Riding the Trains at night in Chicago.
Mar 15 '04 (Updated Mar 29 '04)
The Bottom Line Riding the Trains at night in Chicago is an experience in human nature.
In the recent years Chicago has become my second home. Moving here was one of the best moves I have ever made. Don’t let the fact that Chicago is the murder capital of the United States mislead you, this is actually one of the safest, if not the safest city in the country. Many people believe that the quality of living is in the top five in the entire world. And I agree.
The reason why Chicago has so many murders is obvious, we keep all of the criminals confined to certain areas, away from all of the civilized people and allow them to kill each other with very little ramifications from the authorities. In Chicago we have about four or five parts of the city that make up about 95 percent of the violent crimes. The rest of the City is virtually crime free. I have never seen a violent crime take place in all of the years that I have been visiting and living here. But I often read about the heinous activity the next morning in the Chicago Tribune as I lounge with my hand buried in my boxer shorts for comfort, safely in my apartment sipping Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, wondering why the rest of the world can’t be more like the very sexy and peaceful Mr. Stockholder.
Chicago gives me the freedom to stroll around the diverse streets at all hours of the night. Since I am now informed on which neighborhoods I’m not “allowed” to step foot in without getting beaten within an inch of my life and which neighborhoods are safely filled with harmless yuppie butterflies that demand a police presence at all times and will only commit bodily harm to you if your name is Steve Bartman. Not to mention that the trains are extremely safe at all hours of the day and night. In fact the trains in Chicago normally have a police presence and at times have police dogs on the train.
I want to share with you two of my odd memories of riding the Chicago L-Train. You see, I often take the train to the Near North side of Chicago and to the Downtown Loop area. Out of the approximately 700 times that I have road the train at night about 695 of them were extremely uneventful. But there have been a handful of crazy things that has happened to me, none that made me feel unsafe in anyway, just memorable.
On these trains you see every color in the world. The average trip at night on the CTA Orange line consists of the following race makeup – 25 percent black, 40 percent Hispanic, 25 percent white and 10 percent Asian. One night I marveled at the fact that I was on a train with 8 different people that looked like they came from eight very different places in the world. There was a little Mexican guy that looked and smelled like he spent his entire evening cooking greasy food in a restaurant, there was a polish lady that just finished cleaning 2-3 floors of a high-rise office building for minimum wage and no benefits, a 55 year-old white guy with a security uniform who is obviously going to his home in which he lives with his mother and cats, an angry hard working black guy that mumbles to himself about the white crackers that don’t know sh-it, a beautiful Chinese woman waiting quietly to get off at China Town and my hot dog eating fat rump from Jersey coming home by myself from a Chicago Bulls Basketball game. All these people living in harmony, simply understanding that we’re all in the same boat, taking the train because we can’t afford any other means of transportation.
1
My most memorable and shocking train ride came one evening while I was going to meet my son for lunch near his job. I was sitting next to this large black woman on an almost empty train. Out of the 90 or so available seats, about three were taken. Yet this large woman plops down right next to me as if she could not walk another step, as if that seat was her only option. Her bags that she slammed down were on my foot and her upper left blubbery arm was all over me.
Everything was OK for about 10 minutes, I completely did not mind the confined area, until she let out extreme amounts of gas! Immediately I was gagging and about to throw-up from the horrible smell that came pouring from her large buttocks that was three times the size of a normal humans. I quickly moved to the other end of the train, holding my mouth and covering my nose, letting out loud noises that helped prevent me from vomiting all over the train. In my mind this was an unfortunate situation for both of us, she had a problem with her gas and I was forced to smell it, I really wanted to ignore what just happened. I simply wanted to get away.
When her stop came up, she gave me looks that could kill and called ME ignorant.
I know I'm not ignorant, I love all people, but I’m not going to cuddle up with this woman on the train and smell her gas!! I mean that is not listed in the White Guilt Manual. Is it ?
2
The saddest incident came on one of the coldest nights in my memory. It was about 8 below zero and felt much colder than that with the wind chill. I can’t remember where I was coming from, but because I normally do not go out in weather like that, it must have been somewhere I did not want to be.
I was three stops away from where I get off; it was about 11:30 PM when the train came to a complete stop, all the lights and the heat was shut completely off. I was sitting on an almost full train, packed with people that wanted to get home as badly as I did.
After about 10 minutes of sitting there with no announcements about the delay, finally we were told that the train will not be moving for a longtime, that we need to get off the elevated platform, walk down the stairs and get on a shuttle bus that will take us to our destinations.
As all of the people headed toward the front of the train to walk down the stairwell, all of the passengers had the same horrible vision to our right. An arm with a thick gray winter coat sticking out from under the train, just like a bad horror movie that shows an arm coming from the grave. This person took the moving train on headfirst. Before the conductor could come to a complete stop about 10 feet of the train ran him over leaving only his arm and his pasty white and blue hand to be seen. Several people were in shock and let out screams.
As we walked down the steps, 50-60 firefighters and emergency workers came running up the steps, but it was far too late for this poor soul. I never found out his name or how he managed to get hit by that train. But one thing is for sure, this guy wanted to die or someone else wanted him dead, there is no way he tumbled into the oncoming train on accident. I checked all the newspapers and not one word was mentioned.
To Be Continued
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Member: Chuck Broginger
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