I think that sightings on the NYC Subway are one of the things that make this City unique and give it its, well….charm….ok maybe that’s not the right word for it. But the Subway is such an attack on the senses (much like the street is) and forces you to see things that most people have probably never seen before. It roughs you up…I think the Subway is a great contributing factor into the coldness people see in New Yorkers. It never ceases to amaze me that I continue to see new bizarre things on the trains and tonight was no exception.
Seeing homeless people on the trains is a fairly normal occurrence. Sometimes, like tonight, they’ll lie on a seat trying to sleep, which usually keeps people away from them.
As I boarded my train, I immediately noticed that there was water on the floor. Again, not that unusual a sight. But the water seemed to have originated directly below one row of seats where a homeless man lay. The seats around him were largely empty. As people boarded the train at future stops, many people would take one look at him and sigh or make some noise of disapproval and move along to the next car. But I stuck with it. He wasn’t doing anything to bug me.
Just as we were about to leave 110th St (the stop before mine) the man flips around and all of a sudden started peeing onto the floor of the car (without even getting up). Yes, that’s right, he just whipped it out (for lack of a better term) and started urinating, adding to the watern that was strewn across the floor (it was clear that was the source of the other liquid. At that point, myself and the two other people still in the car got up and moved to the next car. As one man who had left the car said to me, “Man, I could handle the smell, but not the urine!” He kept shaking his head till I got off at my stop.
As my roommate mentioned to me when I told him the story, “you just saw a true New York moment right there…something you wouln’t see anywhere else in the country.”
That just makes me feel so fortunate to have witnessed a man urinating on Subway!
