Monday, August 31, 2009

Subway Antisemite

I took the 6-line on Friday night, trying to get to Penn Station from the Upper West Side. It was late at night, and the trains weren't coming very often. In my side of the tracks, there were only a handful of people, one of which randomly started talking to me as we both got in the train and he sat right across from me.
The train started going down from 103rd St. via Lexington. We started talking about life, about how it sucked to wait for the train on a Friday night, and how at least we got to have a few drinks before going home. I eventually picked up from the guy that he wasn't a native English speaker, so I asked him where he was from, and he ended up being a Puerto Rican hotel doorman from a midtown hotel. "Cool," I thought, and we kept on talking, this time in Spanish.
I don't remember exactly how, but we started talking about Jews. Maybe it was because of the drinks I'd been having, or because we both had Jewish friends. (Shout out to David!). He eventually started telling me how Jews were bad people and how they killed Jesus.
I started getting a little uneasy as the train got to 51st St. I wanted to explain to the guy that Jews didn't really kill Jesus, but that the Romans did, but at the same time I wanted to get the hell out of there. I started telling him that crucifiction was actually a Roman punishment, not a Jewish one, but as soon as I said "Roman," he started saying things like, "yea, man, I'm a Roman Catholic." We just left Times Square as he started saying that, and saying "those Jews, they're bad people, they always choose their own over you, no matter whether you're friends with them."
I had one more stop to try to explain to the guy that Jews were as ethnocentric as Puerto Ricans or Koreans, but as we neared 33rd St., my stop, I thought "fuck it" and left.
Sometimes 70 streets aren't enough time to explain inter-ethnic relations and religious history to a drunk Catholic, especially while a little drunk oneself.