Most areas in and around the city have their fair share of pigeons. But in White Plains, the pigeons are special. I have given several of them little nicknames. There is “Fatty Fat Fat” a rather plump pigeon, which I am sure you could have guessed, and my favorite, “Peggy” also known as “Peg-leg” who has only one leg.

These pigeons are not stupid. In the cold of winter, where would YOU want to be? In freezing temperatures, or chillin’ in the train station, snatching up crumbs of food leftover by careless passengers? It is always incredibly hilarious to watch when one of the pigeons decides to enter the station. At the main entrance of White Plains, there is usually a long line in the morning of people waiting for their coffee or pastry at one of the two shops in the ground floor. Soaring into flight, the pigeons fly perilously close to the top of their heads, startling them. Some do in fact scream. Then the pigeons fly up the stairwell to hang out in the waiting room, where silly passengers-in-waiting (like me) throw them bits of food.

One morning I sat in the waiting room, amusedly watching the antics of one pigeon pacing the waiting room. The way they walk, with their heads bobbing back and forth, I always find amusing. On the door to the waiting room there is in fact a sign that says it is for ticketed passengers only. It doesn’t seem to be a rule enforced, considering my previous stories of the drunks and homeless that hang out and take naps. Anyways, while waiting, a mustached man walks by. For some people a mustache is just a little bit of their overall look… for this guy his mustache was his defining attribute, it was just that massive. Massive enough to completely block his lips from vision. That is why when he spoke, for a few moments I was unsure whether the voice actually came from him, or came from someone or something else. And what did that mustached man say to me?

“DOES THAT PIGEON HAVE A TRAIN TICKET???!!”

Yes, yes, I am sure he does. He carries his pigeon pass… you let me in, or I take a shit on your head.

I think it is an unwritten rule of public transportation etiquette that when there are a lot of empty seats on the train/bus/whatever, you don’t sit right next to another passenger. Let me just say, a guy I saw on the train one evening was apparently unaware of this rule. By the time the train gets to Chappaqua, most of the passengers have already left, and the cars may have about two to three people in them, max.

In my train car, there was only one other guy. At Chappaqua, another man entered the train. From this point on I will refer to him as Bob. Bob decides to sit right next to the other man. After a few moments of awkward silence, Bob pipes up, “I repair radios. What do you do?” The other man appears to be rather dumbfounded, “Is he talking to me??” he thinks. So Bob repeats, “I repair radios. What do you do?”

If the silence was awkward, this was definitely even more so. The man began answering Bob’s questions, with what he told me later were completely fabricated answers. Then Bob wanted to know where the man lived, and where he grew up. Again, he was given fabricated answers.

As we approached Mount Kisco station, Bob asked the man if he knew anything about computers. The man said he did not. Bob abruptly rose from the seat and prepared to disembark, telling the man something along the lines of, “Oh, I don’t think we’ll talk again. If you knew about computers, I might have wanted to talk with you again. But you don’t.” And then, when the doors opened, Bob left.

I like to refer to this man as Bob, recalling a previous visit to Mount Kisco, though not by train. It had to have been at least five years ago, on the way home to Connecticut I stopped at the Burger King in Mount Kisco for a quick meal. In the parking lot there was a car completely filled in every place but the driver seat with fast food trash. Inside the Burger King we saw the man that owned the car: filling a two liter soda bottle in the self serve soda fountain, and then washing his hands in the soda. Needless to say, it was a memorable bit of amusement every time we were to pass through Mount Kisco.

Fast forward to about a year ago. My family again stopped at the Burger King in Mount Kisco, and my dad thought it would be amusing to ask if the man “who washes his hands in the soda” still comes around. Apparently he is well known at the establishment, and a worker told my father his name was Bob. I like to think that this man is the one I did in fact see on the train.

I may never know for sure.

I feel incredibly guilty about an incident that happened today… I found myself laughing at the misfortune of an old man. While waiting near Grand Central for my train back home, I went to grab a bite to eat. At a table to my right was a woman and her child, and to my left, an elderly man drinking a coffee.

Unfortunately, the old man spilled his coffee. The woman turned to him and said something along the lines of “ah, it’s okay, these things happen…” in an attempt to make him not feel so bad. I don’t think the guy actually heard her though, it seems that he was deaf or hard of hearing. Anyways, he grabbed some napkins out of his pocket to wipe up the table, and some change fell out of his pocket. After wiping the table he looked at the ground to see the mess there, and saw the money. He picked up the money and exclaimed, “I found 30 cents!”

He put the money back in his pocket. Except his pocket must have had a hole, because the change tumbled back out and onto the floor. And being that he was deaf, he didn’t hear it fall out. This happened several times. Pick up change, put in pocket, change falls out. The lady at the other table looked at me, and I knew she was thinking, “what the heck??”

Eventually, the guy just gave up and went into the bathroom. When he came out, we noticed that the spill was a lot larger than we thought… His pants were soaked, and it most certainly looked like he had wet himself. The lady saw and said something along the lines of “oh, I feel so bad!”

I replied back, “Yeah, I didn’t realize it was so bad… I feel really bad for laughing, but I do think he found his thirty cents about five times though!”

She laughed, “Oh, you saw that too? He must have had a hole in his pocket!”

Another remembered story… last summer while riding LIRR, I was hanging out in the outdoor waiting area outside Northport station, waiting for my friend to pick me up. I was sitting in an end seat, and the seat to my left had some trash that some slob left behind. A Hispanic man walks up to me, moves the trash, and sits down next to me. Mind you, there were plenty of other open seats, he just chose to sit next to me, despite the fact that he even had to clean off the seat.

In his hand, the man carried an Abercrombie and Fitch bag, the kind with the shirtless guys and a girl that I probably wouldn’t want to know in real life. He holds it up, points to the picture and says “Haha! Look at these guys!” He proceeds to pull out the contents of the bag, a statue of an eagle, which he had made, or at least painted. I was sort of not paying much attention, thinking “okay dude, whatever” and looking desperately for my friend to save me from this nutjob.

Of course, knowing my luck, the situation got worse before it got better. The man began to make comments about my clothing, noticing that I had a hole in the knee of my jeans. He then reached over and began to touch my knee. In retrospect, I probably should have punched the guy. Better yet, I should have gotten the hell away from him long before. But being the nicer person that I was I got my ass up as fast as possible away from that damn nutjob.

While on my way home from work, I often have to sit in the White Plains train station for a bit, waiting for my train to arrive. Oftentimes the seating area is full, but every once and a while it is not.

That is truly when you ought to be cautious. Because a lot of times there are *reasons* why those seats are not taken.

A lot of times those reasons are whom I like to refer to as the drunks of White Plains. My favorite, or perhaps I should say, my *least* favorite, smells heavily of alcohol, and does a pretty poor job of drinking alcohol (out of a large fruit juice bottle, mind you), probably getting more on his body than down his throat.

Another least favorite is a lady who enjoys taking up several of the seats, and stretches out and falls asleep. She punctuates the noise of the waiting area with her own brand of slurred half-asleep gibberish.

In either case, I’d much prefer to stand.

While waiting on the platform, I noticed a woman acting a little strangely while pushing a baby carriage. Not like, strange enough to call the police or something, but just odd. She was pushing the carriage, but it was covered over with a large blanket. If a kid was inside, it would have been suffocating. Every couple of minutes, she would kneel down over the carriage, lift the flap, stick her head inside, and talk. Actually, thinking back, it was pretty damn weird. You see those “See Something, Say Something” posters everywhere, and that was kinda suspicious…

Once we got on the train though, I did happen to notice that the woman wasn’t talking to a bomb or anything like that… she was attempting to conceal a cat strapped into the baby carriage.

I am a lover of hats… they keep me warm. I have a grand collection of them, plain hats, silly hats with ears, all varieties. Several years ago I made frequent use of a baby blue hat, which had a black unicorn embroidered on the front. Perhaps these hats are what attracts the weirdos to me.

One evening while taking the PATH train to New Jersey, a man attempted to steal the hat off my head while I was walking up the stairs, and he was going down.

Okay, that is fairly tame… and not that odd. The next one? A little more strange. It certainly is one of my favorite stories to tell about weird people I’ve encountered on the train. I was riding Metro North from Brewster station, and a somewhat overweight woman decided to sit next to me.

“You must like unicorns,” she said.
“Umm yeah, I guess…”
“Oh, I bet you’d love this…”

She then proceeded to unbutton her shirt, in order to show me a tattoo right above her breast. Of a unicorn. But it was far more than I wanted to see…

In case anyone was wondering, Greyhound is the preferred mode of transportation for people that have just been released from prison. On my cross-country trip by Greyhound, I heard this several times. Personally, if I had just gotten out of prison, I’d be keeping that to myself.