I just spent a couple of days with my brother. At one point he told a hilarious subway tale (initially observed by a friend), but he prefaced it by saying that this friend's stories were always unable to be beaten. But them's fightin' words, so we may have a spate of stories from my time commuting on the Seattle public bus. I felt a little sad over the scant opportunities I have for gathering such stories now. However, I've been good lately, so God felt it was time to reward me. The blessing sat on the seat in front of me on the train ride home.
She caught my attention by emitting deep-throated groans at irregular intervals. At first I was concerned for her well-being, but then realized that the groans were somehow influenced by the music we were all listening to (she evidently felt that the ipod was intended for communal use, and had it set to an appropriate volume, after a brief interruption at the insistence of the conductor). In the end I figured out that the noises were her involuntary and uninhibitedly sensual response to the music, which let all of us know she was One Hot Mama. She didn't seem to feel that this image needed to be restricted on a need-to-know basis, so we all got it full in the face.*
She had a channel-surfing approach to listening to music, being not so big on finishing any particular song as she was on returning frequently to it and then singing along with the chorus ("She used to be the sweeeetest girl/She used to be the sweetest girl Ev-AH!") The first leg of the trip was spent with the Inland Northwester wrestling with the tricky subject of Northeast public transportation etiquette. The girl exuded more attitude than sexuality so I opted for not asking her to return the device to the volume the conductor had requested.
Her cellphone screen saver (held up high, so it was easily seen from the seat behind her in accordance with her Share Me With Everyone policy) was of a cartoon elf, from the perspective more generally seen by a toilet than by me. Then we returned to the music sampler.
But then we headed into the express portion of the trip, and I grew desperate. As the conductor walked down the aisle one last time, I caught his eye, smiled, and pointed to the seat in front of me. He kindly went back and asked the lady to turn her music off. She stared blankly, so he repeated himself a couple of times, finally slipping in, "music isn't allowed if it disturbs others." Seizing the important point, she interrupted to say, "Some-body comp-LAIN-in?" The conductor returned to his purer theme, and after the same amount of time had passed as before her initial response, she turned her music off.
I spent the rest of the trip debating my immortal soul over which was the wrong side of the tracks (for the most part they are indistinguishable) in blessed silence.
*Whereas the response I'm hoping for from passersby is a combination of "My, isn't she clean" and "Hellooooooo Mild-Mannered."
