Stumbling, they come down the dingy stairs, a babbling, mumbling horde, eyes bloodshot and faces flushed, stamping out cigarettes, breaths of liquor, wine and a hundred beers, taste buds number than train track steel, tongues coated with muck, steps wobbly and unsure.
A woman at the far end of the track screams, “Is that a goat?” A big angry billy with six-inch horns and large teeth chews on a New York Post headlined “BABY KILLER!” The goat backs up at the commotion, its beady eyes leery of the huddling mob, stirring and stewing at the end of the track.
The 2:57 a.m. train is gone. The mob of slurring late-night commuters grows, eyeing the goat warily. The goat eyes them back, waiting, but starts to eat more, this time a copy of Barron’s asking, “Can We Ever Trust Accountants Again?” Finishing that off the billy begins to chew a chocolate milk carton and then a New York Knicks jersey, bearing Patrick Ewing’s number, long faded to pink. A parade of rats crosses the tracks, seen by no one. The next train is a long time coming.
Down the rarely used stairs at the other end two men stumble, cursing, carrying an eggplant-colored recliner, stolen from a chichi Soho bar where a Budweiser costs $9 and the imports $12 and the average customer is a sleek-eyed Bolivian model or a dimpled trust-fund financier from Connecticut now living in East Hampton or a published poet with hair plugs and a cabin in the Catskills and the soul of a bankruptcy attorney, sonnets notwithstanding.
The two men stealing the chair had the wrong hair and state school degrees and no business being in the Soho bar unless they were delivering something. Right off they caught the eye of the burly bouncer, his biceps bulging in his tight black designer T-shirt, his head shaved smooth, a Vin Diesel wannabe who tells everyone he’s from Samoa and educated at Yale but is really a Texas junior college dropout. He dreams of being a stuntman, an actor and starring in his own video game. He sees the chair departing, firing a steroid rage within him. He chases after the drunken galoots, the pair scurrying in short steps, running west on Houston Street and then up Hudson Street with the overstuffed chair that will never fit in either one of their Jersey City studio apartments. But the buff bouncer is top-heavy with weak knees and $400 Italian Bruno Magli shoes and can’t catch the drunken duo, although he scuffles along fast enough to keep them in sight.
He sees them go down the stairs to the PATH train. “New Jersey,” he smirks, “shoulda figured.” The bouncer clenches his meaty fists and runs down about 20 seconds behind them only to reach the bottom of the stairs and trip over the now-abandoned chair, somersaulting downward, hitting his shaved head on the grimy concrete, landing supine and unconscious, startling the pissed-off billy goat. The goat brays, opens its large mouth wide and bites down on his crotch, his shrunken steroid testicles barely even a mouthful.
Joe Samuel Starnes, a native of Georgia now living in Jersey City, is a graduate student in English and creative writing at Rutgers-Newark. He is the author of an unpublished novel, Scraps in a Gulf Breeze, that won an honorable mention in the 2002 Florida First Coast Writers Festival Novel Contest. He is at work on another novel he expects to complete in 2003.
