I was on the N train Saturday minding my own business by staring at an ad when I got an eyeful of a red laser pointer (having grown up with a impish younger brother and several cats, I am familiar with the feeling). I turned and saw a chubby teenage boy, perhaps 19-year-old, sitting with the laser at the end of the car. He looked away from me and tried to cover the laser with his hand before slipping it into his pocket. Ha!
Before I could figure out some sort of retort or invoke the Patriot Act ^[1] on the jerk, the train pulled into the 5th Avenue stop, and Tron Boy lumbered off, no doubt towards Central Park to taunt squirrels, small dogs and (hopefully) a nice, burly young man with severe anger-management issues who wouldn’t think twice about grabbing a laser and shoving it horizontally up an idiot’s deserving ass.
After the creeped-out-ness subsided (seriously, it is really freaky having some total stranger randomly shine a laser in your eyes), I got really, really angry. For one thing, I take the health of my eyeballs very seriously, since I only have two of them and am too lazy to learn Braille at this point. The whole incident made me feel almost as violated as I do when I get pervy remarks thrown at me. In fact, this was worse in a way, because it crossed my physical boundaries. It doesn’t even matter if Tronny did it by “accident.” He was fucking around with a laser on a subway train filled with passengers, which makes him totally culpable.
It also made me wonder – is this some sort of trend in stupid subway harrassment, or did I just get lucky? And what would other people do if this happened to them? Would you yell at the twit? Flip him/her/it off? Look away silently and pray that the laser pointer isn’t attached to a rifle? Or take our your very own laser and play Star Wars across the length of the car until someone’s eyeballs went up in burst of smoke?