* On the 5:27 heading out of Gotham last night. Cattycorner to me in a six-seater is a traveler–woman of about 50, kinky brown Mrs. Roper-From-Three’s-Company hair, green t-shirt with an elephant and ‘Spirit of India’ on the front, ugly green suitcase between her legs. She’s wide open, taking-it-all-in eyes, and a big smile, like she’s enjoying every aspect of this trip.

 She’s sharing the six-seater with what looks like her daughter–20, grungy, not quite as excited as Mom.

Conductor comes by, cheap cologne announcing his arrival a few seconds before.

He takes Mrs. Roper’s ticket, then ventures on to the next row, the next row.

Mrs. Roper mumbles some foreign version of “excuse me.” Conductor turns around. Mrs. Roper wants her ticket stub back.

A seasoned commuter guy across the aisle says to her, “Souvenir?”

“Yes, souvenir,” she says with a big smile. “Souvenir.”

* I’m on the 8:43 this morning, feeling a bit guilty about occupying the aisle seat of an otherwise empty three-seater. A woman and her young son, around Little G’s age, gets on at White Plains. We make eye contact and I offer the two seats to my left.

“Sure!” she says.

Just like Little G, the boy, about 4, finds looking out the window better viewing than even Dinosaur Train and Cars. (Speaking of Cars, he rocks the Lightning McQueen sneakers.)

I take a break from the Times movie reviews (”Robin Hood” sounds lame, “Letters to Juliet” lamer, but “Best Worst Movie” might just work) and wonder about them for a second. Mom taking the boy to work for the day, or maybe Dad’s gonna call it a half-day and meet Mom and Boy for the circus, FAO Schwarz, the Brooklyn Acquarium?

Boy still stares out the window, Ritz Carlton twins glimmering in the distance.

“Bye bye, Dad’s apartment!” he says with a small wave.

OK, then.

* 9 a.m. arrival at GCT from Stamford this morning, our New Haven Line correspondent  ConnecticEnergy sees a man sleeping across a three-seat bench on a jammed train.

A man approaches, stares, and mutters, “Business Class gets everything.”

[image: threescompany.com]

Some transit-related eavesdroppings from Overheard in New York.

Loud black girl on cell phone: You know where the train station is, where all them homeless people live? Yeah, that’s where I go get my hair done. She doesn’t fuck my hair up, because I told her, “you best not fuck my hair up.” And now she never does. (chuckles)

–LIRR

Mom to son, after looking through his phone: Who is in your phone as b-i-t-c-h?

–M60 Bus

Guy with teardrop tattoo: Dude, moonshine is awesome. It’s 99% alcohol and 1% liquor.

–L Train
 

Conductor: Please stand clear of the closing doors. (pause) Please stand clear of the closing doors. (pause) Station police officer, please apprehend the man holding the doors in the 6th car. (pause, then doors close) Hahaha, that always works.

–B Train

MTA engineer: Please use all exits. For the love of god, people, use all the doors to get out of the train. What the fuck, people, use the doors. Thank you.

–G Train

Conductor: Please stop holding the doors. (people continue to hold doors). I’m already on the clock, I have nowhere to be.

–A Train

Disgruntled subway conductor: Listen up, y’all! This train needs to move! Do not try to hold open the doors! Do not run at closing doors! Do not stick anything in the doors! That includes arms, legs, obnoxiously expensive purses, children, animals, whatever! Let’s go!

–1 Train

Conductor: Please stand clear of the doors or it will bruise yo face.

–C Train

Thirty-something black man to Catholic high school girls: So what’s it take for a couple of black guys to get to play with y’all’s skirts?

–Metro-North

Friday evening on the 5:27 out of Gotham.

Normal looking dude standing and reading the New Yorker in the vestibule. Neat gray hair the color of iron, tweed blazer, khaki slacks, glasses. The word professorial comes to mind.

The conductor comes around to check tickets. I’m not paying attention until there’s some friction between the Professor and the Conductor. It appeas the conductor has tried to give the Professor that stamped stub that would typically go on the back of your seat, if you had one.

The Professor makes some irate hand gestures along the lines of “What the f*** do you expect me to do with this thing?” His reaction seems way out of line, given the situation.

The conductor raises his hands and steps away, the way you would when you’ve raised the attention of an angry Rottweiler. The conductor gingerly steps toward the man and sticks the stub in the poster ad next to him. It’s an ad for Smart Water.

As the conductor walks away, the Professor shakes his head vigorously to show his displeasure.

He keeps shaking his head from Fordham to Mount Vernon West. It’s uncanny. I start to think maybe the guy is unwell–failed to take his meds and minor things like this just set him off.

Finally, past Mount Vernon, his head-shakes slow and blend into the normal rattle and roll of the train.

Fifteen minutes later, near North White Plains, the Professor shifts his body, turning sideways against the Smart Water ad. He spies the ticket stub and the head-shaking recommences. His mumbles to himself in disgust at the conductor’s actions.

What a tool, I think as I shift one row up to an empty three-seater.

At Valhalla, the same Conductor comes by. He stops next to me and says something. He asks for my ticket. I tell him I just moved up a seat — same as I do just about every ride home. He testily grabs my ticket stub from the seat behind me and places it one seat up.

“You gotta bring this wichoo!” he says curtly. “It’s yours!”

OK, maybe the Professor and the Conductor are both tools.

Besides elicting one of the most bizarre obit second paragraphs as I’ve seen in some time, the passing of famous writer Dominick Dunne earlier this week prompted an entertaining yard from Conductor Bobby, the New Haven Line staffer with a knack for spying–and approaching–celebs on board.

He writes:

I’ve seen the author Dominick Dunne on my train several times over the years. He is always very impeccably dressed and looks as if he is headed to a polo match or some swanky country club. I recognized him from his eyeglasses, which are horn-rimmed and round. They make him look oh so much like a senior member of the Harry Potter fan club.The first time I met Mr. Dunne was on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the Nicole Brown Simpson slayings. He had a garment bag slung over his shoulder when he got on the train in New Haven, which is about a 40 minute ride from his home in Old Lyme.

The two struck up a conversation about the O.J. trial, and Conductor Bobby apparently made enough of an impression on Dunne to worm his way into the roman a clef Dunne wrote about the trial.

The novel was Dunne’s thinly veiled memoir about his experiences at the O. J. trial and how he, somewhere along the way, lost the objectivity of a reporter and became emotionally involved in the case. The novel’s protagonist’s name is Gus Bailey.In the last chapter of the book, page 343 to be exact, gossip columnist Liz Smith asks Gus if he ever gets sick of discussing O. J.:

“I talk about him to Deb at the gas station when she puts gas in my car.

I talk about him to the train conductor on Metro North.”

The year 2000.

The towers stood tall, Mike Piazza hit mammoth home runs, and Ashleigh Banfield was all over MSNBC. Conductor to the Stars Bobby has an Ashleigh sighting on Metro-North (she lives in Connecticut), along with a topless woman who sounds like a lost participant in some Boardy Barn Sunday fun.

It’s all on Derailed.

Bobby writes:

I was boarding the train in Grand Central, when a woman who looked exactly like former MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield ran past me. A few years back, the bespectacled Banfield was the hot rising celebrity journalist, and her reports were all over the cable news channels. But then she criticized NBC and ticked off the studio brass. They fired her, and now she works for Court TV (Tru TV).

When I collected the woman’s ticket, I thought that I was mistaken. Now, up close, this woman looked too young and blond to be Asleigh..

“For a minute there, I thought you were Ashleigh Banfield.” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve heard that before.”

“But you’re much younger.”

“Bless you.” She said.

The woman’s husband was sitting next to her, he looked up, laughed and said, “You’re kidding…right? This is Ashleigh.”

“Wow. You’re younger than you look on TV.”

“Well,” she said. “I like to tell people that I’m 50 ( she’s 41), then they think I look great for my age.”

Since we’re on the topic of trains getting jammed up in tornadoes today, here’s a peak at what it looks like when it actually happens.

Thanks to Conductor Bobby for the link.

It’s every commuter’s worst nightmare, short of a bomb or some other catastrophic event. Just as the conductor approaches, you realize you’ve forgotten your monthly pass.

Happened just this morn on the Stamford train, says our Nutmeg State correspondent Connectic Energy. The conductor was about two rows away when a man–described as a typical commuter, 45, well dressed, bopping to iPod, flicking on Blackberry–started rifling through his pockets and patting himself up and down like a third base coach on speed.

Alas, the ticketless wonder played it all wrong.

“I forgot my wallet,” he told the conductor. “You’re not going to hassle me, are you?”

If I’m that conductor, I probably say something about how people on the train are expected to have a ticket, ya know, and those that don’t are in for a spot of trouble. If that constitutes a “hassle,” well, it ain’t my fault.

The conductor eyes the man up good and slow and long, top to bottom, a good five seconds’ worth of deciding whether the man deserved a break.

Turns out he did, in fact, be deemed break-worthy.

“When you go to New York,” the conductor said in a vaguely John Wayne-ish drawl, “it’s good to have your wallet with you.”

The conductor continued with his business, and the ticketless man slumped to his seat. He’d won the war, yes, but lost a bloody battle.

ConnecticEnergy tells me about some scary moments on the Stamford train pulling into Grand Central about a half hour ago. Somewhere between 125th and Grand Central, the train stopped, and one conductor conversed with the other across the P.A. system.

It went something like this:

“Bobby, someone’s playing around with the buttons again. Can you check it out?”

“Got it, Jimmy, no problem.”

Bobby presumably went to check on some doofus pulling the emergency brake or something, then got back on the house mic–telling Jimmy to call an ambulance to be waiting on Grand Central when the train pulled in.

The next announcement went something like this:

“Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the delay. We have a medical emergency…Is there anyone on board who can offer medical assistance?”

The conductor gave his car location, but apparently no one was forthcoming, so he got on the P.A. again.

“Ladies and gentlemen, as I said, we have a medical emergency. Is there anyone on board who’s trained to give medical assistance?”

Moments later, the train pulled into the station. Connectic Energy did not notice rescue personnel and did not know the end result.

Whether it’s brawlin’ late-night riders or hemorraging day-hoppers, Conductor Bobby’s posts always seem to have a fair bit of blood in them.

His latest:

“Sorry dude!” Said the passenger, now showing me his thumb which was dripping with blood. “I sliced it at work today and it won’t stop bleeding.” I looked down at the ticket he’d just handed me, still not comprehending his apology. There, between my index finger and thumb, lay a crimson colored piece of paper. It was the size and shape of a powder blue Metro North ticket, but streaks of plasma had left it unrecognizable.

But it’s not just blood. It’s snot. It’s sweat. It’s phlegm.

I frequently catch passengers holding tickets in their mouths. Sometimes they’ll go as far as using them as dental floss, spending the better part of the ride mining molars for forgotten bits of a $200 business lunch and then handing me a ticket covered in spit and shreds of steak tartar.

8:16 hurtling toward Gotham this morn.

Conductor comes around for tickets. The man in front of me is Hispanic, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. He’s snoozing.

“Tickets, please,” says the conductor, a normal looking man, about 40, black.

The Hispanic man wakes up. He doesn’t have a ticket.

“Where you going?” asks the conductor. All eyes gradually shift to the scene. It’s more interesting than the Monday Journal.

The man mumbles something.

“Fourteen dollars,” says the conductor. “You owe me $14.”

The Hispanic man mumbles again. The conductor walks away to punch more tickets.

He returns about 10 minutes later.

“Fourteen dollars,” he says, then in Spanish (catorce?). “You owe me money.”

The conductor is not rude, not disrespectful. Just direct.

“Next stop is 125th,” says the conductor. “Where you trying to go?”

The rider mumbles something about Mt. Kisco, then “Plezz.”

“Pleasantville?” says the conductor. “Mt. Kisco? You’re goin’ the wrong way.”

The conductor realizes he’s not getting money out of the man. He walks over to the vestibule and writes something on a ticket receipt. He returns to the Hispanic man.

“Get off at 125th Street,” he says. “Tell the conductor you’re going to Mt. Kisco.”

He hands the man the receipt. That’s what it says, Mt. Kisco–so the Hispanic man can simply show it to the conductor.

“I’m not going to charge you,” says the conductor, and walks away.