A Strange Experience And A Brilliant Idea.
It’s approximately 3am Thursday morning, and I just had a strange experience, as well as a brilliant idea.
I was coming home from a great night out: a fantastic show with Derek James at Crash Mansion followed by another equally fantastic show with Shwa Losben at Public Assembly. FOLLOWED BY Eric Espiritu’s birthday celebration at Rockwood Music Hall! Fun times with Jeffrey and Kyle Patrick, talking about girls and music - seriously, do we discuss anything else ever? The answer: not that I can recall.
Anyway, I walk back to the subway from the cafe, leaving them to a night of continuing excitement…ah well. But I have to get up tomorrow!! Was my reasoning. Many miles to cover to Boston in the AM…but I digress.
I get on the F train at the same time and in the same car with a reasonably cute girl. Bear in mind, this is two in the morning, and I’m not so creepy as to randomly talk to some girl at this ungodly hour, with no one else in the car. Rest assured. I’ve got my seat and my iPod, and she’s got her seat, across from me and down the car a piece. We are not making eye contact.
So now, I’ve painted you this picture. What I’ve left out thus far is the third person to get on the car with us. Picture this: short, thugged out, wasted on something, scraggly little dude stumbles onto the train car and immediately sits down next to semi-cute girl and starts immediately rambling on about something - I couldn’t tell what, since I had my iPod in and was not even a little curious. Oh, and he’s holding a Snapple with the lid off and a 75 percent-eaten artisanal wrap of some kind. Ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. Take my word for it.
So Scraggle Rock is chatting this girl up, and she’s obviously not into it. She’s being polite: little half-smiles, looking out the window, nodding patiently…universal signals for “please leave me alone now”. Dude is wasted so he takes no notice. He’s sitting next to her on the subway row, kind of ignoring the personal space thing…oh, and he’s so wasted that he passes out from time to time AS HE’S TALKING TO HER. Little somatic breaks, maybe thirty seconds each, during which time he variously: drops the wrap on the floor; spills Snapple all over himself; drools a little bit on his own shirt.
In between breaks, he’s still chipping away at her defenses, trying to find an “in” that is definitely not forthcoming. And randomly standing up to take dance breaks. Literally. He stands up from time to time and dances, MJ/Man in the Mirror-style, in front of the subway doors, like some kind of weird Amazon bird mating ritual. Then sits back down again, drools a little bit and talks to her some more.
Pretty cute girl is not liking any of this, and I’m starting to feel quite sorry for her. It goes on all the way to my subway stop. The doors open and I gather my things. I throw her a little glance of sympathy, and she looks at me for the first time. Luckily, the Dude is momentarily unconscious. I tell her “good night”, and she rolls her eyes at her tormentor and says the same back to me, adding a “it’s gonna be a long train ride” type of weight to her voice. Exit.
I’m walking back up to my place from the subway stop, and this is when I have my brilliant idea: what I should have done is the following, and I encourage any man to do this to any woman at any time in any similar situation.
My plan should have been to immediately suss out what was happening, and just say to this girl at the top of my voice, from across the car: “Hey! Oh man, you look so familiar! I feel like I know you from somewhere! Tell me your name again!” And in my mind, in my fantasy in which this all plays out perfectly, she plays along: “Oh yeah! It’s Carol! And you’re…” And I give her my name. And she says, “Oh Phil, right! So good to see you again!” And we talk for a while, completely bullshitting, meanwhile throwing Drunky McWeirdopants off his creepy-drunk game. We get to my stop and I say, “well this is me-I know this great coffee shop here that’s still open, can I buy you a coffee?” And she says “Sure!” And presto, she has an out. Not only that, but then I can say to the guy, “Hey man, you mind? We’re just gonna catch up for a minute.” And the girl and I leave the train, no creepiness, everybody’s happy. Perfect, right?
I only feel the need to write all this out because it bothered me. As it stands, this dude is going to be on this girl’s case all the way home, and I feel like I could have done something, like I should have said or done something, and I didn’t-I just sort of sat there and watched. Then I left. Next time, though. Next time for sure.
