On Wednesday night I met a friend in the East Village for a tacos and a movie.
The tacos? Amazing. How can you go wrong with a taco that involves a hard shell slathered on the outside with guacamole that acts as glue for a soft tortilla wrapper?
The movie? Persepolis, and it was awesome. They did a really good job translating the book into a movie and my friend and I both thoroughly enjoyed it.
We parted ways at around 10 pm, walking in opposite directions, me to the subway and her up to 14th street to catch a bus. She was probably home and in bed before I even got on the train. You see, something crazy happened. And there is so much to this story, I’m not sure I can relate every part of it in this blog. I’ll try to be succinct.
First, I entered the 8th street station on the wrong side, so I had to exit and pay again to go in the correct side. This is supremely annoying to me. But, whatev—it happens. And I got in the right side pretty quickly so it seemed that I would be on my way in no time.
I stake out a spot on the platform and swing my bag around to fish out my book. Book in one hand, bag in the other, I awkwardly zip it up and then lean forward a bit to shift the bag back up on my shoulder. As I do this, my phone (only a month old), which I had foolishly placed in the shallow, flimsy, stretched-out pocket on the front of my bulky sweater, slips out and on to the floor. It slides across the bumpy yellow caution strip and then, you guessed it, down onto the tracks.
Crap.
I stand there frozen for a moment, looking around me to see if anyone noticed. They didn’t; this is New York. I look down at my phone, face down, shiny, its deep red color almost blending in with the dirt of the trough it was in.
Crap.
If I was taller or stronger or more daring, I would have just jumped on the tracks myself. But I am none of those things so I hustle back over to the turnstiles where an MTA employee was mopping the floor.
“IjustdroppedmyphoneonthetrackswhatdoIdo?”
“You gotta talk to that guy.” She gestures with her mop toward the booth.
“I have to come back out there?”
“Yeah!”
Nuts. I did not want to have to pay AGAIN because I am cheap, so I hesitate for a moment—until I realize how completely stupid that was. I go to the booth and, now shaking, I tell the guy what happened. He makes a phone call, so calm, so not surprised by my predicament. Apparently this happens all the time?
He hangs up the phone. “They’re gonna come get it. But, unfortunately, we’re changing shifts in a few minutes, so they probably won’t be here for 45 minutes to an hour.” My heart sank and he could see this, so he says, “but sometimes they get here faster, so go outside, then come back in 20 minutes. Maybe you’ll be lucky.”
When I came up the steps, my first thoughts were where am I, I know nothing about this area and I can’t call Steve. I look in my wallet—no quarters. I go into a pizza place on the corner by the subway stop and when they don’t want to give me change, I tell them my sad, sad story and they give in. It costs me $1 in quarters to use a pay phone (which I barely touch, barely hold to my head) and leave Steve a crazy-lady message about how this is really, really, really, really, really annoying but don’t worry about me if you get home and I’m not there (he was out with work people). I’ll get home eventually.
I wander for a while, and eventually slip into a Starbucks before it closes. I head toward the bathroom, where there is already a girl waiting.
“Hiii…” she says, as if warning me that maybe I should rethink my bathroom trip.
“Hi?”
“Um, this person has been in there a loooong time. Like, the water has been running forever.”
“Oh. Weird.”
We discuss how it is probably a homeless person taking a bath. And sure enough…
10 minutes later, a hunched over old woman emerges dressed literally head to toe in black and wearing a lot of blue eye shadow and black eyeliner. She mumbles something, something like, “Go on now in thar.”
The girl looks at me with big, scared, I-don’t-want-to-go-in-there eyes.
The woman stops, turns around, lifts her drooping head as much as she can. “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?” she practically yells. “GIT IN THAR!”
I look big-eyed back at the girl and she hustles in. A minute later, she comes out. “uhhhhhh! Um, ew, just, uh…” I take a deep breath and go in myself, do the fastest pee of my life in suffocating stench, and move on out.
I go to buy tea. The guy at the counter claims it to be the best green tea ever. I resist the urge to say, “Dude? Did you forget this is just Starbucks?” The hunched over old lady and her friend sit at a table near by, surrounded by suitcases and brushing their teeth, one of them gripping an enormous tube of toothpaste.
At this point, the internal anxiety over my phone is just too much. What if they came, found the phone, and didn’t leave it for me, but instead turned it into some Ministry of Things Lost on the Subway and I never saw it again? I didn’t want to have waited in vain. I hang out in the station, outside the turnstiles, for a while, but then tell the guy in the booth I would rather just wait on the platform, where there are actually benches to sit on. He oh-so-kindly let me in through the emergency gate so I don’t have to pay again. Score!
I watch many trains go by. I try to read my book, but find myself distracted by every person who walks through the turnstile, every sound that crackles like a walkie-talkie, the homeless guy across the tracks on the uptown platform who is making loud, farty noises and swearing periodically at the top of his lungs.
After about half an hour of this, I suddenly look up to see a bobbing flashlight coming down the tracks. YES!
I jump up and go over to where I knew my phone was. I look down. It’s gone!
“Hello?” The worker on the tracks looks up at me.
“I dropped my phone on the tracks and now it’s gone!”
“Oh, that was you? HEY, JOHNNY!” He shouts, and I look toward the opposite end of the platform where another worker is walking on the tracks and has almost reached the blackness of the tunnel. “YOU GOT A PHONE?”
Johnny, keeping his back to us, holds my phone high in the air, then leans over to the platform, lays it on the yellow bumpy strip, and keeps walking.
I practically ran toward it.
“Well, isn’t this exciting?” A girl on the platform says to her friend as I pass them.
I said something back to her. Something like, “I guess,” or “Not really.” I mean, I suppose it’s exciting if you’ve only been waiting for the train for one minute and you see someone reunited with the phone they thought they may never see again. But for the person who waited way more than an hour for that reunion to take place? Not so much.
I got home after 12:30am. My phone wasn’t broken, scratched, or even really dirty. All things considered, what could have been a bad situation, turned out ok. Plus, I learned things:
1) New Yorkers are nice and can be really helpful. This has been proven to me again and again since we moved here, and this experience just further cemented this truth in my mind.
2) Don’t forget your "Not For Tourists: Manhattan" book when you go to the city.
3) Carry quarters.
4) Don’t forget your knitting! I could have made much better lemonaide out of these lemons if I had at least gotten a little further on the final sleeve for my Thermal.
