New York break: subway spit storms and chicken bones

Yesterday’s ride to Brighton and Coney Island took 1 hour and 10 minutes. Going there, the train stopped repeatedly, waiting for clearance. The cars were nearly empty and sitting there in the dark long tunnels, waiting for the lurch that would mean movement at last, tried my patience, though others sat listlessly, impervious to the delay, to the silence of waiting.

Three guys got on at a Brooklyn stop. They were immersed in a spitball (through straws) fight. In the almost empty car, they could sit at a distance from each other and make the soppy crumbled balls fly high over to the far corners of the train. Watching them litter the car, so that the wet little mounds would adhere to seats and walls, I felt the overwhelming desire to tell them to cut it out, and in fact – to clean up the mess. Of course I didn’t, not because I felt threatened – the chances of these particular thugs beating me down were, after all, small, but because I knew they would not listen. There was a moment where I thought of doing it anyway, just for shock value (they surely would recoil), but then decided to simply move myself further out of their range with what I thought was a great display of indignation (I'm sure this only fueled their spit).

I sat at one end, across from a guy who was in workman’s (construction?) clothing, reading Oggi (Italian-American?). He was equally disgusted.

“That big guy is the worst” he told me. “I was a kid once, I got into trouble, but this – this beats the hell out of my pranks.” I tried to imagine if a prank could be smaller than spit balls and still be called a prank.

And the spitballs mounted. More passengers got on, not knowing that they were entering a battle zone. I could not stand the image of sitting in that spit waste, but I watched anyway. It took another group of (high school?) students to finally distract me. Their chatter about that “bitch girl” who “did what she f******* pleased” was riveting enough to draw me away from the speckles of spit bullets.

Besides, by now, my senses were being assailed in other ways as a woman took out (from a dirty plastic bag) a box of Popeye chicken and chewed her way around the thigh bone. She left the bag of chicken remains on the seat, not too far from the spit mess. Others got on, sat down, got off, not knowing, locked in their own conversations and thoughts about whatever destination they were heading for.

My Oggi man got off with a friendly wave at me and somehow I felt the bond of riding out a spit storm with him. That kind of momentary connection with a stranger happens on trains and subways.