odd characters
A little before Christmas, 2000. I was waiting, around 1 AM, at the 149th Street/Grand Concourse subway station for the fourth in a series of five trains I had to take to get back to my aunt's house in the Bronx. Due to some weird scheduling, there was a crowd of people waiting -- you'd figure that late on a weeknight, there wouldn't be an atmosphere reminiscent of rush hour, but there was. On the other side of the tracks, there were a relative handful of people; most of them were rail-maintenance people, probably headed to the 125th Street station.
One non-subway employee comes down the stairs on the opposite side (this is at the bottom level, where you catch the 2 or the 5), walks a few steps on the platform, then stands, waiting for his train. I fumble in my laptop bag, looking for my watch, then a loud thwack jolts my attention back to the opposite platform. A large garbage bag full of stuff had landed a couple of feet (or less) away from the guy who'd just come down the stairs. A few more seconds later, a large black man descends that stairway, looking like a Caribbean Santa Claus -- t-shirt, shorts, flip-flops, a matted afro with some sign of dreadlocks. Santa looked like he'd just come in from the beach -- never mind that it was probably 30° in the real world. He let out a small, jolly chuckle, grabbed his garbage bag, and went on his merry way down the platform, leaving the pissed glare of his near-victim behind.
Santa was much too large to confront in this matter.
And to all a good fr^H^Hnight.