DAY 1: FRIDAY
Allyson doesn’t own a bed, let alone a spare bed, so I come prepared with my one-person air mattress from my days as a Boy Scout. It is unwise to sneak into a music festival with anything that will bring attention to you or hamper your fence-climbing abilities, and my bulky red air mattress does both, so off to Allyson’s I go. Nobody good is playing ‘til like 6, anyway.
I walk out of the train station still fumbling to shove my borrowed book back into my overpacked bag and get Yeezus back in my headphones when I see him. Is that… Brian Sella? The guy from The Front Bottoms is just standing there, leaning on a building and thumbing his phone. He notices me noticing him. “Hey…” says Brian, unsure of what’s about to come next.
“Hey man, what’s up! Dude, “Twin Sized Mattress” is one of my favorite songs.”
“Oh, thanks man!” Nice, he’s not annoyed. Outwardly, at least. I mention I’m trying to sneak into GovBall, and then we simultaneously struggle to remember what NYC festival The Front Bottoms are playing.
“No, go ahead,” Brian says.
“It’s, something with, like, astrology?”
“There’s a P…”
“Panorama!”
After this bonding experience, he puts my name and number in the notes of his iPhone with the promise that I might be able to get into Panorama without hopping a fence. He says he’s gonna start walking, we shake hands goodbye, and then we start walking in the same direction. Jesus. Oh well. We talk about The Front Bottoms shows I’ve seen, and he figures out I’ve met him before, at an acoustic set of his in a Brooklyn record store where he signed my ratty Converse All Stars. He says, “we’ve interacted. we’re friends.” Yes, Brian Sella. You’re my best friend. I tell him I also snuck into Riot Fest in Chicago to see him.
“Really?”
Two summers ago, I was walking around the premises of Humboldt Park in Chicago, intending to carefully construct a plan of attack, pinpointing possible security lapses, when I heard The Front Bottoms start playing. I immediately jumped over the closest fence and found myself in a horrifying No Man’s Land gap of grass, about 20 yards behind the vendors, on the other side of the festival goers. I was clearly in a place I could have only gotten by sneaking in. The adrenaline rushed in and I started sprinting, only to realize, nobody was watching. Nobody saw. I walked awkwardly the rest of the way, and then squeezed through a couple of active sausage grills, doing my best to look confused and unapproachable. Before I knew it I was in the crowd, screaming every word, hugging my mohawked ticket-purchasing friend Mark.
Brain tells me “if you don’t get in you can probably get a pretty good view from Something Park right there in Somewhere.” God, I wish I remembered what he had said. I see my subway station. “Alright man, I gotta get on the D. Awesome to see you.”
“Good luck getting in!”
After playing it as cool as I could and not acting like or appreciating that I was speaking to a hero of mine, I walk down the stairs into the subway and find myself in a whirlwind, overwhelmed and teary eyed on the train platform. I suddenly and intensely process what just happened when I get into the subway, and now my whole memory of our conversation takes place on that subway platform, instead of outside the subway where we actually talked.
Incidentally, the next day my friend who wishes to remain anonymous, Bongo Dubbeldam, would see Lin-Manuel Miranda on his way to meet me. Miranda is the cover of the current Rolling Stone, and is still starring in his hit Broadway musical that he wrote. “You saw him at the probable peak of his relevance,” I would text him.
“He looked like a mechanic,” Bongo would respond.
“It's such a big city / I feel so stupid thinking I might see you if I wander around” –“Santa Monica,” by The Front Bottoms
I drop my stuff off at Allyson’s, we take what we need for the festival, and we head out.
We get to the bridge that we’re trying to walk across, and multiple cops are there with flashing lights and bright orange sticks to make sure we only walk on the one side of the bridge. “I don’t think you understand; we’re not going where all these people are going,” I say in the general direction of the police.
Allyson says she has to go to the bathroom. At this point, I’m ready to go. The adrenaline is flowing. I’m pumped and ready to take on whatever obstacles may come in our path. “You can’t wait ‘til we get across the bridge?”
“I really have to pee.”
Ok, fine.
I sit on the sidewalk, and a cop tells me I can’t sit there. I can’t use my phone, because I don’t know how to get back without it and I can’t afford to waste battery. I sit in utter boredom, and twenty minutes later she texts me that she still hasn’t gotten to the bathroom. “What the crap,” I reply. She’s offended. I’m pissed. We could’ve been across the bridge and back by now. I know I shouldn’t be pissed, so I do my best to pretend that I’m not. Fifteen minutes later she comes out and we walk across. I no longer feel like doing any of this. But I have learned to ignore feelings; they are often erroneous.
Halfway across the bridge there’s a clearance in the trees that puts the main stage in view, angled in the general direction of the bridge. If all else fails, we can retreat here and still get an almost decent, only half-garbled concert. This is the Alamo
Off the bridge, we are funneled on a narrow path towards the entrance, swarming with NYPD and GovBall security alike. They surround us on either side, staring at us with their arms folded. We are still almost a half-mile from the gate. This does not look good. These people shouldn’t be here. Why are there so many cops? Why are my tax dollars paying so many armed drones to patrol this stupid sound-show. Every other concert I’ve snuck into had their own security, and then maybe one or two cops in case something got out of hand. This is different; it’s almost half and half. “I don’t like this,” I say to Allyson. Security via intimidation. They’ve created an environment where everyone is too horrified to break any rules. Even if I had a ticket, this fascist atmosphere would make me uncomfortable. “I don’t like this,” I repeat. Allyson stays silent.
We get to the entrance, and I realize there is no way to sneak in. Even if there was, there’d be no reasonable method to figure out how. The fence and security set-up is so baffling that there’s no logical way to approach it. The most obvious solution is to say ‘screw it’ and just run in, but I have an actual ticket for Day 3 on Sunday, and I don’t wanna ruin my chances of being front row for Kanye. The Strokes aren’t that good.
I’m embarrassed to admit the reason I bought a ticket, with money, is that I assumed Governor’s Ball, the famous NYC music festival that takes place on an island in NYC, took place on Governor’s Island. As far as I know, you can only get to Governor’s Island via ferry, and in order to get on the ferry on the day of the festival, you need a ticket. In order for me to consider sneaking into a place, it needs to be on land and without a roof. I am not in the business of sneaking onto boats.
When I realized Kanye had yet to make any mention of a forthcoming tour for The Life Of Pablo, and considering the increasingly erratic and unreliable nature of Kanye West, and that his only scheduled show was at Governor’s Ball, I decided, after being all the way in the back for a particularly boring David Gilmour concert, to buy a single-day ticket just to see Kanye. This way, I could get to the festival just after it opens around noon with five bagels in my bag and wait at the front row of the Kanye stage all day, half-enjoying the mediocre, innocuous electronica acts that would precede him. $115 for the ticket, and $15 for the fees they could have just as easily added to the original ticket price but tack on at the end just to make you feel powerless.
After buying the ticket, I began to look up the logistics so I could be prepared when June 5th came.I was horrified and embarrassed to learn that the Governor’s Ball now takes place on Randall’s Island, which is accessible not only by ferry, but by car, bus, bicycle, and feet. I would have my revenge, I decided. I would milk those misnoming people for everything they’re worth. I would sneak in on Friday and Saturday, and then on Sunday I could relax.
There is a grassy hill right behind the box office. Our best bet seems to go up the hill when nobody’s looking and climb the fence, hopefully blocked by bushes and the box office. Jesus! There’s a buzz cut head in the bushes. Allyson doesn’t believe me, but I know what I saw. They have a Navy SEAL guarding the bushes. Impossible.
We start walking back, when I suggest to Allyson that we turn the other way, and see where all these people are coming from. All the people from the bridge came from the right, so who are all these people coming from the left? Seeing as there’s two fences separating the right walkway from the left walkway, and on top of that there’s those moveable metal walk-rail things separating the festival-goers on the left walkway from the fascists on the left walkway, there’s gotta be something on the left side worth blocking off. We step around the walk-rail and walk down the left path on the side of the fascists. No one stops us. ATVs and Golf Carts drive around us. We get to the end, and realize this is the ferry stop. They separated two places where anyone can go, places that are outside the music festival, by not one, but two fences, with an ominous No Man’s Land in between.
I can’t believe it. It seems the set-up was designed to personally baffle and frustrate me. Why would anyone set anything up like this? Why did people watch us as we walked off the bridge? Why are the fences fenced off by fences? Intimidation via confusion. Who would dare breach something as lacking in human logic and decency as this? For all I know, they have all seven white tigers of the world ready to pounce on one side of one of the fences. None of this makes any sense.
Security is looking the other way, and the cops have turned a corner. I go up the grassy hill. There is a man in black walking back and forth, talking on his phone, right on the other side of the fence. He looks like he could be chill. This fence seems to be my only chance. Screw it.
“Hey man, if I climbed this fence, would you tell on me?”
“You know you’re not supposed to do that.”
“Yes, but, would you make it so that I can’t do that?”
“I would have to radio it in, yeah.”
I can’t believe that guy. No empathy. Allyson and I regroup and admit defeat. We decide to exit acting as suspicious as possible without actually doing anything criminal. Get our tax money’s worth. We walk along the fence, occasionally touching it, until we reach the bridge. When we get to the bridge, I see King Cop. He’s dressed in white, the others are all in blue. “Excuse me?’” I say at him.
“Yeah?”
“Hypothetically, if someone were to hop the fence, would you arrest them?”
He’s in no mood to deal with someone with my demeanor. “Where are you tryna go? Keep walking.” He keeps his stern glare fixed on me as we get on the bridge.
We walk all the way across the bridge and get some bagels from the lovely people at the Bagel Tree, right across the street from the bridge. Sure, the bagels aren’t very good, but at least they toast them so hot you can’t even hold them. We walk to the Alamo, me juggling bagels and dripping goopy cream cheese all over my pants. After a couple minutes, we start to suspect something is wrong. Either Beck is twenty minutes late, or we can’t hear him at all. Shit. I guess the stage I really heard is the closer one behind the trees that faces the opposite direction. Wait, but why would Beck’s background screen just be advertisements for GovBall? Beck threw a shoe at Thurston Moore in response to an interview question, no way he’s going to sell out like that. Unless it’s ironic, I guess. We walk back towards the festival one last time to see if there’s anything we missed, when suddenly I hear it.Duh. Duh Nuh Nuh. Duh. Duh Nuh Nuh Sympathy Crutches. Mouthwash, Jukebox, Gasoline. That’s Beck! Oh, he starts at 6:45, not 6:15.That’s why. Back to our spot. I got a devil’s haircut, in my mind.
The song ends, and he plays something else I vaguely recognize, but it’s too muffled to enjoy if you don’t know the song, and it’s barely enjoyable if you do know the song, especially with this lady on the phone screaming at her unfaithful boyfriend. We walk back towards the festival with a plan of pretending we don’t care about the music festival and are just trying to meet our friend on the other side of the island, but everything’s blocked off.
The cop says he’s not familiar with River’s Edge Road, where we tell him we’re meeting Bongo, but that we’re free to walk this way, under the bridge. It doesn’t seem like we are actually free to walk this way because it’s almost totally blocked by police cars. Whatever, we squeeze through and start walking. “Yeah, we’re meeting our Uber driver over here somewhere.”
We end up on some barren stretch of sidewalkless road. Some atrocity starts playing, and we walk faster. Oh my god, who are these people? Are they The Wiggles? Did their parents write these songs for them? Why are they addressing the crowd as if we’re five year olds watching a magic show at a birthday party. They’re talking in baby voices, they’re so excited, they love New York City! This is without a doubt the worst music I have ever heard. The only words I can use to accurately describe these “musicians” have been banned by Political Correctness. I look at the schedule. Matt and Kim.
After about a half hour, we walk a twenty-foot stretch that decidedly disallows pedestrian traffic. We pass a Little League baseball game happening in the vicinity of still-audible Beck. We walk a couple more minutes, and there’s a second smaller official entrance, and a rancid smell. The water pouring off the side of the overhead bridge smells distinctly of sewage. Ticket-owning festival-goers on the official walkway to an actual entrance half-heartedly try to avoid the dripping shit-water coming down on them like rain. A couple days later, looking at Google Maps I would find that the Wards Island Wastewater Treatment Plant takes up about a third of Randall’s Island.
There it is. The main stage. On the other side of two fences and a closed soccer stadium surrounded by cops and security guards. There’s a nice sloped patch of grass in good view and proximity to the main stage, where we can wait for Beck to play “Loser.” A man has already passed out there, bottle in hand, but there’s room for the three of us. I hear the slide on the acoustic. It’s happening. I’m dancing and screaming all the words while Allyson lays on the grass. Everyone else is just walking, as if one of The Songs That You Yell In Your Car wasn’t playing live at this very second. How can all these people go through life so unenthusiastic, so apathetic, so utterly joyless.
We check if the bathroom of the stadium is open, and it is. Against the fence, blocked by the bathroom, is an upside down garbage can, ostensibly to be used as a step stool to aide fence hoppers. But, there’s literally a cop staring at me, and I would have to run across an entire soccer field and then hop another fence that is also surrounded by cops and security.
We keep walking, dodging the biohazard rain, until we are behind the stage. The backstage area is all security, no cops. That’s what I like to see. We walk for a bit and notice a nice little nature trail. We skip some stones, read some plaques describing the species of duck that inhabit the island, and walk the handrails of the footbridge like a tightrope. We go back to listen to Beck play “E-Pro” and “Where It’s At.” Then he covers David Bowie for a minute, and then the band plays some other snippets, and the show’s over.
It’s not worth even trying to sneak in at this point. This place so heavily guarded, just seeing The Strokes is not worth it. Still, we walk around some more. We put on flannels some time ago to cover up the fact that we didn’t have wristbands. Two naked-armed girls are walking slowly enough and close enough to the fence with enough inquisitiveness on their faces that they’re obviously looking to sneak in.
“Are you guys trying to sneak in?” I ask them.
“Yeah… we’re thinking of going under the fence.”
“I don’t think you can go under, you might be able to go over…”
“No, didn’t you see those two guys just get in? They went under the fence.”
“Oh, really? Ok.” I turn to Allyson. “Do you want to?” She shrugs. The girls approach the fence. Screw it. I pull up the fence and we all go under, blocked by the beer truck on the other side.
I go out on the right side of the truck without hesitating, realizing my back is probably covered with ground. I don’t see where any of my co-conspirers are. Allyson catches up with me, and the other girls speed up ahead. We’re in, behind the stage. Be cool. Act like you belong. You’re an artist. You’re the bassist of Of Monsters And Men.
Because we’re only seeing one band that I only kinda like, and I’ve done this so many times, I don’t get the rush of adrenaline and euphoria I usually get. My tolerance is too high. This is just another day in the life. The girls go to leave through the nearest exit, just as someone who looks like the head of security walks in. He asks where they’re going. Allyson and I nonchalantly turn left. We walk through a narrow opening in a gate guarded by two yellow and blue guards. They say nothing. We see a crowd of about eight people going into the festival space. We walk out with them, and we’re in the VIP section, right next to where The Strokes will be. We giggle a little and wander around.
Seems the only benefits of the VIP section is that there are about 5 cubes to sit on for the entire section, there are two suppliers of unsurprisingly overpriced alcohol, the crowd is not enthusiastic enough about the music to push anyone to get to a closer spot, and the bathrooms are nice. I didn’t find out that last one firsthand, I held our spot while Allyson went. She came back with a $13 water balloon of wine.
The lights go out and the nonVIP General Admission section smushes up against the stage, everyone pushing up against each other enough to get about ten feet closer at the expense of any personal space at all. “You peasants!” I yell. My fellow Very Important People find that very funny and congratulate me on my humor. A roadie comes out and fiddles with some guitar pedals and I start applauding wildly. The crowd follows along. This happens three times. Twenty odd minutes after they were scheduled to perform, The Strokes finally come on.
Despite Julian Casablanca’s newfound doofy chubbiness and laughably awkward stage banter, the band sounds slick and pristine. Julian’s voice distorted and tuneful, their bass and drums tight and crisp, with impressive and entertaining guitar interplay. Especially Nick Valensi, whose strangely perfect all-American solos of jarring rhythms are mesmerizing live.
Julian then stumbles through a touching tribute to recently passed album artist Brett Kilroe, who’s responsible for their iconic Is This It glove-on-ass cover. Julian’s awkward and inarticulate manner makes him come off as that much more sincere. “Oh God, we hope you don’t hate this,” he says to Brett.
“On and on ‘til the break of dawn,” Julian mutters as the band switches guitars. “I don’t know what I’m saying, as usual. On and on ‘til the break of dawn… maybe if you’re coming from last call at a bar or something like that, but if you start at like 10:30, that’s too long.” He backtracks, “Well, maybe not too long for you guys, haha.”
“Reptiles!” I yell. The people who once laughed are now giving me looks. Still, I must play the part. After they play “Last Nite,” I yell, “Play the other one!”
And they do. As soon as I hear the drums kickstart their best song, “Reptilia,” I remove my protective earplugs and jump forward into the makeshift VIP moshpit for the entirety of the song. “Please don’t slow me down if I’m moving too fast / You’re in a strange part of our town.”
“If there’s more music after us…” Julian turns to his bandmates, “Is there music after us? We don’t know shit, but if there’s music after us, enjoy it. Have a good weekend.”
They didn’t know they were headlining. Incredible
That one song alone was worth everything. “Ok dear, let’s go out the way we came in,” I say to Allyson as we head in the general direction of the officially sanctioned exit. “Excuse me, Very Important Person coming through. Excuse me, we were in the VIP section.”
We stop and fill up our water bottles. A stoic group of five workers shoot water from ridiculous hose-guns into the water bottles of the masses. The more ambitious of them operate two hose-guns at a time. Good thing these professionals are here to control a substance as volatile as water. God knows what would happen if your average Joe was allowed to fill up his own water bottle, willy-nilly.
Outside the festival, we’re at a dead stop. The bridge walkway is too narrow. Thousands of people are trying to get on all at once. A group of four white girls try to push past everyone. “We’re all going to the same place!” someone yells at them. They keep pushing through for another couple seconds and then give up. We’re stuck.
Someone begins walking on the barricade between the walkway and the car-ramp to the bridge. I egg someone on and they take it a step further and jump over the barricade completely and walk in the middle of the road up to the bridge. “Over the top, men! They can’t get all of us!” I yell, and about twenty more people jump over. I observe the police reaction. A cop jumps in his car and peels off, leaving skid marks getting up the ramp. Thirty seconds later, all the jumpers are climbing sheepishly back across the barricade.
Here’s King Cop again, pissed off and physically pushing past me, with bigger fish to fry. I’m tempted to say hi. I’m tempted to confess everything I’ve done, to turn myself in. That way they’ll take me away, and I won’t be stuck in this god-awful human body traffic jam for the next hour and a half.
Allyson asks me who’s playing tomorrow. “Who’s playing tomorrow?” I ask loudly to the fifty people who are in a twelve foot radius from me. All these people know the answer. None of them respond.
We finally make it across the bridge and grab some glorious dollar pizza. I get a vanilla coke, even though the price of soda cans increased from $.75 to $1 from outside to inside the pizza place. We all get what we deserve.
I give Allyson a quick goodbye and bolt to take the 2 to Penn Station, looking up my route with my dying phone. You can’t park at the train station in my town without a permit, and my parents are away, so I took my father’s car, which has a permit, without his permission. I assumed I could leave it at the station all weekend, but as the train pulled away, I noticed a sign that said 12 hour parking. I’m not about to let the government steal $120 more of my money, so now I’m going all the way back home to park the car in my parents’ driveway and then walk the half hour back to the train. Crap. I left the keys in Allyson’s place.
I call her frantically. By some miracle she picks up; she should be in a subway tunnel. I tell her “I’m coming, wait for me, my phone is dying.” My phone dies. 45 minutes and 15 pebbles to her window later, she opens the door.
I calculate what to bring and what to leave. I don’t want to be bored on the train, but I don’t want to be lugging anything around with me as I try to sneak into GovBall again tomorrow. I decide to leave the book, take my good around-the-ear headphones, and then tomorrow I’ll take my crappy in-ear headphones back into the city. I charge my phone just enough to be able to listen to Kanye for the whole ride back without my phone dying as long as I don’t use it for anything else. I bring my charger chord, but leave my charger plug. I’ll just charge my phone into my laptop when I get home. I leave, giving myself ten extra minutes to make it to Penn Station in time for the last train. “Do you have the keys?” asks Allyson. I grab the keys and shoot out to take the D.
There’s a three in the morning train and a five in the morning train back to Long Island. There is no 4am train. I have never missed that 3am train; as horrible and loaded as it is with drunken people, it is infinitely better than staying awake on the cold ground of Penn Station until 5am while cops idly poke passed out homeless people and the other utter failures of the tri-state area question their life choices with grim remorse.
No. What? No. What is this. What do you mean, the downtown D isn’t stopping here? Couldn’t you have told me that before I already paid? I have to take the D uptown to Tremont Av and then downtown to Penn. Okay. Okay. It’s okay. I accounted for this. This is why I left ten minutes early.
The uptown train doesn’t come for thirty minutes. Tremont Av is 3 stops uptown. As we pull in, the downtown train leaves. When I finally get into Penn, the clock reads the cruel time of 3:48AM. This is the time I was supposed to be home. The last train left almost an hour ago. Here we go.
My knee is throbbing in intense pain with every step at this point, and I am limping around. A couple days ago, a doctor carelessly suggested that I might have arthritis before leaving the room. I’ve been pushing that absurd notion out of my mind for the last couple of days, but it’s really hitting hard right now. I’m not an athlete, I’m not a 57-year-old refrigerator mover. I’m 21 and I walk places sometimes. I’m in no place in my life where I can start coming to terms with things like “permanent damage” and “constant pain.”
I wait for “Runaway” to finish in my headphones before making any decisions, knowing this might be the last pleasant sound I hear for the next couple of hours. I limp up to the cop desk, and notice there is an iPhone 5 charging in it. I stand next to the desk for a minute as a giant sweatshirt flirts with the cop. I decide I’ve waited long enough to have appeared polite. “Excuse me?” The cop just stares. “Is there anyway I could use that charger for like, ten minutes, at any point in the next two hours? I’m at one percent.”
“No, I can’t do that for you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. They have charge ports up there at the Jersey terminal.”
“Up where?”
“Up there.”
The sweatshirt chimes in: “Right up those stairs, they have a phone charging station, like in an airport, you know?”
I don’t know.
I limp up the stairs to a Jersey terminal that is closed and locked, a huge metal gate pulled down and blocking the whole thing. I see another cop, walking away.
“Excuse me? Excuse me?”
He turns.
“Is there anywhere to charge my phone?”
“Yeah, over there, there’s a device.”
“…A device?”
“Yeah, you know, a contraption. A green thing.”
“Ok…”
“Over there.”
“Ok.”
I walk ‘over there’ and walk up to the only remotely green thing in sight. It looks like a ticket purchasing machine, but it’s got a little battery symbol on the side. I press a button. I touch the black screen. Nothing.
I limp back the seventy feet back over to the cop just as he’s about to prod another homeless person. “Over there?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“Nothing happened. I tried using it, the whole thing was blank.”
“Huh, someone must have unplugged it again.” Vandals.
He makes the trek over to it, plugs it in, and walks away. As I stand in front of it, it starts yelling at me. Insanely loud robotic burps of heinous electronica, sputtering and zapping and jittering at me. I click ‘restart Windows normally’ a few times, and then walk away. This is too much to handle.
I decide to try the human route again, before yielding to the robots. I walk up to a group of people with abnormal hair and at least one Nirvana shirt. We’re all in this together, right? “Do you guys have one of those USB plug cubes I can borrow for like ten minutes?” They all look at each other before responding, to make sure that their policy is to not treat any strange lone New Yorkers like human beings. “No, sorry,” they all agree.
I go back up to the contraption, and it has loaded a screen that says I can either spend $50 to be able to charge my phone here for a month, or I can spend $5 to charge it for the hour. Brilliant. They make one deal so obviously terrible that the other one seems reasonable. I limp downstairs in defeat. How much am I willing to let them take from me so I can prevent them from taking $100 from me? I’m willing to give up my cell phone until tomorrow as long as They don’t get any of it.
I walk up to two more groups of drunken rejects and inquire about chargers, to the same response. Seeing this, the girl in the Nirvana shirt has a change of heart and hands me a charger. “You don’t have to give it back.”
“Really? Thank you so much!”
It doesn’t work. It does, however, charge my portable charger very slowly. And if I charge my phone with my portable charger while the Nirvana girl charger charges my portable charger, my phone recharges almost as fast as it’s dying. A half hour later, the 5AM train comes, my phone still at one percent. I find the one mythical seat on a train that has an outlet, and someone has just sat there. Her legs are pressed against the back of the seat in front of her, so I can’t sit next to her without her physically moving to let me in. “Hi, can I sit here?” She doesn’t react. “Sorry, can I sit there so I can charge my phone? Is that ok?” She shakes her head slightly without making eye contact. New Yorkers.
I think about stealing her charger when she falls asleep. I think about politely informing her that she’s a bad person as I get off the train. I plug the Nirvana charger into the wall to charge my portable charger, which is in turn barely charging my phone. This ungodly set up stretches across the aisle from the outlet to where I am sitting, causing people to trip into her as they get onto our car.
I can’t set an alarm because I can’t trust my phone to be alive for any amount of time, and I certainly do not trust any kind of internal clock to wake me up in time to get off at Farmingdale at 5:39AM, so I am the only person awake on the train. My phone dies. The train stops. Twenty minutes pass. An ambulance arrives, as do a bunch of bumbling cops.“ He’s down here, Kev!” shouts one. “Figures, I just walked all the way this way and he’s that way.” A cryptic and awkward message comes over the loudspeaker about someone having been on the tracks.
Forty minutes later, the train takes off again. I get off at my stop at 6:30, six hours later than I had planned, due to two blunders of mine and one giant blunder of humanity. My father’s car had been here for like 18 hours now, but there’s no ticket. You did it again, Kev-O. I drive back, the king of the streets. Gleaming with pinkish-orange daybreak, this terrible place has never looked so serene. There are no other cars on the road. I swerve a bunch, I drive on the wrong side of the road for a bit, I take my foot off the gas and just roll. I pull in the driveway, crawl into my childhood bed, and sink into oblivion.
