The Duracell Man

By Straphanger Joe

I’m half asleep. You know, the kind of sleep where you’re awake but almost asleep. It’s a subway sleep. Eyes are half closed and heavy. Heartbeat and respiration slow, but ears still tuned in to what’s going on around me.

My head is leaned back against the pole. The car is only a quarter empty, with lots of space between passengers.

I hear his voice. It’s hard to explain exactly what he sounds like, but once you’ve heard him you won’t forget his tone and the texture of his voice. It’s like a cross between Ben Stein and Eeyore.

“I am a businessman,” he says. “I am selling double A Durracell batteries–two for a dollar.”

Now I’m more half awake than asleep and I see him. I’ve seen him before but it’s been a while. He’s African-American, thin, with slightly graying hair, a small stoop to his shoulders, and he carries a small plain brown box of Duracell double A batteries in one hand and a solitary package of double A batteries in his other hand. The package in his right hand is his sample. He doesn’t ask for money. He only asks for your business.

Batteries are all he sells–Double A, Duracell. Sometimes I see someone buy some from him. He says “Thank you,” and hands over his sample, picks up another one from his small box, and moves on.

It’s got to be over four years I’ve seen him on the F train–on and off, on and off.

He passes me and gets to the end of the car. He sits down and rides quietly, not having

sold anything. He waits patiently, then moves forward to the next car when we get to the station. I can hear his voice before the car doors close.

“I am a businessman. I am selling–”

I wonder where he gets his batteries? I wonder how many he sells every day? I wonder if he travels other lines? Has anyone else seen him on another train line? I can guess why he sells double A’s because it’s a popular size. But why Duracell? Why Duracell?

I’m more half asleep than awake once more as the train pulls away from the station.

It’s five o’clock on the F. I just got on at the 23rd Street station heading north and into Queens.  

I can’t believe it. I walk onto the train and we’re sitting one person per bench with a number of orange and tan benches empty. I take my usual seat at the top of the L and behind me and to my left sits a man in a black Obama-Biden t-shirt, the lettering in bright yellow, his union symbol on the back.

He’s in his early 30s, short hair, white skin with a reddish hue. He pops open a bottle of seltzer.

I hadn’t noticed him more than peripherally as the Peases’ book is open in my lap and I’ve only 30 pages to go before I know enough to conquer the universe through the understanding of body language.

We’ve all got enough space, many with their bags next to them in the seat, staking out their territory, and almost everyone is sitting in some form of the “crotch protect” position–hands folded in lap–men and women alike.

I hear a woman’s voice from behind me, two benches away say, “Watch it with that!” to the man with the Obama-Biden t-shirt.

“What?” he says with a thick Queens accent.

“Watch it with that so you don’t spray it.”

“I’m not going to spray it,” he says, amused, it seems, at the attention.

I turn around to get a glance at the woman. She’s wearing jeans and a bright rose-colored windbreaker, curly hair, white and in her forties. She’s sitting in the crotch protect with her small black pocket book on her lap.

“Just watch it cause you might spray it, and I don’t want to get wet.”

Obama-Biden looks around to see if he can find any allies. I look down at my book.

“What are you talking about?” He parts his hands, palms open to the sides in an offering of peace. He smiles and laughs a little.

“Just watch it,” she says.

“I’m not going to spray it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I open eight of these a day. I open it to the side first–over here. I let out the air like this,” he demonstrates as he speaks, “and there’s no problem. Like I said.”

“Just be careful with it.”

“I am.”

I go back to my book. We pass through Manhattan and into Queens. Obama-Biden takes out a book and starts to read. I don’t know what the woman is doing.

Somewhere around Queens Boulevard, Obama-Biden starts to whistle. It’s Whistle While You Work. It annoys me, but I try to press on. Twenty pages to go.

Somewhere near Northern Boulevard the woman behind me says, “Oh, would you stop with the whistling!”

“What?”

“Would you stop with the whistling? It’s annoying.”

Obama-Biden puts his book down and shakes his head. “What the fuck? Why don’t you mind your own business? You’ve been on my case since I got on this train. I can fucking whistle if I want to.”

“Just stop with the whistling, you idiot.”

He gets up and walks past me, looking back at the woman. “You’re a crazy fuck, you know that?”

“You’re a jerk,” she yells. “An asshole. A stupid idiot. A stupid dork. A stupid bitch.”

Obama-Biden sits down in the next section and looks around at the few people sitting near him. He spreads his hands palm up as if asking, Can you believe this woman?

We get to Roosevelt and he walks up to the door nearest me. He looks over at the woman as the door opens. “Parting will be such sweet sorrow,” he says with a laugh. And walks out the door.

I’m right behind him. He turns and looks in the window opposite her. “Fuck you, you crazy bitch,” he shouts. Then he gives her the finger, smiles at me and disappears into the crowd that’s heading up the stairs.

Yes, sir. Just another day on the F train. 

Masking

I’ve been studying my body language, Allan and Babs Pease style. Their book, The Definitive Book of Body Language, is fascinating. I’ve been applying their guide to my subway Tao.

They state that there are unwritten rules that most cultures follow rigidly when faced with a crowded situation–one in which your personal “intimate zone” is invaded by other people–such as a packed subway car. They are:

This one works for strangers but I find people on the subway will talk to each other if they know each other–unless they don’t want to. I know I would rather read so don’t stand next to me and expect conversation, unless you’re Karen, my wife. In which case we’re talking. Unless she’s also brought her paper. In which case we’re reading–both of us.

Now if it’s crowded and you’re six inches from someone or pressed up against their shoulder, hip, butt, or bag–even if they’re your intimate partner, the odds are you won’t talk. I think the Peases are right. Once you get within that 6-inch intimate zone it’s just not happening in public.

Avoid eye contact with others at all times.

That’s a go. My own study of eye contact on the F train over a year ago showed how uncomfortable this can be for all parties. You gotta be crazy, or a researcher for Trainjotting to do this on any kind of regular basis.

Maintain a “poker face” – no emotion is permitted to be shown.Again, true. But if you smile at someone, New Yorkers will smile back…right before they turn away from you. The smile response is a habit that the Peases talk about. We are hard-wired to return them. The unconscious mind exerts direct control over your facial muscles and you can try not to smile but most times the mirroring reaction wins out. So if you want to test this out try smiling at anyone you make eye contact with on your next subway ride. Only problem is you have to make eye contact first, which as we’ve seen is not easy to do.

If you have a book or newspaper, pretend to be deeply engrossed in it.

People on the subway are experts at this. Check out next time someone is reading a paper or book near you. Wait for them to turn the page. If the page isn’t being flipped after a reasonable amount of time they’re faking it. The subway is my opportunity to read so I don’t fake it. I wonder if women are more likely to fake it than men? The Peases don’t have an answer for that one.

In bigger crowds, no body movement is allowed.

I think this is true. I was on the F this morning, pressed up against four other people. I had to shift every few minutes, changing hands that gripped the overhead bar and moving my weight from one foot to the other. Whenever I shifted, people around me looked at me with frowns then went back to reading their books or listening to their i-Pods. “Sorry,” I said quietly, over and over each time, smiling, trying for eye contact.

  You must watch the floor numbers change at all times.

–Joe Lunievicz

Handbrake as a Metaphor

By the time I made it to the train Friday morning, after dropping my son off at school (something I love to do), I was damp, my waterproof shoes were wet, and my umbrella was soaked.

I did not feel like talking to anyone or even looking at anyone–my mood having shifted with the weather. I gave a police officer a half smile as I made it to the platform to try and push the clouds away. He looked bored, leaning against the wall with his hands behind his back. He ignored me. Ahh, the subway.

The F train pulled up within a few moments. I stepped on, umbrella dripping, eyes unfocused and low, and took out my iPhone to watch a video I’d ripped the night before (a long process involving software known as handbrake which I amazingly downloaded correctly and seemed to use in the appropriate manner without a single call to the their support line–no easy feat for this techno-bungler). Don’t get too excited about the video though, it was only an instructional yoga anatomy video–interesting only to a yoga teacher and even then probably not all yoga teachers. Still, I’d been trying to watch it for four months unsuccessfully at home. Family life, children’s videos, and work simply hadn’t allowed it.

The F was crowded, but I had elbow room so it wasn’t packed and there is a big difference between packed and crowded–about 6 inches of personal space. Six inches of very personal, leave-me-alone, space. More than enough to gaze down into yoga-land and pretend I was somewhere else.

With my usual place by the door I was distracted for a moment by the woman sitting to my left. She was using an iPhone also, but thumb-typing a note to herself in Chinese characters. I stared down at her to watch how the letters and numbers from the QWERTY keyboard translated. I still don’t get how that worked–English letters into Chinese characters–but it made me smile.

Then, I put in my earphones and went to my video section–which up to this point in my iPhone’s existence had been empty. Time to disappear inward. Only when I got to the section, I found it … empty. I’d missed a step in syncing somewhere – must have. Choose your own four letter expletive. No movie this morning. I looked down at my foot. My umbrella, hanging down from my arm, had been dripping water onto my toes. It figured. Good thing, though, the shoes were waterproof.

I took out my book–as a veteran traveler of the NYC subway system I was prepared with my backup, Definitive Book of Body Language, by the Pease’s, Alan and Babs. As we traveled beneath the East River, I read on about how to manipulate people and “be a more powerful communicator–without ever having to speak a word.”

–Straphanger Joe

A few Crazy Commute stories from around the globe for ya:

I was on the F train going from Brooklyn to Manhattan, about 10 a.m. The train was full, and a man got on at Delancey Street. He was about 60, wearing a worn but clean suit and tie, scuffed shoes and a trench coat, and he was carrying a shopping bag. As soon as the train pulled out of the station, he walked over to the doors and faced them like he was looking in a mirror. From the shopping bag, he removed a Chinese takeout soup container of water and began pouring it over his head.

From his pocket, he took out a small bar of soap and began washing his hair. He took out another soup container of water and rinsed out the soap. Then he washed his face and also took a few ice cubes from his pocket and kept rubbing them over his face for several minutes. At this point, we had just passed the Broadway-Lafayette station. He splashed the remaining water over his head and face. The floor was quite wet, and he took off his trench coat and shook off the water, placed it neatly over his arm, put the soup containers back in the shopping bag and got off at West Fourth Street. He dumped the shopping bag in the garbage can on the platform and proceeded on his way, looking refreshed and clean.

***

I work in Center City Philadelphia and take the SEPTA R5 Regional Rail line in from the suburbs. On the ride in, we go past West Philly, which is a bit run-down. A few blocks on that stretch are particularly bad, complete with boarded-up buildings, burnt-out cars, etc. While taking the train this morning, I was looking out the window and saw a boat lying in the middle of the street.

Yes, a boat. It was white, about 12 feet long, mostly intact. But that’s not the strange part. The strange part is that someone sprayed graffiti on the side of the boat that read, “3 hour tour?”

***

A homeless man on the subway line going to Oak Park suburb of Chicago proceeded to take all his clothes off until he was naked and then turned them inside out and put them all back on.

***

Source: Monster Career Advice

Trainjotting is happy to announce our newest columnist, Tim Coleman. Tim, who graced these very cyber-pages as a guest editor at few short weeks ago (if you didn’t read his essay on what happens when you order a Mercedez Benz with your Starbucks frappuccino, you should ), will cover an underreported segment of the commuter population: Those who get to work on their own two feet.

New York has never been hurting for bipedal commuters, but the timing for the debut of “Foot It” couldn’t be better, with gas prices escalating and everyone at least entertaining the notion of being more green.

A taste of Tim’s feet:

Foot It

I am a commuter, but my means of transportation are my own two feet.

I live and work in Lower Manhattan, and it’s about a 30-minute walk each way. Usually, I move along Houston Street—westward in the morning and back east by night. I go the same way so often because it’s a straight shot from my apartment to my office.

I’m comforted by the parade of familiar sights: there’s the homeless guy on the corner of Elizabeth Street, surprisingly young and often face down; the newsstand without the actual stand, a Latina woman crouched on milk crates and under an umbrella; and the pock-marked, poker-faced security guard who roams the loading area of my building through which I always enter.

Sometimes I mix up. I’ll meander down through SoHo, where the voguish boutiques and so-hot-they-know-it women still beat the construction sites and hardhats that pop up every 20 feet along Houston. Or I’ll venture north into the East or West Village and stroll in relative peace and quiet.

On the rare occasion there’s a severe storm, I’ll break down and take the train. Problem is, the subway line closest to home—the F/V—requires that I get on in the opposite direction of where I’m going and get off way past my office. That actually results in longer commute than footing it. Factor in a wait time for the F or V to show, and I might not reach my building for 45 minutes. Unacceptable.

So I walk.

Most days I’m the lucky bastard you think I am, striding along in shades with my mp3 player blasting System of a Down. But other days? I’m the poor schmuck who forgot to bring his umbrella. Or to wear gloves. Or it’s so goddamn hot out, I’m the ass greeting his coworkers in a thick film of sweat, my shirt darkening in wet spots from the inside out.

In truth, nothing much happens on my walks—then something just does. And it’ll be worth reporting to you. Funny things, sad things. Or just bizarre things. This is the first in a series of weekly columns about my particular commute: the happy feet, the sore soles, and the calluses in between.

Got to go now. My feet feel loose.

–Tim Coleman

I am fascinated by tattoos because I can’t get one. My wife would divorce me if I did; it’s written into our contract. I once explained this to my son, and he suggested I get a temporary tattoo. Which makes sense. Still, ever since watching Steve McQueen in Papillion, I thought it would be cool to have one. But these days so many people sport tattoos—hell, there are television shows about tattoo parlors—that they’re too damn “in.” So I feel cooler not having one.

Anyway, it’s 8:47 a.m. and I get a seat on the F-train. That’s two days in a row (what are the odds?) and the same seat, too: bottom of the “L.” I sit with my back to the person next to me and my legs in the aisle, my bags between them. It usually annoys people when they try to pass from one section of the car to another. But I get more room that way, and it keeps me from knocking knees with the person perpendicular to me at the base of the “L.” Six of one, half dozen of the other.

I notice a guy across from me in the opposite section. Same seat, mirror image. In cut-off camouflaged shorts and a black T-shirt, he also has two earrings in his left ear, a close yet untrimmed beard, and a shaved head sprouting five days’ worth of stubble. Maybe thirty, he smiles when a woman sits next to him and he has to move his legs to let her by.

The man is also covered in tattoos. They’ve been inked like identical twins on his forearms: a ring of flames begins at each wrist and spreads to his elbows. On the biceps and triceps of his left arm (I can’t see that much of the right) is a large Victorian clock with Roman numerals; the time is stopped at 11:55. AM or PM, I can’t tell.

On the back of his neck is some kind of bar code. What product is the bar code for? Rolling papers or Rice Krispies? Maybe it’s Fruit Loops. My son’s dying to eat Fruit Loops, but my wife and I won’t let him. Maybe this Illustrated Man got the bar code after seeing Angelina Jolie in Wanted. She had a bar code tattooed on her body. Or was it a binary code? Well, it was a code and it was on Angelina Jolie—somewhere. Maybe that inspired this guy.

Now, when you get rings of flames on your arms, you might be trying to say, “Don’t touch me or you’ll get burned.” And the Victorian clock surely has a Gothic look. But what are you trying to say with a bar code? That he works a day job at The Container Store? I stop looking at him. I don’t want him to catch me studying him, and I certainly don’t want to know what the tattoos mean if they’re trying to say, “Don’t piss me off!”

But tattoos are still cool to me. What about a subway car across the back of my neck? My own personal bar code. It would have to be the F-train, with orange and tan seats, and me at the bottom of the “L”, bags between my legs. Maybe all straphangers should get one. But only if their partners approve, of course. Me, I’ll be keeping this particular canvas blank, thank you very much. You’re on your own.

—Joe Lunievicz

THE POWER OF NOW

At 9:10 a.m. I enter the F-train from my usual spot: the no-man’s land between the two stairs going up to the main level of Roosevelt Station in Jackson Heights.

Inside, a roomful of open seats becomes the setting for a game of musical chairs—and the music has just stopped.

When everyone’s finished jockeying for a seat, I find one in the corner at the bottom of the “L.” My bags between my legs, my pad out and my pen jotting. Two seats are still free in my third of the car. Nothing unusual, except three commuters happen to remain standing.

I know why nobody has taken one of the seats. It’s next to a man who is asleep and seated in the pair of seats at the front of the car, next to the door. He also has placed a shopping bag and two suitcases on the seat next to him against the wall. Wearing a black baseball cap, he’s maybe in his forties and using his fist to keep from nodding forward. His belongings aren’t moving, and nobody’s asking him to move them.

The other seat is across from me, the center seat of three. A middle-aged woman is to one side, reading Oprah-champion Eckhart Tollet, and an older guy is to the other with a book of his own on his lap. The female bookend seems approachable, sit-down-next-to-able. In black slacks and a white shirt—a hard glasses case bulging through the pocket—the male bookend reads a small-print volume with glasses that he squints through and he underlines passages with a blue pen. He’s also holding a Dunkin Donuts coffee cup, regular size. I bet there’s three sugars in it. When he takes a break from reading, he turns the cup around, examining the circumference.

The train passes two stops. Nobody takes the empty seat. I don’t get it. There’s nothing on the seat. And the people on either side are not so big that there’s only a smidgen of seat available.

Finally, a man enters in navy slacks, wingtip shoes, white shirt and red tie. This passenger looks Indian, probably in his fifties, and carries a big, black briefcase. He looks at the two people flanking the seat. They look up at him. Eckhart Tollet gets placed on the woman’s lap.

“Excuse me,” says the man in the red tie says, as he turns around and sits. The man with glasses has just enough time to shift out of his way before Red Tie’s butt grazes him. The woman reading Tollet pivots to move over—but her hips are already against the partition. She has nowhere to go.

Red Tie chooses the elbows-forward position, ceding the back of the seat to his neighbors, who, with a joint sigh, rest their elbows back and down. Red Tie hunches forward some. The train pulls out of the station; we all readjust our positions. Eckhart Tollet rises from the woman’s lap. She shifts a little left and right, acquiring a bit of space with the movement. The blue pen resumes underlining.

The excitement over, I close my notebook, lean back and shut my eyes. I’ll rest them for a moment—before 23rd Street arrives, and I depart.

—Joe Lunievicz

A drop of water falls with the sound of broken glass.

On the downtown F train I look up from my copy of Please Kill Me, now with a wet splotch on page 338. Three white hipsters stand over me. The tallest, with strings of carrot-orange hair, is also the sweatiest. I wonder if it isn’t a drop of water but a drop of sweat. And that one drop brings what happened tonight back in a flood of anxiety. I’ve been trying to forget it, burying my mind in the oral history of punk rock, but it’s no use. This annoyance pokes at some very raw nerves.

I’m alive and grateful to be alive. But I also feel like I’m standing on a tree trunk five hundred feet in the air.

I’d gone to see a movie at Lincoln Center with my friend Brian, then to a Starbucks on the corner of 63rd and Broadway. Brian, who had his back to the wall, asked me what I thought of the movie. As I started to answer, a hollow, metallic-sounding BAP! came from outside. I looked over my shoulder and heard—and felt—a thunderous crash.

Terrorism, I thought. A bomb. Go home to your wife and son.

Yet my eyes did not see fire and smoke. They saw a black Mercedes-Benz careening through the façade. Glass fell straight down in rainy beads. I shook in place. The store burglar alarm sounded, unendingly, as exhaust fumes overtook the coffee aroma. The car was halfway in and out of the Starbucks. Running, but stopped. Where we’d been standing in line not five minutes before.

Brian and I scrambled out the nearest exit to the sidewalk. A taxicab with a mashed-in front fender was idling in the middle of Broadway. It looked as though the vehicles had pinballed off one another, ricocheting the Mercedes backward into the Starbucks. I steadied myself and dialed 911. All circuits—you guessed it—busy. Maybe the 50-odd others gathering on the scene were also calling for help. I was nervous and scared, but also feeling my adrenaline spike.

A blonde emerged from the Mercedes, followed by her little girl. Both looked like zombies, yet neither seemed injured. Sirens joined the din of the alarm and the chatter, as two paramedic vans zigzagged to the corner. Four paramedics hopped out, hustled over and yelled for us to make way. They examined the mother and daughter—

And then a high-pitched scream came from inside Starbucks. An Asian woman visible through the hole in the store was pushing at her cheeks with her palms and staring at the floor. One paramedic went in and immediately brought an Asian man into a chair, wrapping his head in mummy gauze. The man was stunned but conscious. Apparently, he’d been strolling down the sidewalk with his girlfriend when the force of the Mercedes batted him inside.

Another woman screamed: “Somebody help me!” This one was sitting in the backseat of the taxi with a face so bloodied, it looked as if she’d slammed her face against the Plexiglas divider and broken her nose. “There’s a woman over there who needs help!” I cried, pointing into the street. A paramedic hurriedly threaded through the crowd to tend to her and to the cabbie. I was heartened that New Yorkers had acted against type and wanted to help. But the crowd was threatening to become its own hazard. “Let’s get out of here,” I told Brian.

Grinning with sheepish relief, we marched down Broadway, deciding Columbus Circle was far enough away to catch up—and to catch our breath. After going over what the hell had just happened, we went back to talking about happier things: the movie, his engagement news, my experiences as a new father. The night was summer perfection, too: hot but breezy. An hour later, we said good night and took different subway lines home.

So now I’m on the F train. Still looking at the drop of water on the page of my book. I gaze up at the tall, carrot-topped hipster. “Sorry,” he says when we make eye contact.

I realize he’s holding a dewy bottle of some kind of energy drink. The not-inexcusable offense of sweating down on a fellow subway rider could have set me off and made me lose it. But the drop isn’t even sweat. It’s water. I must relax. Still, I want a drink or a cigarette. Or better yet, a drink and a cigarette.

Tonight I’ll forego both. I’ll take the comfort of the F, rocking like a cradle, delivering me to the sanctuary I call home.

For more on this incident, including photos, go to
http://gothamist.com/2008/07/11/car_swerves_into_starbucks_near_lin.php?gallery7123Pic=1#gallery

THE WAVE

It moved through the crowd on the F train like a ripple.

It was 8:44 a.m. and we all wanted to get to work. The train had been slow, stopping between stations repeatedly because of congestion and we were stuck beneath the East River in our approach to Lexington Ave.

We were crowded together in our usual bunches, hip to hip and front to back between the doors and around the poles. I was reading Ghenkis by Connoldon, who wrote The Dangerous Lives of Boys, which I did not read). It was a real rip-snorter historical adventure novel and I was pretty involved, secure in my commuter cocoon, when I noticed the upturned wave of heads approach me from the center of the car.

Something had happened and everyone, like good rubbernecking New Yorkers, wanted to see what it was. So, naturally I looked up and tried to see too.

I heard someone say something like, “He’s hurt,” but it could have been , “He’s Burt,” so I waited a moment to see which it was.

When others around me went back to reading their papers I figured it was the green light to go back to reading my book – Burt or hurt, the show seemed to be over. Onward, Ghenkis, across the frozen plains of Mongolia.

Then a wave of moving heads came my way again. A woman sitting down next to me could see what was going on and she said to the person sitting next to her, “He’s down again. He looks sick.” Some people moved away from the site of the drama, allowing me a view of the unfolding events.

At the same time a woman standing near to the scene said, “Somebody pull the red handle and stop the train. We got a sick man over here.”

The passengers around me looked up at the red handle about five feet from my head then back down at their papers. I wondered if I should pull the red handle when a little voice inside me said, “Wait until you get to the station. If you pull the red handle now you’ll never get to the station and the train will shut down and you’ll be stuck on this slow-moving train for another hour.”

I looked away from the red handle. I told myself I was only postponing a pull on the emergency brake–waiting to see what would happen next.

“Does anybody have some water or something for him to eat?” the woman who told us to pull the handle asked around her. She tried to make eye contact with others nearby but couldn’t find eyes to hold.

She was holding up a young man who seemed to have lost the ability to stand. He took hold of a pole, but he was swaying as if he was ready to go down what I guessed would be a second time. I couldn’t tell if he was drunk, high, sick, or exhausted. They all seemed possible.

A woman sitting beneath him got up and moved away. Everybody seemed to take a small step or two away from him as he swayed a little more. Then, using the pole for leverage, he swung himself around and took the woman’s seat. An orange appeared like magic from over his shoulder. He focused on the brightly colored fruit and took a hold of it, lowering it to his lap. His dazed expression seemed to clear up a little as he pulled off the skin and ate.

We inched into the station at Lexington but the doors didn’t open yet.

“Somebody tell the conductor,” the woman who had been holding him up said again. People looked away. I could tell. Nobody wanted the train stopped so we’d have to offload while we waited for the EMTs to arrive. Besides, h had an orange. He was conscious again. What was the problem?

Finally the doors opened. I hesitated a few moments, shifting from one foot to another, then, making my decision, got off. I walked over to the conductor’s window and told her there was a sick passenger in her car. “You ought to take a look,” I said.

She nodded, concern on her face and got up to see. I watched from the platform as she found, then checked in with the young man, kneeling by his side. I couldn’t hear the questions or the answers, but he seemed visibly better–more color in his cheeks.

I didn’t get back on the car. If the folks inside found out it was me who told the conductor and stopped the train from running, I figured I might not make it out alive.

I waited outside. The conductor called a halt to the train with the dreaded announcement: “We’ve got a passenger in need of medical assistance. We’ll be moving as soon as he’s been taken care of.” I could hear the collective groan of a sea of passengers while I walked across the platform to the other track, trying to look nonchalant.

I took the first train that pulled in to the station. Just as I got on board, the other train’s doors closed and the train pulled out of the station–ahead of mine. I guessed the guy was all right after all.

I ended up late to work anyway. Go figure.

–Joe Lunievicz