ANOTHER BIG LADY

Coming home from a late night after seeing Gomez at the Bowery Ballroom, I catch the A train home and take a seat by a young and rather disheveled young woman who seems to be drunk or otherwise difficult evening. Her belly hangs out over her pants and her hair is a thick tangle of mangle that reminds me of King Buzzo of The Melvins. She’s a goddamn mess. The usual kind of person one encounters at 1:30 in the morning riding the train. I plug into my iPod and settle in to read my book and almost immediately she starts talking to herself in Spanish. Talking to yourself is an indicator of something, something wrong. Still, she’s not talking to me nor trying to engage me so I leave it at that. No big deal. A few stops later she gets up and heads for the doors, like she’s getting ready to get off the next station. She’s kind of wobbling. Must have been the wrong stop. After the train pulls away she heads back towards me, I’m pretty engrossed in what I’m reading, and the train does that thing where it’s trying to accelerate but kind of jerks a couple of times, and she completely loses her balance and falls right on top of me with her total weight, effectively engulfing me with her entire self. I reach my hand out instinctively and it lands palm first onto that belly I spied earlier. My hands sinks into her folds to keep her from falling further and there’s no purchase whatsoever, it’s pointless, I’m smooshed. It’s like resisting a quilt made out of flesh. She smells like a hamper.

“Oh my god. I’m so sorry.” She says, struggling and flailing to get off of me. I feel like I’ve been sacked in a football game.

“Are you ok?” I ask as she finally scraps herself off of me and sits back down where she was originally. She doesn’t answer me. I look around and no one around us has any sort of reaction at all. Like it happens at least ten times a day. It probably does.

It’s one of those embarrassing moments that’s best to speed on from like a trifle, so I try to get back into my book, but my brain is processing all this, so I end up reading the same paragraph three times before I look over at her and see she’s decided to stretch out on the seat, laughing to herself in this slightly psychotic way. Her toes are pudgy and she’s wearing little slippers. It’s been a cold night but she’s wearing slippers.

I continue reading until I’m actually reading and then she finally gets off at 145th street. I watch her shamble off. No one else does.