Living underground so much of the time

When I first moved to New York City, I did not like riding on the subway at all. Well, honestly I didn't really like the city at all. It did not feel exciting and invigorating to me, but absolutely overwhelming, bleak, depressing, and disorienting. Of course this was one month after 9/11, and I came knowing almost nothing and no one, but so do many people who move here. I had visited my older sister in the Bronx, so I was familiar with the Fordham area, and had been to a few gay bars in the city, and the most common neighborhoods once or twice (Greenwich village, Times Square, etc), also stayed with a friend in Brooklyn a couple times, so Park Slope not a totally new place either. I had one friend, who I broke up with very quickly and my older sister moved to Chicago, then I was really alone. Anyway, I was in a perpetual panic attack for the first year, alternating with crying fits. I was scared on the trains because I didn't know uptown from downtown or how to get anywhere, and felt like I stood out and everyone knew how green I was. For job interviews (I sent out resumes within three days of arrival, actually that's all I did for a while besides work a temporary catering job), I had to bust out my subway map and concentrate very hard on the gridlike nature of the city layout, which obviously doesn't work downtown. I realized right away that my clothes were all wrong, but I didn't have any money. I ate a lot of fried rice, nutella, pizza, or nothing at all, and I drank Olde English or Colt 45 to knock myself out at night. What I really wanted was a job at a record label and a place to sing. Eventually I did achieve these things (although the label fired me after two years), but at the time they seemed almost impossible, but I just had to try. I was calling every record label in the yellow pages, literally, and asking questions that people hang up on, and getting people who only spoke spanish, and fake interviews, and dead ends. I went to Universal and tried to give my resume to a security guard. All kinds of stupid shit. All wearing the wrong clothes. I felt very ashamed but I only once considered going home to my parents in Minnesota where I knew I would kill myself from boredom and a sense of defeat. Plus I couldn't afford the u-haul to get there after a week or two (I came with five hundred dollars). Anyway, the point is the subway. One night after working my job as an operator for a medical answering service, which was the 2nd shift (4:30 to 11:30pm), I dreamed that I was in a subway car that pulled into a station full of corpses, and I knew it was all the people who had died in the city during the night. They were laid out on the platform and hanging from the ceiling. I was horrified and closed my eyes, but the car stalled and just sat there.