Subway Adventure No. 764a

You’re on the N or the R – you weren’t paying too much attention when you got on – and you’re minding your own fucking business, reading a borrowed book, eating some Swedish Fish, chewing on your nails a bit, crossing and uncrossing and crossing your legs, when a dirty and disheveled gentleman off to your left who had previously appeared to be asleep screams “Shut Up!” as if his head were going to explode into skull fragments and a wash of whiskey saturated gray matter if the two Korean women on the opposite end of the car don’t stop whispering to one another. There is awkward silence before the train gets going again.

At the next stop he leaps up and demands for you to tell him if this is 95^th Street. It isn’t, and you tell him so. You are about to give him a bit of helpful information, when the train rocks into motion, throwing the drunk back and causing him to careen into one of the metal ceiling-to-seat supports, spine first.

“Bitch, cunt,” he burbles, “You saw that, you had your eyes open!” He sits down across from you, attempting to scowl, barely able to keep his eyes open. “I should kill you.”

You sit, trying not to laugh, but not doing very well. He makes a slow reach into his coat pocket, maybe to make good on his promise to kill you, but only to haul out a huge bottle of brown liquid (Old Barton? Kentucky Gentleman?), all the while giving you a wobbly eye and cursing you. You look around at this point, and see that the rest of the car has migrated north. This suddenly seems like the best idea.

You move to your new seat, and now it sounds as if the drunk has begun to encourage you to go get AIDs, but it’s difficult to hear. When the train makes its next stop, it becomes apparent that he is indeed hoping you get AIDs, because he is still screaming about it.

At Whitehall you switch cars; you don’t want to be around when he figures out what you were going to tell him before he started screaming at you: that in order to get to 95^th Street, he needs to get on a train going the opposite direction.