Terrorist Threats: The Innocent Kind

There is a fair share of crazies on my ride from the northeast edge of Brooklyn to downtown. Most of them are picked up on a long ride through Bed-Stuy, which seems to be gentrification-averse and charmingly violent in the evening.

I know I’m in for a treat when I hear the grovelly voice of a woman in gold or silver sweatpants talking to the closest stranger. She rides to her “meetings” in downtown Brooklyn once a week, and has an uncanny ability to tell her life story to anyone within five feet of her, in 40 minutes or less.

After hearing the standard “I-was-a –junkie-and-now-I’ve-found-the-Lord” story (cliché) over a handful of bus rides, I overheard her in the rear of the bus this morning while I was reading. “No, I’m not suicidal, I’m homicidal. Some days I could kill this whole fuckin’ bus!” she tells the bus. And just in case the people with iPods didn’t hear, she says, “I think about it every day! Do you know how hard it is to think about killing a whole fuckin’ bus every day?”

That’s when I realized that her meetings were of the psychiatric variety. And I seriously wondered how many weapons could be stored in a pair of gold sweatpants.