Sobbing On The N Train
I was on my way to Manhattan from Brooklyn on the subway. I was riding the N train, which is notorious for making way too many stops in downtown Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. It was a Saturday night and the train was semi-crowded with partygoers on their way to the city. As the train was snaking its way through downtown Manhattan this woman got on. She was quite striking, but this was hard to make out because she was sobbing uncontrollably. A hush fell over the train as people turned to examine the woman. She took a seat right across from me.

The train continued to creep through lower Manhattan with the woman sobbing. The mood on the train was different though. The intoxicated people on the train were now completely silent. Everyone was wondering about the woman. After a few minutes with no one attempting to do anything, I got up and sat next to her.

I had no idea what to say to the woman, so I asked her if everything was all right. Just as the last syllables were escaping my mouth she turned and threw her arms around me. She started crying even harder into my shoulder. I hugged her back. I told her that everything was going to be fine. I didn’t know that this was true, but an ex-girlfriend of mine always told me that if a woman is crying, they want to be told that everything is going to work out, even if it isn’t.

All presenter photos by Patrick O’Dell. Styling by Sara McCormack. Bobby: Sacque suit, Pierre Cardin shirt, Allyn St. George tie. I continued to hug her as the train pushed on. Eventually I looked up to see the whole train silently praising me with their smiles. The woman was bawling just as hard as ever.

This continued as the train hit the stations in the Village and Chelsea where the partygoers left to start their night. I knew my stop was coming up, but I tried to avoid letting the anonymous woman know that sooner or later I had to leave the train as well. When my stop came up I made the motion to get up, but the stranger only grabbed me tighter. I knew she wanted me to stay.

I stayed. She cried. The train finished traveling up through midtown and started its final stretch into Queens. A few stragglers remained, but for the most part I was alone with the woman. We took the train all the way to its last stop in Astoria, Queens. The doors opened, but the woman wasn’t moving. We sat at the last stop for a minute or two. When the cleaning crew got on and told us to leave, she bolted up, still hanging on to me. We left the train and walked out of the station. Her tears were still coming. We walked through the suburban streets of Astoria for several blocks. At last we stopped at what I assume was the front door of her apartment building. She let me go for the first time that night. She looked up at me and muttered a thank you, then gave me one final hug. Then she pulled out her keys and walked in the door. I walked back to the train station.

VITO FUN


My Dad Died Twice
My father passed away a little over two years ago. The old man and I were close. He wasn’t perfect, but once you become a father yourself you realize how hard it can be and that nobody can do it without making any mistakes.

He’d been sick for a long time (congestive heart failure—quit smoking now, people) and we knew the end was in sight. He was declared ineligible for a heart transplant, so that pretty much meant it was time to “put things in order.”

Anyway, I got a call from my mom: “Dad has collapsed and is in the hospital. This might be it, come right away.” I flew over there as fast as I could and found my mom. After a few minutes the nurses told us we could come in and see him. We sit with him a little, and then an alarm on the stuff next to his bed starts going off. The nurses usher us to a little room in the ER and tell us to wait. A few minutes later our worst fears are realized. The doctor addresses my mother and me. They did all they could, but he is gone. We thanked him and asked to go see Dad. They let us, and there he was, pale and sickly, not breathing. Though it was not unexpected, the grief was still overwhelming. There was a lot to do though—people to be called and arrangements to be made. My first call was to work, to tell them I wouldn’t be in for a few days. My mom did the same thing and then we began to call close relatives. A good 15 minutes had gone by when the doctor reappeared looking very grave and told us that he had to talk to us.

My mom and I exchanged looks. Didn’t he do that already? What is he, really, really dead now? “I’m afraid I have some difficult news,” he told us. Now we were sure he was crazy. Did he forget he’d already told us? He went on, “Your husband/father is alive.”

We were incredulous: “What is this, the Middle Ages? Don’t you have machines and stuff for this? How can this happen?” He was at a loss, and I kind of felt for him. Ironically, it was harder to tell us that he was alive then it was to tell us that he had died! He hastened to add that my dad was almost certainly brain-damaged, and would die in a few hours or maybe a day.

Wrong on both counts. A few hours later he was sitting up in the ICU while my mom and I chatted with him. Sorry to disappoint all you New Age types, but there was no light, no tunnel, no out-of-body experience, no visit from long-dead relatives.

Now the hard part came: Remember all those people we called? Now we had to call them back. You haven’t experienced the old clichéd “emotional rollercoaster” until you’ve said goodbye to your dead father at 6:00 and gotten him more lime Jell-O at 8:00!

He did die not that long after, and at the funeral I started the eulogy by saying, “Just so you know, we’re absolutely sure this time.” There was a nervous titter, then raucous laughter. The priest looked at me like I was crazy. I had to explain it later.

Even now my mom and I joke about it, inventing lines the doctor could have delivered: “I’m afraid your father is double secret dead… Your father is dead, and we have it on good authority he is in hell… I’m afraid your father is dead—and his check bounced.”

I always just tell people my dad died twice—the second time it took.

LEO FEARPINI


Dead On Arrival
This must have been about 25 years ago. I was 18 and I was getting wasted with my born-again Christian pal and my Nazi skinhead pal. We had been drinking Labatt 50 all day and doing MDA (an early version of E).

So we’re riding the Toronto subway, which back then had these old wooden trains called Red Rockets that had the lights that went on and off every time it left the station. They must have been from the 60s. We have a whole car of the train to ourselves, and we decide to have a death match. We’re all pretty big guys and we’re feeling no pain, so we just start HURLING each other against the walls of the train. At one point the skinhead pal throws me so hard I open the window a crack. That was one of the weirdest things about these cars: The windows opened. It wasn’t easy, but if you really pushed you could open them. So I push the window open even further and the whole car has all this wind rushing through it, which felt fucking amazing. Then I look out the open window and see lights careening past at what appears to be about two million miles an hour. Holy shit. I call the other guys over and tell them they have to see this beautiful light show. One particular light seemed to hypnotize me and I reached out to tap it very lightly as we whizzed by. It was one of the many light signals that the conductor uses to figure out how far the next station is. Well, if I’d had a more sober brain in my head at the time I’d have realized that you can’t tap things when you’re whipping by them. Hmmm. Just as I was considering this, the light pole grabbed my arm and ripped it back out of the window, smashing all the glass around it, cracking off the edge of the window frame, and then hurling it back at my head like it was a baseball bat trying to kill me. My head then pounded into what was left of the window and knocked me out cold. My arm was broken in three places and had given me such a severe concussion when it snapped back that they had to drill a hole in my head to let out the fluid. Of course, I don’t remember any of this as I WAS FUCKING DEAD!!! That’s right. When I got to the hospital both my eyes were little cartoon Xs and I was DOA. Apparently that thing where they go, “All clear” kzzzzt, actually works because, as you may have guessed, I’m alive now. They say I was dead for about two minutes, or whatever is just short of so long you have brain damage. I’m not sure if I believe that though, because I’m 42 now and still looking for a job as a painter. And I live with my Mom.

Anyway, when I woke up there was a priest in my room. Apparently they have them in all hospitals for last rites or whatever. He was really eager to know if I saw anything and what was it like and all that. I guess it’s a shitty job talking to people who are about to die all day and he wanted to make sure there was actually something out there after you die that would make his terrible job worth it. He kept asking and asking, but all I had to say was, “I have nothing to tell you about what’s out there because a) I was wasted out of my mind, and b) I was dead.”

JOE BRADY


Lonely Crackheads
When I was 24, loneliness caused me to start dating a female friend whom I really loved and respected but didn’t really want to fuck. For some reason, she was completely in love with me. The worst part was that we both rented rooms in the same house along with several other assholes. After about two months of us being together, she went on a three-week vacation to some tropical resort and I had hopes she would have sex with some island man and then return to break up with me out of guilt. I should also mention that I had a very good engineering job at the time and made great money for a 24-year-old.

As soon as my girlfriend left, I went out and bought crack off a crusty, fortysomething sack of shit. We got high in an alley and then I invited him back to my home to smoke more crack with me. He brought some fellow crack addicts: An 18-year-old white girl and a seventysomething black man (who I really ended up liking). We smoked crack on into the night, and I immediately started fucking the 18-year-old. That night turned into three weeks of crack smoking. My roommates discovered that shit had been taken from their rooms while I was at work, but still somehow never knew about my pet junkies because of my secluded place on the other side of the house. It even had a separate entrance. I missed ten days of work, and the days I did show up I was covered in dried jizz and smelled like I shit myself. It was like I’d entered an alternate reality and I couldn’t give a flying fuck what anybody back in the real world thought of me.

But then I woke up one morning and realized I had to go pick up my real girlfriend and her mother at the airport, so I told my new friends that I was moving three states away and made them leave that day in an insane panic.

My girlfriend came back and, over the next month, I really did quit my job, break up with her, and move three states away to finish college. I tried to stay her friend.

The worst part came when the 18-year-old, who must have come back looking for me at first, started renting my old room. I started getting nightly calls from my friend/ex-girlfriend about the awful little drug addict bitch that was now living in my old room and who always had these two crusty old black druggies with her. I was so paranoid that she knew and was fucking with me, but I played along. Miraculously they never actually had a conversation because everyone in the house was focused on alienating the 18-year-old and getting her thrown out, which they did after five weeks when the girl was arrested for stabbing another woman in the lung for fucking her new boyfriend, the fortysomething drug dealer. I was never so relieved to hear that someone got stabbed in the lung than when my friend/ex-girlfriend read me the article from the local paper. She never knew that I had been ass-fucking the perpetrator, high on crack, while we were dating.

CHUCK FLANNIGAN

Death Rattles
A friend of mine used to work in a mental asylum. It was in the middle of the woods in the East German countryside. It had to be there because the people in the asylum were really fucking crazy. There was this one guy, Mr. Schmidt, who had to be strapped to his bed the whole day. The only time he wasn’t strapped down was when my friend was washing him. He had to do this every day. My friend worked there for three months and saw this guy every day. He always said hello and spoke to him but the guy never answered back. He never said a single word.

Then one day my friend went in to wash Mr. Schmidt and he saw him sitting up in bed, looking out the window, whistling. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” he said. He then asked him to sit down and he started explaining all about himself. What he was like as a kid, the first girl he slept with, the affair he’d had, how he’d killed a guy in the war. It was his whole life story. When he finished, my friend ran off to tell the nurses. When they heard what Mr. Schmidt was doing, the nurses screamed for a doctor. My friend was totally confused. The nurses said Mr. Schmidt was about to die.

When some guys are mentally fucked-up, they shut themselves off from the rest of the world. Then, just before they’re about to die, their bodies release endorphins to help with the pain. The thing is, these hormones also shake the guys out of the little mental room they’ve been living in for the past 30 years. When they get back into the real world, they want to explain all the stuff they never had a chance to before. The nurses and doctors all rushed down the corridor to Mr. Schmidt’s room. They found him lying dead on his bed.

MORGIN VUSKOP

I would only like to say: The winner is…


WINNER: DEATH RATTLES

Morgin Vuskop: “Thank you. Thank you everybody. I’m glad you liked my story. I have told that story about 200 times in my life and I hope I never have to tell it again. I will just hand them this issue of the magazine and say ‘Feel free to ask any questions.’ I hope you all learned something about death from this or at least endorphins and I’d like to thank the judges for acknowledging that my story teaches people.”

 

BOBBY

I’m from Puebla, Mexico. I went to school until I was 12, then started working when I was 13.

What was your first job?

My family and my uncles do construction, so I was working on houses.

How’d do you end up in the states?

I took a plane from Mexico City to Tijuana, then crossed the border with a few people. We walked for a few hours and ended up in L.A. the same day. I was there for about three days, then I flew to New York. I just stayed with friends and family wherever I went.

What kind of work did you do when you got to New York?

When I first got here I was working on a Pepsi truck. I’d load them then do the deliveries to the supermarkets and stores.

How do you get along with Americans?

I used to get a hard time from black and Puerto Rican people in my neighborhood, but now everything’s fine. I like to work with Americans though. They’re good people. I don’t work with Spanish people anymore. No way.

Why not?

The Spanish people are always trying to get you to work harder, and it’s like the more work you do, the more work they want you to do.