Recently, the Disco Biscuit moved from New York to Boston to begin his law school studies. Simply put, this kind of bites, but since I don’t have a choice, I’ve tried to make the best of it. Only 250 miles separate the two cities, after all. Alas, the Biscuit has more or less soldered himself to a desk in the law library, so thus far I have done the bulk of the travelling, and I must say that I find all methods of transport between points A and B completely unsatisfactory. I tried driving, but this involved taking a train from New York to New Jersey to pick up the car at my parents’ house, discovering a flat tire, throwing a tantrum, acquiring a new tire, plunging headlong into the Labor Day traffic I had hoped to avoid, careening across the Tappan Zee Bridge, bolting halfway up New England, veering onto the Mass Pike for a 50-mile stretch, dropping a lit cigarette between the seats and hunting for it while trying to gauge the speed of the ‘77 Chevelle in front of me whose brake lights had stopped working sometime during the Carter administration, screaming “I DON’T WANT TO DIE” repeatedly out my window, silently reassuring God that if he let me survive I would never ask for anything again and that I really meant it this time even though I said I would never ask for anything again every time He let me pass a math test in high school, slaloming through the toll booth and into town, peering in vain at buildings as they whipped by in order to find the building number, making a number of flagrantly illegal U-turns that would have made Starsky and Hutch green with envy, calling the Biscuit from the car and wondering rather loudly why I had wound up next to a baseball field instead of at his apartment building, staring incredulously into the receiver as he “remembered” to tell me that his building sits behind another building that I had just passed several dozen times, peeling off another stunning General-Lee two-
wheel U-turn, sailing into his parking lot, retrieving him, and bringing him downstairs to help me find a parking spot for the weekend, only to discover that I had caught yet another flat tire, the very same tire that I had in fact just replaced at a cost of eighty-five dollars and considerable annoyance, and then repeating the ENTIRE process at the end of the weekend, except that this time I had the pleasure of not only cannonballing home through a driving rain that knocked out the power to most of Long Island but also waiting for the inevitable “thump . . . pffffffffft” of the tire screwing me over once again because, as we all know, bad things come in threes. I got back to New Jersey in one piece, but after tottering out of the car and shouting at it, “Shadow, Shadow, WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME,” I vowed that never again would I undertake this hellacious drive, and that I would take the train instead.

Well, I made a reservation on Amtrak, but it only looked like a train from the outside. Once in the train car, I found myself in the middle of a large-scale anthropological experiment composed of several hundred minute irritations which, taken together, would drive every single passenger stark raving barmy. Most of these irritations fall under the heading “other passengers,” but I’ll get to that later. Let’s start with certain facets of the train itself. Now, I don’t pretend to have a vast knowledge of engineering, but it seems to me that, when installing a rest room in a moving vehicle, one might want to make sure that the locks on the doors work. (I should add that Amtrak trains have two different types of toilet: the regular garden-variety airplane type, so tiny that passengers wishing to turn around in the bathroom must first grease themselves liberally with Crisco, yet so crowded that even the slightest curve in the track sends all manner of paper towels and rolls of toilet paper and other assorted sundries cascading onto the floor; and the handicapped- accessible type, large enough to accommodate a wheelchair but designed in such a way that “abled” passengers will ricochet along the walls towards the commode much like the protagonist in a-ha’s “Take On Me” video, finally tumbling headlong into the floor-to-ceiling stack of moist towelettes stored at the back of the chamber.) The locks on the doors of the bathrooms of this particular train did not work, so that travellers constantly whipped open the door to expose other travellers taking a crap (small bathroom), or opened the door and didn’t see anyone inside and stepped in and lurched forward into the lap of someone taking a crap (large bathroom). A couple of passengers inadvertently lurched out of the bathroom while still fastening up their clothing; at one point, a door flapped open and whacked someone on their way to the cafÈ car in the head. When I visited the bathroom, I secured the door with chewing gum. What century do I live in again?

Speaking of the cafÈ car, I must say that they serve good food at reasonable prices. Unfortunately, it takes a herculean effort to get to the food, because the Amtrak folk have packaged it so impermeably that those who left their Swiss Army knives at home will have to settle for looking at their lunches instead of eating them. On the trip up, I ordered an Italian sub. I wrestled with the plastic vainly until fashioning a makeshift blade with the catch of my bracelet, but then I had to get the damn dressing packet open, and I tried everything – my teeth, my jewelry, the Vulcan mind meld – but nothing worked. Finally, a woman across the aisle handed me her husband’s pocket knife, and I would have stabbed myself with it if she hadn’t pointed out that I could use it to open the packet. Once I managed to get at the food, it tasted delicious, which makes me wonder if they don’t super-seal everything on purpose so that we work up an even larger appetite.

Of course, the fact that I had an appetite at all after interacting with some of my fellow passengers strikes me as nothing short of miraculous. For some reason, people on trains must think that nobody else can see them or hear them, or that if they don’t know the other people on the train personally then obnoxious behavior doesn’t “count.” Several passengers picked their noses so thoroughly that I felt sure some sort of aneurysm would result, but once the second knuckle vanished into the tunnel, I stopped watching. Others cleared their ears of wax, wiping the excess on the headrest of the seats in front of them. I found this revolting, and also incomprehensible, since the nonstop howling of a disagreeable infant made some sort of earplug a necessity (not to mention the infant’s parents, who evidently believed that telling their child repeatedly to “shut the hell up” would soothe it to sleep. It didn’t).

Happily, I didn’t hear much of the baby’s shrieking, because my seatmate had purchased a large bag of Doritos before leaving the station, and proceeded to eat them as slowly and as loudly as possible for the first two hours of the trip. This woman, who appeared dainty but could – and did – fit as many as five entire Doritos into her mouth at once, emitted a window-rattling crunch roughly every minute and a half. After she had polished off the entire bag, blanketing the car with the delicate scent of synthetic nacho cheese in the process, she fell deeply asleep, so that if I wanted to go the bathroom or to the cafÈ car, tapping her lightly on the knee wouldn’t get the job done; I had to take her by the shoulders and yell “WAKE UP Dorito lady” directly into her face in order to rouse her. Once, I clambered over her instead of waking her. Naturally, at that moment, the train ran over an object the size of a Shetland pony, at which point I landed in my seatmate’s lap, and let me assure you that that woke her up, as well as anyone else in the car who might have fallen asleep, and a couple of people who live in houses next to the train tracks as well, because she yelled “eeeeeeeYOOWWWW” and then informed me snippily that I could have just shaken her if I wanted to get by because she had “just closed her eyes for a moment,” and despite overwhelming evidence that I would have had an easier time waking up Sunny von Bulow, I apologized and stuck my nose back into my book. Then I thought that maybe Sunny had the right idea, and I leaned back in my seat to catch forty winks, but immediately behind me, an unbelievably pretentious conversation had just begun on the writings of John Irving and I couldn’t help listening. The two people, who held their discussion as if on Crossfire, then dissected the sorry state of French cinema, the nature of long-distance relationships, the cost of living in various Canadian cities, how to keep a fern alive, and a number of other bland topics that had escaped from the set of a Pier One commercial.

At last, we arrived at Penn Station. When I got back to my apartment, I burst through the front door and called the Biscuit to tell him that I had gotten home safely and before he could get a word in edgewise I begged him to transfer to a New York law school, because I can stay home and let other people irk me for free instead of paying eighty bucks for the privilege.

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