s reasonable enough, but it’s not the real issue.

The real issue is harder to make out, and more insidious. It’s the breakdown of tribe and community, which has been happening in slow motion for several decades, as the old social fabric has steadily eroded.

But maybe we can see the value in these young men. To stop regarding them as expendable. And meet them where they live.

The Twitch riot in Union Square on August 4. (Alexi J. Rosenfeld via Getty Images)

The young men of Union Square have a lot in common with the young men who ride the rooftops of the subway cars that bisect my Queens neighborhood.

I live in Sunnyside, a sleepy little warren filled with families, strollers, immigrants from Ireland and Mexico and Turkey and pretty much everywhere else. By New York standards, there’s not a lot of crime.

The No. 7 train runs through the center of the neighborhood on an elevated platform. In the late afternoon and early evening, the sun ducks behind the skyscrapers in Manhattan to the east, and the whole neighborhood is painted a golden-reddish hue.

That’s when the platform becomes a field on which boys like to prove their mettle. As the subway passes above ground, they clamber up the doors between the cars onto the top of the train. They take in the view, walk up and down the stainless steel rooftops, take a selfie, get some video they can post to their social media feeds. They’re usually between 13 and 16, and they’re almost always black and Latino. Sometimes, they die.

I imagine the wind whistling past them. Their legs shaking. A tunnel approaching. The ballsiest of them lying flat with their backs against the roof as the ceiling of the tunnel, inches away, races past the tips of their noses.

Kids have been doing stupid, jackass things like this forever, but the numbers are going up.

Between 2021 to 2022, the number of subway surfers jumped 366 percent.

In June, two 14-year-old boys collided with the entrance of a tunnel as the train they were surfing dipped underground. One of them, Briyan Crespo, died. The other, Widinson Garcia, may never walk again. One of the boys was hit so hard, his shoes were knocked off.

A month later, 14-year-old Jevon Fraser died while riding the No. 7 train that goes past my apartment. He apparently fell off the roof.

The subway surfers, like the rioters who broke car windows and made a mess of Union Square, are largely drawn from the same cohort of directionless and bored young men. They are scared and unformed and often without male role models, and they are constantly prodded into doing, thinking, and saying idiotic things by the mobs of other young men. Everyone egging everyone else on, no one old enough or wise enough to state the obvious: this is not how you become a man.

Once upon a time, these boys would have been absorbed by other things: a boxing gym; a basketball court; a church; a job; a classroom; their apartments overflowing with siblings, cousins, friends, their mother in a cramped kitchen making dinner. Young men in search of themselves had a degree of freedom to try out different groups or tribes or personalities within the relatively safe confines of their community. It was hardly free of violence or danger. But there was a way things were done. There were guardrails.

Those who don’t grow up like these young men have no idea what it’s like to live in a world stripped of its guardrails. Their lives are structured, organized. There are guardrails everywhere—rules and regulations meant to protect their children from the vagaries of city life. Or just life.

They send their kids to climbing gyms or Muay Thai classes, or maybe they kayak the Colorado River or a Norwegian fjord, or ski some uncharted mountain. The violence or quasi-violence they take part in is a compartmentalized and sanctioned violence. We call it sport, and they will probably mention that sport on their college applications.

Let’s be clear: wealthy young men have the same need to demonstrate their manliness, but the society from which they come insists that they do so in a way that is relatively safe and edifying and even marketable. They are doing the same thing the young men of Union Square and the No. 7 train are doing. They are proving their worth, but at a vastly reduced cost.

Two subway surfers captured by an onlooker in April this year. (Photo via X)

I know something about the young, dumb men prowling the streets of New York because I used to be one. I had a MetroCard and a desire to fuck shit up, and I am lucky I never had the chance to do anything dumber than scrawl my name on the facade of a local RadioShack.

Many of my friends were not so lucky. I see their faces in the pictures of the rioters, the subway surfers—all of them young men trying to define themselves in a world that has made it harder than ever to do just that.

I’m in my early thirties, and the way boys in the city showed our courage fifteen or twenty years ago was by tagging. Graffiti.

A lot has been made of the artistic qualities of graffiti, but we weren’t in it for that. It was all about climbing somewhere dangerous to do something you shouldn’t do. Defying order. Proving we were tough and strong and worthy of a desirable mate.

Armed with paint pens and cans of spray paint, young men ran wild across the city in the nighttime hours, scrawling their pseudonyms (“Funky Fresh,” “Knave,” “Breezy”) across buildings and signs and walls, down in the tunnels, up on the rooftops of buildings. The truly brave sneaked into buildings and scaled the billboards on top of them so drivers on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway could see their tags. I never made it off the sidewalk.

A boy who scrawled his name somewhere really spectacular could become the subject of local legend. His classmates would point out a tag at the top of a building that seemed impossible to scale. “That was Chris,” they’d murmur, as you scratched your head wondering how the hell Chris managed to get up there. We just wanted adventure, camaraderie, maybe a little glory.

But boys—men—constantly push boundaries. If we don’t, then what’s the point? It’s really dangerous only if it’s never been done before—if no one can be sure you’ll get out of this okay.

So, for other boys, tagging was never going to be enough. Nor was shoplifting. Nor was shooting heroin (think The Basketball Diaries). Nor was having unprotected sex (à la Kids).

You have to keep pushing. Doing dumber and dumber and more destructive and dangerous stuff. Like TikToking on the roof of a subway car going 55 over the Williamsburg Bridge.

The pushing is never going to stop, and officials wagging their fingers won’t do much good. That’s just grown-ups telling young people not to be stupid. It’s not telling them how not to be stupid—how to be grown-ups themselves. It’s not giving them a boxing gym, or church, or army, or cause, or sense of purpose.

A lot of people are going to ask why we should indulge these boys’ desire to show physical courage.

But along with being a reformed knucklehead, I’m a big fan of history, and here’s what I know. The stupid courage of young men—to ride on top of the subway or go toe-to-toe with the NYPD at Union Square—has historically been a virtue. The same idiots causing your train delay are descended from men who faced down saber-toothed tigers when we lived in caves. At Flanders, they were the ones to go over the trench when the whistle blew.

We like to think we are past the need for dumb physical courage, but when I go on YouTube and watch the endless streams of frontline combat videos taken by young men fighting the Russian invasion in Ukraine, it hits me how young their voices sound. No matter how far the No. 7 train seems from the Ukrainian battlefields I see on my screen, no society sails in peaceful waters forever. One day we may need to break the glass on our knucklehead boys again.

The crisis we face is not really about children being dumb. In fact, it’s not really about children. It’s about adults not knowing how to be adults. Not knowing, or forgetting, how to steer our angry young men out of the pitfalls of adolescence and toward something better.

McCaffrey Blauner is a writer living in New York City. His writing has appeared in The Nation and The Daily Beast. This is his first piece for The Free Press. A version of this essay first appeared on his Substack; follow him on Twitter here.

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Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

10 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

17 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

21 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641