On Becoming Older

Due to unlikely and shameful circumstances over which I will temporarily throw a veil, I found myself on an early-morning LIRR train from the Flatbush Ave. station in Brooklyn to the untamed wilds of central Long Island.

I rode in predictable silence on the sparsely populated 3:00 a.m. to Jamaica Center, where I was to connect to a Ronkonkoma-bound train coming from Penn Station in Manhattan. But when we pulled in to Jamaica, who should I find awaiting my train but hundreds - HUNDREDS - of drunken teenagers.

My first thought was, "what the fuck?" My next thought was, "is this a threat to my safety?," which it wasn't (cops by the door, many kids already passed out, my generally inconspicuous appearance, etc.) Then I settled in to my seat and got down to the serious and inevitable business of passing judgement on others.

Here were the facts I had to work with: this was the last train from Manhattan to Long Island for a few hours before or after. It was the night before Thanksgiving, which, in America, is traditionally when we as a people go home to our families, become desperate for a way to avoid them, and go out to get drunk with all our other friends who also live out of town and are also desperate for a way to avoid their families.

Between these two bits of information, I could conclude these were Long Island kids out for the night, inexplicably travelling together 600 at a time. Harmless fun, right?

Thing is, these 1) kids seemed too young for college, 2) they had that sort of over-privileged, white-bred look, clothes and nature that bugged me (example: the one Latino kid seemed to know everybody, which I'm guessing was at least partly because he was the only Latino in the school.) and 3), and this is the part that really bothered me, the couple across the aisle from me each did a bump of coke about half an hour outside of Jamaica.

Now I'll talk later about why, but my initial reaction was that this just made me furious. Then I went through a bunch of possible courses of action (take their photo and post it here? Tell the cops? Confiscate it?) before settling on my standard New Yorker response of sitting quietly and not saying anything.

Then I went through a run of second-guessing - would they really do that with the cops three rows away? Could this just be some sort of nose-administered decongestant? Could I really dissaprove this strongly of a little coke and give the obviously stoned kids that filled up maybe every third seat on the rest of the train?

Finally I let myself accept the fact that I had definitely seen these kids doing some coke, I certainly disapproved of it, and I absolutely felt that I was within my rights to do so.

Here's my problem with coke versus, say, pot: it's dangerously addictive. Here's my problem with these kids: they were way too young to be fucking with this shit. What's more, this was clearly not a one-time thing for them. You don't casually do a bump on a train in more or less the middle of a nap with cops five feet away unless snorting coke has become ritualized and routine.

But we're not here to talk about over-privileged kids from Long Island. We're here to talk about me. And my thing is, there was a time - indeed, a time in recent memory, when I would have seen these kids - or maybe the non-coke-sniffing versions of these kids - as peers.

Well, almost as peers - not enough to expect casual drug use, but enough that I could see them as distant, Yankee version of my own friends.

Instead I was looking at this half-dressed high school senior and future frat boy and just trying to figure out how I could keep my future kids from ending up like that.