My day yesterday was all messed up. I had an evening event in the city, so I got permish to work from home so I could hang with the kiddies a bit before heading into Gotham for the night.
The 5:49 p.m. out of Hawthorne was kind of a nuthouse–dirty, loud, crowded, and with no one nuttier than the woman who entered at White Plains, and POSITIVELY SCREAMED into her hands-free wire for several painstaking minutes in the vestibule.
The woman was very definitely ready to murder someone. She had a beef with another woman, who I think was her sister, over her son approaching the other woman with a problem, instead of his mom. She also presumably took issue with the advice the other woman gave the kid. She made her displeasure abundantly clear to everyone in the car.
I have to say–seeing how the woman handles anger, I can’t blame her son for seeking out another adult with which to discuss his matter.
She was about 40, black, one of those knockoff designer sweat jackets with New York City in script across the front, straight hair brushed at a 45 degree angle down her forehead. She looked sort of like any other woman in New York.
But she didn’t sound like it. She entered from White Plains howling, bellowed through Hartsdale, then Scarsdale–her head slowly, methodically moving left to right, right to left, and she delivered a full-volume screed to her foe over and over and over, with more F words than Dice Clay at a Friar’s Club roast.
“I tell you one thing, and you pass it on to my son–God don’t like ugly, and what goes around comes around!”
Technically, that’s two things, but I wasn’t about to point it out to her.
Riders looked at her, and looked at each other in commiseration. Several turned their iPods up to blaring levels to drown out the screaming, but even Spinal Tap turned up to 11, and noise-cancelling Bose headphones, were no match for this woman’s set of pipes. There was nothing you could do except leave the car, or deal with it.
She hung up south of Scarsdale, had a refreshing sip of Haterade, then called someone else to give them the blow by blow. As she relayed the previous exchange, she got more and more worked up–and quickly reached the same full-throated volume, and fury, as when she was fighting with her sister.
“My son, he ran to his fucking aunt, cuz he can’t talk about that shit to me!” she screamed.
Oddly, “aunt” was pronounced the stuffy prep school way, rhyming with “font.” I didn’t expect that.
It was not a woman you could ask to quiet down–she was that far gone, and if she had a weapon, she would’ve used it on your sorry whining ass. Our only hope was that the conductor would intervene. The man took her ticket and a five spot for, presumably, a peak upgrade. She kept the volume down while dealing with him, and even brought her hand to her mouth and apologized after dropping an F bomb in front of the man in blue–a surprisingly sweet schoolgirl gesture.
Soon as he cleared out of the vestibule, the screaming resumed.
I figured I was stuck with her until 125th or Grand Central, but–unbeknownst to me–the train mercifully ported at Fordham, and she got out.
When does that Quiet Car program go systemwide?
