So, I’m riding the LIRR sitting next to Chauncey Howell (formerly of WABC news and now on Channel 12, Long Island) when there is a problem with the ticket taker. Some guy is trying to beat the fare. When the ticket taker gets to our seat, Mr. Howell asks what the problem was. The ticket taker tells him how the guy was trying to use an expired monthly pass. Mr. Howell then says:
“Yea, just like the guys how hide in the bathroom. You know why you have this problem? Because this train originates in Brooklyn.”
I say (to the ticket taker): “Because it’s well known that nobody in Manhattan would ever try to beat the fare.”
“No, they don’t!” Mr. Chauncey Howell exclaims. When I pointed out to him that the very train we are riding originated in Manhattan, goes through Queens and never stops anywhere near Brooklyn, he brushes that off by saying all the fare-beaters got on in Jamaica-- changing from Brooklyn.
He goes on to say that he’s “seen the crack houses in Coney Island.” Have you ever been to Alphabet City? I ask. Is there something in the water in Brooklyn that turns people into criminals that is not found in Manhattan?
Mr. Chauncey Howell then goes on this elitist, bigoted rant whose major points were:
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The streets named after his family in Brooklyn are now overrun by “those people”. Van Housen St, Chauncey St and Howell St where were the real New York Families used to live and now look what happened when the old families no longer live there.
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Brooklyn (and The Bronx) is filled with nothing but welfare using, crackhead immigrants.
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Since he is old world money and his suit jacket cost more than my whole wardrobe, it was obvious he knew what he was talking about and I didn’t.
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I was not as open-minded as I said I was because I thought he was an “evil white oppressor”.
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He asked what I did for a living. When I told him I was a claims analyst with a well respected accounting firm, he said that I must have gotten my job through workfare.
Now, how much of that bullshit do you think I could take before I got medieval on his ass? I told him he was nothing but a stereotyping idiot, that the smell of all his old money was rotting his brain and making him more feebleminded than the immigrant, crackhead Brooklynites and that his suit jacket may be worth more than my whole wardrobe, but he was sitting next to me in a pink shirt and shiny-assed pants so it was not money well spent.
The crack about his pink shirt and shiny pants really bothered him. In fact it was after I said this that he claimed he was just trying to piss me off on purpose. “Well, you did a bang-up job, you stereotyping idiot.”
That’s why your shiny panted, pink shirted ass was fired from ABC and now you’re commuting from Glorious Manhattan to Hicksville, you putz. (No, I didn’t tell him that. I don’t think he realized I knew who he was.)