Dan's Journal Entry

The Cable Car Boogie

This morning I decided to take the cable car to work rather than the bus because I didn’t feel like sitting next to some one cutting their toenails.

The cable car cost three dollars more, but some days it’s just worth it. It’s packed with young attractive business people who look like they get their hair cut fresh every morning, standing and sitting quietly listening to ipods and reading graphs and charts that look like homework and make me happy I don’t have a real job. The cable car operators make inside jokes with the regulars and boost up children to ring the bell, and the tourist, in their summer shorts and flip flops, though it’s 55 degrees in San Francisco, sit smiling quietly studying the people and buildings around them; all very polite, very well mannered.

So I found myself standing up a little straighter, making extra room for ladies, and when I felt the need to clear my throat I didn’t just make the usual hacking sound that only me and old ladies in Chinatown make, which sounds like Chewbacca vomiting. I covered it up a bit; by turning my head and raising my hand to my mouth and disguising my horrible choking sound with a gentle sophisticated cough, and in doing this a quarter sized gob of phlegm shot out of my mouth, passed my hand, passed the guy behind me, and stuck to the door frame. I casually turned back around and looked out the window, pretending like nothing had happened.

As I stared out the window seemingly admiring the beauty of Grace Cathedral I shouted in my head, “Holy Shit! Did I just spit on the wall in front of all these people and then ignore it?” But what was I suppose to do, announce politely to the crowd, “Oh, how embarrassing, I’ve hauked a loogie on the wall. Anyone have a tissue or a kerchief?” Wouldn’t that have been worse for everyone?

But as the drop of phlegm slowly sagged longer and longer with time, I felt more and more shame. The cable car is nice, and now I’d spat on it. If everyone that spit on the cable car were too embarrassed to clean it up, then in time it would just be the bus. So, I waited for the next bump to jostle the car and pretended to get my balance by grabbing the door frame with my sleeve and slowly, very slowly wiped it down the edge of the door.

It’s gross, but better I be covered in my own mucus than the beautiful historic cable car. It’s important to keep some things respectable, so that there is still a nicer version of something to treat oneself to. I waited awhile longer, and eventually, when no one was looking, I glanced back to see phlegm smeared all the way down the door frame and now onto the window.