the bad train story

This story is about someone getting killed. So consider yourself forewarned...



About a month after I moved to Baltimore I was invited to a Pampered Chef party by one of my work colleagues. I decided to go because I didn't know many people at that time and I was a little bored with spending my whole weekend at the aquarium. Also, I thought, because of the name of the party and the invite description, that I was going to go to this colleague's house and some great chef was going to cook for us. Had I known it was just a get together so someone could try to sell me kitchen stuff that I would never use, this whole bad day never would have happened. Anyway...

The party started at noon. It was an hour drive from my place so around 11 am I walked out in front of my apartment building, a building called the Atrium. I had been parking at a flat lot two blocks down the street. A homeless guy would sleep against the side of my car to keep people from breaking in to it. There is a light rail train that runs in front of the apartment building on Howard Street. The apartment building sits on the corner of Howard Street (where the light rail is) and Lexington. There is (or was, when I lived there) an alley that runs alongside the apartment building that goes to the Lexington Market. The intersection of this alley and Howard Street is a stop for the light rail.

As I walked down Howard to my parking lot, I saw a man on the other side of Howard Street running down the alley towards me. I figured he must be running for the light rail train. For whatever reason I stopped walking and watched him. As he exited the alley, I noticed he wasn't slowing down. Neither was the light rail. The man ran behind the bus stop shelter where people would wait for the light rail, so there was no way the train conductor could have seen him. He continued running on to Howard Street.

At that point the light rail conductor saw the man and tried to brake. At the same time the man tried to turn and run back onto the sidewalk. The train hit him on the back. As the train hit him I think I turned my head because I don't have a visual of the man being hit. The only thing I remember is a sound like a cork coming out of a wine bottle and then something that sounded like gravel being stepped on. I turned back to see what had happened and the man's body was bent over completely backwards. In my memory his legs were pressed up against his back but I'm not sure that's what he really looked like. I looked away from the accident and in the direction of my car because I was trying to get myself to move but I couldn't.

A cop came running up behind me and asked if I had seen the accident. I said yes. He asked if I could tell him what happened. I said no (I filed a police report that evening). There were some women on the other side of the street who had been waiting to cross when the man was hit. They were screaming. I realized that after the popping noise I hadn't heard any other noises until the cop came up and talked to me.

After the cop gave me his card I walked to my car and drove to the party. My hostess was kind of upset with me because I was a half hour late. I told her I had just seen a man get hit by the light rail. Everyone at the party looked at me but didn't respond. Then I asked for a drink. She offered me a coke and I told her I wanted a shot of something.

We ended up going into the kitchen and her husband poured me a shot of Jack. He had just gotten back from Afghanistan. I did three shots with him and didn't feel any change. He started talking about the war. Then my hostess came into the kitchen and asked me to come back to the party. I sat on a sofa with 5 other women while some lady chopped up cheese and cut crust and did whatever other things you are supposed to do when you are cooking. Then she pulled out this apple crumble thing that had been warming in the oven and when I saw it I felt sick and ended up throwing up in their downstairs bathroom. When I came back from puking I noticed no one had eaten the apple crumble thing and they were all putting on their coats to leave.

I ended up buying a pizza stone and a chopper thing because I felt so bad for ruining my hostess' party. I gave the chopper thing to Miss Daisy, who manned the front desk at the hotel, because she used to make me dinner. I put the pizza stone in what I thought was a drawer in my oven with the thought that some day I might make a pizza. Unfortunately the drawer was actually some broiler thing connected to the oven, so every time I turned the oven on to heat something the pizza stone would burn up. When I finally discovered it the day I was packing my kitchen to move it looked like a blackened pancake. It smelled worse. I tossed it and vowed to never buy kitchen stuff again or to attend a kitchen party.