Getting Spit on By a Crazy Man
The time a homeless man spat on my head
One day a crazy homeless man spat on my head. It was a Saturday before Christmas after I had just moved to New York and some of my school friends wanted to go see the tree at the Rockefeller Center (which was big mistake, let me tell you). I stepped off the subway and almost immediately started pushing my way through a sea of humans. Manhattan is always crowded, but this was something I had never seen before on normal city streets. It thought I was going to be trampled like a Walmart shopper on Black Friday, and I wasn't even close enough to see the tree yet. I miraculously spotted my friends in the crowd and we all agreed that we should leave immediately and go to a bar.
After escaping the crowd and walking several blocks away from the Rockefeller Center we were finally able to move freely again. We reached a corner as the walk signal disappeared, so we stopped and continued chatting while waiting for the light to change. That's when I heard a noise like a rush of air behind me, and felt a wet mist hit the back of my head.
I turned around to see a snarling, very crazy-looking man inches from my face. We stared at each other for a second. Confused, I turned and looked at my friends, who had all stopped talking and were staring with their mouths hanging open. I turned back to the man, trying to understand what had happened.
"You stand behind me again and I'll fucking kill you!" he yelled.
"What the fuck?" was all I was able to utter in response. Suddenly I realized what had happened.
Apparently I had been standing behind this man (he had also been standing behind me, but I decided not to point this out to him), and he didn't like that so he spat at me like a frightened alpaca. However, this is where his similarities to alpacas ended.
For example, alpacas primarily eat grass, while this gentleman looked like he subsisted on a strict diet of drugs and 99 cent pizza.
But more notably, alpacas lack top teeth, while this man had a (mostly) full set of top and bottom teeth. I know this because he growled at me, revealing the most horrific teeth I've seen since the opening scene of Shrek. I looked at his brown, decaying teeth and thought of his saliva on the back of my head. "What the fuck?!" I repeated louder.
Suddenly the light changed and we all just started walking, partly because we didn't know what else to do. The man and I walked awkwardly next to each other across the street without exchanging any more words, as if nothing had happened. Apparently he hadn’t thought much about what he would do after spitting on the back of my head. My friends silently followed us, also unsure of what to do, and so we all marched quietly across the street. We reached the other side and turned right while the man turned left, parting ways with us forever.
When we reached the bar I went straight to the bathroom, rinsed my head off in the sink, then joined my friends again as if nothing had happened. "Are you sure you're okay?" one of them asked, then added, “you handled that well.” I wasn't sure how else one could have handled it.
I would have punched him, claims every single person who has heard this story. But for some reason I wasn’t in the mood to exchange any more close contact and bodily fluids with this man.
I felt as though I should have been more traumatized, but I felt fine. After all, being spit on wasn't as terrible as trying to see the tree at the Rockefeller Center. To this day I have never seen the tree at the Rockefeller Center, but whenever I hear about it I think of toxic saliva on the back of my head.