Train Pain

Last Friday I had a great chat with a fellow on the train to London Bridge from Greenwich, it was the sort of conversation you only really get when you’re traveling around London and it really made me feel at home. I was on my way to play a show in Kingston with my other band (/downigo) with our new drummer, John. We had a bit of gear with us and lugged it all onto the train, before I’d even sat down the guy sitting opposite me grabbed my attention; “Oi mate, have I got anything up my nose?” Here we go, I thought to myself, train freak. Luckily enough its only a ten minute journey from Greenwich to London Bridge so I wasn’t too rattled and told the bloke that there was nothing up his nose… “Nothing white?” he asked. Holy shit! This guy was asking if he had any cocaine residue up his hooter and it was only five o’clock in the afternoon! The guy was high as shit! “No mate, all clear” I said.

“Do you know what a kilonewton is?”

Goddamn, why oh why oh why did we choose to sit in these seats? The guy would not shut the fuck up, he was on a scaffolding course and started telling me all about it at the top of his voice, everyone on the train soon knew how much of an arsehole his teacher was and how hard it is to learn everything you need to know to qualify. And worse than that, the train was going so slowly I though it was going to start going backwards. Damn you Boris Johnson, damn you.

“What sort of music do you lot play? Rock yeah?”

“Yeah… rock…”

“Like Coldplay?” (I let out a small sigh, these conversations are always the same)

“Yeah just like Coldplay”

“I don’t really listen to that, its not my sort of thing usually, sometimes though. I listen to drum n bass and funky house, not RnB though and not Hip Hop” At this point he dropped his voice to a whisper and I knew what was coming, I braced myself. “Hip Hop’s for black people”

OF COURSE! Of course the guy was racist, its not enough to have to listen to his inane shite for far longer than I should he just had to drop that bomb into the conversation! Sweet! Usually, when in conversation with somebody I discover to be a vile ignorant piece of shit I would lay the law down, but faced with a coke crazed lunatic I forced myself to bite my tongue. I don’t think the guy would have been particularly open to my views on his prehistoric mindset so I stayed quiet and tried to blank out the remaining crap he had ready for me.

Things were going better than I’d hoped though, at least the guy was friendly, coked up to the eyeballs, but friendly, it could have easily gone the other way so I did everything I could to keep him in a good mood.

“Do you do Mandy?”

What the fuck is mandy? I didn’t know. Its MDMA apparently, the cokehead informed me of this at high volume and then spun me a great yarn about how he’d done so much the previous weekend that he didn’t sleep Friday or Saturday night and then went to bed at 9.30 on Sunday night and had to be up in the morning for his scaffolding course. Poor guy, I bet his arsehole teacher wasn’t impressed at all.

Conversation continued to flow my way until, almost at London Bridge, he perched the cherry atop the huge shitty drug cake and asked me if I wanted some toot. Toot? I immediately assumed that toot was cocaine and politely declined but he was not to be put off from his toot mission. The freak reached into his bag and pulled out an old glove, concealed within the glove was a wrap of coke, which he of course had no issue with getting out and opening up on London public transport.

Sitting there with a small pile of “toot” in his palm he was all too happy to tell me that he’d picked it up in Kent, “It’s way better in Kent, they cut it with all sorts of shit in London, but if you go down to Kent you can get the good shit, sure you don’t want some? This made my nose numb straight away, its brilliant”. The geezer grabbed a hefty pinch between his finger and thumb, jammed it up his nostril and started sniffing like a motherfucker. “its not even going up anymore!” he gasped between snorts, white dust drifting slowly down onto his chest. It was really one of the most disgusting things I’ve seen in a long time.

The train pulled in and with a cheery farewell, coke cemented to his top lip the freak left the train. But not before pulling down his collar to show me his tattoo, “Made In England”. I wish you hadn’t been mate, I really wish you hadn’t.