TOOLBAG TUESDAY

In the summer of 2004, my twin sister, Joy and I spent the best three months of our lives living in New York. It was so much fun, in fact, that I don’t think I could live there again for fear it won’t be as awesome.

We actually lived in Hoboken, New Jersey (fist pump!!!) but, NO it wasn’t like meathead JERSEY Jersey, it was actually filled with cute, young professionals.
AND it’s closer to downtown Manhattan than Brooklyn, OK??? (Joy and I are Hoboken ambassadors…love it…birthplace of Frank Sinatra and baseball).

Anyway, to get to Hoboken from Manhattan, you have to take the PATH train, which is exactly like a subway only it doesn’t come as regularly.

When we lived there, the PATH train would come every 15 minutes during the day and every half hour after midnight.

The train had a hold on our drinking schedules after midnight, since we had to strategically leave the bar either close to the :15 or the :45 each hour to catch it, because missing the train by a SECOND and having to sit in the hot, smelly station half-drunk for a half-hour isn’t terribly fun.

But, we made the most of it. We played a card game, Phase 10 (buy it), we squealed as we went out of our way to watch big rats running along the tracks.

Joy would also start up conversations with other people bound for Hoboken.

Joy is much more social than I am when it’s really, really late and we're drunk and ready to go home.
I would turn into a brat and slump over and try to sleep on the tiny train seat, while Joy would ask a cute guy his life story and see if he wanted to share a cab with us once we got to Hoboken.

One night as we rumbled from New York to New Jersey, I was trying to doze off, but I was too amazed by the conversation between Joy and a guy on the train, who kept repeating that he was a super successful architect. He was desperately trying to impress her.

“Yea, so I took clients out for dinner, the bill was $800!” he said, loudly. “Here, look at the receipt!”

This guy actually TOOK THE BILL OUT OF HIS POCKET and flashed it at Joy, who looked at it wide-eyed and said, “I can’t even imagine getting a $160 tip off one table!”

“Yea, well, I go to dinner all the time,” he said, his head swelling. “This isn’t even CLOSE to the most expensive dinner I’ve paid for.”

At this point, even though my eyes were closed shut and I wanted to sleep, I had to see what this douchebag looked like.

Slumped over sitting across from them, I opened one eye to look at him but before I could scan up to his face, I saw HIS WEDDING RING.
I laughed aloud.

“Dude, you’re married!!” I said, the first words I had spoken in 20 minutes.

He and Joy were taken aback since I looked half-dead up to that point. Joy looked at his hand, then looked at him and then he looked at me, and got uncomfortable.
(For the record, he was "sort of" cute).

“Um, yea, my wife, she’s an interior designer! She stayed in tonight,” he said, hurriedly.

(No one asked him what his wife does for a living).

“She knows I’m going out tonight!!” he said, responding to another question no one asked.

“Whatever,” I said, and slumped back in the chair.

Joy kept the conversation going for the next few minutes because she's nice, even though I had ruined it — haha — and we shared a cab with another guy when we got to Jersey.

“‘Look at my $800 restaurant bill,’” we both mocked him in the cab, laughing. "Look at my gold shoes!"

“Please!” I said. “Like, you’re gonna drop your panties because he's got 'super important clients'.”

I totally forgot about him until the next week or so. I was coming back from Manhattan by myself and got off the PATH train and waited at the cab stand.

“Wanna split a cab?” a guy asked, and I nodded absentmindedly, making sure that we were going to the same part of the city.

I slid into the backseat and then realized that guy I was sharing the cab with was the super successful architect.

He looked at me.

“Are you the NICE twin or are you the BITCHY twin?” he asked when he recognized me.

“BITCHY TWIN??!” I asked. “I’M a bitch because I called you out for being married?”

“I mean, your sister and I were just talking,” he said.

“Ok.”

“I wish she was in this cab.”

“Ok.”

(Perhaps his wife should have weighed in on who exactly was the bitch in the backseat.)

I made him pay for the whole cab fare. I wonder if he showed off the receipt to anyone.

-Jenny