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Strangers on a Train

On the train ride home yesterday, I was — as usual — squeezed onto a seat next to somebody irritating. I enjoy rush hour a lot. This woman was sitting there, reading a book, when all of a sudden she gasps out, “Oh, Jesus.” The tone in her voice indicated that the Second Coming was nigh. I thought to myself, “Ignore her.”

Suddenly, the woman thrust her right hand — the one not holding the book — down into her general crotch area and buried her face into the open book. I had absolutely no idea what she planned to do down there, and I didn’t particularly want to find out. Still, on a train at rush hour, you can take whatever seat you can get, and it’s not like there was room to move around. It was standing-room only. So I thought, “Continue to ignore her.”

Then, she started waving the book back and forth in front of her face, and suddenly I knew what the problem was. “Oh God,” I thought, “she must’ve farted.” Still, you don’t want to jump to too many conclusions. It’s completely possible that she got the vapors or the megrims or one of those other weird ailments you find in 19th-century romance novels (not that I’ve ever read any of those…) and needed to fan herself off.

Then, she inched forward in the seat, exposing the thin, blue, almost-plush lining, and honestly, I thought I was gonna die. I grew up in a house with quite a bilious father, and the gastric explosions I was privy to in my youth were enough to make most mortals go blind. I have to settle for a lack of depth perception, but still, I consider myself tough when it comes to anal stench saturation.

But this…this was out of control, to the extent that a hazmat team showed up at the Western Avenue stop, stripped us down, and sprayed us with industrial hoses. Then, the removed the affected train car, buried it two hundred feet below the surface, salted the earth, and sealed off the entire area with a thirty-foot electrified privacy fence.

Okay, that didn’t actually happen, but it should have. This odor was unbelievable, and it lingered in the air for twenty minutes. Shortly after an explosion of gas reminiscent of Los Alamos, New Mexico, circa 1945, the woman escaped from the train, leaving the rest of us to deal with what she had created. A woman sat down next to me, and I wonder about the ordeal she went through afterward.

Honestly, I’ve been wanting to write about people farting on the trains for months, because it’s really starting to get to me. I understand people get gas — seriously, I really understand — but can’t they just hold it in until they get off? Or, actually, until they get out of the station. I was walking behind this guy at Union Station the other day, and we were on the escalator, my ass right in his face, and he just lets fly. And in rush hour, I’m sitting, and people stick their asses in my face and fart.

What. The. Fuck?

No wonder nobody takes advantage of public transportation except poor people like me and big fat losers like the dude who brought a seven-course Taco Bell dinner (I shit you not, irony sort of intended) onto the train on Monday. Also, I swear the Taco Bell guy wasn’t also me.

Posted by Stan on February 11, 2004 12:53 PM  | Permalink | Stories of Pain and Humiliation | Digg It