For years, the sight of the impossibly innocent girl drawn crudely on the packaging of Utz snack foods has brought me nothing but joy. I've always been impressed, actually, with how her attire - limited as it is to a matching bow and blouse, her torso obscured by a bag of something yummy - always matches the colors assigned to the specific snack vacuum-sealed into the package. Green for the sourdough pretzels, red for the classic chips, orange for barbeque style anything; it all works, in a fashion sense, with her stubbornly sixties mop, which seemingly requires gallons of gel to achieve its helmet-like appearance.
Alas, as with all things virtuous and good, I'm sad to report this little girl, with her milky skin and cheerful expression, is no longer capable of making me smile. Not after today, when, during the evening rush-hour, unwitting teens instigated an outburst from a fellow subway passenger while consuming a brand of the ubiquitous Utz potato chips.
I was reading an article about Liberia's new president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and the ridiculous challenges she's facing trying to turn that decrepit hellhole around, when out of nowhere this guy starts shouting in the sanctimonious tones of an elementary school crossing guard. "No! That behavior is not allowed on Metro transport vehicles! Listen to me; put that down! No! You are not allowed to eat on our trains! You must keep the cars clean!"
While his language, his exact phraseology, could have come straight from the Metro employee handbook, from the "Semi-Confrontational Demagoguery" section, his tone resembled that of HAL in his death throes, an uncertain and plaintive coo which made him somehow endearing even though he was being an asshole. I followed his invective, starting from his quivering self-righteous lips, to the orange bench across the aisle, where a Minority-American duo sat crunching on their snack, oblivious to the cackling mainframe ten feet away.
"I said no! No eating on the Metro; this is how we keep things clean!" He kept repeating this theme, and although he proved quite unable to get the words exactly right during each successive outburst, thus minimizing the effect of his rant, this much was clear: those kids weren't eating those Utz chips today, not on his watch. In traditional teen form, his adversaries invoked the "whatever" retort, which would have disarmed a lesser muckraker, but not our man, who's boiling blood nearly dislodged the yarmulke pinned tenously to his head.
"Oh yeah? Well, I'm gonna take your picture then and... and... and send it to Metro." With that he busted out his fancy pants cell phone cum camera and prepared to snap the perps for posterity. His fiance, withering beside him, shrunk into the deep recesses of her seat, whispering words of encouragement or disbelief, I couldn't tell which.
The camera gambit, while startlingly effective in warding off the Car 4 crumb factory - their half eaten bag of goodies fell to floor, and with it a bottle of juice - it had the unintended consequence of inviting hostile actions from other passengers. Another woman, seated next to the teens, whipped out her own camera phone, pointing it in the man's direction.
"You want to take picture? I take your picture." I seriously wondered what everyone was going to do with all these pictures. One thing was certain - this guy enraged the wrong fucking lady.
"You take my picture? OK, take it!" said the man, pointing his camera phone at the woman. Pretty soon cameras were flashing and everyone was gathering lots of evidence to send to the authorities or, more likely, the oblivion of the trash bin once we reached Metro Center. Finally, the conflict ended when the man's girlfriend, having found a way to get him out of this silliness, made the suspicious claim that no pictures had actually been taken. Then the woman, sensing a possible detente, said the exact same thing.
"I take no pictures." She turned around and said something in Spanish to the chief muncher, and an eerie silence fell over the car. With that, it was all over, and the bottle of cranapple juice, which had dropped to floor moments before, rolled slowly toward the exit doors, underscoring the close of this cross-cultural battle.
I tried to return to the tale of Liberia's rebirth, but, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Utz girl's smiling face undulating with the movement of our car, and I hated her for her guileless cheer. Maybe someday I will see things once again as I did in my age of innocence, but for now, that girl is one commute ruining slut.
No comments:
Post a Comment