More than once a week I'm forced to wait while some embarrassed douchebag breathlessly apologizes as he struggles to get his paunch through the closing doors of a subway car. And he sweats, and he apologizes, as I silently pray that a short in the electrical system tells the conductor that the door is actually shut and off we go, the man screaming, the passengers horrified, and me dancing and clapping like I'm Arnie Grape. But that never happens. Eventually the doors reopen, the guy gets in, and another day goes by without any bloodshed.
Now, these urban daredevils do not limit their theatrics to an underground stage, oh no, they take that shit to the streets, too. And it's not that I care about their safety - I'm indifferent to whether or not they make it across the road or get splattered across 45th street* - what I hate is if their moves delay me, or if there is gloating afterward. Walk/Don't Walk light about to stop blinking? There will always be some dummy that goes sprinting out into the street like he's carrying a heart transplant for the King of fucking Mongolia, no matter if there's 78 Beeline's bombing down 7th Avenue. It doesn't matter. There could be a fleet of fucking Sherman Tanks filled with Nazi Cannibals and someone will still say, "Fuck this, I can make it," and boom, they're pumping their arms like Usain Bolt testing out a fresh cycle of that sweet, sweet juice.
But one thing I don't get is, most of the people that go barreling down a subway platform like they're a fat, bald, mediocre version of Jason Bourne, they're on their way to work. Let me repeat this in caps so you can hear and visualize me yelling - THEY ARE ON THEIR WAY TO WORK! And this impromptu daredevil-ism doesn't end in streets. Fuck no. You get them on the elevator in your building. You're minding you own business, agonizing over the presentation you have to give in the afternoon that you blanked and now have to improvise, and just as the doors almost fully close, someone sticks a shoe into the six inch gap. The door pings and then reopens. Jerkoff with the shoe gets in and smiles. While I'm trying to not bludgeon him over the head with my cell phone, he smiles, and maybe winks at someone he recognizes in the elevator, like he just disarmed a nuclear fucking bomb. I fucking hate this guy. It is never okay to stop an elevator door from closing. NEVER. I don't care if you're using a tray from Burger King to hold in your guts after getting knifed, you wait until the next elevator comes. And again, more importantly: you're going to work - WHO THE FUCK IS IN A RUSH TO GET TO WORK???
How about fucking dummies that run seventeen blocks to Grand Central/Penn to catch their train home? These people are the same ones that come into work the next day and fucking BITCH about their wife, their kids, their dog that won't stop shitting in the sandbox. I don't understand why this fucker rushes to get home if it sucks so hard? Go plant your fat ass at a stool in one of the seven billion bars around GCT/Penn and catch a nice buzz while you wait for the next train. Terrible situations are much more tolerable after you've downed seven pints of beer, anyway. If you complain about home and then rush to get their, you deserve every minute of misery, because you are a fucking ASSHOLE.
In Manhattan, you always have to be on the lookout for some dickhead sprinting down the street or through a lobby, eyes bulbous, heart teetering on coronary. And it's never to save an old lady from bums attacking her with tin cans, or a man rescuing a baby from a Kodiak Bear - nope, that would be too cool - it's just some awful shithead trying to make his bus/elevator/train/car/airplane/rickshaw. I've had my shoulder bumped so many times by people rushing around that I've lost count. And what makes it worse is, when I get checked, I always assume that when I look up to see who did it, it will be a seven-foot-tall black man with hands the size of Toyota's, and I will immediately lower my head and hope he doesn't decide to tear me into two equal parts of cowardly-white-man. But no, it's always a balding dork in a suit. And I'm always a second too late to throw a shoulder into his chest and pretend I'm Steve Atwater and he's Christian Okoye.
*I saw a guy get hit by a taxi once. It was fucking awesome. He was, of course, on his cell phone, across the street from me, not paying attention to anything, and wandered into traffic. I think I was on Columbus Ave. Everyone near me kind of froze, because they saw him babbling away, stepping out into the street. Then, BOOM, he goes flying into the air, the taxi screeches to a halt and the guy's shoes went soaring into the intersection. When his briefcase finally landed and his the cement, it opened up and papers went EVERYWHERE. He laid there for a second or two and then sat up and started yelling at the poor cab driver, who was not at fault, whatsoever. Then the guy who got hit started yelling about suing the cab driver. But the weird thing was, he was still on the phone. Shoeless, but still on his fucking phone. He had held onto it even after he got hit by a fucking car. This is probably why nobody helped him out and left him sitting in the street and I accidentally walked all over his shit and gently nudged it into a storm drain...
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