Strangers on a Train

An embarrassing story about a terrible haircut

One of my favorite types of story is “one that happened a long time ago but is still incredibly humiliating” — preferably ones that happen to other people. Here’s one that unfortunately happened to me, personally, that I think about almost once a week and which still makes me want to crawl into a sewer and live there.

I don’t consider myself unfriendly, per se, but long before my brief time as a New Yorker, I adopted the city’s approach to strangers: I’ll gladly help you out if you’re being actively killed, but otherwise, you and I are none of each other’s business.

I’ve always fallen somewhere between “a little shy around new people” and “pants-pissing social anxiety” -- in my younger years, I could fake being “outgoing” if I had roughly a soup pot’s worth of alcohol and some kind of stimulant, but in general, I’m awkward and sweaty with new people and strangers. Because of this, I’ve always enjoyed the solitude that travel and transit afford -- when you are between places you’re supposed to be, you can just take the time to think, and the polite thing to do is keep to yourself. I’m also someone who has always generally enjoyed silence and alone time (which, needless to say, has been rough on me as a parent, but that’s another essay). It’s when you’re expected to be friendly that I get sweaty and ridiculous — I once stopped going to a small mom-and-pop grocery store that was a block from my house and had incredible produce in favor of one that had to be driven to and whose tomatoes tasted like wet feet, because the manager at the “good” place greeted me by name every time I saw him and I couldn’t remember his, and after months, it was too late to ask.

I don’t want to let myself off the hook too much, but moving around a lot and changing schools often as a kid had made me extra wary of people I didn’t know -- I was nearsighted, bad at gym, and had a bone deformity, all things children were famously chill about in the 1990s. If I’d become a misanthrope by nine, I felt it was justified and hard-won.

So, in high school, when my older sister was in a school play and couldn’t drive me home after classes, I immediately took to public transportation, in that riders all pretended mutually that the people inches to the left of us or sometimes partially in our laps do not in fact exist. In Cleveland, we have a kind of B-minus light rail system that runs from downtown to some of the suburbs -- think of a trolley without the looks or personality -- and for a couple of quarters, I could get from high school to my house in about twenty minutes among my fellow sophisticated commuters, sharing a genial silence as North East Ohio flashed brownly by.

Until one day, when a boy about my age boarded. He wasn’t bad looking; in fact, he was one of the first in a specific subsection of people who would be attractive to me until they prove that they are interested and available. He was on the smaller side, in a huge North Face jacket through which a tie peeked out at the collar. There were many seats for him to choose from, but he sat down directly across from me.

Now, I don’t want to be controversial, but I don’t think introversion and extraversion exist as two distinct and exciting personality types so much as “ways every alive person feels at some point.” I understand the contemporary urge to align ourselves with any available subgenres of mental illness as an organizing social principle or thing to put on a couch pillow. But, not liking to be at parties where you don’t know anyone does not make you some sort of rarefied Victorian invalid or emotional protected class. Canceling plans at the last minute because your “social battery” is “drained?” In my day, we called that “being a big fucking flake.” However, in whatever construct-y way pure extraversion is real, this kid was it.

“So where do you go to school?” he asked, as if we’d already been in the middle of talking, leading me to do the classic, Are you talking to me? look around that gives you a brief time to assess whether you’re about to be annoyed or murdered with a shoe.

I told him I went to the public high school in my suburb, in my most inviting-zero-follow-up voice. He nodded, and I figured that would be the end of that, since I certainly wasn’t going to return volley, but as I would soon learn, he was the kind of conversationalist who sees “replying” as wholly optional, if not at cross-purposes with his particular talking style.

“I go to [X],” he said, naming one of the private, all-boys schools nearer to downtown, then he leaned forward. “I heard your school is dangerous.” And he went on to say something about kids having to go through metal detectors, which was a tedious “60 Minutes”-concern of old people at the time, who maybe shouldn’t have spent the entirety of the 1960s emotionally dysregulating our parents if they didn’t want their grandchildren to listen to Ween and carry pocket knives.

“It’s not,” I rolled my eyes, and decided to take out a book, which was absolute amateur hour -- the type of guy who talks to you unbidden on a train LOVES a book, because it gives them a handy topic to bother you about.

“A reader, huh,” he said, then he whispered conspiratorially, “Did you know Shakespeare was gay?”

Boys like this were always trying to convince you of some dusty old piece of historical apocrypha that a “cool” teacher convinced them was true -- like that Pepsi used to be mostly heroin or that the vibrator was invented by doctors to calm down Eleanor Roosevelt. A good 90% of the time, it was just that some historical figure was secretly homosexual. Paul Revere? Gay. Gandhi? Gay. Napoleon? Un gay.

Luckily, this couldn’t go on for much longer, because I was only two or three stops from the school, but before I left, this boy insisted on getting my name and telling me his, which we’ll say was Danny. And from then on, I saw Danny. So much Danny. I don’t know how he managed to be in the same railcar as me, but there indeed he was, every time I got on, ready with zero introduction or lead-in to disgorge an arsenal of unprompted urban myths and vaguely insulting breakdowns of current events, usually about how public schools were essentially depraved urban gulags overstuffed with illiterate teen larcenists.

I heard that in your neighborhood are gangs that drive around with their lights off and if you flash your lights at them, they’ll make you be the leader of the gang, and then you have to be in charge of the gang’s snack every week?

I heard that in public school, if they catch you praying, they make you watch PBS until you don’t believe in god anymore. Speaking of PBS, Jim Henson died of AIDS.

Also, did you know Mother Theresa was gay?

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of Cleveland winters could keep him from his chit chat, like Terry Gross with frosted tips and slightly less self-awareness. It seemed like there was nothing to do about this daily trial. Until, one day, a strange, golden opportunity arose: I got a haircut.

I should specify, this was also a time when I was fully obsessed with the television program “The X-Files,” including writing fan fiction, poring over episode guides, and dissecting each episode on online message boards with other people who had never had sex. If you’re thinking, Hm, sounds like you weren’t really in a position to reject anyone socially, you’re correct. I mention “The X-Files” because I’d been begging my mother to let me transform my shoulder-length, Purina brown hair into coppery, face-framing wisps like actress and harbinger of my nascent bisexual awakening, Gillian Anderson, and my mom had finally agreed, despite the expense and clear cross purposes with my shiny bagel of a face and medicine ball-sized head.

My mother’s colorist at the Cleveland Galleria took one look at my olive Greek complexion and said, “I’m sorry. You’re just not a redhead.” Until then, I was not aware that hairdressers had the right of refusal. But after a little convincing on my part (tears), he agreed to compromise on a light “auburn,” and I left the salon with a trapezoidal newscaster’s bob in the color of purplish brown favored by Batman villains and elderly female shut-ins.

I did not look like Dana Scully. But I did look different. Enough people said something like “Wow, I didn’t even recognize you” (derogatory, as we say now), that the little flame of an idea began to grow inside me, and as soon as the train approached the platform that day, I knew with sickening certainty what I was going to do.

I sat down at the opposite end of the car as Danny, who never met a hint he couldn’t fend violently off. He scooted down until he was next to me, and whistled at my hair.

“Did you do that on purpose?” he asked, with his characteristic pleasantness. I pretended not to hear him. Then, after he repeated my name a few times and waved a hand in my face, I made my move.

“Oh,” I said. “You must have me confused with my twin sister.”

For once, Danny seemed to acknowledge that I’d responded, although he didn’t look like he’d quite ingested it, so of course, I had to double down.

“I am an identical twin,” I said, trying to summon my actual, non-twin sister’s flair for the theater that put me in this wretched situation to begin with. “I can see how you’d be confused, but my name is Erin. My twin, Julieanne, takes this train too, but she has brown hair. I am a wholly different person.”

I don’t know what I was thinking. I am not and was not a good actor. But I was desperate, and the idea that identical teenaged twins might have different haircuts but the same backpack and pair of Chuck Taylors that they’d drawn David Duchovny on seemed like what we in the TV industry call “refrigerator logic.” I couldn’t take another day of being badgered about whether, as a public school kid, I’d decided to pledge the Crips or Bloods yet, or if I knew that Hitler invented R&B. It was utterly unbelievable, except that this was a kid who believed that Mountain Dew made your sperm swim backward, so it was maybe worth a shot.

Regardless, it didn’t work. Danny’s face darkened. Somehow, after everything, I’d never actually just told him I didn’t want to talk. Yet here I was doing it now, in the most cowardly way possible. I could feel that I’d crossed some sort of crucial moral line -- he may have been obnoxious and intrusive, but I was a liar. And in a reversal that defied belief, HE took out something to read (not a book, no -- couldn’t be Danny -- but one of those period-specific magazines dedicated to calling women “hotties” and exalting the flavor of bacon that we used to hilariously believe represented the worst masculinity had on offer).

And with that, he proceeded to ignore me.

I should have felt free, but instead, I felt the full weight of his judgment, and more than that, the true spitefulness of what I’d done. Anybody could tell after looking at Daniel and his Aztec-printed fleece jester hat and male-fupa-enhancing school uniform pants and my burgundy nightmare haircut that we were more alike, socially, than I’d been willing to admit. And, as a person who’d gone through long periods of friendlessness, not counting the fictional FBI agents I spent my weekends with, shouldn’t I have been the first to offer him a bare minimum of civility? How terrible is it really, to talk to another person for a few minutes every day, even if they’re a little bit annoying? Wasn’t it Jimmy Carter, or somebody equally nice and morally superior, who said that the cost of community is inconvenience?

From then on, I felt the black heft of Danny’s coldness every day, until, at last, the school play ended and my older sister could drive me home once more. But every time I saw my old train stop or had trouble sleeping at night, I’d see the look on his apple-cheeked, still-boyish face, when I’d attempted to fool him in the dopiest way possible. Confusion, disgust, and perhaps worst of all, hurt.

Two years later, I went to prom as the date of a boy from another school. It was one of those group hangs where you were only nominally someone’s “date” -- my escort and I weren’t interested in each other romantically. In the intervening time, I’d adjusted to high school life somewhat. I’d also grown enormous breasts, gotten a more flattering haircut, and secured a tentative spot in a large friend group who preferred leaving the house to smoke weed in each other’s garages to ranking members of the writing staff of a spooky primetime soap on the FOX network, so I was now sometimes invited to things like prom.

I saw Danny almost instantly when we walked into the decorated gym. The little trap door keeping my stomach in place gave way. I hadn’t known what grade he was in, but this was a small school -- he had to know my date and our prom group. What would he say to them? Would he expose my essential badness to my new friends? I spent all of the seated dinner with sweat making dark donuts on the corset of my Jessica McClintock princess dress. Then it was time to dance, and I found myself nearly back to back on the floor with Danny.

He looked pretty much the same as he had the last time I’d seen him, except that he was wearing suspenders and a top hat, like Mr. Peanut, and one of those “fun” cummerbunds with a loud pattern of colors and shapes. He didn’t notice me at first, because he was busy doing the “worm,” but I couldn’t stand the tension, and decided I would be the first to say “hi.” So I did. Even if it was too little too late, the least I could do now was to be friendly.

Maybe he’d been drinking that night, or maybe it was the smoke machine and the dimness of the gym, but his face was a complete blank -- there was zero recognition in his eyes, and he just sort of nodded at me before he went back to dancing.

As he pop-locked enthusiastically away with some startled girl — probably regaling her with statistics about how many substitute teachers in the public school system have criminal records — I realized that while my dismissal of him might remain a shameful dark mark in my past, maybe I was the one who hadn’t ultimately registered to him. Maybe he was just the kind of person who talked to everybody, who simply chose goodwill over hostility when given the opportunity, even if the rest of the world didn’t reflect this neighborliness back to him.

I worried that I would always be one of those people who cannot naturally commune with others with pleasure and ease. I would never be the kind who just instinctively waves the other driver across the intersection even when it’s not their turn, who has a smile for every toll booth operator or grocery bag checker and fellow commuter, who makes lasting friendships with their seatmates on airplanes instead of pretending like the people around me are invisible in the name of protecting my own peace.

Or maybe he just genuinely didn’t recognize me — after all, I had just gotten bangs.