Never Get Out of the Boat 2

It had happened every morning for the past week, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. At some point between 3 and 4 a.m., my big, retarded cat, who had been sleeping comfortably next to my head, would awake with some sort of tremendous weed up his ass.

He'll then trot down to my feet, around to the other side of the bed, then back up toward my head again?where my smaller, smarter, evil cat is sleeping peacefully. Then he'll look at her. That's all he'll do?look at her. That's what he does when he really wants to cheese her off. It always works.

Well, she'll wake up and start to growling, and he'll keep staring at her, and before long all hell breaks loose on top of me.

Every single goddamn morning for the past week this has happened.

So when it happened Tuesday morning, I was less angry and frustrated than I was simply resigned to it. I rolled over and looked at the clock. It was 4:30. I sighed, then decided that I might as well get the hell up, as I wasn't going to get any more sleep anyway.

I went to the kitchen, grabbed a cigarette and slipped in two sputum puddles on my way to the bathroom.

During the course of the next hour, as I took my time getting myself together, I dropped shampoo bottles, combs, toothbrushes, socks, spoons, paper towels soaked in cat sputum, more socks and a shoe. With each dropped object, I could feel things tighten up one more notch in my guts. It wasn't the most illustrious start to the day.

Shortly after 6, I was on my way to the train. It wasn't a bad morning out; it wasn't raining, the streets were empty, and it was looking like I'd be getting into the office a bit earlier than usual.

"Let's hope the train's empty, too," I thought, hopefully.

After just missing the first train (I'm morally and physically opposed to the idea of running for a train) I had to wait 20 minutes for the next one. Trains don't come along nearly so often at that hour. When the train finally did arrive, I found my earlier wish had been fulfilled?but with, as should be expected by now, a cruel twist.

There were only about half as many people on the train as I normally find at 6:35. Problem is, they were all asleep. Asleep and sprawled out over all the seats. As a result, there was no place left in the car to sit down. Even when the car is twice as crowded, I can usually find something. Not that morning, though.

Instead of waking someone up, or simply knocking their feet to the floor and sitting down, I sighed again and grabbed a pole. As I looked around, I noticed that there were a few people who weren't actually asleep?but who looked like they might as well be, their faces gray and sagging, their eyes unfocused. Hell, they might've been dead, come to think of it, just propped up there in the seat for one last ride to the end of the line. But at least they kept their goddamn feet on the floor.

Behind me, a snoring man rolled over, and his feet slipped from their perch, opening up a seat, which I nabbed. He didn't seem to notice.

Then my own face started to sag, and my own eyes grew unfocused (well, you know).

At the 23rd St. stop, I heaved myself up and squeezed out of the train. Most of the people who were sleeping when I first got on were still asleep when I left.

It had been, if nothing else, one of the quietest train rides in recent memory, if you could ignore all the snoring.

I pulled myself up toward the street and waited for the light to change. I can't even remember what I was thinking about. Usually I give myself something to think about during train rides, but that morning it was all dusty, vague shadows and a low, insistent hum. I lit a cigarette as I stood there on the corner.

I made it across 6th Ave. and continued across 23rd.

Not too far in front of me, I saw a bum in a ragged blue shirt. He was over 6 feet tall, I'd say, with matted hair and an unkempt beard, and he was talking to a man who was obviously on his way to the same station I had just left. The bum was standing awkwardly, as if he were badly crippled somehow, or had suffered a massive stroke. One arm hung limply at his side. The man he was talking to shook his head, and continued on his way.

The bum turned and walked in the opposite direction, dragging one foot, the arm still hanging limp. After a few steps like this, however, he slowly straightened up, the limp arm moved, the dragged foot suddenly became nimble again. It was like the final scene from The Usual Suspects?except with a bum instead of a master criminal. He was perfectly fine?just trying to pull the cheapest of cons, that's all. Nothing wrong with that every now and again.

As I passed him, I heard him ask, in a mumbled, strained voice, "Hey buddy...can you spare a cigarette?"

Well, first of all, cigarettes are getting mighty expensive these days. You need to make every last one count. And second, I'd already seen through his ruse, so I shook my head and continued.

I hadn't gone but a few yards before I heard him bellow: "Fuckin' honky motherfucker!"

It's been a long time since I'd heard anyone called a "honky motherfucker." In fact, it might've been since the last time I watched an old Jack Hill picture. I didn't acknowledge him, and continued walking.

He kept walking, too, following me and lobbing crazy names. "Crappy!" he screamed. "Crappy man! Crappy mother!" He began to laugh, but not in a friendly, jovial kind of way.

Oh, I really do not need this sort of thing this morning.

Up 7th Ave. he followed me, screaming all the way. "Gonna put a bullet in the back of your head! Gonna kill you, honky motherfucker!"

After a while, it just became silly. Again, like in one of those old Jack Hill pictures.

"Gonna put a gun against the back of your head and pull the trigger! Boom!"

Yes, well.

As I drew closer to the office, I began trying to figure out exactly how best to handle the situation if he were to follow me inside the building. It had happened before. It's not that I thought he was a threat?I knew he wasn't that?he was more like an anachronistic annoyance. It was almost like I was being followed by a deranged Disco Stu.

Long before I reached the office, though, he gave up, trailed off, maybe turned a corner or found someone else to pull his crippled shtick on. I settled in at my desk, opened my coffee and got to work. Before long, I'd mostly forgotten about him, forgotten how tired I was, forgotten how frustrated I'd been with physical objects earlier that morning. Fact was, I was feeling okay about the world.

Even as computers crashed left and right, and people sniped at each other in the hallways and over their cellphones, my mood continued to blossom.

Morgan called later that morning. "Everyone seems so dour today," she said. "They all look like they're really depressed. Even on the train this morning, nobody was talking. They looked like they were about ready to fall asleep." She even admitted that she herself, while not exactly depressed, just didn't have the energy she normally did.

It struck me then that something was happening. And whatever it was, it was clearly a citywide phenomenon.

Then I got an e-mail from a friend in Los Angeles that began: "Woke up in a foul temper this morning. Well, fouler than usual." He then went on to detail all the things that had gone horribly wrong during his first 15 minutes at work.

My God, I began to think, maybe it's a nationwide phenomenon. Maybe even worldwide!

That would certainly explain a lot of the wacky news I was reading?every corner of the globe, it seemed, had more than its share of grumpy people with explosives.

Normally I'd put widespread depressive weariness down to the weather. It was a little overcast in New York that day, sure, but it was comfortable outside, and the barometer wasn't going all nuts. And besides, it can't be dreary and overcast across the entire world at once, can it? Someplace out there has to be sunny and nice. Or maybe it's one of the early effects of that whole El Niño business.

(Just as a quick aside here?when I was a kid, there was a restaurant in Green Bay called El Niño's. It was one of those family steakhouse joints. Their slogan was "El Niño's?Where Good Eatin' is Good Fun." That always cracked me up, for some reason. They went out of business a long time ago.)

But back to our story here, this daylong universal celebration of gloominess and dread.

The seeming reach of these doldrums might also explain why my own mood had taken such an upswing after spending half my morning commute being threatened by an insane fake cripple.

The evening before, I'd commented to Morgan that I never really trusted people who were happy all the time. It's true. And by the same token, my own mood tends to slip whenever I find myself surrounded by too many simultaneously happy people. Just the opposite happens when everyone around me is grim. That's when I tend to perk up. It's almost like I feed on it. Unless it's simply a matter of comparative moods.

I knew it couldn't last, though. The minute I left the office, the sun came out, people started talking to one another again and I could feel things begin to droop inside me. The train was full of cackling, fresh-faced middle school students, which only made things worse.

When I stepped through the front door of my building, the air in the hallway was thick with the smells of heavily spiced ground beef, browning on the stove. That picked me up. Then I remembered that I wouldn't be getting any of it, that I'd be eating another frozen chicken pattie that night.

Once inside my apartment, I opened a beer and promptly dropped the bottle. Yeah, as per usual, I was right back to where I started.