Word count: 903 | Reading time: 4 min read
Pretzel Logic
For a while, it was fun watching the ever-swelling crowd of storm-stranded rail riders mill about in confusion. But that soon got old. After more than an hour at Market East waiting for my train, boredom had set in.
Then the payphone started ringing.
I have this thing about payphones. If nobody answers, I like to pick up the receiver and find out who is on the other line. You never know who it might be.
One time, at City Hall, it was a woman who liked phone sex with the cops. Betty the Breather. This time, it was a man named Jordan.
“Is Joy there?” he asked.
I looked around the platform. At the weary and the bedraggled waiting for trains that never came.
“I can definitely tell you there is no Joy here,” I told Jordan, who wasn’t amused.
For a moment there was an awkward pause.
“She’s a black woman in a black hat,” Jordan said before I could respond. “Do you see her?”
I told him I did not. Then Jordan asked me for a favor.
“Will you look for her?
Now it was my turn not to be amused.
In a station full of people stuck in transit limbo, there were many black women. Given the meteorological conditions, many were wearing black hats. It felt, well, kind of crazy to approach strangers like that. I felt like a profiler.
Thinking that I should probably have hung up the phone during that awkward pause, I agreed to give my new friend Jordan a hand.
For a moment, I thought about just shouting out “Is Joy here?”
The words may have been in my head, but they sounded like Homeric barkeep Moe Szyslak.
So I dropped the phone and started searching.
The first woman I approached was sitting on one of those square wooden slabs that dot Market East. The last thing anyone in a train station wants to make is eye contact with a strange stranger, and the woman on the bench was no exception.
But there I was. Asking if she were Joy.
From the stony look on her face, I could tell that Joy she certainly was not.
Neither was the next woman. Or the next.
By now I was really starting to feel dumb.
I walked back to the dangling phone to tell my new buddy Jordan the bad news.
“Sorry,” I told him as I perused the conglomerated gloom. “There really isn’t any Joy here.”
At first, Jordan didn’t want to believe it. But reality soon sunk in.
Bidding him good night, I hung up the phone and sat down again, just in time to watch a tiny old white woman, dressed up like Tweety Bird’s granny, run for the R5. She was running so close to a moving train that it was clear from the faces of people who were also watching that I wasn’t the only one with visions of crushed old-lady legs.
Granny was followed quickly by another scampering senior, this one a Latina, who spoke little English but made her desired destination abundantly clear.
“New York,” she said to anyone who would listen. “New York.”
Just then, walking down the stairs, I saw a black woman. In a black hat.
“Jordan,” I muttered to myself.
I needed to ask her. For Jordan.
But this time, I tried something different.
In a scene that would bring tears to Doctor Seuss, the black woman in a black hat sat.
The moment was phat.
Taking a seat on the other side of the wooden slab, I waited for the right moment. When the station announcer announced, in his silky Caribbean voice, that “trains would be delayed anywhere from half an hour to 90 minutes,” I knew my moment, unlike my train, had arrived.
I slammed my bag on the slab, for punctuation.
“Ninety minutes late,” I uttered. “Oh Joy, oh Joy.”
I shot a glance over my shoulder. I was hoping that the woman would bite.
She didn’t blink.
“Oh Joy, oh Joy,” I repeated.
Nothing.
Least of all, Joy.
I sat down dejected.
Jordan, old buddy, I let you down.
Finally, I’d had enough of this station. I hopped the first train to 30th Street, hoping to catch at least a donut.
The scene on the platform there was even more confused than at my last stop. No telling when my train would come. So I grabbed a quick muffin from the Dunkin’ Donuts man and went back to wait.
And wait.
At last, the R8. I got on board, settled into a seat and looked outside my window. As the train lurched further from the station, I could see small fires lit under sections of track.
Later, the conductor came out, asking for all tickets and passes.
“You got to be joking,” said one passenger. Hearing this, the conductor walked back into the cab and got on the loudspeaker.
“I am not joking,” he said, his voice booming out of the speakers. “I am just doing my job.”
The tired, previously cranky passengers burst into laughter.
About 15 minutes later, the train pulled into Queen Lane and the conductor got on the speaker again.
“I want to thank everybody for their participation as well as their patience,” he said, which made us smile.
At least somebody this night found Joy.
