My commute is usually rough… I have to be at work at 9:00, but seldom get out of bed before 8:15, which means I’m usually out the door by 8:40 and to the train by 8:45, leaving a mere 15 minutes for the MTA to transport my behind to another wonderful workday. Maybe if I lived in London and rode the seamless Tube that would be a reasonable time frame, or even on DC’s Metro… but the MTA is a different story. Granted, with my usual late-starts I don’t make it any easier for myself, but it certainly doesn’t help when trains go 2 mph through the East River tunnel, are re-routed without prior notice, come to frequent dead stops, or fail to come at all.
Then there are days like today when I get an extra special treat! Running behind as always, I was not able to get to my usual waiting spot on the platform. The train pulled up just as I got through the turnstile, so I unable to complete my usual strategic placement for optimal transfer efficiency at the 6 (yes, I get a certain sad, geeky joy out of minimizing my transfer time). This would be the beginning of my folly…
The foreign R car that I found myself in was particularly crowded; apparently I wasn’t the only one running late today. I guess between the body-on-body action, the unseasonable mid-September humidity, and the general unease that we were all feeling from being late and knowing the MTA would not be making that any easier for us, a lovely little fight broke out. At Queens Plaza a large group of people imposed themselves on the train, the last among them a young African-American woman, probably about my age. She squeezed herself into the space in front of the door, between two people: one, a quiet, nameless, faceless commuter; the other, an apparently misogynist and racist middle-aged man.
As I try to recount the incident, my memory is even reluctant to re-live it. This guy was cracked, or as the young woman would aptly later describe him, ‘a crazy fool.’ As she was squeezing in he was repeatedly shouting ‘no room here!’ ‘it’s you or me, b*tch’ ‘you f*cking b*tch!’ ‘get out of my face b*tch!’ I really felt for her and was very impressed with how she handled it… she didn’t curse back, didn’t yell; she just calmly stated that there was in fact room for her and tried to turn herself away from him.
Unfortunately there wasn’t space for that, and he continued to curse at her under his breath. And so nastily too, with such venom. After several minutes of this, with a lot of tension mounting, she finally broke down and pleadingly shouted ‘Shut up! Just shut up! I don’t want to listen to this! No one else on this train wants to listen to this! Just SHUT UP!’ Of course this only served to re-ignite him back to full volume, and really start to scare the bejesus out of everyone else. I honestly thought he was going to get physical, until finally, a nice middle-aged foreign man broke in with his cutely accented English, ‘Stope it! Stope it! Enough man! No one wants to hear it! Itz ok, everyone’s ok, please just stope!!’
Thankfully this did shut him up. But the rest of the ride was still tense…. tense, yet there was a positive vibe brewing. Despite the fact that it was hot and we were all arm-over-arm-over-arm and body-against-body, I think everyone else on the train was appreciative of the fact we didn’t have the bad luck to be smooshed up against some whack job and incur such unwarranted wrath.
What was it that set this guy off? How did he get so angry?? Sure, there was not an abundance of space for this woman to fit into, but I know I’ve been in trains that were much more crowded before. And shouldn’t we all be able to empathize with that last commuter trying to squeeze in? Everyone has been that person at least once, and unless the train is truly AT CAPACITY (it was not in this case), why should anyone have to wait for the next train and get to work that much later? I’d like to say that it’s isolated cases like this that give New Yorkers a bad name, but…
Upon leaving the R, I ran up the stairs to the 6 with extra speed to avoid any overflow from the previous incident… unfortunately the bad vibes stuck to me anyway. When I got upstairs the train was already there so I was forced to run directly into the car in front of me (lack of strategic placement screws me again!), and as soon as I enter I’m assaulted with more anger. One of the same women who’d been in the previous R car with me had apparently bumped into another woman while entering the train. The jostled woman was scolding her loudly, informing her she needs to be polite and say ‘excuse me.’ The offender calmly but willfully responded that she shouldn’t be blocking the doorway in the first place (I feel bad saying this because it’s un-PC, but it should be noted that the width of this woman’s hips did occupy most of the doorway space).
Now if I had been this particular girl, given our experience on the R, I would’ve just said excuse me and left it at that. Why be defensive and contribute more fuel to ANOTHER potential argument? Do others enjoy a morning commute that is this spicy?? The two of them bickered back and forth a bit, but luckily there was enough space and in the car for things to dissipate quickly. Hopefully this was the last bit of strange-to-stranger angst I’ll witness today, and for the remainder of my commuting week. But I suppose it could be my own fault… had I been running on schedule, I would’ve been in my usual R car with my usual even-tempered commuters, and would’ve walked from 59th Street to work, avoiding the 6 altogether.
Lesson learned: get thy arse out of bed and to work on time!
