Strange Subway Happening Part 2

Really, I could make this whole blog Weird Things That Happen to Me on the Subway, or, more appropriately, Weird Things That Happen to Me Because I am a Woman in NYC. But I'm still hoping that Oh, College will be restored soon and that will continue to be my forum for that. In the meantime, however, here is a funny story:

On Saturday morning, a morning on which I was feeling terrifically nasty and unpleasant for a variety of reasons, I took the R train from Prince St to Rector St. This is a feat on weekends, because the NQRW is, in the mysterious ways of MTA, rerouted from Canal St to DeKalb Ave in Brooklyn.

This in itself is worth remarking on. The NQRW in Manhattan is supposed to be a dark, underground train ride. One Saturday I found my R train suddenly bathed in sunlight and hurtling across the Manhattan bridge. Now that I know this, in standard New York fashion, I act totally unfazed when this happens and secretly delight in watching other, far n00bier subway riders' shock.

So I'm sitting in the Prince St station, listening to my iPod, which is basically a universal signal of don't-talk-to-me. And this guy comes up to me. Some people, you have a hard time determining, from the way they are dressed, whether they are chic hipster types or crazy people. This was one such dude. He was wearing a giant corduroy sport coat and green velvet dress pants and, if memory serves me, a bowler. So naturally I'm thinking, this might be a crazy person, or this might be a whole new level of ironi-style I haven't even been made conscious of yet!

He sat down next to me on the bench and said, "Good morning," which might seem like your standard run of the mill greeting, but in New York, when you are a woman sitting alone, and it is from a man who looks like he might be on drugs, it is an automatic bad sign.

"You look nice," he said, and I said thank you and laughed because, believe me, this was definitely not a morning on which I was looking particularly nice. This man then proceeded to ask me all about where I was from and where I was going, and I responded brusquely and curtly-- not because I am, as guys like these so frequently accuse me, a cold hearted bitch, but because this guy had this relatively creepy bug-eyed quality. Call it bullshit, but I believe women have a built in intuition for this sort of thing. If you don't happen to be of a gender that has to structure their behavior around fear of murder and rape, then perhaps you do not understand this.

"Twenty-six," he said. Twenty-six what? Twenty six dead woman skins are necessary to complete your dead-woman-skin sewing project? "I'm twenty-six. And you?"

"I'm twenty," I said.
"Do you want a Coke Zero? I have another one."
"No, no I'm okay, thanks."
"Are you sure? There are no calories!"

There was a nice refreshing pause in the conversation during which I willed the train to arrive.

"Do you have a boyfriend?"
"Yes." The answer is always yes, even if, as in this case, it was a total lie.
"Just asking."

The train arrived and I walked a couple paces away in the hopes that I might discreetly get away from this guy who was making me uncomfortable. No such luck. He sat across from me, in one of those awkward L-shaped seats that MTA scrapped in its newer trains (because they are really inconvenient for anyone who has legs.)

Then, the kicker:
"I'm going to Staten Island."

There was such immense pride in this statement.