SUBTERRANEAN SUBWAY STORIES II

I find it absolutely amazing that more people aren't murdered on the subway during rush hour. People are late for work, tempers are flaring - or nostrils and you're packed in tight like those sardines in that old Warner Bros. cartoon. You could easily slip a knife out of your pocket, casually stab the person standing next to you and nobody would know anything until the train pulled into Times Square and everyone suddenly rushed out leaving the body to fall over. Then, the people getting on the train would just assume the person lying on the floor or the car was drunk, and they would carefully step over them. You'd never get caught because I just assume if there are no bomb sniffing dogs to be found in the subway, there are no metal detecting dogs either. “Use all doors” conjures up this image of people scrambling in and out of every single door on the entire train as fast as they possibly can before all the doors fully close and the train starts to pull out.. Sometimes you hear, “Use all available doors”, but there never are any available doors because people choose to stand in them and “block the doors”. I am convinced they do it on purpose. People love the power it gives them when you're forced to climb over them. There's enough room behind these idiots for a grand piano and a dance band, and they could move “all the way into the car”, but “fuck you”, they're just not going to. Most people never learned how to “step lively”, because nobody ever taught them. When you're growing up you learn how to crawl and then walk. You might even learn to dance. But nobody ever teaches you how to "step lively". It's a lost art. And the truth is you don't hear it much anymore except from the matron in the Ladies Room at the St. James Theatre at intermission. “Everybody rides!” I love that one too! One subway conductor actually announces,"Everybody Rides". Absolute crap! Because if you can't get on - you can't ride - And if you can't ride, you ain't goin' nowhere.