Occasionally I catch a train from Newtown to work. Newtown’s a happy, ragtag jumble of uni students, goths, ferals, women who rediscover or redefine their sexuality on a biweekly basis and can’t help but monotonously explain this in great detail to everyone near them, Lifestyle Channel obsessives and homos. It’s one of the few inner suburbs of Sydney which happily thrives without major fast food chains invading the area – Oporto aside, of course, because that’s like crack rocks in chicken form. Regrettably, a Gloria Jeans Coffee outlet is present with – surprisingly – no attempt to localise their offerings. They’d make a freaking fortune in Newtown by specialising in coffee from ethnic countries on the brink of complete social implosion due to coffee bean slavery. Even McDonalds quivers behind a mere McCafe-only outlet.
As a general rule, any suburb such as this results in fantastically dodgy pubs. What with the Cooper’s Arms offering a weekly $1 schooner happy hour, you’ll play witness to the true scum of Newtown rising up from the underground, reinstituting the six o’clock swill with a manic energy which is entirely at contrast to the amount of debilitating drugs they’ve already smoked all day.
On $1 happy hour days, I’ll encounter truly dodgy fucks at Newtown train station without fail. Hiccuping, fresh from their vacuum-style ingestion of commercial quantities of beer in record time, the crazies truly come out to play.
My issue is that there’s also quite a few school kids catching the train at the same time. Having experienced Newtown over a long period of time, I can see that most of the kids know who to avoid, but I witnessed one particularly disturbing scene a few weeks ago.
I boarded the bottom level of the train carriage (in case you’re a complete mongoloid, the bottom level is always to be ridden on Sydney’s double-decker trains: you can easily spy on the scrota bulges of dudes standing near the doors, without being noticed at all). The only other passengers were an athletic looking guy in a business suit, and three giggly girls around age 14.
Then, one of Newtown’s finest bounded into the carriage, and the girls screamed and giggled – it seemed this fellow had been hassling them at the train station, and they thought they’d shaken him off. This guy was very tall, decked out in a cowboy hat and leather trenchcoat, and had elected to speak in a pirate accent. The beer evaporating out of his pores almost had me drunk by proxy. He was a bit of a grub, appeared slightly off-kilter, and definitely had played host to a few too many schooners that afternoon.
He sat down opposite the girls, who weren’t quite sure how to react. “Arrr, ladies,” he roared at them. “Ye are all so pretty.”
I glanced at Business Suit, unsure where this was headed. He didn’t seem particularly interested. The girls were trying to laugh off his attentions, but I sensed some growing discomfort.
He continued displaying his affections to them, remaining fairly innocent, but still somewhat creepy. Amongst many attempts to gain their interest, he continually claimed that he was Johnny Depp’s godfather, and wouldn’t they like to fuck Johnny Depp? And didn’t they think that he looked just like Johnny Depp?
Thankfully, he struck a misguided strike when he took an unexpected change of subject, and began ranting into the girl’s faces about how fucked up society is, and our obsession with celebrity. Sarcastically, he began asking them if they wanted to be famous when they grew up – if they wanted to be Madonna. Now, to this fellow, Madonna is likely still sporting conical breasts and is firmly unaware that she’s morphed into a haggard old mum. The girls burst out with genuine laughter at him, which only angered him even more.
He began spitting at the girls that they all wanted to have perfect bodies, perfect faces, perfect arses, perfect tits, and they all looked so sweet and innocent already, and didn’t they want to fuck him?
This was when I began wondering if I should do something – ask him to stay away from the girls. By this stage, Business Suit piped up and asked the guy where he was getting off. He remained elusive and continued to gibber and yell random pirate phrases interspersed with Johnny Depp facts – by the time we pulled up to Central, Business Suit and I ensured he left the train.
The girls turned to us and thanked us – they were quite shaken, but they’d done a good job of telling him to piss off, and I told them so.
As we continued to chat on the way to Town Hall station, it emerged that Business Suit actually worked with people who have intellectual disabilities for a living. He’d been observing the guy and he definitely wasn’t disabled, which made everything slightly creepier – he was trying to actually make a move. (And was pissed, obviously).
The girls thanked us, and Business Suit told the girls not to worry – if something like that happens, and there’s other people in the carriage, they’ll stand up for you if something goes wrong. Curious, the girls turned to him as they were leaving the carriage, and asked what he would have done.
“Oh,” he replied. “Well, I travel with a knife strapped to my leg most of the time, so I would have just stabbed him,” he laughed. The schoolgirls giggled. I giggled like a schoolgirl.
“No,” he continued. “Really. I would have stabbed him with a knife,” he repeated, a little more insistently, rolling up his trouser leg revealing an enormous bladed weapon.
I’m not sure who the crazier of the two on the train was, but… that’s Newtown station for you.