A Philadelphian Conversation - Number Four

The 10:42 pm train out of Atlantic City leaves on time, and I'm happy not to be driving back to Philly, for a change, so I can read. Reading is what I'm doing when a man perhaps fifty years breathing stumbles on at Hammonton and stops in the aisle beside my seat. I can smell the booze sweating out of him as I feel his look. My eyes remain fixed on the pages in front of them. The guy sits down and talks to himself. "You ain't gonna rob this train. You ain't gonna start a fight. Gonna get home. Finally gonna get home."

"Ticket." commands the ticket checker.

The man produces a crumpled up, skinny piece of paper anyone would know is not a ticket for this train. "Bus driver told me I could use this to transfer."

The ticket checker hands the man back the wrinkled slip of paper. "This isn't a ticket for this train. You—"

"But the bus driver—"

"I'm trying to tell you—"

"But he said—"

"Doesn't matter what he said and if you'll stop interrupting—"

"Okay."

"—I'll tell you how it is. You need to get off at the next stop."

"You ain't throwing me off now?"

"I can't stop the train now that it's moving again."

The man nods and looks down toward his feet, presumably in acceptance of his fate. "What's the next stop?"

"Atco," answers the ticket checker, and walks on.

A few minutes pass and I read on without looking around. I hear the man say "What you readin'?"

I look up at him and hold the book out so he can see its title, which I'm sure he doesn't compute. He has close cropped whitish grey hair, a gold stud earring in his left ear, and the most crooked nose I've ever seen. He wears a black Harley shirt with orange writing and sleeves cut off, revealing faded, dark green tattoos set on thin, muscular arms.

"Any good?" he asks.

"Yeah," I say, "pretty good."

I go back to reading and hear him start up talking to himself again. His head is lowered toward his lap, shaking back and forth, mumbling. "Not gonna fight. Gotta get home."

I peek over at his hands to see what they're doing. They're by his sides, but in constant motion.

"Hey," he says.

I look up at him again, but this time I think to myself if you fuck with me, I'll kill you and do my best to make him feel that vibe from me, make him hear my thoughts.

"You know if there's a Wawa near the Atco stop?"

I shake my head, still giving him my best don't-fuck-with-me look. "No, dunno."

When the train pulls up to the Atco stop, the man slowly stands and stumbles off the same way he stumbled on. He mutters something like "Gonna get home. Little closer now."

I feel sorry for him, but whatever sequence of events landed him where he is on this Thursday evening, I have a feeling he's no victim.

When the train starts moving, as we pull away from Atco, the ticket checker passes by again.

A Philadelphian Conversation - Number Three

The doorbell rang and I assumed, because it had been snowing all day, that it would be Scott with a shovel. I set a little bowl of spaghetti down on the table and looked out the window to see who it was. Scott had already started shoveling, so I opened the door and told him I'd pay five dollars when he finished.

When he knocked on the door again, he said "You know they stole my bike" and I said "Really?" and he said "You don't seen me on it, do you?"

I shook my head to indicate that indeed, I had not seen him on it.

He said "My own people took it from me! My own people took my bike."

"How do you know that?"

"'Cause I couldn't catch 'em. They was too fast. I had it locked up and everything and they came up with one of them clippers and cut it loose." He sighed. "I had that bike fourteen years."

I told him about what happened to me a few months back when I was assaulted by a random person walking down the street, and how I got away before the guy and some other guy he was with were able to rob me, which, I told Scott, was certainly their intention. He said "You lucky man" and I gave him the five dollars and he turned to leave.

As he walked away, he shouted back to me "I'll get me another bike! You'll see! I'll get me another one!" The snow came down on him beneath the streetlights, and I realized it was coming down on me too.

A Philadelphian Conversation - Number Two

"My boss thinks the cleaning lady takes the money, so I'm just gonna go with that for now. He came up to me and told me it's missing and said he figures it must be the cleaning lady and I just didn't say nothin'. So I'm gonna roll with that for now and see how long I can make it go."

"Honey, you got to do what you got to do."

"I can't ask my husband no more now he cleaned up. It's just twenty I need, nothin' crazy like what he'd burn through, but I still can't ask him."

"What's that like, him being clean?"

"He been with me eleven years and I been there through all of it with him, so he knows whasup. He knows he can't ask me to quit just 'cause he can't hang no more. I mean, I never done it on his level and I can go a few days between, but then I get to a certain point and it's like, yeah, I just gotta get up to the spot and get on that level."

"Yeah."

"It's just been so hard to keep up on everything. Rent, groceries, shit," she looks around, "a SEPTA pass."

"Yeah."

"But my husband's cool, he knows the game. If he could just give me the twenty, he probably would, but it wouldn't be like that for him and anyway he don't make shit just like I don't make shit."

"I got you."

"But damn, I been talking the whole time. How you? Whasup?"

"You know, same old."

She looks around again. "This our stop. Let's do this. And remember, it gets pretty real, so stay together. Get my back and I'll get yours. If we split up, remember we both gonna come down, one way or another. May as well do it our way."

A Philadelphian Conversation - Number One

Standing outside the little Comcast customer service center on Columbus Boulevard in a nook beside its entrance, staying out of the rain. Internet says the place opens 7:00 a.m. weekdays, but the schedule printed on the door says otherwise. 9:00 a.m. Having arrived too early, I'm second in the growing line, and the first four of us fit comfortably in the nook. Nobody speaks until around five of nine when we're all getting a little antsy to get inside and get our business done with Comcast and get on with our lives.

"I see her in there," the guy in front of me says. He's white and looks around mid-sixties. A white goatee and close cut grayish white hair hover above his sleeveless black tee and cut-off shorts, tattoos covering his arms and legs. "Be nice if she'd open a little early."

"Don't bet on it," says the guy behind me. He looks exactly how I'd imagine the other guy to have looked twenty years ago. "I wouldn't expect any extra effort out of these people."

I think: "if you dudes worked an hourly job for Comcast, you probably wouldn't open up early if you could either, and Comcast probably doesn't even allow it," but find myself saying, "Hard to believe how much cable costs nowadays. If it weren't for the Phillies, Flyers, and Sixers, I might cancel."

"Yeah, tell me about it, I pay $208 a month now."

"Me too, I'm about $200 now too."

I nod in acknowledgement of their monthly rates and pull out my phone and start scrolling through some emails.

"Which city you think'll go bankrupt next?" asks the guy behind me.

"Probably Philly," the other guy answers.

I realize I'll likely be on the sidelines for the remainder of their conversation, wherever it leads.

"Probably. There's no good jobs. I applied for food stamps the other day and you know what they gave me? Sixty bucks a month. You believe that?"

"My wife went in and she only gets $18 a month, they said I make too much."

"Sixty bucks a month! Who can live off that? And then you got these blacks," he tilts his head toward the woman working inside the service center, who we can see through a window in the nook, "and they get like $600 a month food stamps while they drive around in their Cadillac SUVs."

By now I can't wait for the doors to open so that, I hope, these guys will stop talking.

The guy in front of me sees me scrolling down the screen on my phone, trying to mind my own business. He says, "And I tell you what, they know everything you do on those phones. Even in your house they know. A buddy of mine was just indicted and they were watching him inside his own house, through his tv! They have some way they can do that shit – they hook up some device to your tv and watch you through your own tv. You believe that?"

Mercifully, as he asks that last question, the woman inside the service center opens the doors. I put my phone back in my pocket and see its clock change from 8:59 to 9:00 a.m. We all enter the service center and the two guys start talking about how they're both there to pay their bills. I return my friend's cable box for him and go to work, and later wonder whether the $60-per-month-food-stamps-guy is out looking for a job. Place where I work has some openings. I mighta mentioned it, but I knew he wouldn't have been a good fit.