Gum Bomb

Warning: This post contains language that may not be suitable for younger readers, but that hopefully adds just the right amount of emphasis at the appropriate moment.

When my train pulls into Grand Central in the morning, we’re almost always on the same track, track 24, and when I get off the train, I go out the north exit, which is to say the ass end of Grand Central. Most people go out the front end, the wide open end, where you stroll through the main station room with the majestic vaulted ceiling like effing Fred Astair, and you just know you’re going to have a good day. That’s not the way I go. I go out the ass. The part that most people don’t see. The part with leaky ceilings, poor lighting and perennially empty Metro North schedule bins. And when you go out the ass on track 24, you have to stand in a long line with the other ass enders and wait your turn to squeeze through the small little single door exit that faces backwards (a sadistic touch of engineering) at the end of the track platform. Just another one among hundreds of commuting indignities that I’m forced to suffer. I start my day by being shat out the ass of Grand Central.

So every day I stand in the line, waiting to pop out the other side, and almost every day, somebody cuts the line. It’s usually a guy (surprise), and he’s definitely the kind of guy who doesn’t do lines. A non linear guy. A maverick. A renegade. Actually, a douchebag. He slithers along the yellow studded warning strip that lines the edge of the platform until he reaches the front of the line, and just when he gets to the door, he looks at his Blackberry as if he just got the worlds most effing important email, and he pounds through.

Now this is the world I live in and I expect no apologies. It’s the commuter world, warts and all, and I know just as well as the next guy, that it can bring out the worst in people. So I don’t hold it against the cutter. He’s just taking his place in the never-ending circle of hell that is my daily commute. He’s like the guy who goes into prison a garden variety tax cheat and comes out a white supremacist. Ride this train long enough and eventually one day you’ll be a dick. It just wears you down.

Plus he probably has a reason. We all have reasons, right? Im sure his older brother laughed at his penis or his wife holds the remote or his mom didn’t breast feed him or his kids de-friended him or he’s gone as high as he’s going to go among the lemmings of middle managers at his company, and so this is his moment. This all he’s got, man. Which is kind of sad when you think about it. Eff the line! Eff waiting my turn! Today, right now, for just this one glorious moment, I am going to stand up and be a douchebag! I am going to cut to the head of the ass-enders line and get shat out into the world 1 minute and 25 seconds sooner than the rest of you losers!

And that’s cool. I get it. Law of the jungle and all that. You live by the rule of the commute. But you also die by it. And so this morning, when a guy cut in front of me in line, I simply took my gum out of my mouth and dropped it into his open briefcase, right on top of his Wall Street effing Journal. Point set and match motherfucker. See you tomorrow.