In an effort to save money on gas, and as an extra bullet in the chamber when I find myself in a sustainability smugness-showdown, I try to take the train as often as I can. It has its upsides; all of which I just listed. And it has its downsides, which an infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite number of years wouldn’t even get half way through.
Of the downsides, there are some real stand outs. The first being people who treat the train like it is their car. Now, I don’t mean that they adorn the back of the train with fake testicles or plaster it with stickers of tribal butterflies and Calvins peeing on anything you can imagine[1]. I mean that the train’s most frequent passengers assume that, because it is their main mode of transportation, it has the same sphere of solitude that is provided by a car. Everyone knows that your car serves as a mobile kitchen, bathroom, and open mic amalgam. You are free to sing, fart, eat, brush your teeth, shave, get dressed or undressed, and talk on the phone, often all at the same time. This works because you are alone in your car, and everyone else is too busy doing the same things in their car to notice how ridiculous you look eating a breakfast burrito, buttoning your shirt, and calling in to win tickets to a concert that you don’t even want to attend.
This doesn’t work on the train. You aren’t alone, there are no doors around you, and other passengers have absolutely nothing better to do than observe you making a fool out of yourself. But this doesn’t stop people from having extremely private conversations, “Well the tests came back positive, and it’s either you or Tony, or Pete, or Tiny, or Doug, or Mike, or Theo, or Baby Chico or…”, eating a four course meal comprised completely of Subway subs, or flossing[2]. I am all about oral hygiene, but when you take a loose piece of floss out of the pocket of your jeans, I think you may be doing more harm than good.
But that all pales in comparison to the living ipecac that is people who treat the train like a singles bar. I should qualify ‘people’ because it is a very particular type of person. Crappy old guys. No one else seems to think that some benevolent force in the universe crafted a dating service on wheels for the deservedly lonely.
When an 18 year old girl is reading a book and listening to her iPod that is her way of preemptively saying no to any manner of conversation. If conversation was a car, the book and iPod combo isn’t just a stop sign, it is a train crossing, it is a drawbridge on fire; do not proceed. But these public transit romantics know no bounds and are willing to go out on a limb for love. Or, their ability to pick up on even the most obvious of social clues has been washed away from years of getting drunk of mouthwash and cough syrup.
I was sitting next to some human leather and overheard him ask the girl sitting across from us if it was her boyfriend that she just got off the phone with. She shook her head and looked like someone had just puked in her mouth. I glanced over at the Wal-Mart Don Juan. He was totally unphased. When the girl got off the train and another girl, sporting book and iPod armor, sat down, he got right back on the mechanical bull.
What I would like to know is how these guys envision these conversations playing out. For every hundred girls who respond by looking like they are digesting barb wire, is it expected that one conversation to go their way?
“Hey missy, was that your boyfriend on the phone?”
“No, would you please be? I have a thing for weathered men of indeterminable ages with first generation walk men hanging from their jorts.”
“No it isn’t. But I must admit, I noticed your yellowed Big Dogs t-shirt from across the train. I was hoping you could come and sit next to me despite there being several other empty seats.”
“I’ve always been into guys older than my dad who look and smell like the Crypt Keeper.”
“Your skin looks like KFC original recipe friend chicken. Have sex with me right now Colonel.”
Since I have zero desire to ever enter into a conversation with any of these locomotive Lotharios, I’ll never know what is going their heads. Maybe it is a Zen thing where these guys are striving to be the living embodiment of kōans; I’ll hear a thousand trees fall in forests I’m not in before these guys ever make the smallest amount of headway. Maybe it’s a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. If anything will prove definitively that there is a god, it is one of these interactions ending in anything other than a complete strike-out. It will also prove that god is evil and vengeful, and I will start building my ark immediately. Realistically, it is the same compulsion that makes people play the lottery, and I have witnessed quite of few of these types stockpiling scratch tickets while I wait in line at a gas station to buy a Coke.
So, is it this population of grizzled gamblers who funds our public education system through their lottery purchases and then teaches anyone who uses public transit to always have a cell phone, whistle, pepper spray, taser, or pit bull on hand? Yes. Yes, it is. We could consider them our nation’s great educators. But we shouldn’t; they are just skeazy old guys.
[1] The most inspired version I have ever seen was a Calvin/smirking boy peeing on the words “ex-wife.” It appeared to be a custom job and it should go without saying that it was on a truck with truck nuts. Now available in both “flesh” and “camo” colors.
[2] I have seen this twice. Twice.
