Last week, I had just stepped out of my office in Manhattan for my lunch break when I heard a guttural groaning close by and to my left.

“NUUUUUUUUUNNNGGGGHH…GAAAAAHHHHH!”

Turning to look, my eyes were scarred, possibly forever, by the sight of a greasy, smelly, dirty and probably insane homeless guy, semi-squatting on the sidewalk next to me. Mr. Stanky had his pants down and was holding the New York Post under his butt like reading the news with his ass was an everyday thing and taking a huge shit. Whatever the guy’s motives (it was the Post…) or mental maladies, rather than stand around and ponder, I quickly put some anti-stank distance between myself and this man in the process of taking a huge dump at one in the afternoon, in front of my office on Park Avenue.

I’ve been living in New York City for five years now and I can unfortunately admit that this moment of fecal fun was not my first experience of being exposed to the bowel movements of the city’s indigent and insane. If you live in here, at some point you’re going to see some skanky homeless person drop one. It’s horrible, especially when you’re about to get food.

You know you’ve reached the pinnacle of stanky homelessness when you cheerily take your pants down on a crowded street and without a second thought, vomit out of your ass. You are a star amongst your peers. You are captain of the fecal cornucopia. No one can touch you, in large part due to the fact that you smell really fucking bad and more then likely do not wash your hands, ever.

I remember walking down twenty-third street, by Madison Square Park one year and finding my way blocked by a toothless and grinning old woman, skirts raised, gushing a geyser of piss onto the sidewalk. I actually made eye-contact by accident. I recall her idiotic glee far too well. It was a happy pee for her, no doubt.

Another time, I was in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, having just entered the Grand Army Plaza subway station, when as I started down the stairs to the platform, I noticed a neatly dressed and elderly black lady with a nice, middle-class, grandmotherly air about her some distance in front of me. Near the bottom of the stairs, she stopped, put down her shopping bags full of groceries, shuffled a bit and squatted. I thought that she was perhaps tired and had sat on the steps to wait for the train as some people do. Nope. Grandma was taking a piss. After leaving a huge puddle, she hoisted her pants and walked on to the end of the platform, toting her purchases.

I can’t pretend to understand the motives of someone willing to violate this extreme social taboo. I guess you could chalk it up to insanity. Perhaps it’s a lack of any environmental sensitivity due in large part by being socially invisible as a homeless person. However, you can argue that it could be intentional by virtue of this same defense. Hey, look at me! I’m taking a shit on your toy poodle! I’m a person! Whatever the reason, be it defendable or not, it’s fucking disturbing.

I was riding the 2/3 train into Manhattan yesterday morning and as I stood there, blasting that German death metal, as I am wont to do in the mornings, I noticed a middle-aged black woman, seated, knitting and bopping along to whatever was playing on her walkman. Her bag on the floor was overflowing with balls of thread and after a second’s scrutiny, I noticed that aside from her boots, the lady’s entire outfit was made of yarn. She wore a knitted hat, skirt, shirt, vest and socks. Lo and behold, I was in the presence of a yarn junkie at the end stage of the disease.

I stood there thinking that she must be crazy or something. She looked clean enough to be a normal person, but then again, plenty of seriously crazy fucks dress better than I do. Case in point, I once watched a genial looking grandmother type, very tidily dressed, walk to the bottom of the steps to the Q train platform, smile, drop trousers and pee on the floor. Another time, on Wall Street, I witnessed a very dapper businessman get into a one-sided screaming match with a magazine rack that culminated in fisticuffs and a copy of GQ having to go to the emergency room. You just never know.

Anyway, as I stood there pondering the sanity of the yarn lady, we came to a stop and two girls got on, carrying coffee cups. Squeezing through the commuting crush, they ended up right in front of this lady, who upon seeing them, raised her needles threateningly and yelled “You motherfucking bitches better have those coffee lids on tight ’cause if you spill one goddamn drop on me, I’ll fuck your ass right up! I ain’t fucking around, you better watch yourself. Nobody spillin’ coffee on me! I’m from Brooklyn, bitch!”

The two girls, visibly taken aback, mumbled affirmatives in regards to the tight seal on their coffee lids and quickly moved farther down the car, taking care to clear this crazy knit-freak’s needle plunging range. The lady yelled after them, “You damn right you’re moving on! Ain’t nobody spillin’ their shit on me! Damn right you gonna get outta my way, motherfucking bitches!” and then went straight back to knitting and bopping along to her tunes.

Unfortunately, I make it a habit to never bring food or drink on the train. I was sorely wishing I had a cup of coffee so I could get the same attention. Oh well, next time.

Lately, as far as I’m concerned, everything’s been all about the mad subway masturbater. A man, dedicated to what I envision as a insane, frantic and unstoppable pud-thwacking frenzy that was caught on a cell phone camera, spanking his monkey like there was no tomorrow. Not a man to be upstaged, nor crossed. It’s all over the news. It’s the topic of conversation. It’s the image that’s burned into the back of my retinas when I awake, sweaty and screaming for mother in the wee hours of dawn.

Few of us, here on this earth can reach such levels of social inappropriateness as a guy who likes whipping his junk out in public. It’s raw, it’s primal, it’s really bizarre. Most of all, after consuming a lot of alcohol, it’s really fucking hilarious to me.

Now I know, this guy is a serious pervert. He’s victimized a lot of people and he’s really bad and should be castrated with extreme dull-bladed prejudice, but fuck, I have brain damage, I come from a broken home and at this current mental state, the whole thing is looking kind of humorous to me.

I mean seriously, a mad, demonic subway masturbater. Just when you think it’s safe to take that 6 train… THWACK, THWAPPA-THWAPPA-THWAPPA-the demon wanker of the underground has struck! You look up from your newspaper to a grinning fiesta of greasy, meat-spanking weirdness and you ask yourself, “Who am I, really?” As a passenger here on Spaceship Earth, do I really know where I’m going in this life?” Some deep moments can be had when facing the leering mask of the Monkey-Spank God.

By whipping his johnson out and painting the ceiling, he has single-handedly (literally) shown the world that as civilized as it may look, underneath the surface, lurking around the corner is a crazy dude that likes beating it in public. You probably work with him and don’t delude yourself by pretending he washes his hands on a regular basis.

There’s something almost primal about a dude who sees something he likes and just starts punching that clown till there’s no tomorrow with total disregard for social norm and restraint. It’s totally fucking caveman and in that sense, is awesome. Unfortunately, there’s victims. But let’s pretend for a minute that there aren’t. Remove the victim and in my mind, the Mad Subway Masturbator is a hero of the times. A man that refuses to bow to society’s rules, who indulges in his animal roots and yanks it left and right, preferrably on public transportation. His rigid, grinning visage of onastic pumping joy serves as a beacon to shock us and remind us that we are human and not that far away from the caveman, whipping one off by the campfire.

If he hadn’t terrorized those girls, I would’ve felt a lot more support for him. I envision him pulling an OJ Simpson, riding the train into the sunset, cops on his tail, whacking that shit till it bleeds because he’s not jerking it for himself, he’s jerking it for the world. He’s whacking it for God, man. I’d be right there on the platform as the train would whip by at breakneck speed, with my cardboard sign that said, “Go Mad Subway Masturbater, Go!”

But reality is something I’m far removed from. This guy’s an asshole. He’s a pervert that needs to be someone’s ass-toy at Riker’s for a few months.

This morning as I was riding the subway to work, I noticed an old man sitting across from me, or rather, I smelled him first and noticed him second. Trying not to be obvious and pretending to be squinting at the map behind him, I checked him out.

He was old, homeless and crazy looking. His clothes were filthy. His pant-legs tattered. He’d kicked off his shoes onto the floor and his feet were so black and swollen, I wondered if he’d actually be able to get them back on. His shirt was unbuttoned, displaying a mass of white chest hair and an impressive slab of gut, hanging out onto his lap. There was a hell of a lot of dandruff of a frightening flake size residing on his shoulders. He was nasty.

I’m not sure where my fascination with the homeless and insane comes from. I think it’s probably a safe bet that it all stems from me being such a neurotic sociophobe. I look at them and search for myself and not suprisingly, I see similarities. Also, it can be entertaining. That may sound cruel, but considering the probable fact that your children will be poking fun at my smelly, homeless ass on the train, thirty years from now, I feel like I have a right to indulge in bum-watching. Some people watch birds, daveb likes the homeless crackheads and schizos. Each to his own, I guess.

As I sat there trying to be inconspicuious while fishing out my cell phone, hoping to take a picture (I collect photos of the homeless), his eyes locked with mine and I got busted. I smiled and nodded at him. “Fuck you…pooper!” came his reply.

A little startled, I replied with a genial, “Good morning, how ya doin’?” and flashed him the million dollar smile grandmothers and shih-tzus the world over fear and whisper about in the dark of night.

“Stick yer finger in ass and tell me how you doin’, cocksucker!” Mister Personality was showing the love. He returned my smile, minus almost all of his teeth. I noticed that was a considerable amount of what was either food or vomit in his beard. Mesmerizing!

“Well, I’m a bit reticent to do that, if only because we’re in public, but honestly, it’s just not my thing, so I gotta say no to that one, but thanks for the suggestion, buddy!”, said I, throwing him a wink.

He squinted at me, his brain, or what was left of it, chewing over my response. Then, with a huff and jerk of his shoulders, he launched into a tirade of “cocksuckers”, “motherfuckers” and “assholes” intersperced with vague, illucid threats off violence muffled into his beard directed seemingly at no one in particular. The fun’s over, I thought to myself and went back to my book.

As the train came to the next stop, the guy stood up or more like fell upright, if that’s possible, looked me in the eye and said, “Well, gotta go. Take care, bud.” and left the car.

It made my morning.

This morning, I had a nasty encounter with one of the countless sketchy, lunatic assholes that float the edges of society here in Manhattan (like yours truly). Every day after leaving the station at Park and 28th, I hit up the nearby Scarfucks for coffee. I hate Scarfucks, but everything else available in the immediate vicinity tastes like colored water so fuck it.

Anyway, as I walked up Park Avenue, pretty much tuned out with German death metal blasting my eardrums, I noticed a scuzzy middle aged guy, dressed sloppily and holding an odd looking camera. He seemed to be taking photos of people walking down the street, without their permission and he was trying to be sneaky about it. Looking at him I figured a couple things were going on. He was either a crazy homeless person with a camera that may or may not have actually had film in it or one of those sleazy scumfucks that use those special lenses that let you take psuedo “X-Ray” photos by filtering the light and causing the resulting photo to look like it’s possibly seeing through clothing in a lame kind of way. There’s sleazebags riding the subway, holding their cameras by the waist, using these filters all the time. In short, I immediately wanted to pummel this guy into a twitching bloody pulp, but this is New York and you never fuck with the crazy people unless there’s no choice. He snapped a couple photos of me, but I kept walking, crossed the street and went inside the Scarfucks. After I had secured some coffee, I stepped outside the building to find the guy right in my face taking photos of me. I made to push the camera away and said something to the effect of “Get that fucking camera out of my face, you fucking asshole.” He stepped back, smiled and I kept walking.

Now, that German death metal I was blasting was about as loud as my mp3 player would allow, but I could clearly hear him bellowing at the top of his lungs, “Go home and fuck your fucking whore, you fucking asshole!!! Fuck you and you fucking blah…blah…blah”. I and everyone else on Park Avenue this morning could hear him screaming all the way to my office which is three blocks away. It was a great way to start the morning. I should have dumped my coffee on him. Then, the over-roasted crap Scarfucks tries to pass off as good coffee would actually have some worth.