2002-12-09 10:49 a.m.
buzzes and gurgles

My mornings are eerily quiet.

On a good morning, when I've woken up early and pumped a little Red Bull into my system, I'm already bopping around to music and writing by 7.

Usually, I just oversleep (much more prevalent in winter for species Goldman nuyoricanus escribius), stumble out of bed in time to shower and pull myself and lunch together, and scoot to the train.

Most mornings on the Q, everyone's comatose, either lost in thought or in the headphones around their ears, eyes buried in the Daily News, the latest hot novel, or a beautiful Russian girl's ass.

But there's this buzzing...the speakers on the train always have this feedback, a mechanical keening that pierces my eardrum if it gets too loud, a fly that's buzzed its way into my underpants or under my hat if it's quieter.

This morning, there was another sound mixed in, a faint gurgling, underwater sounds. I kept seeing a fat Queens man with three-day stubble inexplicably drowning in the conductor's box, victim of a ghost's revenge for old crimes. His body would slump onto the brake at the next station and the train would just stop, residual fear and murmurs about ruined mornings rippling through the train. His unexplained death would become urban legend a few word-of-mouth-years later.

I kept seeing the story in my head as a good movie, but the world's already lived through too many episodes of the X-Files. We need more episodes of, say, Ray Bradbury (or Alfred Hitchcock) Theater, or better, Mercury Theater on the Air.