• Guy with his pants down furiously masturbating in the middle of rush hour. Caused a delay.
• Tweaker trying to grind on us til a BAMF lady with a tazer and a huge afro scared him off
• Two rival gangs threatening each other with guns. Police raided the train from both ends
• Masturbaters on the bus
• Delusional woman accusing everyone of touching her hair and trying to pick a fight
• Guy blowing off another guy in between moving train cars
• Subway surfers
• On the bus, guy kept saying “mmm gassy” while eating Chinese takeout and loudly farting

NYC is wild

Wholesome one this time.

I played a club sport in college. Nothing fancy and I was a fine but not top-of-the-roster player. Several of us rode the city bus to practice every day.

There was often a woman on the same bus as us. She obviously had some mental and physical challenges. She would chat with other passengers at times, and eventually figured out many of us were teammates. She started getting into it, asking us who was the best player and if we were going to win “the big game”. (There was no “big game” ever upcoming, it was just a question she associated with sports and asked frequently). One time she brought her autograph book and asked us all to sign it.

When we did finally play in a “big game”, it got posted on YT. So I showed her a bit the next time we were on the bus together. She was pretty excited and asked for another round of autographs now that we were TV famous.

She never came to a game, I think a disruption like that to her routine might have been really hard on her, but it was fun having such a non-judgemental, joyous fan.

Guy sets a bluetooth speaker down on a seat, and then proceeds to do a full gymnastic dance routine right there in the subway car. Plenty of “regular” dancing, but also handstands, hanging from the rails, spinning on the floor, walking on the walls, the works. All well-timed to the music.

Didn’t ask for money. Just got off at the next station. Dude just wanted to dance, I guess.

As I was preparing to get off the train, I heard the man next to me say “hublublublubluh”.

I looked over. He was lying down.

“hublublublubluh” he repeated, and this time I got to witness the exit of pints of beery vomit onto the floor.

The train stopped. The vomit rushed across the floor under other people’s feet and bags. As I got off I noticed the smell.

Really glad that was my stop.

The bus driver watching loud porn on his phone and cheering them on loud enough for the whole bus to hear.

Two, both on the same bus ride:

Old guy comes on with a cart and starts selling cotton candy, with surprising success. 50 cents, and the rest of the ride people are just all enjoying cotton candy in violation of no eating rules (especially sticky stuff).

Girl, probably around 16ish, on a loud phone call with someone in regards to a boyfriend in prison with increasingly more depressing and dire details as the ride goes on except a random moment where she talked about Fortnite. We’re talking drugs, pregnancy, other women, and Fortnite.

Some guy wearing a large hoodie got on the piss-soaked train right before the doors closed. As he was walking down the aisle he stopped right in front of me, pulled out a Taser, and lit it up right by my face. Right after he opened up his hoodie like the RE 4 merchant and showed a collection of batteries, tasers, Bluetooth speakers and all sorts of other junk. He was the world’s shittiest salesman.

I was taking the train to work and there was this homeless dude sitting there quietly scooping chocolate powder over his head.

Just using the little plastic scoop that comes in the can. Scoop, scoop, scoop.

He wasn’t hurting anyone, so I called it in to the transit authority when I got to my stop. On the one hand, I didn’t want anyone seeing a bunch of brown powder thinking we got anthraxed, at the same time, I didn’t want to be late for work. ;)

“Yeah, there’s a guy on the Westbound train quietly covering himself in chocolate powder.”

“What kind of chocolate powder?”

“. . . I dunno, Nestlé Quik? Does it matter?”

Young dude sitting waiting for a train flicking a bic lighter until it exploded in his hand.

Old lady fell off the platform between two cars while the train was still rolling. Had all the toes on one foot crushed and cut off. The sock was still intact so when we helped the conductor pull her back up it was just a bloody tube of sock with… stuff at the bottom.

Train stopped in the middle of nowhere after it hit a horse. The train won.

Dude on the train runs a successful business selling plain white socks. See him hustling nearly every day.

high speed train. a scrawny dude in a tracksuit asks someone when the train will stop. next station in 40 minutes, someone tells him. (there are only five stops and all in large cities) this reassures him for a while.

30 minutes to the city. dude stands up and asks when will the train stop. the same someone tells him that in half an hour, but this time he doesn’t chill out. he wants to get out, RIGHT NOW. dude gets increasingly more agitated and hovers around train door. he found a hammer somewhere and tried to break open glass in that door, but it’s reinforced so it doesn’t fall apart. at that point someone alerted train staff. he wants to get out, right now, and won’t through that hole. train got stopped shortly after, everyone in that car was moved out to others. other than that dude, that is, now without hammer, repeating I WANNA GET OUT

some of staff tries to pacify him, but it doesn’t work. border guard and some other uniformed officer, both on leave, tackle him and hold until railway security arrive. it took six of them to take that tracksuit dude out to ambulance. (he got to leave train) motherfucker caused 4h of delay for this train and many delays downstream

On a bus from El Paso to Phoenix someone smoked a joint in the bus bathroom and got dumped on the side of the highway immediately after.

Two hours later on that same bus trip the bus got raided by immigration and I got into an argument with the officer that wouldn’t accept my ACTIVE, UNEXPIRED Military ID as a valid form of ID and started yelling at me for my passport (I have a Spanish last name). I threw my passport at him and told him to fuck off before I got my command group involved with his. I don’t know how that worked but he got real quiet and left me alone immediately after that lol. There were several people that were pulled off of that bus that night. It was overall pretty shitty.

Once I was working at a train station on a nice, sunny afternoon, and there was a fella on the platform with a sharpened bit of PVC just waving it about, threatening people. I did as I was supposed to, stayed in the booking office, told security and the train guards, etc, but I was telling people not to go down to the platform because there was a fella waving a sharpened bit of PVC about, and they were saying “oh don’t be daft”, “oh I can’t miss this train”, and so on. I for one would let someone off if they were late because a fella was waving a sharpened bit of PVC about at the train station, but everyone who lived around the station was an hard knock or something.

Once I was working at a different station a bit further out in the sticks, and I was watching the CCTV as the train on the down platform was letting out. I saw someone walk into the car park, duck down between two cars, and walk away in different clothes. Bit odd, I thought, but fine, they’re not causing trouble. Then a man came to the window and he was apoplectic: “some fella’s just got off there and now he’s got a dress on!” So I said yeah mate, I’ve just seen that on the CCTV. This man stayed there for at least a few minutes repeatedly complaining to me that this other fella had got off the train and changed into a dress. I found it weirder that he was so upset about it, honestly.

Once I was on the way home from work on Orangeman’s Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelfth) and of course the train was rammed. I was sort of looking around, surveying the scene, and this bloke at the arse-end of the carriage suddenly piped up: “fuck the pope! Wahehey!” which I found a bit bemusing, but it’d of course been a dogshite day at work so I didn’t engage any further.

I’ve probably got hundreds of these anecdotes if I could jog my memory a bit. I had a bit of a talent for straddling the line of acceptability when writing the reports to security, which got sent to every booking office, so I ended up with a reputation and the nickname Mad Bob.

I live in a city, Manchester UK, so I’ve pretty much seen anything you could think of.

• Fighting
• Pissing / Shitting
• Shagging
• Smoking
• Doing heroin
• Once saw a guy jump off the bus as he saw someone that owed him money, ran over and battered the guy
• Football hooligans being loud and obnoxious
• Racists being racist to people that look different to them
• people being arrested

That said I love living so close to a large city.

In the late 80s I ended up on a bus from North Minneapolis to South Minneapolis at around 9pm after a school play.

With me were my sister and several of our friends.

I’ll never know if this was in any way an out of the ordinary ride for the time and place. For context, we are all 13-15 years old, all white kids.

1. A middle-aged black man holding a very small suitcase gets on and walks to the very back of the bus, sitting next to one of my sisters friends. Out of his jacket he pulls a few red roses and hands them to her. He then begins to flirt with her, angering other passengers and causing the bus driver to scream at him and kick him off.

2. A fight breaks out in the front of the bus. Everyone, including the driver and the couple fighting, are laughing. Then one stumbles into the driver and they get kicked off.

3. A drunk man comes and sits next to me and my friend Nick. Nick and I are chatting about a game, probably Warhammer Fantasy.

The man asks Nick for a favor.

“What?”

“Teach me your language.”

“What??”

“Teach me Russian.”

“I don’t know Russian!”

“Teach me anyway.”

That’s it. Of all of those I’m now sure the drunk guy was just deliberately fucking with us. But we also all made it home safely. Just a little window into 80s Minneapolis night life.