The midnight train going anywhere...

Ah, the subway. The rich vein of scum that is the lifeblood of the city. The poor man's answer to transportation and the rich man's answer to "too drunk to drive home." Where one can hone one's ability to ignore the other 200 people packed into the same car despite their raised voices, gigantic feet that stomp on yours, and general stench. Where one can learn how to avoid eye contact with 400 eyes at once and fade into a crowd when a panhandler walks by. It's a city unto itself, possessed of its own social castes, snack vendors, and a code of conduct far stricter than one finds in most elevators, encompassing etiquette for food consumption, music playing and listening, conversational faux pas, drunken weaving... you name it, there's a different way of dealing with it on the subway.

The subway irritates me. I get very peevish very easily on long underground trips, particularly on weekends, when some small voice in my head is always saying 'Don't we do this enough on weekdays? Can't we just take a cab?' while the other small voice is saying 'No we can't take a cab, you idiot, we'd be bankrupt in no time if we took cabs everywhere!' The two voices usually get into knock-down, drag-out fistfights with each other, which makes me slightly more irritable. And when this is going on in my head at 3:00 am on a Saturday night local 2 train that I'm doomed to be on for 150 blocks, I get really antsy.

And when I'm that antsy and am suddenly confronted by obnoxious people on the train... well... I get VERY irritable.

So, at 3:00 am on Saturday, when Connor and I had finished a late-night sushi binge on MacDougal (which involved a whole lot of obnoxious drunk people in the restaurant), we clambered tiredly onto the 2 train and I braced myself for the coming grouchiness. So did Connor - he gets a lot of flack when I'm grouchy.

We got on the train and were immediately subjected to Obnoxious Columbia Students. There were four of them - 2 men who were very gay and 2 women who were way too tan, and all in very expensive looking clothing. They weren't doing anything particularly annoying, per se, but they were talking REALLY LOUDLY about the most inane details of their oh-so-completely-uninteresting Columbia undergrad lives. I was able to block most of it out and focus mainly on digesting the huge amount of spicy tuna, salmon, and yellowtail in my stomach, and wondering who the aging rock-star we'd seen in the restaurant was. Until I heard the girl next to me announce: "You should totally have picked up your phone, because if you had, I was totally, honestly ready to walk down 122nd Street, the WHOLE WAY to the D train, BY MYSELF, at like midnight. I was READY. I know it wouldn't have been very safe or a good idea, but I was READY. I would have DONE it."

Oh, for Christ's sake! 122nd Street at midnight? If you LIVE near Columbia and are on a train filled with other people who live near Columbia and are really dumb enough to think that 122nd St is THAT bad... 2 choices for you. Either A) keep it to yourself because everyone will think you are a MORON or will try to mug you now that they know you're easy pickings, or B) take a stroll through Bed-Stuy or Jamaica or the 155th Projects or even near Fordham - then see how scary 122nd St. is at midnight.
Twit.

Finally these upstanding young citizens got off the train and left us in relative peace. I was content for a few seconds to contemplate the fish in my tummy.

But not for long! Oh no, on this ever-changing, evolving, developing, degenerating world of Subway Travel, the worst is never the worst. Something far fouler is always around the bend.

Two young guys - Dominican, if the one guy's shirt can be believed - sat down across from us. They were having a lively conversation in rapid Spanish, seemed nice enough, weren't bothering anyone overtly. Except the one guy was... how do I put this? He was a big guy to begin with, probably 6'1" or 6'2", so he was having some difficulty fitting himself comfortably onto the narrow train seat. Makes perfect sense. But he was one of those big guys who: A) appears to have very recently become fat and doesn't quite know what to do with his extra skin, and B) feels the need not to just sit, but to LOUNGE, in order to be comfortable. Well, with his stature and the smallness of the train, there was no way he could get comfortable, but instead of just dealing with that fact, he instead chose to twitch and twist and gallumph about, crossing and uncrossing his legs, trying to fling his arms over the back of the seat - even though there IS no back to those seats on the train - lean back, lean forward, wrap himself around the pole nearby... and continuously lift up his T-shirt to... I don't know... reposition his gut? Air it out? Show as many people as possible a sneak shot of his gross belly? I got several peeks at it before turning away, now contemplating that the fish in my belly wanted to escape.

But, alas! When I turned away, my eyes were met with a far LESS appealing sight! Yes, it existed! There was a woman sitting further down the bench seat, picking at her eye makeup in a small mirror. She was shaped like a Hershey Kiss. As if she had been sitting for her entire life and her body had just taken up the least gravity-resistant shape it could. She had no discernable breasts - if there were any beneath her bright pink shirt, they were masked by the stretches of that shirt as it endeavored to envelope a bulging, flabby stomach that burgeoned out from the waistband of a pair of black ripped leggings. NOT PANTS - leggings. I could see a large portion of her thigh through a rip in the leggings. It was as unattractive as the rest of her. She was very unpleasant to look at. But it was pretty much stare at her, or the guy across from me, or risk falling asleep on the train - a fate worse than death. (The rats might eat you if you fall asleep!) So I continued to watch her placidly pick at her eye makeup. After a while she put her mirror away and started to... oh my god... she was like... PETTING her distended belly. Rubbing it, as if she were pregnant, but she was NOT pregnant. Make no mistake. I know a round, firm pregnant belly when I see one, and this one was neither round nor firm - it was gelatinous... oh my god was she tucking her hand up UNDER her roll? Yes she was! I almost vomited up my sushi. She was petting and LIFTING her belly now.

I had to look away. It was horrendous. But when I turned, there was the gigantic fat man again, pulling up his T-shirt and breathing heavily! I saw his stomach. The yellowtail in my own stomach made a leap for the esophagus. Dear god, where could I turn?

I turned back toward the gross lady, thinking I'd just look past her and further down the car, but I was distracted because she appeared to be REMOVING her almost-flattened-by-gravity breast from her shirt. It was morbidly fascinating, watching her try to resurrect her almost-dead, deflated piece of femininity and display it to the world. Horror-stricken, I watched as she pulled it upward from the depths of her pink shirt, before plopping it back down - mostly still covered, thank goodness - into her bra, now in some semblance of cleavage.

I managed not to hurl for the last few minutes it took us to get to our stop, but just barely, and I had to keep my eyes closed. But I've never smelled sweeter air than the rancid bouquet of the 3rd Avenue-149th stop's fetid track water when I got out of that car.