Rescue Me

I was on the 4 train tonight, headed from work to therapy, when a man stumbled onto the train. He was completely disheveled, hair all over the place, speaking to himself, all herky-jerky....and wearing a full suit, with button-down collar and tie. (In the exact same tone, I might add, as my own, hypothetical wedding suit.) His shirt was untucked, cuffs ripped and hanging haphazardly outside his jacket sleeves, stains strewn about here and there, and he was wearing white athletic socks - - but still, other than the clear external signs of insanity and dispossession, he could just as easily have been coming home from a hard day at the office as anywhere else. Or, at the very least, from a huge bender after a hard day at the office.

And I thought to myself, Is this what happens to us in this city? One day we're headed to work, or on our lunch break, or training it home, and *BAM* we snap, lose it, can't take the crowds and the noise and the mayhem and the stink and the heat anymore, and spend the rest of our lives lost and stumbling around the transit system in our jelly-crusted, beer-stained work clothes?

No sooner had he lurched himself off the train at 59th Street, when a three piece tribal drum orchestra parked themselves directly next to my seat and proceeded to hammer their music past the thick five o'clock shadow of my brain and into the very core of my own tenuous sanity, and it was all I could do not to follow my new friend into the depths of the New York City underground playground for the urbanly challenged.