SUBWAY FASHION SHOW 8-7-04
Ink, had finished his first year at Colorado State in Boulder and ad about a month to kill between the end of his classes and the time he would start his year of schooling in the UK so he decided to take a trip back to his roots. AKA New Jersey.
He invited me to fly out to Boulder to help him load up his car and road trip it back to the East Coast.
It would have made for some great stories, but I had too much on my plate and couldn't go.
Big Anthony took the flight and hung out in Boulder for about a week before him, Ink and Ink's friend Math took the long drive back. (the whole journey was chronicled in Ink's Update-which I hope one day will be turned into a blog,because his writingis hysterical).
Well, when Ink called me wanting to know if there were any parties going on in the city on the Saturday night they returned, after having not seen him in half a year, even though I was cranking on deadlines and had a wedding scheduled for noon on Sunday.
I heard about a subway party/ fashion show going down on Saturday Night, and told them that this would be a possibility.
I made a deal with them. I would go out with them and take tem to this party, so long as they could get me home by 3 am, so I could get a little sleep, pack a suit and drive way the hell out into long island for my buddy Vern's wedding.
They assured me that this woudn't be a problem.
Ink picked me up and we drove over to Anthony's dad's resturant where we had dinner. Ink, Ant,Math and myself were shooting the shit for a while and realized that we were going to be late. The bitch about this being that with a subway party, the train doesn't wait for you. You either catch the party, or you don't. There is no "fashionablyly late" at a subway party.
Ink isn't that fast a driver, and Ant is a fucken speed demon, and he has one of those, what the hell are they called? Remember those commercials where the baby said "What the?" Yeah, one of those, or something that looks like it, I have no concept of cars. All I know is that it is fast, and that it's stick. (A plot point that will become critical later in the story).
We got the the city in no time flat. The bitch was parking. We needed to find a parking spot and get to one of the scheduled subway stops by the times listed on our instructions.
We first tried the 42nd street stop but quickly nixed that idea when we realized that there would be no way we could park and make the train in time.
So we shot down to 33rd street. There we dumped the car in one of those underground pay parking places and started runing for the subway. We had literally about three minutes to sprint to the subway stop.
This was cutting it very close, especially considerng Anthony probably hadn't run this far in 10 years.
We made it on to the train by the skin of our teeth. And when I say it ws close, we had to actually throw our bodies in the doors to keep them from closing so Ant and Math could make it down the stairs in time.
But we were in the right place. It was the party train alright. There was music and it was jam packed.
People were standing on all the seats, passing arnd joints and smiling big part train grins.
The train was draped with streamers and peole were passing out flyers and shit.
Compaired to how party trains should be, this was crap. No booze, no candy, the music was coming out of the smallest "my first Sony" style boombox ever.
We decided not to take it to the end and bailed out of the party on 7th ave in Park Slope Brooklyn.
Ink had told his friend Brian (who went to school with him in Colorado and was visiting his family in NY) . When we hopped out, so did Brian. We stood there confused for a few seconds trying to contomplate our next move.
The transition from being in the middle of a subway party, to stepping out onto an emptyplatform is like eing in the middle of a rave, and taking a step and somehow teleporting into an empty warehouse.
We walked up the stairs and boarded a train Manhattan bound.
Just another day in the life of an Art Juggernaut.
-Cojo