Cracking A Smile.

Last night, I was on the metro headed home when I witnessed what I would like to call the evolution of a drunken man.

I entered the metro car and pretty quickly noticed a man kind of slouching in the seat with his face awkwardly pressed against the hand hold. His body position looked extremely uncomfortable, but he was passed out and oblivious to the world. After a few stops the people who were sitting directly next to him stood up to get off. As they exited the metro it became obvious that they had been acting as a prop for him … because he began to slide further and further out of the seat. I pointed him out to my friend J, and we (along with the rest of the people sitting in his direct vicinity) waited and watched to see if he actually fell off the bench. He tried to adjust himself on the bench so as not to fall off. Finally after a few flailing movements with his arms and legs he got himself upright in the seat. But then, as happens regularly with the motion of the metro, he started the lean. The lean is when a person who is drunk cannot sit upright because of the constant moving of the metro car. He leaned to the left and once he got his upper body past that middle point it was not so much of a lean as it was a slow motion fall over. He simply slid down into a prone position on the bench. He kicked his feet up on the bench and comfortably laid his head in the lap of the guy sitting there.

It was at this point I laughed and told J, “I should take a picture.” As I was contemplating how much trouble I might get in for taking a picture on the metro (in theory it is illegal); the poor guy with a drunk man laying in his lap kept shaking him trying to get him to wake up and get out of his lap! There was never any response from the drunk man.

The crowning point of the whole scene came when the man who had the unfortunate luck of having some random guy lay his head in his lap handed his bag to his lady friend, whipped out his mobile phone and took a picture of the guy passed out in his lap. His lady friend was laughing out loud, he was laughing so hard he could hardly stand up to take another picture and I pulled out my camera to get a few pictures myself (though it is as hard to hold a camera still on a moving metro as it is to sit upright on the metro while drunk).

As all this was going on, several others in the area were laughing or at least smiling at the scene. Then the more conscious drunk guys standing on the other side of me pulled out their mobile phones for pictures too! Except they did not stop with just taking the guys picture and laughing … no, they were laughing hysterically as they posed with the passed out guy. They took several turns of getting everyone’s picture.

The initial commotion eventually died down, but there was still a lot of head shaking, chuckling and quite smiling going on around the drunk man sleeping on the bench. As we exited the metro car, J and I could not help but chuckle again. Until that moment, I had never seen a stranger here laugh out loud in public – it is nice to know that they do.