Saturday, March 26, 2005

Dodging .45 Caps in NYC, Part 1

Well the semester has seen a fair amount of snow storms, sloth and other vices that go with extreme cold. Apart from a remarkable night in New York City, the details of which I have stated below, and a rather arbitrary weekend at Tufts University at Boston, the semester has been pretty straight forward, actually not that straight-forward, but not as crazy as Stephanian times.

On the first day (a saturday) of Spring Break, dad called and told me that one of his friends would be flying to San Francisco via New York and that I should meet this gentleman at JFK on Thursday night. come Wednesday I'm all set to go to the city, when my dad calls in the evening and informs me that the above mentioned gentleman would now be flying in on the following Sunday instead.

Saturday night I find out that there is a certain chap on campus who was going to be driving down to NYC on Sunday morning. Naturally I decided to hitch a ridewith him. This guy tells me that we'll leave at 11 am on Sunday. I was fine with that since the before mentioned gentleman's flight was supposed to come in at 5:30 and NYC is only about 4 hours away from college.

Sunday: (I'll do the rest in an itenary format tospeed things up, this keyboard sucks!)
As asked, I show up at my ride's room at 11, only to be told that it was in fact his brother who would becoming in from Yale to pick us up and drive us to the city and that his brother was not here yet.

12 pm: his brother turns up in a spanking new fuel guzzling Nissan SUV and we set off and I promtly fall asleep in the back seat.

2 pm: I wake up and look around and notice a rather large board saying "Welcome to Whitestown, Pennsylvania". I panic. "Dude, aren't we going to the city?" I inquire. "Yeah we are but my parents just called and they want me to return the SUV to them, so we'll take my truck from home and then go to the city." my friend replies.

3 pm: I am cramped in the tiny utility seat in the back of a Chevy Truck and we're headed towards NYC. They smoke a joint en route.

6 pm: We reach the outskirts of NYC in a a place called Beacon and my friend stops the truck outside the railway station and tells me to take the train from here to the city since he was not going to drive any further since he was going to go to a friend's place here.

7:30 pm: the freaking train takes an hour and a half to reach grnd central. I get onto a bus for JFK

8:00 pm: I'm in JFK. Obviously the fore mentioned gentleman is no longer waiting for me. I call dad and find out which hotel he's staying in and go there. I've never met this guy before in my life, but it turns out that he was pretty chilled and all. He gave me some money dad had sent and my plane tickets to fly back home. He asks me if I wanted to spend the night here or go back to college. Since I was working the next day, I decided to go back and took the West bound subway to the bus station at Port Authority.

9:45 pm; I reach Port Authority in time to miss the last bus to Utica by 15 minutes. The next bus is at 7 in the morning. I have from 10pm at night till 6 in the morning to kill. I decide to go to Broadway.

I'm at Broadway, outside a theatre playing "The Lion King". They're sold out. Fortunately or unfortunately, I find a shady dude scalping ticketsfor the show close-by. I pay an exorbitant amount towatch the show, which was awesome (the show that is, not the exorbitant amount)!

1 am: I wander into the Laughter House to watch comedian Kathie Lee perform. She's terrible...house-wife humour. I walk out an hour later. I wonder why I stayed so long.

2am: the only kind of people on NYC at this time were drunks, black chain gangs and 24 hour chinese food delivery people. I decide to head back to the bus station.

3 am: I'm sitting at the cafeteria downstairs of the bus station, trying to read "Brighter Than a Thousand Suns" when I and some other people in the cafe realize that the woman sitting next to me was trying to commit suicide. This lady was a diabetic in her late 50s or early 60s I would guess and her preferred method of dying was tearing open sugar sachets and pouring the contents into her mouth. How did we find out? Well, we noticed that there was a rather unusually large heap of empty sugar satchets on her table, maybe about forty or fifty and when one of the cafe staff guys tried to ask her what she was upto, something flipped in her head and she started cursing, flailing her arms about and screaming "let me fucking die the way I want to, what the fuck is your problem?" Finally the transit guards showed up and managed to take her away.

3:30 am: The earlier events well behind us, the cafe is back into it's lethargic late night mode. there are a few homeless drunks sleeping on the floor, or Hispanic labourers with their families curiously looking at the shoes on display at one of the closed shops. Things were pretty quiet.

4 am: A massive caucasian male, standing roughly at around 6ft with dirty salt and pepper dreadlocks and an over worn moss green trenchcoat walks into the cafe. No one, except for a few people take notice of him or the 9mm pistol he's holding in his right hand. Almost in a whisper he says "I'm so fucking pissed off, I'm going to shoot every one of you mother fuckers overhere". No one really responds. Needless to say, I was shit scared - I didn't really want to die in a cafeteria in a shady NYC bus station, there had to be a better way. With most eyes on him now, this maniac marches upto an old chinese (he could be Korean or Japanese, I couldn't really tell) guy who was eating a hotdog, picked him by the collar and asked him "how much money you got huh, how much money you got?"...

[I'll leave it at this cliffhanger...will Maity escape with his life or will he succumb and become just another New York crime statistic, find out in the next episode of "Days of Our Lives"]