overheard on the L train

Several days before Thanksgiving. Sitting across from me on a half-empty, late-night, Canarsie-bound L train are two white men who are probably in their early 30s but have clearly done so many drugs that their faces (pocked, scarred, missing teeth) could be fifty. They look like anarchist-punk hitchhiker types, but not cute and malodorous like the ones you see begging in front of the Virgin Megastore, but ruined and repellent. Both men are wearing black hoodies, one with the broken zipper held closed by a safety pin; one wears originally-green double-kneed Carhartts that have turned black.

The man on the right, with wider shoulders and a beard, has his feet propped up on an olive green external frame backpack that looks like it has been tied behind a truck and dragged about four miles. This man has a bat tattooed on his forehead - not necessarily a bat, but a symmetrical shiruken-thing with gothic fluting that travels down from his forehead in tapered lines that end under his eyes, kind of like a jester mask or the Batman logo. It covers an area about as large as your hand would if you put it on your face.



He is squinting at a cell phone held at arm's length, and the bat on his face flaps with the effort.

The other man is scrawnier and appears unable to focus his eyes or is merely wall-eyed. He has the word "FIST" tattooed on his right hand, and "FUCK" tattooed on his left.

They are talking very loudly to one another. They sit next to each other but don't look at each other. There are empty seats on either side of them. The other passengers who have been riding the train a few stops won't sit next to them, but at the First Avenue stop a pretty young woman gets on and takes the seat next to FIST FUCK, and then looks very uncomfortable as the train travels under the East River, and this conversation unfolds:

FIST FUCK (FF): I have HPV.
BAT FACE (BF): (not looking up from his cell phone) What's that?
FF: Human pampler virus or something like that. It gives girls warts on their pussies but doesn't do anything to men.
BF: How do you know you have it then?
FF: Because of that girl I was fucking in Vermont.
BF: (yelling at phone) Goddammit!
FF: She was so nasty. When I was fucking her, it looked like she had all these tumors on her vagina. It was like all over her pussy.
BF: Heh-heh.
FF: Talk about "ribbed for his pleasure"!
BF: Heh-heh.
FF: Heh-heh. Heh-heh-heh!
BF: Heh-heh-heh.
FF: But she was the one who woke me up by kicking me in the face. Fucking bitch. That was the end of her.
BF: (still looking at cell phone) FUCK!
FF: Then we got a bunch of people to beat her ass down.
BF: (at phone) They make it fucking impossible to beat these games.

The woman who sat down with them at First Avenue got off at the next stop.