It’s 5:59 and I have to get from 26th and Park to my train in the basement of Grand Central by 6:10.

Sure, the next train is only 23 minutes later. But Little G has been hassling me about not playing enough of late; he was spoiled by the abundance of Dad-ness over the Christmas break, and then again with the three-day weekend earlier this week.

“Play with me, Daddy!” he’s implored me all week as I set out for work. If I don’t work, you don’t get Legos, I tell him. Hit ‘em where it hurts.

So I had to be on that 6:10 to give the kid an hour before bed.

Making a train in 11 minutes is, paradoxically, a bit easier than making one in, say, 14 minutes. If I have 16 minutes, I can walk the whole route at a brisk clip. If I have 11 minutes, I have to run the whole thing. If I have 14 minutes, it’s a nebulous mix of walking and jogging, and sometimes I get the mix wrong.

So I ran, and actually made the thing with about two minutes to spare.

The 6:10 doesn’t leave at 6:10. Maybe it’s that one-minute late rule the New York Times unearthed, I say. But the minute passes, and we’re still sitting.

The conductor walks by. I don’t take the 6:10 much but I always notice the guy on it. He seems like he’s drunk. I’ve never smelled hootch on him or anything, but he just has that look–the glassy eyes, the Weebles Wobble demeanor, the jaunty humor that doesn’t quite meet its mark, the layer of permascruff on his face that makes one think of hangovers, unnatural desires for bloody marys, and internal promises to quit smoking.

The conductor sorts out some sort of door trouble and we’re off.

But in Harlem, it’s a similar story. We close the doors at 6:22 and sit.

The wobbly conductor walks by again, talking to himself.

“Can we fasten the door down there?” he says to no one in particular.

I watch him pass through our car, then see him through the window of the next car, making his way up the aisle, looking for the faulty door.

Little G awaits at home, Legos in hand, looking toward the door.

C’mon, dude. Get this thing moving.

There was a peculiar fellow on the 8:16 today. He was a big white guy, around 6′ 3″ and 220. He wore the geeky horn-rimmed glasses one tends to associate with psychos, and he had a blackened tooth on the side of his mouth.

I first spotted him when he stopped in the small alcove near the door that heads to the next car, next to the 1 3/4-seater. He stopped, put his bag down, and searched frantically for something in his wallet–presumbably a ticket. He seemed overly agitated, and I moved him out of the file of Ordinary Commuter into another file marked Person of Interest.

I sort of forgot about him as I lamented my dubious judgement in grabbing a window seat in a four-seater, and my foolhardly thinking in predicting that both the seat next to me and the seat across from me would remain open (seat next filled in North White, seat across filled…tightly…in White Plains).

The nervous guy had left the door alcove area, but then returned, trying the door between cars and failing to successfully get through it. (It was not locked.) He looked more agitated. He spoke hurriedly to the person sitting in the 1-3/4 seater; I don’t know what was said. The man wore a wedding ring, which led me to think he was not psycho. Then again, if we can borrow a hackneyed ’80s sitcom convention, maybe it was married life that pushed him to psychocity.

The man then disappeared down the aisle again.

Around this time, other people too had moved the man into their Person of Interest file; perhaps it’s the glut of terrorism stories in the news these past few weeks. There was the casual glancing around the train, to see who might be a potential ally should the man go crazy. The man cattycorner to me was an older fellow with a bad gimp; he wouldn’t do much good, but his cane, sitting on the seat between him and the woman who’d squeezed in across from me, might come in handy. That’s the way you think when you’re squeezed onto a train with a potential psycho and no way out.  

The man walked past us a third time. Eerily, he’d removed his jacket and was wearing–yes–a long-sleeve camouflage t-shirt. He was murmuring to himself and pacing nervously. He bent down and fished something from his bag. I looked across the aisle and saw three men of about 40 who were friends; they looked healthy and alert–good allies, just in case.

The agitated man stood in the entrance/exit train vestibule as we approached 125th. One of the three men across the aisle trained a careful eye on him. My back turned to the vestibule, I watched my commuter colleague for clues.

Thankfully, the psycho guy jumped off at 125th. A dozen people on our car followed him out, relieved to see his back.

I could see the guy on the platform. He sprinted into an elevator, slamming into a huge black guy who was trying to get out. Once inside, his arm crept outside the elevator, his fingers frantically slapping at the buttons on the outside wall, thinking this was perhaps the first elevator in elevator history where the riders select their floor with buttons placed on the outside of the car.

The doors shut and the psycho man was gone from our sight.

Standing on the 5:46 home the other day, I had the express pleasure of scoping out a bunch of faces from my unique vantage point. One guy had just plopped himself down on a folding seat. The folding seats always give their user the look of being beaten down, perhaps because they’re a little lower than the typical seats. This poor fellow looked like he’d had a horrible day. His hangdog face was twitching, his cheeks thrusting upward every five seconds or so as he tried to unwind, which seemed to make the problem even worse. With each thrust of his cheeks, the gentleman’s eyeglasses, perched near the end of his nose, rose and fell about a half inch.

I was able to grab a seat after things cleared out in White Plains, and boy, was I happy I did. I was facing, albeit three rows down from, a heavy-set woman of about 20 who’d boarded with a friend at 125th. The woman boarded with a giant frosted bun of some sort. Not the tasty and vaguely fresh ones, such as those for sale at Cinnabon, but some nasty one you’d buy for 75 cents at the bodega. Her hands were covered in the sticky stuff, and people were sure to get out of her way as she squeezed her considerable frame into a tight five-seater.

Once she’d polished off the frosted bun, the woman started on what looked like a batch of fake grape Starburst candies. She chewed the gummy candies with noticeable effort, mouth wide open, frankly resembling a cow making her way through the morning cud.

Periodically, the woman would jam an index finger in her mouth, and scoop out the stuck grape candy like a croupier raking chips across the felt table.

The woman across from her, packed knee to knee, looked on in horror, fearful some purple saliva would land on her person.

It was a bit difficult to get myself psyched for the Missus’s dinner after that experience.

[image: animationlibrary.com]

I had the pleasure of visiting the Metro-North station at 125th and Park around midnight Saturday, heading home after an annual gathering of the old rugby club at the famed Bohemian Beer Hall in Astoria. (The beer choice at the Hall reminded me of McSorley’s: you could have a light-colored beer or a dark one.)

I’d had a reader ask about safety issues up there on 125th, and readers offered unanimous agreement that the station is safe during the daylight hours. I didn’t get the sense that it was unsafe at midnight (of course, there are safer parts of the city at night than under the train tracks at 125th and Park), but it was sort of depressing. Both the men’s and womens’ rooms had handwritten signs on them explaining they were closed, which is not what you want to see after a night at the Bohemian Beer Hall. Maybe I’m just a cynic, but a lot of the customers at midnight on Saturday are half in the bag, or all the way in the bag, or maybe just a quarter in the bag. I think this encourages them to find a spot outside to go; if I lived in the vicinity, I’d be, well, pissed off.

There was no police presence, other than a parked and empty police car on the side of the station. When I’d arrived earlier, at around 6:30 p.m., a small police office in the building was open, with a few cops inside.

There was, however, either a large mouse or an undersized rat flitting about the waiting room, grabbing spent McDonald’s french fries off the floor and returning to his home under the baseboard. Each appearance caused a voluble squeal from a pair of women seated on a bench. After his first few appearances, they spent the remainder of their wait with their feet up on the bench.

Yo, Metro-North–what was with the 20-minute ride from 125th to Grand Central this morning?

You pulled out of 125th at 8:53, like you normally do. You sat at Blackberry Hill for about four minutes, waiting at the mouth of the tunnel like a child afraid to enter a haunted house.

Then you positively crawled your way through the tunnel before resting at track 23. All told, a 20-minute ride that covered about 80 blocks–pulling in at 9:13 instead of your scheduled 9:04.

That’s even late by your lax standards.  

If you thought you saw a substantial show of force at the 125th Street stop this morning, you did indeed: the NYPD was massed to show potential terrorists they’ve got the turf covered, reports Yonkers Man Mugged…I mean, the Journal News.

The daily reports:

The joint effort by the New York City Police Department and officers from the railroad, known as a counterterrorism surge, was limited to the 125th Street station, railroad spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said.

He got on in White Plains.

He had all the earmarks of a daytripper–one-way ticket to Grand Central, freshly bought Daily News, lumpy countenance and tacky salt-and-pepper blazer of a professor at a monolithic, mid-ranking state school.

He flipped through the News half-heartedly, elbows sticking a little further out in the two-seater than a seasoned commuter would allow, then took out his day planner: He was slated to “return to Maine” this Friday.

Lumpy then took out his cellphone, and scrolled along, looking for a name in his directory.

The call went through. He chatted about being on the train, about his stay, about meeting at some point in the “mid-afternoon.”

He hung up.

The train ambled along. His phone rang around Wakefield. He chatted briefly. I tuned him out.

We hit 125th and headed for the tunnel. Lumpy’s phone rang again, some peppy, annoying ring tone.

“Hi Ange,” he said.

“No, I…”

“But I…”

“I didn’t…”

“Ange” wasn’t letting Lumpy get a word in edgewise.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m….sorry.”

The train hurtled into the blackness and Lumpy’s line went dead.

He stared at the phone and thought about his unfinished business: a misinterpreted comment, an unaccepted apology, the 10 interminable minutes until his next attempt to rectify the situation.

Sucks for him.

Boy, did I think I was going to be early when the 8:17 chugged in to 125th at 8:49. Boy, was I wrong.

It took all of 18 minutes to get from 125th to Grand Central Terminal, well above the already painstaking 12-13 minutes it normally takes.

I want a full explanation waiting on my train seat when I leave the city today.

After visiting the accountant on the Upper East Side last night, I had the express pleasure of taking Metro North from 125th Street in Harlem, instead of my usual Grand Central launching pad.

The Harlem MTA station looks like it was at once grand, though cheap paneling like your neighbor’s old basement probably covers up much of the grandeur. It’s a big rectangle, about the size of a great loft apartment, smack in the middle of the ghetto. It’s a block west of the 4-5-6 subway stop, prompting one to wonder why they’re not all one and the same; perhaps that’s a question for Engine Bob.

While the homeless are out in full force outside the station–even on a rainy Thursday at 9 p.m.–it’s well-policed inside, with an officer sitting in an office whose door is marked with a huge NYPD logo for all to see, and others on foot.

Framed photos dot the walls and tell the story of the station’s overhaul in the past decade, so presumably this is as good as it gets at 125th. Further hampering the design, one of those giant three-headed blue garbage depots (slots for plastics/paper/regular garbage) sits in the middle of the room.

The view from the platform is kind of neat, with the baby blue erector set approach to the Triboro on one end, the famous Apollo Theater on another end, and bustling 125th below.

The building next to the platform held some sort of art installment: lights shining through green and pink fabric, with silhouettes of animals (eagles, moose, rhinos) affixed to the walls. Weird, especially after a long day.

Once on board, I squeezed in next to an old Hassidic key who did word searches with themes like “Parts of a Typewriter” (Home Row…Carriage…etc.). Once he completed a puzzle, he tore it out, folded it and place d it in his knapsack, like he was going to show his handiwork to his wife.

Two construction workers volubly discussed their income; one shouted his weekly takehome ($630!…no, $625!) for all the train to hear, while the other fiddled with a calculator.

Long day. I sprung for a cab at Hawthorne Station.

Yesterday, it was snow, sleet, freezing rain and locusts falling from the sky (”I’m shoveling Margaritas,” one Brooklyn maintenance man told the Times), and the train was all of two minutes late.

Today, it was sunny and clear, though butt-cold. And what hell awaited me on the 8:17. The train pulled up at 8:21 — not unexpected on the heels of a Nor-easter. We were going slow past White Plains and Scarsdale, and probably on course to be a bit late.

But that was OK. I had a two-seater to myself. I had the papers, the iPod and the new BlackBerry.

Then we slowed to a trickle somewhere between Fleetwood and Mount Vernon West. Then, at 8:52 — when we’re usually pulling into 125th – we slowed to a dead stop.

“We’ve got a switch failure,” said the conductor. “There are a couple trains ahead of us, then they’ll let us go. Should be 5-10 minutes.”

People called work. People shuffled. Other trains flew by. Why hadn’t their switch failed?

The conductor came on four minutes later. “They’re on the scene, working on the switch failure,” he said. “We’ll keep you posted.”

I got a little nervous. I hadn’t realized there were fix-it guys involved. I had no water. I had no food since I’d eaten my “emergency” granola bar a month ago and never replaced it. I was done with the Times (though saving Sports for lunch…spring training!) and half done with the Journal. I should’ve saved the Money section, instead of throwing it out. Why hadn’t I packed an emergency book?

At the stroke of 9, the man came back on. “The switch failure has been…uh…solved,” he said. We started moving.

It was a crawl the rest of the way, along with another dead stop under the 153rd Street sign in the Bronx, when I actually thought of busting through a window and walking.

We got in at 9:41. That’s 36 minutes late; even by Metro North’s generous “on time” standards, that’s just plain late.  

Dreadful commute? Let us know: trainjotting@gmail.com.