Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good

So not every day on the LIRR is all that bad. At its worst you will be left blood boiling, standing in a hailstorm, three hours after you should have been home, waiting for a train that’s not coming…and no one bothered to tell anyone that it wasn’t gonna show (actually happened). Other times your commute might be made less pleasant by a man approaching middle age who thinks Couples Retreat is the funniest movie of the past twenty years and insists on quoting it almost every day (also true). Since every day isn’t always a complete nightmare, I’ll recount some of the A+ days from years past when new happenings are slow.

Today’s story comes from the files of “My headache was caused by a fellow commuter, and not the LIRR. Holy shit, what a nice change of pace.”

Every once in a while I forget my iPod or headphones at home or at work. When this happens, a beacon is sent out to all the crazies alerting them to sit as close as possible to me on the train and talk at the loudest possible volume about inane shit.

In the mornings I try to catch the express train if I can, because I like my commute as short as humanly possible. On this particular morning I happened to be taking a later train. Double whammy: I left my iPod at work the night before and now I was going to have a longer ride in.

Somewhere around Brentwood, a grungy looking, middle-aged fella gets on, plops down in a seat across the aisle from me and promptly falls asleep. No problem. It’s about two stops later when he takes a phone call that the problem begins. This is one of those guys who has NO PROBLEM letting the world know his business. Because if it were an issue, he wouldn’t speak at a decibel level well above that of a Motörhead concert. As an added bonus, he had a thick Long Island accent and he was one of those guys that pronounces all his S’s as slight Sh’s (i.e. ‘Sho I shays to the guy…’)

I was doing my best to drown out what he was saying, until I heard the same phrase repeated a couple times: “Don’t be bustin’ down my door, bro.” It was then that he had my full attention, because clearly this was a story worth hearing. Luckily for me, he’s one of those guys who will tell his story over and over again from the beginning, as if his listener can’t quite grasp the gravity of the situation.

From what I could piece together, this guy lived in some kind of halfway house. That morning, some fellow creep he lived with came into his room while the guy was still in bed. The creep was just kind of hovering over him, when the guy snapped out of his sleep and unleashed on the creep. He recanted to his friend how he grabbed the creep and held him against the wall while continually reprimanding him with the words, “Don’t be bustin’ down my door, bro.”

This guy must have said, “Don’t be bustin’ down my door, bro” sixty times in the span of ten minutes. Often preceded by the phrase, “So I says to him.”

Do me a favor. Go say, “Don’t be bustin’ down my door, bro” ten times in a row and tell me you don’t want to punch yourself in the face. This guy’s phone call lasted almost half the ride and I have never been more sorry that I had no audible diversion.

I’ll be honest, I feel bad for the guy. No one wants to wake up to some weirdo staring at them in their sleep, but I have a problem with a flaw in the guy’s storytelling: He woke up after the creep had been staring at him in his room. If his door had been busted down, as he so undoubtedly believed it was, would he not have woken up at the sound of wood being torn from its hinges? I suppose, but then the story wouldn’t have packed the same punch if he had been saying, “Don’t be gingerly openin’ my door, bro.”