Within a week Nelly had asked Darius for his Social Security number and invited him to move in. Several months later they would be married, and Darius would confess to Nelly, having fabricated a story about his nineteenth arrest, that he was a lifelong subway impostor, and she would say, through her sister, “If it’s your problem it’s our problem, and I’m not going to tell anybody,” and then successfully inveigle him into signing over the rights to his story to a small Manhattan production company for a relatively tiny sum (several newspapers had covered his arrest). Eventually a lawyer hired by Darius’s parents would void this agreement, and Darius would yield to their unremitting pressure and request a divorce. When he is asked now if he worried about his quick start with Nelly, Darius says, “No, because I had already said a long time ago that I had not planned to get married until I was at least in my thirties… I wanted to get married when I was a little more settled, when I had a little better insight.”
In Nelly’s kitchen, Darius ate a plate of the fish and rice and beans that she had cooked the night before. He sealed the rest in Tupper-ware and brought it back to the crew. He told the guys to take their time finishing up; he had to check on his truck at fleet operations. Then he left to visit a friend, a token booth clerk at 57th Street in Manhattan.
Darius’s friend was at lunch when he arrived, so he let himself into the station’s command tower to wait. The control room had a big signal board that tracked train movement and a tinted picture window with a platform view. The vacant tower had recently been automated, but Darius remembered when the seven empty lockers had been full and when, in the recessed kitchen with its miniature sink and stove, there had been pots in the bottom cabinet and food in the top. He had often stopped by to chat about work, or read the newspaper, or get a doughnut and a cup of coffee.
Darius sat surveilling the lights on the board: a clear-skinned dark black guy of average height in an unusually complete Transit Authority uniform. Darius is only slightly overweight, but everything about him appears tender and fleshy: the heels of his hands and the little underhung bellies of skin between the knuckles of his fingers, his small paunch, the cushions of his cheeks, his chubby iridescent lips. His movements are almost always leisurely-when he’s being chased by transit cops he lopes onerously, counting on his knowledge of the system’s crannies-and he stands slightly stooped, the shallow curve of his back in conformity with all the small padded curves of his body. Darius has big circular eyes that quickly admit delight, a serene form of which he was feeling as he absorbed the scrupulous, luridly represented shuttling of the trains. He can’t explain why, but he is always content in the subway: elementally content, at unrivaled ease, unable to think about anything outside the system.
Darius grew up near the 179th Street yard, the terminus of the F train, in Jamaica, Queens. He was a bright, early-talking child. His obsession with the subway manifested itself as soon as he began riding trains with his mother, at age three: His desire to see a train’s headlights materialize in the tunnel black always threatened to propel him over the platform edge. The force of this attraction never diminished. Darius did well in school, but an opaque inwardness isolated him from other children and worried his teachers; he never formed enduring friendships or felt comfortable in class.
Darius spent hundreds of hours watching trains at 179th Street. He estimated the angle of every track intersection in the yard. By the time he was eight, he could visualize the entire New York City subway system. (Later he memorized the architecture of the stations.) Family and friends with subway questions began calling the McCollum household and asking for Darius. In small notebooks he recorded arrival and departure times at various stations, and documented whatever he observed: the shrill, keyed-up atmosphere an emergency stop instantly creates on a platform, the presence of transit police, mechanical problems (“E train to Canal st 0015 L.C. Delay of train leaving Parson’s Blvd Door Trouble”), passengers riding between cars (“A train to 81st L.C. 4112-Girl riding in between cars approx. 17 Brown Coat Blue Pants Brown Shoes”). He hasn’t abandoned this note-taking. His logs-
0210 D train 169st N.P.C. Meal
0217 S/BF 169th st L.C. 586
0230 S/B F Woodhaven D train
0311 N/BF 71 st F.H. L.C. 1200
0317 N/B E Kew Gardens L.C. 1134…
– span twenty-five years.
When Darius was 11, a classmate, unprovoked, stabbed him in the back with a pair of scissors. The scissors punctured a lung and came within an inch of his heart. The boy opened and closed the scissors as he pulled them out, creating a wound in the shape of an irregular star. At the hospital, doctors pumped blood out of Darius’s lung and reinflated it. He didn’t speak that day or the next: He just stared at his parents with awestruck eyes. At night he paced in his sleep or lay awake. When he went back to school, he would sit only with his back against the wall.
Not long after the stabbing, Darius began disappearing into the subway system for days at a time:
3/30/81 7:30 didn’t go to school, but then I went on the J train up to Chambers st… 11:30 I went back on the J train and went to catch the D train to Brighton Beach at approx 12:45. Transf to M train and went to Stillwell at 1:05 and went to the bathroom (no food dur this time) back on the M, return to Brighton and took D train to pacific st (Bklyn) approx 2:00 took the #2 train transfered to the #6 to 28th street to Girls Club at 3:30 pat, angie, rosemary. They gave me a sandwich and milk and then left 3:45…
4/2/81 I left to #6 to Grand Central took #7 to 5th ave and took F for the rest night, and slept on the F train Balance of night till approx 6:30 am.
Darius counted on certain relatives in Queens and Brooklyn: He would stop by to eat and spend the night and then return to the subway. He often went home for provisions when his parents were asleep or at work. Samuel and Elizabeth McCollum worked long hours, but they tried to stay up later than their son and wake up before him. They tried to lock him in and lock him out; they talked to NYCTA supervisors; they called his school and arranged for morning escorts; they tried different schools; they had him hospitalized for psychiatric treatment. But each remedy had its limit, and ultimately they found that they could only interrupt his journeying. Mrs. McCollum tracked her son’s movements. On one of her calendars, the word “out,” meaning “location unknown,” fills fourteen day-boxes in January of 1981, when Darius was first arrested for driving a train. The four days from the twenty-seventh to the thirtieth read: late for school-in at 10:00 A.M.; home; out-drove train; court.
By this time Darius had cultivated a constellation of admirers at the 179th Street yard. Darius has always been deeply disarming. His charm resides in his peculiar intelligence, his perpetual receptivity to transporting delight, and his strange, self-endangering indifference to the consequences of his enthusiasm. Darius never curses. He has no regionally or culturally recognizable accent. He has a quick-to-appear, caricaturishly resonant laugh, like the laugh ascribed to Santa Claus, and he can appreciate certain comedic aspects of what he does, but he often laughs too long or when things aren’t funny, as when he mentions that he briefly worked on the LIRR route that Colin Ferguson took to slaughter commuters. Darius litters his speech with specialized vocabulary (“BIE incident,” “transverse-cab R-110”) and unusually formal phrases (“what this particular procedure entails,” “the teacher didn’t directly have any set curriculum studies”). He frequently and ingenuously uses the words “gee,” “heck,” “doggone,” “gosh,” and “dang.”