Never An Empty Seat

On Saturday, I met up with a couple of buddies in the city. We fought with the Brooklyn girls for tweed miniskirts at the GAP on the 34th Street. We braved the shoe department at Macy’s. We purchased freshly ground curry spices in the East 20s. When our bundles became too heavy, we hunkered down in an old favorite tapas bar in the East Village for a pitcher of sangria and spicy potatoes. Great day.

However, I was gypped out of the quiet hour on the bus into the city. I was looking forward to the finishing off the double issue of the New Yorker and some quality time looking at the skyline over the Meadowlands. But it was not to be. Because crazy people love me.

I’m a magnet for racists, wackos, drunks, and needy foreigners. They seek me out. If there is an empty seat next to me on a bus or an airplane, they’ll make a beeline for it even if every other seat is empty.

The racists like to tell me about their noxious views preferably loud enough for the entire bus to hear. The paranoid-schizophrenics quietly hand me notes before darting out the sidedoor of the M4. The notes offer evidence of a master plan for world domination by aliens and the CIA between the lines of a brochure for Radio Shack.

On the trip into the city, I got the needy foreigner. A Fabio look alike sat next to me and quickly asked for information about the return bus. One question became another and soon I could see that he was going to request the guidance of a tour guide. I dealt with it the only know way I know how. I pretended to fall asleep. Narcolepsy can be your friend.

While waiting for the return bus in the Port Authority, a conservative Jewish woman in her forties asked me about the destination of our bus. Then she asked me about my views of New York hospitals.

See, I wasn’t prepared. I’ve never encountered a wacko in a cheap wig before. Before I knew it, she was squeezed next to me in a nearly empty bus, telling me about the network of social workers and doctors and lawyers and insurance companies, all conspiring to write “histrionic” on your records when, clearly, the blackouts and lumps on your head all pointed to cancer. It’s a network, I tell you. And then I’m considering the consequences of getting the driver to let me off right there in the middle of the Lincoln Tunnel. The falling asleep trick wasn’t working with this woman because she kept smacking me in the arm.

Why am I a magnet for crazy people? Why am I singled out to hear about the networks and the CIA plots? Do I have a very understanding face? Do they think that I am one of them? Slightly worrisome.