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[May. 28th, 2009|01:03 am] |
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| |  amused | ] |
Taking the subway on weekend nights is always an experience. This Friday was no exception.
The stop after mine, ten or so guys in their late teens/early twenties enter, sit down one row ahead of me, and immediately break out in a reggaeton-esque freestyle-rap jam session (for the record - although it really doesn't matter, but slightly amusing nonetheless: these guys seemed to be Pakistani, Kurd/Turkish/Serbian/Albanian/something and white in pretty equal numbers), accompanied by hand clapping, floor stomping, beatbox...ing? and friggin' POUNDING ON THE WINDOWS. Aye.
At first, I was totally taken aback by this - you have to consider that I work nights, in a predominantly white area that wishes it was more posh than it is (why on Earth I got myself a job there, being thoroughly sick of the place after three years of going to high school not ten minutes' walk away, I do not know), and as such the only kind of nightlife I encounter (apart from the subway rides to work) consists of preppy high school seniors, uni freshmen with entitlement issues and their girlfriends, for whom drunkenness is just another excuse to be obnoxious. I had simply become accustomed to 'rowdy' meaning 'hella nasty drunk' and forgotten that people from my part of town, despite media giving us a bad rap, are often REALLY REALLY loud, but usually benign. (In fact, I'd go so far as to say that somebody needs to hold a grudge towards you personally, or you have to walk up to their face and ask for it, to get in trouble - in the nearly 24 years I've lived here, I have never, ever feared for either my life or my possessions. But then I was also never affiliated with the cool kids in jr. high who were into all sorts of shady business - I believe these things stay internal within certain groups. Goodness, that sounded so snotty, but how else can I put it? This bracketed sequence is more than long enough already.)
It was plain to see that other passengers, too, were reacting the same way I had at first - newcomers glanced briefly at the ensemble and hurried up to the front of the train; people who were already seated tensed up and shifted nervously. None of the jolly boys seemed to care, and the singing, for lack of a more accurately descriptive term, continued. A couple stops later, and a guy I recognised from school - Christian, a year above me, older sister OD'd and died at 17 - came in. Enthusiastic shrieks and an impromptu rap to his honour ensued, and suddenly a bunch of rather inebriated girls came dancing up the aisle from the back of the train, waving their beer cans and long-stemmed roses. And just as I was wondering where they might have got the latter from, a little old Gypsy woman came after them with her arms full of the flowers which she was obviously selling, and then everybody was dancing and rapping and singing and shouting and thumping on the walls and the windows and the ceiling, and Christian was standing right in the middle of it, laughing his head off and filming the whole thing with his mobile. Oh. My. Goodness.
I could barely contain my giggling at this point, and it didn't help when a scruffy looking middle-aged man entered with his bike and sourly asked them to shut up - to which they merely reacted with a split second of baffled silence before continuing the freestyle rap, now dissing him, his "dirty cap," the soccer team he was supporting and the fact that he was taking up a lot of space with the bike; all in a way that might not have been very poetic *or* poignant, but bloody hilarious all the same. I spent about 25 minutes on that train before I had to change, and I swear this musical escapade went on in some form or another for at least 20 of them. After I left the train, I could hear them perfectly well from outside - not least the walls-and-windows-banging - other people waiting on the platform stared anxiously at the carriage as if expecting it to fall apart any minute, and I cannot say I blame them; that's pretty much how it sounded. It was fucking EPIC. Man, I wish *I* had thought to film it. |
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