Not sure if it’s the case with other railroads around the world, but Metro-North has this knack for putting forth truly awful performances on the first day back from holiday breaks.

The 8:16 rolled in at the normal time this morning at Hawthorne, and all was fine until White Plains. Once all the Plainsers boarded at 8:28, the conductor got on the mic and said we had to sit for a bit due to a broken switch, as the train awaited orders as to which track it should proceed on.

We sat for about three minutes, until he got on the P.A. again and said we were ready to roll.

But still we sat for a few more minutes before proceeding toward Gotham.

Still, the ride was painstakingly slow. An older woman who looked like a cross-dressing Nancy Pelosi, bedecked in gold baubles and a silk scarf, applied layer after layer of makeup–the end result resembling a garden fence that’s gotten about eight coats of paint over the years.

The monotony was broken up by a man on a cellphone whose tone (and volume) went from restrained to almost hysterical. He was standing in the vestibule, just behind me in the last row. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him as he argued with someone on his phone. I took off the Bose headphones for a better listen, though I could hear him fine despite Bose’s cutting-edge noise reduction technology.

Far as I could tell, the person he was arguing with is the boyfriend of his baby mama, if we can slip into contemporary ghetto parlance for a split second.

“I was with her for eight years!” he yelled. “That’s my baby’s mother! She don’t even like you!”

The man got hotter and hotter, drawing the attention of most everyone in the car.

Then it got a little more ominous.

“If I catch you, I’m gonna kill you!” he yelled.

“Tell me where you at! I stay strapped too, niggah!”

“You have to die, son, if you around my daughter!”

The man on the other end apparently insisted he was avoiding the daughter; it’s a bit saddening to imagine this domestic scene, a woman’s boyfriend making considerable effort not to interact with a girl living in the same house so as to avoid angering the girl’s father, who lives elsewhere. Leave it to Beaver, it ain’t.

“How you not around my daughter if you livin’ with Mary?” yelled our fellow passenger.

Surely some on the train wondered if they should call the cops, especially if the dude indeed had a gun, as he’d said he did. I heard the conductor behind us and heading our way. The conductor seems like a hardy fellow; pleasant but no-nonsense, and I’d noticed some Go Army branding on his badge-holding neck strap this morning. Perhaps he’d nip this little issue in the bud–throw a little Semper Fi at the strapped straphanger.

“Sir,” I could hear the conductor say. “Sir?”

Alas, he was merely requesting a ticket from a slumbering rider, and walked on by the angry cellphone guy, who had seemed to quiet up a bit.

The man on the other end of the line had either launched a seriously foreboding counterattack, or said the magic words to pacifiy our fellow rider.

“Aiight, aiight,” cooed our friend. “You won’t see me, you won’t see me.”

He and his opponent then seemed to join forces against another man who was not lucky enough to be in on the conversation.

“He been driving my car. He stole my car!”

“He’s a bitch! My niggah, if I catch him, I’m gonna kill him. Every time he see me, he run the other way.”

It got quiet a moment later, and I slipped the Bose headphones back into place.

When we finally pulled into Grand Central at 9:14, a full 10 minutes late, I stood up and tried to get a look at Uneasy Rider. Pardon the racial profiling–I don’t think it was the pasty white 20-something kid in slacks or the doughy middle-aged man in a suit in the vestibule spewing the ghetto-speak–but I think I found the man: bi-racial, perhaps black and Hispanic, corn rows under a do-rag, long black t-shirt, baggy jeans hanging below the ass, a surprisingly preppy black and white checked knapsack over his shoulder.

We got off the train, where three of New York’s finest were walking up the platform, obviously looking for someone. Uneasy Rider put his head down and shuffled along, hit the concourse, and hung a left for the subways.

Back to freakin’ work.

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.