Monday, July 7, 2014

N Train Performance

Well, that was impressive on the N train...  Going over the Manhattan Bridge a young teenage boy got on and loudly announced, "It's Showtime!" and "Last show of the day!" before turning on his boom box to some obnoxious music.

No, he wasn't that good, just clumsily repeating a few moves over and over, dancing and whirling his hat from his knee to his head, head to his toes, under his knee, and an occasional twirl around some of the bars in the train...  I've seen much better performers...

What was impressive is after he finished, he sat down on the bench, not far from where I was standing (I always stand on the train going home, so I don't sleep (yeah, sometimes I do, I doze and my knees buckle and I catch myself halfway down...), otherwise I risk missing my stop, and I'll get even less sleep at night), took the batteries out of his boom box, slid it under his seat, got out his headphones...

And then started counting his cash...

It was a lot of cash.  Several hundred dollars.  Mostly it was $1 bills, but no shortage of $5 bills scattered in there.  He'd reach into his backpack with his right hand, pull out a handful, straighten them out with the ones already in his left hand.  Over and over.  By the end he had a gigantic stack of bills in his left hand that he couldn't actually fold over lengthwise.  Then he curled it into a large, very wide cylinder and wrapped a band around it and stuck it back in his bag.

And the kid wasn't even that good, and the trains weren't even that busy...

Of course, I don't know how much of that he gets to keep, or if he has to pass on a chunk of it to someone else.  When he started his routine, dancing from one end of the car to the other, he stopped and fist-bumped a scruffy looking guy standing at one end, who didn't seem surprised, and in mid-town left his standing spot to sit on the bench one seat away from the kid.  That might well have been his supervisor or someone...

...Hmmm...  Maybe it's time I practice, make some extra cash while I'm already commuting and on the weekends...  :)