Monday, March 12, 2007
Subway bloody subway
Last Saturday, I met up with my buddy KatieScarlett and we went to go see The Host, this Korean horror movie in which the titled monster is basically a giant, man-eating, amphibious Chingy!, and then forced her to accompany me to a K-town noodle shop for Tsingtaos to bolster me for what I consider an arduous and lengthy trek: a D-train ride to Brooklyn to visit our friend Miss Corbutt.
I hate going to Brooklyn. For one thing, I always get lost there. It seems like Flatbush and Atlantic Aves are everywhere, and go in every direction, so I can't even use those landmarks to get situated like I can here on the fair isle of Mannahattas. I hate going off the grid. Furthermore, once you actually get to Brooklyn, the nearest subway stop is always at least two miles from wherever you are going. People who live in Brooklyn don't notice this, because they are so used to it. My subway stop here is four blocks from my apartment, and that takes all of five minutes to walk. Our destination in Brooklyn was like ten blocks from the subway, and it took us a solid twenty minutes to get there. Granted, we did have to stop at a bar so we could pee after our post-Host Tsingtaos, at which I insisted on doing Jaegermeister shots to "keep us warm" during our hike. "I need spirits to keep my spirits up," I told KatieScarlett. "Oh, Razzy...it's really not that far. Miss Corbutt's place just isn't that convenient for getting to and from the train." She was being very tolerant of my curmudgeonly grousing, though, and just took her shot. I liberated the bar's supply of NYC condoms from the bathroom and we returned to our quest.
Miss Corbutt just had surgery, and we were asked to bring some prune juice for her. We had no idea where to buy prune juice, but we were hoping it would be at some establishment that also sells beer. We passed a bodega called Angie's Deli. "This looks like a good spot," I said. "I bet they sell beer."
"Yes, but do they have prune juice?" KatieScarlett asked skeptically.
"We won't know until we go in and see."
"If you were running your namesake deli, would you stock prune juice?"
I thought quickly over the inventory that I would purchase for my bodega: Heineken, imported cheese, other beers, sausage, frozen pizza, toilet paper, Beneful, ice cream, and rolling papers were the first things that came to mind--not prune juice.
"Good point," I said. "But maybe we should get some beer here?"
"We still have a ways to go...you don't want to carry the beer all that way, do you?" KatieScarlett asked cheerfully.
I groaned. "A ways to go" probably equals three miles in Brooklynese. We kept walking. Finally we found a grocery store that sold prune juice but NO COLD BEER. "We should have gone to Angie's Deli," I grumbled as we checked out. We stopped at another store for beer, and then we were on the home stretch to Miss Corbutt's.
We kept passing these young lesbian couples everywhere we went. After passing the last pair of pixie cuts, I was so strongly reminded of Smith that I asked, "God, did some wrinkle in space-time or whatever result in half of Northampton, Ass being mystically transported to Park Slope, or what?"
"I know, it's pretty lesbish around here," KatieScarlett agreed.
"Smith should open a fucking satellite office of the alumnae association here--if they haven't already. Now I see why you and Bienvenido-a-Miami moved here."
"Miss Corbutt lives here too and she's not a lesbian."
"Yeah, because she's from Northampton! Lesbians probably make her feel as comfortable as mountains, smoked salmon, and Starbucks make me, and decrepit steel mills, scrapple, and Christmas music makes you" (KatieScarlett is from Bethlehem, PA). "Are we there yet?" I added.
"Almost," said KatieScarlett in a quit-your-bitching type of tone.
We arrived at Miss Corbutt's and spent a while visiting with her and her boyfriend. Then she was feeling a bit strained, and since she just had her guts rearranged (her surgery required a lot of digging around in her abdomen), we left her to get some rest. I went over to KatieScarlett's and Bienvenido-a-Miami's for dinner, and afterward, was feeling very full and content and not at all like doing anything besides getting horizontal.
"You can stay the night here, Razzy," offered Bienvenido-a-Miami.
"I can't...you know, the dogs need walking. How the hell do I find the D train again?"
They gave me directions to the train and I sucked it up and trudged off alone into the misty night, hoping that I would not get lost in this most confusing of boroughs. Fortunately, I found the train, and even more fortunately, a Manhattan-bound D train zoomed up within five minutes of my arrival on the platform. I boarded and sank contentedly into an empty seat with my book about Genghis Khan, confident that all my troubles would subside now that Brooklyn was almost behind me.
Sadly, my hopes of a nice, quiet, Mongol horde-filled ride the whole way back to Sugar Hill were dashed almost immediately. Across from me were two short dudes that were obviously completely shitfaced. They were passed out and leaning against each other. I wasn't paying them much attention since they were both asleep. As the train emerged from the subway tunnel to cross the Manhattan Bridge, I looked across the East River to the city full of its tall buildings and bright lights and felt very pleased and relieved; I was returning to my home borough. I'd be home in twenty minutes.
**THUNK**
A loud noise snapped me out of my reverie and I saw that one of the drunk guys had fallen smack into the middle of the floor of the train. He didn't move, and I wondered if he was even alive. Everyone around him was trying to decide if this situation warranted a break from the typical New Yorker apathy concerning crazy and/or drunk people on the train. Finally, some dude on the train stood up, appraised the situation, and said to some guy a few seats over, "I guess we'd better pick him up."
The other guy made like he was going to protest, but the first guy reiterated, "We gotta pick him up. Come on, we can't just leave him there on the ground."
I vacated my prized seat so these guys could haul the drunk motherfucker up and lay him down across the bench where I'd been sitting. In spite of the drunk guy's petite size, they were having a difficult time getting him to stay put on the bench. Even though he was totally unconscious, his limbs were sprawled out like he was playing some bizarre static game of Twister.
"Holy shit!" one of the Good Samaritan lifters exclaimed, and they both released the man, who slipped back on the floor, this time with a slightly less pronounced thumping noise. Blood had started gushing from the guy's head, presumably from splitting his head open when he initially fell. There was blood all over the seat, and now it was pooling on the floor. Everyone was backing up as though they were going to get hepatitis just looking at him.
"I think we should call 911," said one of the lifters.
"Tell them to send a Hazmat team," quipped another passenger.
"Fuck, no, are you crazy?! They'll stop the train!"
While the prospect of being stuck with Bloody Mario for an indeterminate amount of time was unappealing, the guy was bleeding profusely and was generally unresponsive. I grudgingly sided with the guy who wanted to call 911.
"We have to get the cops or something," I offered.
"I know, I know," said pro-911 guy. "I don't want to be stuck here either. But, Jesus Christ, look at him! He's still fucking bleeding!"
The train pulled into the Grand Street station and I went with pro-911 guy to tell the conductor to call an ambulance. The conductor did indeed stop the train. When I returned to the car, the dude was now sitting upright although whether or not he was aware of his surroundings AT ALL was unclear. Blood was now pouring down his face onto his shirt, and given his dirty appearance, he looked like he'd just survived a roadside bomb in Iraq. People were shouting at him to wake up, I think because nobody was sure if he was just dead drunk or actually dying. Someone decided to try and appeal to his equally drunken but thus far uninjured friend.
The friend finally looked up with a bleary eye, announced something semi-intelligible about needing to piss, and started unzipping his fly.
"NO!" the entire train car shouted, practically in unison. "NO! NO! NO!"
"Eh?" he squinted up at everyone, apparently not believing that the subway car was an inappropriate place to urinate.
"You pull anything out of those pants and you'll be lookin' like your friend there," said the conductor menacingly, having just arrived at the car to assess the situation.
Meanwhile, one of the other passengers found an empty fifth of vodka under the drunks' original seat and showed it to the conductor.
"Here's what they were drinking," he announced. "Leeds Vodka. Christ, I've never even heard of that."
The conductor turned around and said, "I wouldn't touch that, sir. It could be a health risk."
The guy dropped the bottle immediately. I offered him some hand sanitizer. At that moment, two of New York's finest arrived. They took one look around and immediately shouted, "Okay, people, please exit the car! This car is being isolated!"
We all moved to a different car, and about 15 minutes later, the train was on its way. As we moved past the platform, I saw the two drunk dudes facing the wall as the cops fitted them each with a pair of lovely silver bracelets.
When I got home, I thought about all my trials, ranging from not being able to track down prune juice to nearly being spattered with possibly HIV-loaded blood, and I realized that ONCE AGAIN, everything was going fine until I ventured into that accursed borough across the river. It's all Brooklyn's fault.
I hate going to Brooklyn. For one thing, I always get lost there. It seems like Flatbush and Atlantic Aves are everywhere, and go in every direction, so I can't even use those landmarks to get situated like I can here on the fair isle of Mannahattas. I hate going off the grid. Furthermore, once you actually get to Brooklyn, the nearest subway stop is always at least two miles from wherever you are going. People who live in Brooklyn don't notice this, because they are so used to it. My subway stop here is four blocks from my apartment, and that takes all of five minutes to walk. Our destination in Brooklyn was like ten blocks from the subway, and it took us a solid twenty minutes to get there. Granted, we did have to stop at a bar so we could pee after our post-Host Tsingtaos, at which I insisted on doing Jaegermeister shots to "keep us warm" during our hike. "I need spirits to keep my spirits up," I told KatieScarlett. "Oh, Razzy...it's really not that far. Miss Corbutt's place just isn't that convenient for getting to and from the train." She was being very tolerant of my curmudgeonly grousing, though, and just took her shot. I liberated the bar's supply of NYC condoms from the bathroom and we returned to our quest.
Miss Corbutt just had surgery, and we were asked to bring some prune juice for her. We had no idea where to buy prune juice, but we were hoping it would be at some establishment that also sells beer. We passed a bodega called Angie's Deli. "This looks like a good spot," I said. "I bet they sell beer."
"Yes, but do they have prune juice?" KatieScarlett asked skeptically.
"We won't know until we go in and see."
"If you were running your namesake deli, would you stock prune juice?"
I thought quickly over the inventory that I would purchase for my bodega: Heineken, imported cheese, other beers, sausage, frozen pizza, toilet paper, Beneful, ice cream, and rolling papers were the first things that came to mind--not prune juice.
"Good point," I said. "But maybe we should get some beer here?"
"We still have a ways to go...you don't want to carry the beer all that way, do you?" KatieScarlett asked cheerfully.
I groaned. "A ways to go" probably equals three miles in Brooklynese. We kept walking. Finally we found a grocery store that sold prune juice but NO COLD BEER. "We should have gone to Angie's Deli," I grumbled as we checked out. We stopped at another store for beer, and then we were on the home stretch to Miss Corbutt's.
We kept passing these young lesbian couples everywhere we went. After passing the last pair of pixie cuts, I was so strongly reminded of Smith that I asked, "God, did some wrinkle in space-time or whatever result in half of Northampton, Ass being mystically transported to Park Slope, or what?"
"I know, it's pretty lesbish around here," KatieScarlett agreed.
"Smith should open a fucking satellite office of the alumnae association here--if they haven't already. Now I see why you and Bienvenido-a-Miami moved here."
"Miss Corbutt lives here too and she's not a lesbian."
"Yeah, because she's from Northampton! Lesbians probably make her feel as comfortable as mountains, smoked salmon, and Starbucks make me, and decrepit steel mills, scrapple, and Christmas music makes you" (KatieScarlett is from Bethlehem, PA). "Are we there yet?" I added.
"Almost," said KatieScarlett in a quit-your-bitching type of tone.
We arrived at Miss Corbutt's and spent a while visiting with her and her boyfriend. Then she was feeling a bit strained, and since she just had her guts rearranged (her surgery required a lot of digging around in her abdomen), we left her to get some rest. I went over to KatieScarlett's and Bienvenido-a-Miami's for dinner, and afterward, was feeling very full and content and not at all like doing anything besides getting horizontal.
"You can stay the night here, Razzy," offered Bienvenido-a-Miami.
"I can't...you know, the dogs need walking. How the hell do I find the D train again?"
They gave me directions to the train and I sucked it up and trudged off alone into the misty night, hoping that I would not get lost in this most confusing of boroughs. Fortunately, I found the train, and even more fortunately, a Manhattan-bound D train zoomed up within five minutes of my arrival on the platform. I boarded and sank contentedly into an empty seat with my book about Genghis Khan, confident that all my troubles would subside now that Brooklyn was almost behind me.
Sadly, my hopes of a nice, quiet, Mongol horde-filled ride the whole way back to Sugar Hill were dashed almost immediately. Across from me were two short dudes that were obviously completely shitfaced. They were passed out and leaning against each other. I wasn't paying them much attention since they were both asleep. As the train emerged from the subway tunnel to cross the Manhattan Bridge, I looked across the East River to the city full of its tall buildings and bright lights and felt very pleased and relieved; I was returning to my home borough. I'd be home in twenty minutes.
**THUNK**
A loud noise snapped me out of my reverie and I saw that one of the drunk guys had fallen smack into the middle of the floor of the train. He didn't move, and I wondered if he was even alive. Everyone around him was trying to decide if this situation warranted a break from the typical New Yorker apathy concerning crazy and/or drunk people on the train. Finally, some dude on the train stood up, appraised the situation, and said to some guy a few seats over, "I guess we'd better pick him up."
The other guy made like he was going to protest, but the first guy reiterated, "We gotta pick him up. Come on, we can't just leave him there on the ground."
I vacated my prized seat so these guys could haul the drunk motherfucker up and lay him down across the bench where I'd been sitting. In spite of the drunk guy's petite size, they were having a difficult time getting him to stay put on the bench. Even though he was totally unconscious, his limbs were sprawled out like he was playing some bizarre static game of Twister.
"Holy shit!" one of the Good Samaritan lifters exclaimed, and they both released the man, who slipped back on the floor, this time with a slightly less pronounced thumping noise. Blood had started gushing from the guy's head, presumably from splitting his head open when he initially fell. There was blood all over the seat, and now it was pooling on the floor. Everyone was backing up as though they were going to get hepatitis just looking at him.
"I think we should call 911," said one of the lifters.
"Tell them to send a Hazmat team," quipped another passenger.
"Fuck, no, are you crazy?! They'll stop the train!"
While the prospect of being stuck with Bloody Mario for an indeterminate amount of time was unappealing, the guy was bleeding profusely and was generally unresponsive. I grudgingly sided with the guy who wanted to call 911.
"We have to get the cops or something," I offered.
"I know, I know," said pro-911 guy. "I don't want to be stuck here either. But, Jesus Christ, look at him! He's still fucking bleeding!"
The train pulled into the Grand Street station and I went with pro-911 guy to tell the conductor to call an ambulance. The conductor did indeed stop the train. When I returned to the car, the dude was now sitting upright although whether or not he was aware of his surroundings AT ALL was unclear. Blood was now pouring down his face onto his shirt, and given his dirty appearance, he looked like he'd just survived a roadside bomb in Iraq. People were shouting at him to wake up, I think because nobody was sure if he was just dead drunk or actually dying. Someone decided to try and appeal to his equally drunken but thus far uninjured friend.
The friend finally looked up with a bleary eye, announced something semi-intelligible about needing to piss, and started unzipping his fly.
"NO!" the entire train car shouted, practically in unison. "NO! NO! NO!"
"Eh?" he squinted up at everyone, apparently not believing that the subway car was an inappropriate place to urinate.
"You pull anything out of those pants and you'll be lookin' like your friend there," said the conductor menacingly, having just arrived at the car to assess the situation.
Meanwhile, one of the other passengers found an empty fifth of vodka under the drunks' original seat and showed it to the conductor.
"Here's what they were drinking," he announced. "Leeds Vodka. Christ, I've never even heard of that."
The conductor turned around and said, "I wouldn't touch that, sir. It could be a health risk."
The guy dropped the bottle immediately. I offered him some hand sanitizer. At that moment, two of New York's finest arrived. They took one look around and immediately shouted, "Okay, people, please exit the car! This car is being isolated!"
We all moved to a different car, and about 15 minutes later, the train was on its way. As we moved past the platform, I saw the two drunk dudes facing the wall as the cops fitted them each with a pair of lovely silver bracelets.
When I got home, I thought about all my trials, ranging from not being able to track down prune juice to nearly being spattered with possibly HIV-loaded blood, and I realized that ONCE AGAIN, everything was going fine until I ventured into that accursed borough across the river. It's all Brooklyn's fault.
Labels: BK, crazies, gross, MTA, NYC, oh the horror
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
