I could see them eyeing me from across the car, one of the most unfortunate times to be a bigger guy. I was a meal--a Thanksgiving feast to all these drunkards, and in the midst of all their McDonalds munchies, I looked like a combination Big Mac, Supersize Fry, 20 piece nugget, Diet Coke smorgasbord. The white people were, officially, out of control. I had always wondered what it would be like to be in this moment--the day that people reverted back to their animalistic ways. And all I could do was sit there and think, How did I get here? What led me to this moment? Let me tell you.
***
About six hours earlier, my roommate and I decided to go into the city for a Beerlympics competition. Sure, it seemed a little college-y, but I'm an addict for competition. Shortly after we arrived, we were sorted into teams, and the games began. After a handful of beers, we decided to go and meet some friends in another part of the city. After navigating the crowded floor of Cafe Citron via a combination of walking/salsa-ing to Jennifer Lopez hits, we finally found our group. As a classic group of 20-somethings, we danced awkwardly in a circle for approximately 20 minutes, fist pumped, and then decided to leave. No one was inebriated beyond help or anything, but it was obvious that we wouldn't be driving--there were only a couple options left and, sadly, one of those was taking the metro back toward home.
The Saturday night metro isn't really a place that you ever want to be because it's a completely mixed bag. Sometimes people throw up; sometimes people are making out; sometimes you don't even want to know what happens. So before we got on the metro, I called our other roommate, our last hope, before we got on the train headed toward our apartment. Normally, I would have given up after one call, but the mixture of competition and low-grade beer made me more optimistic than usual. Five calls later, there was finally an answer: a groggy roommate who was not going to pick us up. The moment had come to face what would be the most absurd and slightly dangerous Saturday night metro yet. Most of the time, if you just keep to yourself everything turns out fine. I mean, sure, you might get awkwardly approached by someone, but it's a relatively painless process because the metro runs on a timetable, or at least that's what we like to believe. We transferred over from the red line over to the orange, and it seemed as if the ride was going to be relatively patient, until the next to the last stop. On the way to the station we needed to get off at, the train came to a halt in the middle of the tunnel, and we were stranded in the car with a train full of people and a faulty speaker.
Whenever the train stops in the tunnel, I immediately imagine that we're under the Potomac, even if we're not. I imagine that the walls are going to cave in, and then I'm going to have to swim out of the tunnel Fear Factor style--and then I immediately regret smoking because I'm going to lose and then there's not going to be any trained swimmers to save me. And then something happened on the metro, as if everyone else was also thinking that the walls might cave in to. Essentially, everyone went bat shit crazy. It all started when two large women got up from their seats and addressed the young men who kept staring at them. They had green and purple tubes coming out of their hair, kind of like The Hunger Games, but without any regard to trying to look glamorous. This only caused the guys to egg them on more, which caused the one with green tubes and suspenders to get up and start grinding on the pole, which in turn caused everyone to pull out their cameras and start videoing the entire thing. I, too, pulled out my camera because I knew that if I made it out of that godforsaken train car, I wanted to write about it--our fear and our pain.
My friend Samantha sat their, her eyes full of worry. We've gotten close, but none of us wanted to go out like this, and under the influence of alcohol, it seemed all too real that this could really be it. Suddenly, one of the guys next to us announced, "Maybe we need to start voting people out." This seemed like my moment, so I began working with the gay guy and his overbearing friend next to us. If I've learned anything this summer from watching Big Brother, it's that America LOVES the gays, so that's a good addition to my alliance. We also decided to include the girl who was passed out in the seat in front of them because, well, God only knows what would happen to her if we didn't... but it was at that moment that we heard screams from the other side of the metro, and we looked down the car to see that the two large women were pulling away from each other and saying, "We'll give you something to take pictures of!!" and then they started making out again. The guy they were with who was wearing a Juggalo shirt stood propped up against the door nodding his head, and someone screamed, "Let's eat someone! Let's eat someone!"
It was at that moment that I realized that we weren't on Big Brother, nor were we in a metro car anymore... this was Lord of the Flies kind of stuff. Over the course of 20 minutes, we had progressed from a normal, semi-unstable Saturday night metro train to an island full of one-time-young-professionals contemplating who to kill for food. I worried first and foremost about the girl who was passed out. Being a young female passed out in an urban setting is already dangerous enough, but being in this urban setting only made the situation more pressing. I knew the obvious choice was probably the outlandish lesbians, but I couldn't help to feel paranoid: I was one of the meatiest options. I would provide the most nutrition--I could sustain at least half the car for at least thirty minutes. I thought about the future and what it could have been, and I began to actually wonder if that train car was where it would all end. In the mean time, everyone was screaming, begging the metro car to start moving, and the speaker would occasionally erupt into a loud noise that mostly sounded like, "Passengers...time...sorry...thanks."
And then the train surged forward. All the lesbians, alliances, and Juggalos couldn't keep me from the excitement I had in my heart. It was as if I had been saved, and once the doors opened, I hugged Samantha goodbye and ran out the doors with my roommate. One young man stopped to tell a metro worker that he was an "inbred piece of..." well, you get the idea, and in a last moment attempt to restore civility to the world, I yelled, "Everyone has lost their damn minds. Go home. Everyone go home," and people started moving toward the escalators. You never know what the future holds, but when you're stuck on a metro of potential-cannibals, you do learn to appreciate whatever is ahead. Again, I survived the Saturday night metro, but as for the next one... you can never be sure.
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