Respect Authority

Montauk Monster, Part Deux. I’ve dreamed of this day.

I don’t know if you all knew this, but the J train is sometimes a time-travel portal to the 1983 hair-band scene. 

When Creature Feature came about, Aaron and I were veritable ninjas at finding the subway’s most crazy. It was a skill to explain the character without letting them know you were talking about them, but clues like “King Coopa,” “Giraffe Woman,” or “Triceratops” would get the point across. Once everyone upgraded to cell phones that did more than text message, it dawned on us that these freaks of nature could be documented — and Creature Feature was born.

Unfortunately, taking inconspicuous pictures of people on the subway is about 74% harder than you’d think. For one, no one holds their phone vertically while doing anything real — like texting, or playing Tetris. It’s almost immediately obvious that you’re avoiding pointing the phone at your feet, and this makes it necessary to snap the as discreetly and quickly as possible. Truly, it’s an art.

So in what I consider a pretty amazing feat of spycam work, I captured a woman we’ll call HuffPuff the Magic Dragon, in action on the J train. See, HuffPuff sat down first, and with her puffy jacket and elementary-school-gym-teacher physique, managing to take up room in the seat next to her. In comes Tired Looking Asian Woman, who sat down in the remaining seat, only to receive a NASTY look from HuffPuff, who nearly huffpuffed herself to the ceiling with sighs of discontent that someone would encroach on her space. Discontent because HER girth is taking up space in the seat next to her! Moreover, after TLAW got off the train, another woman moseyed over to eye the space and HuffPuff gave her a stare that said, were stares able to speak, “Are you fucking kidding me? Does that fucking look like a seat to you?” whereupon Lady #2 chose not to sit.

I don’t know what city HuffPuff lives in, but in New York it’s pretty hard to commute without people touching you. In fact, if taking the subway were like a transit version of Operation, and a buzzer went off every time you made contact with another person… well… you’d be deaf. Clearly someone needs to TAKE some gym classes.