Eye Contact Etiquette : Manners: Riders on the new Red Line are swept up in the politics of looking. Staring may involve ‘a number of social punishments.’

The trick is not to let them know that you’re looking.

Anthony Wren offered this bit of advice Monday as the former New Yorker cruised Los Angeles’ first modern subway in a black New York cap and a black sweat shirt that proclaimed his “New York State of Mind.”

“I look at everybody--I’m a people- looker,” said Wren, a 49-year-old aspiring artist. “But if you stare, people tend to think you might be out of your mind.”

So, you casually cast your gaze around the train, just catching a glimpse of that burly, camouflage-clad fellow with the walrus mustache and mutton-chop sideburns, or the blond-wigged bag lady toting an oozing sack of fermenting vegetables. But never linger long enough for them to question your intentions.

“You have to just take a glance, so that they don’t realize you’re looking just at them,” said Wren, who used to routinely test that cardinal rule of subway conduct by taking his art supplies on the New York train and sketching his fellow passengers. “Otherwise, it creates a problem.”

As many Angelenos get their first taste of underground transit, they find themselves plunging headfirst into the finer points of subway etiquette. The politics of eye contact, as every inveterate commuter knows, can be the thin line between a tranquil ride and an unnerving trip on the subway from hell.

In New York, where the desperate suck tokens right out of the subway turnstile, it is generally considered prudent to mind your own business. Lord knows what kind of unwelcome overtures could be unleashed with a reckless glance, earning you the affections of a glue-sniffing, salami-munching devil worshiper in a tin-foil hat.

Here, along the Red Line, the rules are still being hammered out.

For those who commute by freeway, human contact is usually limited to a honk of the horn or the hurling of a curse.

Riders of the bus can peer out a window, taking stock of life along the gritty streets of their route.

In a subway, you are stuck in a sealed compartment with a group of strangers as you hurtle through a dark tunnel.

“In a crowded setting like a subway system, people use their eyes to create space for themselves,” said Gust Yep, who teaches a course in interpersonal and nonverbal communication at Cal State Los Angeles. “If you violate it by staring at them in an inappropriate way, there are a number of social punishments.”

Like being labeled a pervert. Or an ax murderer.

At least in New York, you can focus your gaze on a bevy of colorful subway ads offering remedies for such nagging woes as cockroach infestation or hemorrhoids. But the architects of the Red Line, hoping to avoid the negative images associated with the Big Apple, have chosen to keep the subway interiors clutter-free.

Unlike New York’s early subway cars, few seats on the Red Line face each other. The exceptions are near the stainless-steel doorways, where single seats on both sides join the regular twin seats in an L-shaped configuration.

It is a sleek, slightly sterile environment that smells vaguely of a Band-Aid. You can look at the floor, covered in black, simulated-marble linoleum. Stare at the walls, which are made of hard, cream-colored plastic. Examine the seat covers, upholstered in a fuzzy red-and-black herringbone print. Or peer into the darkness of the windows, watching as the lights flash past the tunnel’s concrete walls.

“I was just lookin’ out the window, trippin’ out,” said Jose Traiza, a 23-year-old Echo Park resident who, on Monday, took the first subway ride of his life.

For now, the novelty of the Red Line seems to have created a jovial atmosphere--a communal experience that does not judge eye contact a severe breach of subway decorum.

Riders, at any rate, are still intrigued enough by their new surroundings that they have yet to develop the surly exterior of commuters whose only concern is to get quickly from here to there.

“These are Los Angeles people,” said Red Line rider Roger Anthony, a retired engineer who left New York 39 years ago for Southern California. “They tend to dress colorful. New Yorkers wear black.”

On Monday, a young woman in the kind of sunglasses Catwoman would wear rocked back and forth to the beat of her Walkman. A young man carrying a paperback copy of “The Living Bible” struck up a conversation with another passenger about the width of the aisles.

A businessman with a thick attache case nervously picked at his nails. An infant girl with pierced ears stared at a stranger from the comfort of her mother’s chest. A young African-American professional studied the Spanish translation of the emergency rules posted by his seat.

“Why does it smell like a hospital in here?” a rider wearing a wool cap and carrying a bag of hot-dog buns announced as he walked onto the train. “Does it to you?”