The Weekly Screed (#608)

The war among pedestrians 
and the ghost of Musashi
by David Benjamin

PARIS — Growing up in a small town, I had no pedestrian style. I didn’t need one. On a normal day, it was possible to walk a dozen blocks of Tomah’s sidewalks without meeting anyone coming the other way. If that happened, the instinctive mutual choice, to avoid collision, was to behave like a car and move to the right.

Then, as you passed, according to small town etiquette, you said “hello.”

Complicating my education in pedestrian style was the fact that, in Tomah, for a kid, pavement was superfluous. Wisconsin folks tend not to build fences. If I wanted to, I could go from one end of town, down by the Milwaukee Road tracks, all the way to the other end, up by Oak Grove cemetery and the Clay family’s horse farm, entirely by passing through people’s backyards. My only deviations would be to accommodate a few turf-conscious geezers and the odd unfamiliar dog.

Any kid in Tomah who stuck to the sidewalks just wasn’t cool.

However, that early-life deficit in sidewalk technique has caused me moments of grief as a city-dweller. Here, for example, pedestrian style is a grave matter of personal dignity, if not survival. Parisians are aggressive walkers. They come right at you, often with eyes downcast or glued to a cellphone, while emanating portents of Dirty Harry. Get in their way and — splat — you make their day.

The sidewalk cold war in Paris — and great cities everywhere — is a game I call “pedestrian chicken.” Give ground and shift first — you’re the “chicken.”

Which is me. I’d rather be Foghorn Leghorn than turn myself into one of those downcast plodders who ignores the vibrant city around him in order to stake out a straight line on the boulevard St. Michel.

The masters of pedestrian chicken evince a common urban pathology — a sort of ambulatory turf jealousy whose ferocious jousts are invisible to everyone else on the street. The saddest casualties of this pedestrian war are those who can’t bear to give ground, for whom life boils down exclusively to petty victories over oncoming strangers on congested concrete. Dostoyevsky’s protagonist in Notes from the Underground, a squirm-inducing portrait of strangled hopes and urban paranoia, is the pure practitioner of pedestrian chicken. Dostoyevsky’s short, brilliant novel reminds us that the naked city is a there-but-for-fortune world in which we are all a few steps away from becoming, ourselves, the Underground Man.

You can tell how close you are to this fate by your pedestrian style. The more determined you are to stick to an imaginary line along the sidewalk, the more you see every strolling stranger as a mortal foe bound to push you aside and snigger maniacally as you stagger into the gutter. The harder you defend your invisible lane, the closer you are to becoming a raggedy-ass Dostoyevskian archetype.

Nowadays, living in New York, I’ve had to change my style again, completely. New York poses the possibility of not just the occasional psycho stalking the sidewalks, as in Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg. The Big Apple is wormy with Underground Men. And so, it’s a city of dodgers.

There he is, shambling straight at you, chin sunk into his collar, eyes hooded, a cloud of blue smoke curling up from his do-rag. If you’re a veteran New Yorker, you don’t prolong the drama. As far as 20 yards before passing him, you alter your course, signaling an abject surrender and a wide berth. Seeing you, sending a mute message that “I don’t want any trouble, either, pal,” he does the same. You clear each other without eye contact and with six feet to spare. The two-chicken tango.

The irony is that pedestrian war denotes safe streets and bourgeois complacency. In Paris, nobody looks threatening, nobody’s scared, nobody’s likely to whip an AK-47 out of her Sonia Rykiel raincape and rake the street with gunfire.

This goes double for Tokyo, possibly the world’s the safest city — where pedestrian chicken is blood sport. While Parisians, typically, are content to hold their ground and force an adversary right or left, Tokyo walkers seek out collisions. The most menacing are certain menopausal women of ample means who’ve been embittered by the neglect of workaholic hubbies and the sneering ingratitude of the kids they spoiled rotten for 20 years, only to see them turn against mom like snakes, moving to another side of Tokyo or even to Osaka, and never calling home.

These women seethe with pent-up fury. It isn’t enough to tack visibly away from one of these oban as she bears down. Shift course, and she will shift with you. Slow down, and she will accelerate. Feint left, and she will swerve to the right, still on track to impinge on you with no room to spare, swing her weaponized Louis Vuitton handbag into your unprotected ribs and hook your ankle with the handle of her Hermes kasa, so that you end up sprawled on the sidewalk and trampled by herds more of her troops, each one stepping on you as though you did not exist.

Nor do you. This is Tokyo, where nonexistence is a way of life.

My favorite pedestrian skirmish in Tokyo happened on a train platform in my old neighborhood. I stood alone. From the corner of an eye, I spied a marauding oban, head lowered, bent with age and too small for her overcoat. Although her movements seemed aimless, she had charted a diagonal route aimed at me — center mass — the only target within 20 meters. My train had just appeared in the distance as she got within range and I thought — for a breathless instant — that her objective was to lower a shoulder and pitch me ninja-style onto the deadly tracks.

I braced just in case. I tensed to — if necessary — fight her off hand-to-hand. But as the train rattled into Ebisu Station, she eschewed the direct hit. She could’ve killed me. Instead, she swung an understated elbow, landing a subtle but blunt “Gaijin, go home,” message on my kidneys. The train arrived as she shuffled, triumphantly, into the sunset — like the ghost of Musashi, Lone Ranger of Japan.

“Who was that old bag?”