« Huddled Masses | Main | You Know...For Kids! »

Subway Bingo

Fri., October 27, 2006

There should be (if there isn’t already) a New York subway bingo game featuring squares for all the crazy stuff you can witness as a passenger, because all of a sudden today, I had two brand new subway experiences.

The first was guy-on-my-car-collared-by-a-cop, which I’d nearly experienced before, although it was guy-arrested-right-outside-my-car-for-pushing-a-woman-onto-the-tracks (she was O.K.). The best part was this cretin got pinched for attempting to board a jam-packed 1 train at 66th Street by leaping the safety gates between two cars. That’s a spectacularly bad idea because although people will do this when the train’s stopped, it’s possible the train will start moving again before they’re done clambering. Just last week, some idiot was pulped in this way. The guy on my train made it on board, but he neglected to account that he did so in plain view of the token booth clerk. A small, scrappy woman, she burst out and started shouting at him, causing a cop to materialize from seemingly nowhere and barge into my car. Of course, now that the suspect was on an ultra-crowded train, he had nowhere to go. The cop grabbed him with ease and drug him off, yelling, “You know how stupid that is?”

My other new subway experience happened very late on the uptown 1 train. I entered a half-empty car with joy, which goes to show you I’m not quite a New Yorker. I quickly realized my mistake. There’s almost never a catch-free half-empty subway car; likely, there’s Something Bad in there, such as:

In my case tonight, it was a fresh puddle of puke on the floor.

A puddle of puke on the 1 train.

It was brown, chunky and didn’t smell that bad, but it had cleared half the car. I sat across from it because I was sleepy and I like end seats, bodily waste be damned. It was fun to watch people stride on board only to stop in their tracks with disgust as they spotted the ralph. One guy walking through the car didn’t even notice until he’d trod through it, then had to angrily shake off his sullied sneaker while nearly slipping with his other.

Tags: Subway | Comments have been closed.