SUBWAY STORRRRYYYY

Before I lived in New York, I thought everyone on the subway was beautiful. Many of the people I rode with were conventionally beautiful: models, actors, Greek guys with good hair. And the people who weren't conventionally beautiful were interesting looking. I could see their journeys on their faces--they were like less-famous Frank McCourts and S. Epatha Murchersaii.

I loved them. I thought, "God, I can't wait to live in this city, to be around these amazing looking people every day."

I don't know where those people have gone.

Since I've moved here, every trip has been like spending 30 minutes in a Bruegel painting. People on the subway bleed and cry, and shout at each other. And they don't have stories, they're just insane and dumb. Today I saw a woman set her Capri Sun on the floor of the N train. As the train moved, the container fell over, the juice spilled slowly out. She righted the container. It fell over again, more juice. She folded the corners of the bottle over, as though that would do something. It fell over one fucking more time, and I jumped out at the next stop. The next train I got onto had a woman slowly eating yogurt out of one of those big jugs. But instead of bringing the spoon to her face, she held the spoon, full of yogurt, down near her knees, and slowly licked the yogurt off of it. Her husband was on his cell phone, shouting at a friend.

New York, as the cliche-meisters will tell you, is a tough town. I don't have a job, I don't have an easily-accessed social network, I don't even have a bed. I have a mattress, on the floor. And riding the subway can compound these indignities into one oily hate-ball.

A few weeks ago, I was riding to an improv class. I was tired, I'd just shamefully deposited a loan check from my parents, and my feet hurt from not working all day.

This train had eclipsed Bruegel and had descended straight into Bosch. Not only was there an odd ranch dressing smell wafting in from somewhere, but someone was playing grating Czech pop music very loudly on their headphones. And the train was running slowly.

At Queensboro Plaza a man and a woman got on the train and stood near me. She was very pretty, and seemed really nice. He was wearing the stupidest shirt I had ever seen, and I have three (3!) Venture Bros. t-shirts. I have a friend who only wears t-shirts with jokes like "Beware of the monster behind my zipper" on them. I know from stupid shirts. And yet, this one was the Platonic ideal of stupid shirts. It was tight and apple green, and had three strips of denim hot-glued to it. I'm sure it cost him $79. Because I'm a bigot, I assumed he was gay.

Wrong, bigot! He was touching that very pretty girl on the ass, and they were discussing their weekend plans. He wasn't touching in a sexual way, just that boring, non-squeezing possessive way that people in committed relationships settle for. They had been together for months! My closest female companion is my roommate's Yorkie.

The unlikely couple got off the train. They were replaced by a young man reading a book of Cervantes works. He had sad eyes.

"Kudos to you, young man." I thought. "I couldn't handle Cervantes, ever."

Then I saw his head. He had the strangest male-pattern baldness ever. It was thinning irregularly all over the top of his head. The front was thin, but the back was...less thin. And the sections of hair weren't delineated straight across the head. His hair was thinning diagonally. He had scars on the top of his head. He had had surgery. He had had brain surgery to make him intelligent enough to read Cervantes. Was he some sort of government experiment? Would government experiments wear JNCOs?

"Stop looking at me, young man." I thought. "And, um, get off the train so I don't have to look at your head. Also please don't explode my brain using your new Firestarter powers."

I had to avert my eyes. That guy genuinely scared me. I realized that I was on a train ride to Hell. I started to have a panic attack. I knew that if that train didn't get ot 34th Street in the next two minutes, someone was going die (probably me). And then, I looked at the floor...

And saw a toenail. A human toenail. Someone had been clipping their toes on the subway. Or somehow, they had come in trailing human detritus and had decided to leave some on the train. Was I sitting on a pube? Was I sitting in a puddle of blood? Did I have Hepatitis? Would it matter, or was the brain-prober across the car going to pop my skull like a grape before I could even get tested? Would my hep-blood infect the other passengers?

Then the door opened and I walked onto the subway platform. It still smelled like ranch dressing but I knew I wouldn't live anywhere else in the world.

Than on that subway platform.