Bizarre CTA Experience: This morning I stepped onto the platform at Chicago red line stop, and began reading Nabokov's Blues, a book about the writer and Lepidopterist (butterfly scholar/ collector) Vladimir Nabokov. I was on page three of a book I received this morning, when I guess my peripheral vision mapped an old man approach from my left side. Many travelers pass you by, and you barely pay attention. I was really enjoying my reading material, and before I sensed how close he was, he knocked the book out of my hands. The book, with two blue butterflies on its cover, fell onto the steel-gray tracks. With the book gone, my hands still raised up as if in prayer, I saw before me an old, haggard, African-American man. He had a cigarette butt in his lips, and a very angry expression on a wrinkled, dissipated face, eyes bulging out of sockets as if if with intense hatred. I stepped away from him, as did others around us. Then the man went on to partially drop his pants, expose his posterior, while a hand got busy for few seconds in his pants in the front. A minute or so later, with posterior still exposed, he walked past me, and approached an African-American woman who was sitting on a bench. He picked a tissue paper and a fork lying next to her, and angrily threw it at the tracks. A person next to me kept saying: is there an emergency button around here? Quite soon, but not soon enough, the train arrived. I boarded the train, later called and talked to a CTA representative reporting the incident to make sure the troubled man, the troublemaker was removed from the train station. Also I expressed interest in getting my book back. The man appeared quite disturbed and unstable, and clearly needs some form of care and cure. I wish I knew how to help him, and though I was appalled by the whole thing as it unfolded, I am still wondering why did he do what he did? #CTA #Chicago
