A Nice Man

Brains are weird. When they go wrong, all kinds of bananas can break loose. At the more benign end of the spectrum there is stuff like colour blindness. These poor souls cannot distinguish between red and blue, or blue and yellow, or sometimes any colour at all, and so are doomed to wander the earth in paisley shirts and striped trousers. Other unfortunate individuals suffer from amusia, which sounds like a made-up clown disease but refers to the condition in which the sufferer is unable to differentiate between musical pitches, and is thus unable to enjoy, or even recognise music. When we move up a few levels we enter the territory of things like prosopagnosia, the inability to tell one face from another, Capgras Delusion, where a person is convinced that a close family member has been replaced by an identical looking imposter, or something called Paris Syndrome, which is suffered almost exclusively by Japanese tourists who, having spent years romanticising the City of Light, are unable to reconcile their idealised notions of the French capital with their first interactions with the breathtaking rudeness of actual French people, and as such suffer such severe culture shock that they undergo a mental breakdown from bottling up all their anger at douchey French waiters (there's even a support hotline for Paris Syndrome operated by the Japanese Embassy in Paris. This is completely true).

Since I moved to New York I've become convinced that I, too, suffer from an insidious misfiring of the brain. Whilst some people are forced to endure being unable to recognise colour, music, other people's faces, or that their wife isn't a robot, or that the best way to deal with a jerk waiter is to pour all the sugar all over the table as you're leaving, I am apparently unable to distinguish the difference between my home and New York's Grand Central Station, as evidenced by the fact that every single time I have to catch a train anywhere I'm still calmly sitting in my room googling images of lolcats when I should be well and truly on the subway if I expect to actually catch said train. As such, despite the blood-oaths I make to myself every time I'm sprinting through the terminal with a goddam backpack the size of a Galapagos tortoise on my back that the next time I have to catch a train I will bloody well leave the house with a window of more than fifteen nanoseconds to spare, I inevitably repeat my panicked mad dash through the streets of New York every few weeks or so. Being an intelligent adult capable of undertaking complicated planning procedures, the only conclusion I can draw from my Groundhog Day-like approach to interstate travel is that I must suffer from an acute inability to understand that trains to Connecticut do not leave from my bathroom.

The most recent attack of my unfortunate disorder occurred a few weeks ago when I had to go upstate for the Norfolk Music Festival. The closest train station to Norfolk from New York was about an hour's drive away, and so I had to be on a specific train at a specific time to be met by someone with a car to take me the rest of the way there, otherwise I would be walking to Norfolk. Of course, forty minutes before my train left Grand Central I was still toodling around in my bedroom, probably engaged in some task of breathtaking import like alphabetising my underwear, and when the realisation hit me that I had done this f@*&ing shit all over again I grabbed my backpack (which mercifully I had packed the night before) and ran out the door. The subway wouldn't get me there in time though. I had to catch a cab. That's okay, cabs are always going over the Williamsburg bridge near my house. Easy. Cabs.

There must have been a no-cabs convention or some shit because fifteen minutes later I was still standing like a pickle on the side of the road desperately hailing anything that even looked like a cab, including school buses, ice-cream trucks, and a lady pushing a yellow pram. As my panic and self-reproach began to approach tears-in-public level (I am such a baby), a cab finally pulled over. I gratefully flung open the door and prepared to hurl my backpack in.

"I'm off duty," the guy said.

"...?" says I.

"I'm off duty," he says again.

"You're off duty? You pulled over to tell me you're OFF DUTY?! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!" I shrieked calmly inquired (meanwhile, four vacant cabs that had apparently been skulking out of sight and waiting for me to be distracted made a break for it and whizzed past me triumphantly over the bridge).

"I have to go to Mosque," the guy explained. Ah. Of course (?).

"Come on, man, my train leaves in like thirty minutes, and I'm totally stuck!" I begged.

"... okay, okay, just get in, I'll take you over the bridge but I won't charge you."

All I really heard was "get in" so it wasn't until we were actually moving that I processed the rest of the sentence.

"You won't charge me? Don't be silly, I have to pay you."

"No, no, I'm going over that way anyway, I have to go to Mosque, so I won't charge you. I'll get you as close as I can to Grand Central, then I'll get you another cab".

Which he did. Traffic on the bridge was unusually light, and my man got me a mere ten blocks from my destination before he was satisfied that I'd be able to catch another cab without too much hassle. I tried one more time to pay him, but he insisted: no money, he was going to Mosque. A little stunned by this completely un-New Yorkish approach to taking other people's cash, I thanked him, ran out into the middle of the street and jumped into the cab that screeched to a halt to avoid running me down. I made it to the station with ten minutes to spare and so have probably learned nothing from the experience, except that once people learn you suffer from a disabling brain disorder like mine, they can be really, really nice.