As mentioned in several other posts, I meet a LOT of strange people on my daily commute and most of them against my will. This particular guy was, I’m guessing, trying to impress me.
The only thing he impressed me with was his storytelling ability.
I was hanging out in North Station as I waited for the last train on a Friday night. I was seated on one of the benches reading a book and listening to some music to keep me awake, when a man sat down on the bench next to mine. My first thought was “accountant” – don’t know why, but he really just looked like the stereotypical idea of an accountant. He wasn’t a bad looking guy, but just rather short and geeky looking and definitely not the sort of person you would expect to strike up a conversation with a stranger.
You can always tell when someone is trying to get your attention when they keep looking at you. And that’s exactly what he was doing every couple minutes, until he finally got up the nerve to talk to me.
(Which is when I had the dubious pleasure of smelling his alcohol-reeking breath—Clearly he was feeling no pain!)
At first he just started talking about how much he hated having to take the last train out of North Station because if you miss it, you’re basically screwed. Then he asked me if I took the Lowell train. Since there were only a couple of options and he was probably going to be there when my train boarded anyways, I told him I did.
Not the best idea.
He then launched into a very tall tale. He then told me the main reason he hated having to take the last train was because he always falls asleep. His stop is before Lowell, but several times he had to be woken up by the train staff at the end of the line (My question here would be – is he really “sleeping” or just in a “drunken stupor”?). He said he paid $200 for a cab ride back to his car once or twice in the middle of the night (If he really paid that much, it had to have been a drunken stupor!).
I politely listened, but kept trying to go back to my book in the hopes he would take a hint.
He didn’t.
Instead, in a bid to regain my attention, he told me that a couple of weeks ago, he woke up right after the train began to pull out of his station stop. Realizing he would have to take another expensive cab ride home, he claimed he ran down to the nearest door and, just as the train reached full speed, he jumped off.
And, miraculously, by exerting his apparently superhuman powers, he escaped without a scratch despite jumping into a ravine in the woods and marsh.
Yeah, right.
First, the train crew mans each door and there’s only two doors accessible at that time of night – jumping off simply isn’t an option. So, there’s your first lie. Secondly, if he really did somehow manage to get by the train crew, which usually consists of a large, tall, black man or another large, not as tall, balding white guy (Not likely!), he would almost certainly have broken an arm or leg or both in the fall.
This guy’s nose should have been growing like Pinocchio’s!
Then, to make matters worse, he asked me which stop I got off at. I lied and told him Anderson or something like that because his stop is the same as mine and I really didn’t want to have to keep up a conversation with this person for the next couple hours!
He then asked me to wake him up if he was still on the train when I got out!
Fortunately the conversation died shortly thereafter and I got up and pretended to go look for the bathrooms. (I actually just moved to another bench outside of his field of vision).
Funny thing, when I did get off the train later on, there he was sleeping.
I didn’t wake him.
Does that make me a mean person? I almost feel bad, but not quite