Continuing With My Week Of Gross Out Posts…

Last fall my buddy Jimmy and I were on the D train going to our jobs. It was around 8AM when we got on the train at 36th Street in Brooklyn. The car we were on wasn’t too crowded, and there were a lot of the usual suspects – Death Mask, Kim Jong Il, Sideshow Bob, Tupac’s Sister, Kofi Annan, etc.

At Pacific Street only a couple of new people came on, which is a rarity for a morning commute. You would think that this would always be a good thing, but not this case, as the near empty standing area comes into play later.

See this one guy in particular that boarded our subway car was a guy that was most likely in the 35-40 age range, he had a pot marked red nose, he was dirty from not showering, his clothes all greased up, he had a shopping cart of some belongings with him, and inside that shopping cart was an open tall boy of Bud that he was nursing. I think that he was most likely homeless, or, as we called them when I was a child, he was a bum.

A bum from Brooklyn, no less – it’s part of our Brooklynite heritage, and this guy wasn’t going to let it die out as long as he was around.

At first bum guy attempted to stand with his cart in the doorway next to both Jimmy and myself, and tried to make small talk with us.

This would have been enough cause for both Jimmy and myself to cower away to a different section of the subway car if it continued, thankfully, Mr. Bum decided that he would truck himself on over to the opposite doorway, which was empty and had plenty of room for him to discreetly sip his beer, and read a two week old New York Post that he dug out from the bottom of his shopping cart.

A few moments before going over the Manhattan Bridge, something began to happen to Mr. Bum. It appeared as though he had developed an itch in his crotch.

He scratched and scratched and scratched over the surface of his worn pants for a good three minutes. Both Jimmy and I couldn’t take our eyes off of this prolific scratching, because a) we were facing the guy, b) he was a new character, and c) the subway car was too empty to have any bodies obstructing our views of Mr. Bum.

Mr. Bum really had one heck of an itch develop, because he had to place his tall boy down in his shopping cart, stop reading, and literally go for it.

He jammed his left hand down the front of his pants unabashedly; he dug in what I assume to be in his pubes for a good minute. His face grimaced with the pain of an unstoppable itch.

Then his hand began to pull out of his crotch, was he done?

Nope, he just needed to adjust his scratching technique.

Then, he appeared to have found the source of this itch. He tugged, pulled, and scratched feverishly. Then he was done moving his hand in his pants.

He pulled his hand out, and went back to reading his NY Post as if nothing had just happened. It was as if he was in the comfort of his parent’s living room when he was 12 years old - but there still was something.

The hand that had been jammed down into his crotch was playing with something. We couldn’t tell for sure what it was, so we kept our enamored look in it’s direction.

After a good 30 seconds of his playing with the mysterious crotch gold in between his index finger and thumb, Mr. Bum was done with it. He then flicked it to his left without looking, and thankfully it landed on the floor.

“Was that a crab?” Jimmy and I asked one another.

To this question, we had no definitive answer, and we weren’t about to find out.