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.

Subway Conversation

The 7-train at rush hour is a "fucking standing Benetton ad," to borrow from the white guy in the Mets shirt who was standing a few inches away from me. My car was full of white people in Mets shirts, and Latinos and Asians going back to Queens after a day of hard work.
I was sweating and, from the smell of the train, I could tell everyone else was. I avoided people's eyes by keeping mine fixed in my New Yorker and, everytime the doors opened, I hoped somebody would get off the train. It didn't happen. A girl walked in at the first stop out of Manhattan and she stood right next to me.
We were holding on to the same post, and she asked, "Is this the train to Jackson Heights?." "I don't know, but there's a map right there," I said. I sounded like a douche, without meaning to, so then I said, "but what's your stop? Maybe I can help you."
She wanted to go to 74th St., I think, so I told her to switch to the local line on Queensboro Plaza. She thanked me. Then I started to talk to her about other things, trying to practice my people skills. I started with the first obvious question that came to my mind: "so you're not from around here?," and it ended up she was from around, but never really took the Subway to get around. We kept on talking about other things, like the recent death of Michael Jackson and that I used to watch his movies as a kid, that she was going to Berkeley College and that my college education didn't really pay the way I wanted to, and that I knew only two words in Bengala, which ended up being foods (I learned them at a restaurant).
As we neared Queensboro Plaza, I wasn't sweating so much. Maybe I was keeping my cool. She asked me for my e-mail, which she wrote down in the iPhone, and we parted ways. I've been checking my inbox every few hours since that day, but only work mail comes in.
Sometimes I wish more Subway people would get in there more often.