But it is rarely as Red Line as it was today.
I waited an interminably long time at the Chinatown stop, with some high-school brats. They whipped each other with their own belts, fake-threatened to throw each other onto the tracks, and accidentally really-almost knocked innocent bystanders onto the tracks. Then the train came.
Tired of the brats, I got onto a different car and sat down a few feet from a very quiet and very homeless man who could have been dead except for one subtle movement that he made a few minutes into the ride. At Roosevelt (the next stop) some bangers (at least I assume so because they dropped a half-dozen signs in as many blocks) hopped on, kicked their feet up, shouted at me and half of the other passengers, informed me that I was scared, and then asked me what I was reading. “Notes,” I told them. “Notes?” they said. “Notes I wrote,” I clarified. “Fuck that shit,” they said. They got off the train at Monroe.
At Lake Street, a dirty hippie got on and sat down next to me. He was a very dirty hippy. Make your eyes water dirty. I really couldn’t focus on anything else until he got off the train at Fullerton.
That was where some loopy Catholic couples got on and started rolling joints. “I fucked it up,” said the boy, after he had, in fact, ruined the third joint in a row (not that I’m an expert in this but the fact that he kept dropping his stash and stepping on the leaves couldn’t have been a good sign). “You never roll before?” asked the kleptomancer sitting behind me. “No, I rolled since I was seven,” he said, “and it was like…” He lost the thread, then picked it up: “When life gives you lemons, man, fuck those lemons.”
Ironically, the train was relatively quiet, uneventful, and odor-free from Sheridan to Berwyn: the entirety of Uptown.
A few of these characters (including the kleptomancer) got off the train with me at Bryn Mawr, but I turned east and they turned west and we saw each other no more.
It was every stereotype of a nighttime ride on the Red Line packed into one efficient 40-minute package.