Sympathy for the Subway Surfer

Young men want to test themselves. Without direction, they can be a danger.

I live in a middle class neighborhood in the borough of Queens in New York City. It’s called Sunnyside, a sleepy little warren, filled with families pushing strollers and hard working migrants. It’s quiet and there’s not much crime other than the occasional beating or murder, which is normal for New York.

The 7 train runs through center of the neighborhood on an elevated platform that offers striking views of the skyline. In the late afternoon and evening, the sun sets in the west behind the skyscrapers in Manhattan and the whole neighborhood is painted a golden-reddish hue.

The elevated 7 train that roars through my quiet neighborhood has become the chosen field on which boys show their mettle and worth to their peers through an act of defiance of danger. These boys clamber on top of the subway by using the doors that go between the different subway cars, as the train passes above ground open to the sky. They are usually between the ages of 13 and 16, the insane jackal years where your child brain is reeling from testosterone infusion. The boys are almost always Black and Latino. Very often, they die.

They ride on top of the 7 train. I have to imagine that the wind is whistling past them. Maybe their legs are shaking, from fear and adrenaline. Then, a tunnel will approach, and sometimes, the truly ballsy ones will lie flat with their backs against the metal of the subway roof as the ceiling of the tunnel scrapes a nauseatingly short distance above them. Sometimes, they take video of themselves, to post on social media of course.

Subway surfing is nothing new, but the number of young men clambering on top of the train to ride it is. New York Mayor Eric Adams says reports of people subway surfing rose 366% between 2021 and 2022. When he says people, we can be fairly sure he mostly means teenaged Black and Brown boys.

Local news in New York shows a regular drumbeat of their names and faces. In June, two 14-year-old boys hit the ceiling of the tunnel as the subway they were surfing went underground. One boy, Brian Crespo, died. The other, Windinson Garcia, may never walk again. Local news reported that one of the two boys had been hit so hard his shoes had been knocked off. A month later, 14-year-old Jevon Fraser died trying to ride the 7 train that goes past my apartment. You can imagine how amazing the view must have been for Jevon, who was from a rough neighborhood in the far reaches of Brooklyn called Canarsie, the air crisp on his face as the city skyline zoomed by.

Earlier this month, a gaming system giveaway hosted by a popular YouTuber and Twitch streamer in New York’s Union Square turned into a riot. News outlets showed video of hundreds of young men in full break shit mode, stomping on cars, bashing windows. Like the daredevils who take to the top of the subway, almost all are black and brown and they are young, with smooth faces and pubescent beards. The NYPD told news outlets that out of at least 65 people arrested at the riot, 30 were under the age of 18.

The respectable classes tutted a bit about the bizarreness of it all before getting back to their normal lives. After all, wacky stuff happens in New York in the summer. But I think there is something deeper and more dangerous afoot. We are seeing skyrocketing rates of mental illness and social dysfunction among young people of both genders, likely driven by the emergence of social media, breakdown of community and social groups, with gas thrown on the fire by covid-era policies like remote school.

There’s probably also something to be said about the disturbing growing primacy of parasocial relationships with social media figures, like Kai Cenat who hosted the Playstation giveaway-slash-riot. Particularly against the backdrop of widespread social atomization across the U.S. The result is a generation of lost boys, steered mostly by men on the internet who will never know their names but are happy to take their money, and a primordial gravitation towards danger and chaos.

In a place like New York City, these boys are very vulnerable. The city landscape once dotted with boxing gyms is oddly barren of activities that teenage boys are interested in doing, especially if they don’t have a lot of money. A kid growing up with affluent parents on the Upper West Side might be able to pay for a climbing gym membership or Muay Thai classes, he might be able to go to Aspen or Killington every winter to cultivate his love of speed and big jumps.

Boys growing up in rural or suburban areas blow shit up, fish, shoot guns, and generally amuse themselves by running around in the woods. But these boys, the ones who ride the trains, come from rough neighborhoods where no one goes skiing, and the money for a gym membership is scarce. And in a place like New York City, crime, depravity and deep physical risk are never more than a subway swipe away.

Let us be clear, many boys don’t want to take a photography class or do learn to make sculpture, they want to confront physical danger, to earn prestige among their social group by acts of valor, and they want to earn the respect of older males through mentorship.

I can speak confidently on this topic because I was one of these idiots, set loose on the city with a MetroCard and an inarticulate desire to fuck shit up. I am lucky that I never had the opportunity to get into anything stupider than writing my name on a local business with a paint pen and some drunken antics. I’m fortunate that my parents had the money, time, and wherewithal to subvert my own wild impulses into sports and outdoor activities. Many of my friends were not. I see their faces in the pictures of the boys who die or are maimed while riding on top of the subway.

To a certain kind of person, this whole thing – a child who wants to confront violent danger for social clout – might sound insane and distasteful. If these boys want danger, there is something wrong with them, you might think. We live in a civilized society and these dummies need to get with the program. I can’t argue with you there, but there’s a reality that this is how we are made. In a peaceful, affluent culture like ours, these impulses are wildly out of place, and serve as a rudder to push boys towards the inside of prisons and the “without a college degree” part of bar graphs.

But in past times, the willingness of young men to risk their lives was what dragged our species into the light of civilization. It was the same knuckleheads causing your train delay after falling off the subway who faced down sabertooth tigers and other Ice Age megafauna when we lived in caves. At Flanders they were the ones to go over the trench into certain death when the whistle blew.

We like to think we are past the need for such a sharp and brutal implement, but in modern societies dragged backwards into violence, like Ukraine, it is their hands that hold the guns. The arc of history shows that no society sails in peaceful waters forever. One day, we will likely need to the break the glass on our knucklehead boys again.

I don’t know exactly what we must do with them, but the danger is clear. Unproductive young men without strong social attachments are a combustion element in a society, and the existence of them in large groups strongly correlates with violent civil insurrection and war.

In some respects, we are lucky that the internet, where people of all ages increasingly spend their time, is a containment zone. In past societies with large contingents of lost young men, they often found their way to fighting in the streets, like pre-war Germany. Instead of joining an ideological group whose name ends with -ism and fighting members of other groups in the streets, our lost boys are indoors staring at screens and simulating violence in League of Legends and Call of Duty. But I don’t know how long or permanently this distraction will last.

All I know is that we need to appreciate the value that these boys can bring to our society, and engage them on their own terms. They want danger, they want opportunities to demonstrate physical courage, and they want you and everyone else to know how brave they are. We need to give them something to do, or we risk the consequences.