This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter

This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter
By Anthony Buccino

If you ever commuted to work, you'll enjoy your ride reading Anthony Buccino's latest collection "This Seat Taken? Notes of a HaplessCommuter" about the joys and follies of getting to and from work in the city using public transit.

Buccino's bus and rail commuting tales and observations are collected in this new 224-page book which is available in print, on Amazon and Nook.

Buccino spent 12 years editing business news copy at Dow Jones & Co. for the Ticker, NewsPlus and The Wall Street Journal professional web pages in Jersey City and later at the NewsCorp building in the Times Square district of mid-town Manhattan.

For his first year working in Jersey City, Buccino actually drove the 12 miles each way to work and home. An average commute would take 20 minutes to reach the city and at least another 20 minutes to cross the city to his parking lot near the Hudson River. It wasn't long before the crosstown traffic and the monthly parking fee, nearly enough for a car payment, persuaded the author to use mass transportation to get to work for the first time ever.

For 11 of those dozen years, he rode public transportation including NJ Transit buses, Newark City Subway, Port Authority Trans Hudson's PATH trains, the occasional NYC subway and DeCamp buses.

For five years, Buccino wrote about commuting and transit in metro New York-New Jersey for NJ.com. His transit blog on NJ.com earned the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism award. Many of those blurbs are gathered in this collection.

PATH Car Away From Ninevah I

With special dispensation in my pocket, I found myself on the PATH car heading from Exchange Place to Newark, full of people, okay, crowded, but moving along. It's only a 15-minute ride, so we'll play Charlie the Tuna for a few minutes.

How bad could it be?

At Journal Square we picked up more people than we dropped off and the place was so crowded we bled inside each other's wounds, so to speak.

That's when I noticed the youngish blond haired guy reading the newspaper. He was sitting in the last seat of the row near the door.

Next to him, standing like two deer in the headlights were two old people. They had to be in their 70s, or older.

The young guy read his paper. Then finished it and tucked it under his leg on the seat. He dug deep into his parachute pockets and began fiddling with ear phones and an electronic device the size of a cigarette lighter.

He seemed oblivious to the old people clinging to the safety bars at his right. He didn't see the wrinkled elbows just inches from his nose.

I've always felt that you are where you are because, because that's where you're supposed to be.

Somewhere past the place where the overseas containers are loaded on the rail frames and our next stop in Harrison, the train stopped.

I wondered should I ask the guy to let the old folks sit? Or should I mind my own business.

Perhaps I could ask to borrow his paper, and if it was in English, then ask him to help me read the sign he was sitting against... WON'T YOU PLEASE GIVE THIS SEAT TO THE ELDERLY OR DISABLED

The rules of the road seem to ignore what your mother might have told you about being a good boy.

Here, if you don't see someone in need, they don't exist.

It wouldn't surprise me if the blond guy drives his car the same way.

After we stood there a few minutes, stopped in the prairie, waiting without a word from the famous PATH speaker system, I realized this was all my fault.

We were stuck here in the middle of nowhere, and going nowhere fast all because of me. I was heading away from Ninevah, I was like Jonah trying to ignore my duty. Soon they'd cast lots and I'd be groveling in the gravel.

Without anybody saying anything, to me or to the blonde guy, I knew we'd be sitting here in the nether land until I dug into my pack, pulled out a pen and paper and told you what I see from where I stand.

Granny's elbow nearly took his eye out. But the blond guy sitting in the last row, he never noticed.

What would you do? You're on a crowded PATH car and it's stopped for no reason in the middle of nowhere. You don't know whether you'll be here another minute, five minutes, ten minutes, or over night?

Out the window we could see the billboard advertising a TV show: Criminal Minds.

Maybe we should wait until Granny passes out on the floor. Then we could step over her on our way out.

Would you get invovled?

Would you ignore it?

I looked at the blond guy's shirt and tried to read his company logo. Maybe it said D Drive?

Here in car 121 near the end of the PATH train we couldn't hear the conductor or read the script on the blond guy's shirt.

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Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

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PATH Car Away From Ninevah II

Staring real hard at the embroidery on the shirt of the blond guy sitting in the end seat of the crowded PATH car stopped in the middle of the meadowlands for no apparent reason, it seemed to read C Drive Technologies. We Make It Happen and on the sleeve it read HP Internet Stew, or something.

It was 625 and we had been on this car about a half hour. We were stopped about 10 minutes or so, so far. And we weren't moving.

Looking out the window, it didn't look like we were going anywhere. We had about a half dozen tracks on each side of the rails where we waited. It would take TV's McGyver to get us out of this one.

Gram has golf clubs embroidered on her horizontally striped blouse. The three and five clubs have numbers on them. Pop has flowers on his shirt like he was from Florida or Hawaii Five-Oh.

They both wore K-Mart blue jeans. And when they spoke to each other it was with a Southern accent.

Gram looked like Central Casting sent down an actress to play a sweet grandma who would treat the kids to milk and fresh baked cookies. Even though she looked like she was tiring, her old blue eyes sparkled as she stood next to Pop.

Pop leaned against the advertisement between the last seat and the door. He held onto the rail and Gram. With a rugged tan and his yellow-grey hair slicked back, he looked like Nick Nolte at 80.

The rail cars lurched forward like a hiccup on New Year's Day.

We strained to hear anything from the conductor a dozen cars away and then the car stopped again.

HARRISON

The train moved and we soon saw the Harrison Station on the wrong side from usual. We were on the outbound track heading in. The blond guy unfurled his body from his nap and clambered out the door.

We parted a path like the Red Sea and Gram and Pop sat. They breathed a sigh.

So did some of the folks around me.

We disembarked onto Platform C instead of Platform H as usual. No one knew where the stairs were and we followed the leader like the dazed lost sheep that we were.

People are not like homing pigeons. You put them in some place strange, change their routine and they get messed up, lost.

They follow the unofficial leader of the flock who may know the way to the ground or the main concourse lobby.

You end up, then, following the crowd and breaking off when your turn comes along just like a homer with a strange flock on race day - each bird in the flock on his own way home.

No thanks to the PATH folks we figured our way down and out from high Platform C.

Aha! I saw the bookstore and realized this was not too far from the subway stairs and another leg home.

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Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission. Updated May 2008

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Platform H (Wednesday PM Commute I )

Going home I got the CD player to work. Sort of. It only played one song over & over. And only in one ear. If I tilted my head like I was thinking real hard, I could hear El Paso in stereo.

But El Paso was like the flashback music cue …
In 1961 I was the fastest gun in Belleville, N.J.
It ain't boasting if it's true.

Back in the day who would have challenged me and my two six guns?

My cousins Tommy & Bobby next door? They wore six guns over their PJs!

My cousin Billy Boy, that fan of Yancy Derringer? Not a chance. (I thought he lived near Montana in Rutana States and went to Styretowne to shop, but that's a local joke.)

I could act out the entire El Paso song by Marty Robbins. We got the 45 at Prosperi's Market on Bloomfield Avenue in Newark. It had that famous picture of Marty in mid-draw.

The famous Robbins

I’d start out as a hardened cowboy sitting there as “Felina would whirl.”

Then I’d be the angry cowboy who shot the “dashing and daring” young cowboy to prove my feelings for the “Mexican maiden.”

Then I’d hop on the arm of a big fat armchair and gallop off “to the badlands of New Mexico.”

But I’d be weak, like the cowboy in the song, pining away for Rosa’s cantina and Felina. I’d ride hard back to “the hill overlooking El Paso.”

I’d whup that chair to a froth, the hooves to the quick and head for Felina until I was surprised by “five mounted cowboys” and then “a dozen or more.”

I made a lot of noise firing my six-guns over the back of the couch into the big mirror at the men keeping me from Felina.

Some times I was reloading when I felt that “deep burning pain in my side.” I clutched myself and tried to stay on the arm of the armchair.

I could feel myself getting weaker, like all the TV cowboys did.

A wince and I struggled against the bullet “deep in my chest.”

Off the davenport now, the room getting dark, my pistols out of reach, “from out of nowhere Felina has found me…”

Then, that mushy part, “One little kiss, then Felina, good-bye.”

And with that I slumped back spread eagle on the rug, in front of our Motorola TV. Some times I was half-slumped in the toy box.

The song played over and over. In one ear mostly.

The blond and her mother, or maybe a best-friend, stood in front of me. The blond would have won ‘best looking on the crowded PATH car’ if there were a contest.

Her dirty-blond hair straight as an arrow & held in place by a wispy strand. Not a hair was out of place. She looked like she could have been a cheerleader not too long ago.

And when she carelessly ran her fingers through her hair it seemed like a Clairol commercial with Farah Fawcett or one of Charlie’s other angels.

Her pink top was as lightly colored as her rich deep ruby lips were dark. Her bling-bling and baubles were in all the right places, as far as I could see.

If she saw me writing she acted coy. If she saw how I wrote this she tried to act like she didn’t care.

I clung to the upright post and scribbled this, of course, in the hope I’d be able to read it later.

If the blond even looked at me, I probably looked like a drunk man scribbling nasty things to his ex-wife.

There, in the distance, the lights of Bears stadium and good old Platform H.

For me, anyway, H is halfway home "for one little kiss ..."

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission. Updated May 2008

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Ballads & Trail Songs

Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs

Twin-Music Lyrics - El Paso

Bob Dylan - Desire

Romance In Durango

Walkman