Meet Robert, the W Train Operator And Aspiring Actor

“They called us the Nighthawks,” Robert says, sitting beside me on a bench outside the Astor Place Subway Station. Robert operates the W train, which stops here, but not on weekends. Like most native New Yorkers, Robert Fetik is a multihyphenate. Unlike most New Yorkers, his hyphens are Former Delivery-Courrier-Ticketing-Officer-Tow-Truck-Driver-Train-Conductor, Current Train-Operator-and-Actor.

I first met Robert Fetik under rather ridiculous circumstances. After sitting in the back of a Toyota Camry hurtling from Manhattan to Long Island City with a bag full of bikinis and a minor hangover, I’d set out to spend my evening as an extra on a fake beach constructed in a warehouse while my friend’s band taped their TV performance. It’s on said beach, in said warehouse in Long Island City, that I first laid eyes on Robert Fetik.

He was enchanting—no shirt, no shoes. A bristled gray mustache draped across his upper lip like an opera curtain, a dark shadow cast over the cupid’s bow from the downward slope of his nose. His pasty, unclothed stomach looked not unlike a beach ball pumped up to full inflation. Robert was seated on a black leather couch behind the billiards table, regaling no one in particular with the details of his latest modelling gig. “Robert posed for our last album cover,” the lead singer explained to me while he decided between six imperceptibly different white t-shirts.

But back to the Nighthawks. Robert’s bright blue eyes go glossy as he travels through the underground tunnels of his memory. “While all the kids were clubbing—dancing, smoking, taking drugs—we’d be outside taking their cars,” Robert says of his time as a tow truck driver in the 90’s. Across every borough, he towed Porches, Jags, Mercedes, Bentleys. One time even an Armored truck. “The key was in it and the engine was running. As soon as I started towing, they came running out with their guns drawn.” He describes rappers and their entire entourages rolling up to the impound lot the next morning to retrieve what the Nighthawks had taken from them.

Robert’s way is the long way—every detail adorned with elaborate drama. The only question I’ve posed so far is: how did you get into train operating? We’ve covered everything from bicycle courier delivery to the retinal cones of his eyes, but have still yet to arrive at the locus of his train operator origins. Which is more than fine with me—every detail of his is perfect. Robert has just come from a photoshoot for a barbershop in which he posed in his underwear on the street, his hair shellacked into the most spectacularly coiffed combover I’ve ever seen. “I do nude shoots all the time,” he tosses out, casually. There’s a certain sweetness about him, twisting his mouth into an oopsie smirk, raising a pinky to his puckered lips, his laugh childlike, honeyed with sincerity, lofted into the breeze. “Photoshoots, portraits. I’ll do anything. Except for another Bollywood film.”

The way Robert describes the start of his acting career is, quite fittingly, like something out of a movie. The rain. The wind. The infinite stretch of asphalt in a Staten Island Shopping Center. The PennySaver pages unfurling before him, fluttering open to an ad for an acting class: $2,000 for a 10 day workshop at the New Yorker hotel. He didn’t know it was a scam. He signed his 13-year-old daughter up. As he sat in the cavernous auditorium for her acting class graduation, watching her fearlessly performing her monologue for 1,500 other proud parents in the crowd, Robert found himself thinking: I could do this. Why can’t I do this? I already do this every day.

The Subway System is operated like a tight ship, even though it rarely runs like one. If you’re sick? They’ll come to your house and make you prove it. Late? Don’t even bother showing up—they’ve already sent in someone on Extra Extra duty to fill your place. Before Robert was a train operator, he was a train conductor. For 2 years, Robert was responsible for opening and closing the subway doors at every station, and making live announcements over the train’s intercom. “I’d have to act. For real. Especially on the radio” he explained. “If there was a fire on the tracks, if there was someone who’d fallen, or a serious delay. I never wanted people to panic, to get irate. So I’d act!”

If all the world’s a stage, then the 36 subway lines that service this city are mobile movie theaters for humanity’s most heightened antics. Sometimes people are at their most primal: they get naked. Publicly relieve themselves. Start fires. Graffiti their names on tunnel walls like modern day cave drawings. Sometimes they’re at their most performative. Robert tells me stories of guys wheeling a grill into a train car and hosting a whole barbecue, an unattended alligator slithering across the scuffed floors. Young subway surfers riding the wave of the 7 train to their untimely demises.

“Look, I’m married,” Robert interrupts himself. “You gotta be a good actor to be married. So I already had plenty of experience.” But it wasn’t until Robert saw a video of An A List Actress He Would Not Name that he started his serious pursuit of acting. He wouldn’t reveal her identity, as some of his friends have taken to taunting him over it, but she’s largely the catalyst for Robert’s acting career aspirations. “I’m not a stalker, not paparazzi,” Robert explains. “I just know we’d be friends. I know we will be. Most of my life, I’d been very shy and introverted. And watching her? She’s exuberant, outgoing, not shy at all. She’s a risk taker.” He just has to meet her.

So he did his research. “She wasn’t gonna come down into the subway, into my world,” he reasons. “So I have to join hers. I have to become an actor.” He signed up for improv classes. Twice, he attempted to go. Twice, he found himself staring at a closed door, too afraid to turn the knob. “It took three tries going to class to finally take that risk, to cross the threshold into something new and different. But I knew I had to do it. So I opened that door.”

Opening that singular door has since opened a full fleet of them. “I’ve done hundreds of projects since then,” Robert says, an unpretentious joy beaming from his eyes like geysers of gratitude. “I bring my memories, my background, into every scene. To me, that’s all acting is! Piece of cake. Why are people afraid to act? I’ll do anything!” A glimpse of Robert’s Instagram confirms this. Each post is a portrait of increasing peculiarity: Robert in a pair of scrubs, pressing a telescopic pointer to a mannequin’s prosthetic penis; Robert posing nude, his indecency obscured only by a brown WingStop bag; Robert, seaside in a speedo, a strawberry ice cream cone dripping from his closed fist; Robert in a power stance under a running rain shower, sopping wet. “Why should I be embarrassed?” He asks. “I’m gonna be dead one day.” Robert doubles over into a full belly laugh, then straightens up, suddenly serious.

“I’ve never actually killed anyone,” Robert assures me. “However…” he trails off as the sirens of a high speed chase ricochet around Astor Place. “I’ve come close. Let me tell you a good one.”

It was a Midnight job. 2 line. New train—the now vintage R-142 trains of the late 90’s. It’s not entirely uncommon for people to be on the tracks: Signal Maintainers, track workers conducting maintenance. Fearless, foolish pedestrians who drop their cellphones.

The train came around a sharp curve. Full power. There were yellow lights flashing, but a worker waved the train on, signalling to Robert the coast was completely clear. Until he came around the curve. And it wasn’t. The train straightened itself out, 900,000 pounds of metal barrelling straight toward 12 unsuspecting bodies on the tracks. Six Signal Maintainers, six Track Workers. Robert was able to stop the train within 20 feet of their lives. They never thanked him. He’s never forgotten it. “I saved them,” he says, staring out into the infinite stream of traffic coming down Bowery. “And no one thanked me. Just like Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day.”

Robert’s life hasn’t been optioned into a movie yet, but it could, maybe even should be. He’s Mister Mom, the primary caretaker for his four children. He pays the mortgage, the bills. “Hopefully not paying the student loans,” he jokes. He finds time to squeeze in photo shoots and acting gigs to his full time Train Operator schedule. He loves to sit around and eat ice cream. He loves to be a pawn in the game of other people’s projects. And he really loves to improvise; the fabled February warmth of our afternoon drains to pure chill as he gives me a play-by-play of all his favorite improv choices.

I want to know what Robert’s idea of success is, what inspires him to get there. Besides his Mystery A list Actress, of course. “I want…” Robert’s eyes float upwards, his mouth curving mischievously, “...a mansion. I want a mansion. And maybe to be cast as a regular on a TV show. And I just want to have fun!” His kids inspire him. His daughter, especially—a word he pronounces with full Staten Island strength: my dawder. “One day, when I’m sitting at a round table for the Academy Awards, I’d love to have my daughter with me. And maybe I’m even sitting at the same table as my actress.”

“Even if I don’t make it big,” Robert explains, “at least I’m finally doing what I want to do.” At the end of this calendar year, Robert is quitting his job as a W Train Operator to pursue acting full time. He doesn’t consider this to be a risk. “I have my savings, my pension,” he explains. “What’s wrong with being rich and famous?”