Life Imitating This American Life (or Quit It, Ira Glass, You're Freaking Me Out)

It's Friday, October 5th around 10pm.  My chosen listening for my commute to and from work is the recent podcast of This American Life, "Send a Message."

The opener describes the bizarre coincidence of Kepler's translations of Galileo's coded messages.

In a nutshell, as host Ira Glass describes, "[Here was] a guy ... [Galileo, who] would send a message that he probably hopes will never be decoded. And then it gets decoded, but incorrectly. And then the wrong message turns out to be right not once but two times."

(For details, you're just going to have to listen to the episode, or read the transcript.... it is too weird and arcane to get into here.)

The next story, the show's Act One -- The Motherhood of the Travelling Pants, delved into weirder synchronicities, as a family recounts its generations-old tradition of sending either a pair of little-boy pants or a little-girl dress to the next expectant mother. And, with a statistically brain-breaking level of accuracy, the sender (usually the last person who bore a child) correctly predicts the sex of the newborn.

This is put to an astonishing test when one prior mother can't decide which to send -- so she sends both the dress and the pants to the next mother. And the new mother has... wait for it... fraternal twins!!

So here it is, 10pm and I'm  on my way home after having stayed late at the office to put the finishing touches on my solo show. And I am up to the next segment, Act Two -- Message in a Bottle -- told by stand-up comic and musician Dave Hill -- which, as one would expect from a stand-up, contains its share of playful crudity.

He begins bemoaning the current edge-lessness of our recently sanitized  city:

I understand that there was a time in New York when you could walk down the street, and just crack open a beer, and just suck it down, and throw the bottle on the ground. [LAUGHTER] And you might get, like, a little raped, or whatever. [LAUGHTER] But it didn't matter. It was like a give and take. You took the good with the bad. And everyone was fine with it. And now you can't really get away with any of that stuff. But you can get a really nice brunch at a lot of places. Just go with your friends, free refills on mimosas. It's great for everybody.

And this is true. As a native of this town, I remember all too well the crack dealers prowling the corners of Lafayette and Bond (on my way to do stand-up, myself, at the First Amendment Comedy Club), and I remember vaulting over mats of sleeping homeless on my way to class at NYU.

And I have seen my share of exposed body parts and those parts' various secretions. 

But I have never had an experience quite like what followed that evening on the downtown B train.

So, as I am listening to this segment, where Mr. Hill describes putting a rather harmless piece of refuse on top of  one of those large black garbage bins that can be found at the edges of many subway platforms. This apparently disturbs a homeless guy sleeping near the bin:

And he's like this sleeping giant, just like, [GROWLING SOUNDS]. And he gets up. And his bones are creaking. And his hair is, like, all crazy all over the place. And he looks at me. And he just starts yelling. And he's like, back up! Back up! 

Hill fails to back up.

At that moment, a B train pulls in. Now, I always get on at the last door of the last car because I need the rear exit of my stop. And I usually sit in one of the forward-facing window seats of the back-most cluster of the B's R68 cars.

But there'ss a homeless guy huddled up in the backward-facing seat of the rearmost cluster, so I move to the next cluster up and sit facing backwards (which I usually never do on an empty car since I prefer to face forwards).

So I am sitting there, directly behind the homeless guy, spacing out a little with my eyes gazing towards the floor, and Dave Hill continues on:

And then he goes, back up or I'll throw this bottle of piss on you! And then from out of nowhere, like a ninja, all of a sudden he's got this Gatorade bottle.  And it's a huge Gatorade bottle. ... Only, instead of being full of delicious and refreshing Gatorade, it's full of pee, of urine.

And at the very moment Hill says this:

And before he even finishes his sentence, he cocks his arm back and just launches it at me. ... His aim was incredible. It was just coming right at me. The first blow nails me right in the head.

I begin to notice some liquid travelling down the center of the car towards me.

Now, liquid in a subway car is not that big a deal. People still drink all kinds of beverages (even though you are not supposed to have open containers anymore) and they slop them cavalierly whenever and wherever they please.

But this liquid is special. It isn't spilled-soda liquid -- a single, localized hit -- this liquid keeps on coming. I trace my eyes along the widening rivulet, following it towards the back of the car and I see ... wait for it... a full Bethesda Fountain emerging from the lap of the homeless guy. It is arcing its perfect parabola towards the center of the car.

Now, as I mentioned, I have seen a lot of stuff -- but I have never seen this -- a full-blown, unrepentant micturition right into the center of a subway car.

It takes me at least 20 seconds to wrap my mind around what I'm seeing, as Hill goes on:

It's going down my back and down my jacket. And it's soaking my pants. It soaks through my pants, soaks my underwear. He had effectively wet my pants with his pee.

And I'm realizing, "Hey this is a crazy-assed coincidence!" And then I think, "Hey maybe I should take a picture of this..." But he's been at it for at least 30 seconds, so I figure it's probably all over and I continue to listen to the podcast.

Because if you figure if your opponent's first move in a confrontation is to just drench you in his own pee, like, what's next? At the very least, he's got a couple more bottles of pee back there, you figure.

The pee fountain continues full force, and finally I decide that yes I will photograph this insane event, but the moment I get my phone out the car stops and the people sitting in front of me get up and block the last few moments of the geyser.

So it's all over.

I move to the next backward facing seat hoping get a good shot of the urine starburst on the floor and its watery trail through the car -- which is shown here -- as well as the homeless guy himself, who huddled back to sleep the moment he was done.

And in a testament to the fact that neither New York nor New Yorkers have lost our edge, another passenger continued to sit blithely just a few feet from the homeless guy all through the urination episode (see his feet at the right of the photo). 

Yes, Dave, this motherf*cking town is back!!