The Free Ride Mystery

4 min readOct 31, 2022

October 30, 2022, 10:51 pm
Filed under: community, Healthcare | Tags: cops, healthcare workers, Mystery, police officer, quirky artists, scrubs, Subway, turnstiles

When I ran my Metrocard through the turnstile, it came up Insufficient Funds and I frowned and looked around for the machines to fill it up. (I was not in my usual station so it wasn’t immediately obvious.) As I walked away, I heard this police officer call me back. There’d been three of them lounging by the turnstiles and one of them had come forward and was offering to swipe me in. I was baffled but not about to argue. He told me to have a nice day and off I went, very confused.

As I rode home, I tried to work out why this might have happened. It did not feel like he was hitting on me in any way, so it wasn’t a pick-up move. Was it an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the NYPD with leftie radicals like myself? I didn’t think so. I don’t think the NYPD is at all worried about what we think of them. I’m pretty sure this guy doesn’t know or care that I’m very interested in defunding the police.

Was it maybe Help a Quirky Artist Day and no one told me? I don’t think so — though I do wish such a day existed.

Perhaps he’d mistaken me for a healthcare worker? I was wearing a mask and the dress I was wearing has been mistaken for scrubs before. (By a doctor! Who should know better!) This felt like the likeliest possibility. The officer’s gesture had the quality of one public servant helping another. And despite the fact that I have never seen scrubs with a skirt, there’s something about this green wrap-around dress that reads as hospital garb to some people. I was satisfied with this theory though I cannot prove it in any way.

I imagine that the cop felt good about himself helping out a healthcare worker — and I wondered how he’d feel if he knew my actual vocation. Would he take his free ride back?

What would it be like to live in a world where folks might be as happy to see an artist out in the wild as this guy was to help who he might have imagined me to be?

I’m certainly glad that someone out there is doing all they can for the healthcare workers they run across but mightn’t it be better to just pay our nurses better? To give them the time off they need? To have, say, a national healthcare system we can rely on and help workers care for everyone equally? Wouldn’t that be better than randomly giving free rides to people you perceive to be healthcare workers out in the world?

I’d wager that most struggling artists could use a free subway ride even more than a nurse could given that a nurse has a salary and possibly a travel allowance while most struggling artists are managing month to month on spotty freelance gigs, But I feel pretty confident that no one would institute such a program. Help a Quirky Artist Day will likely never come to pass.

I don’t mean to look a gift ride in the mouth but I can’t help unpacking unusual circumstances — and this was very unusual for me. Maybe for public servants, like healthcare workers, it is commonplace. Is it? I’m curious.