Thursday, July 23, 2015

Take on the LIRR

As much as I may complain about the hell that is Port Authority, the Southwest Airlines mentality of herding cattle at Penn Station might be worse. For those who have not had the pleasure, there are a million people standing in the main terminal area staring at a huge screen like they are playing bingo. At some point the screen changes and they announce a track number and then it becomes a mad dash of hair gel, fake tans and accents. Imagine 10,000 guys with shitty haircuts and muscle shirts squeezing past you in all their sweaty manliness like you are having a beer over at Blazing Saddles as they try to get to Port Jeff, Babylon or Bay Shore. Meatheads and businessmen alike are literally running down the steps, shoving handicapped seniors and pregnant women and for some reason you start to feel like you should hustle too, so you start to run.
You finally get to the platform and the entire dance begins again, all these Carl Lewis wannabes are now standing on the platform with cans of Budweiser in their hands and Newsdays under the arms and they wait until finally the bingo chart comes again. Finally some train which looks like it belongs on the 70s pulls into the station and the platform becomes a basketball court after the ball leaves the shooters hand. These morons all start to box each other out, asses pushed against each other, ladies pulling hair and guys hand-checking all to be the first to have the pleasure to get into a car which smells like bad perfume and urine.
Here they all sit, legs spread wide so no possible human can sit next to them and they gossip, gossip like a bunch of 80 year old yentas. Oh Tommy from down the block just got a tattoo, Tracy with the dyed hair just got pregnant and Rob with the fancy house has put on sooooo much weight. It is just brutal and still you are not done

The thing chugs past Jamaica and Islip and Lake Ronkonkoma and these frat boys become more boisterous after their fourth beer in an hour, the women less attractive and without any working AC the car becomes unbearably hot. You then realize that somebody took a nasty Chinese Food dump in the shitter whose stink is seeping through the entire car. The girls are spraying on so much hairspray you can see the hole forming in the ozone layer and the old men are bitching about their old days in Huntington which they pronounce without the first "t".
You hear some Billy Joel blasting through some headphones and a couple of guys talk about hockey and you just want to kills yourself and that is when it hits you..maybe the train will jump the tracks and the world would be rid of this entire scene of tank tops and bad haircuts and meatheads and accents and we'd all be better off for it.

1 comment:

  1. We don't take trains in LA.

    Thus, it was not until I visited Europe right after college that I first learned that at train stations, they show the track number of one's train on the overhead screen just like 10 minutes before the train arrives.

    And then I forgot about it.

    And then I visited France again this past spring and re-learned that process.

    They don't do this in India or China or Japan. The tracks are already pre-ordained for various train rides.

    This announce-at-the-last-minute procedure must be a white people thing.

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