Afterward, we headed to Hoyt-Schermerhorn to take the train to a restaurant in Prospect Heights. The stifling and oppressively hot station is two stories below ground and filthy, and we sweated standing still while waiting for the C.
And we waited.
The G-train, which never runs, arrived thrice going downtown and twice going to Queens ... and still no Euclid-bound C arrived. An A-train came, which might have been going local, but it was packed to the gills and we couldn't make out the conductor's announcement. So we let it pass.
As we continued to wait, a wraith of what might once have been a person came staggering down the platform towards us. We gathered it was a woman by the dried (presumably menstrual) blood smeared across her belly on her soiled clothes. She looked like Dominique Pinon, had he been hit in the face with a shovel.
She shuffled by -- rank, blood-smeared and caked with dirt, her head topped with a bird's nest of dusty, nappy curls -- and came to a stop facing a pillar towards the back of the platform.
My girlfriend gaped, horrified, at the vagrant woman. We heard a clicking sound.
"She's smoking rocks," my girlfriend said. "She's lighting up in the goddamned subway. She's smoking crack on the platform!"
I shrugged, inwardly appalled by my own indifference but outwardly disgusted by the woman, her habit and the state to which she allowed herself to decline.
When she was sufficiently rocked up, she turned and licked her chapped, crusty chops like she'd just downed a turkey dinner. She pulled out a cup full of money.
Suddenly, an LP dropped from near her person to the platform, chipping into a pac-man shape. She made no reaction, but my girlfriend and I wondered from where it had come.
Did the crackhead drop it? Where had she been hiding it? Did someone throw it at her?
Crack lady started making the rounds shortly after the LP appeared, proffering her cup and asking for money.
The sheer audacity of this incomprehensible individual put me aghast. The menstrual (or other) blood on her clothes made me cringe. My flesh crawled.
When she asked me for change, all I could do was vehemently, albeit silently, refuse by shaking my head ... and she skulked off towards the front of the platform.
Another G-train to Queens pulled into the station and my girlfriend and I resolved ourselves to abandon our previous plan and take it to Greenpoint for pierogi and kielbasa.
As the doors of the G closed, the C train for which we'd waited nearly 20 minutes arrived across the platform. It didn't matter; if Greenpoint wasn't nearly far enough away ... Prospect Heights was far too close.
This city is a cesspool. I am -- as is anyone else who resides within it -- insane to live here.
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