My cousin and the iron maiden

Last night I went out for dinner and drinks with my younger cousin "J". She has two sisters as well, and it seems that all three of them have grown up while I wasn't looking, and turned into real people. So, since J is now going to graduate school in the city, we decided to hang out for a night of drinks and dinner. We met at Heartland Brewery in Union Square and had a couple of pints of their micro brews. We both agreed that their light beer, "Indian River Light" was the tastiest light beer either of us had ever had. It felt really good to be together, and our conversation was interesting and fun, even if I did feel like I talked too much. After 3 pints and a bit of a buzz we moved next door to Republic for dumplings and noodles, and more beer and cocktails, of course. Towards the end of the meal, my roommate texts me and tells me to meet him at Hooter's on 56th St. This made no sense to me, as I know he hates those kind of places, but apparently he had been dragged out by a young straight-boy college friend with whom he has a crush on...so you know how that goes.

J and I leave the restaurant and we both head uptown to Hooters. As we go underground, we have to go through a "high exit turnstile" in order to get into the subway (see picture above). As it encases your entire body, it is also known as an Iron Maiden. So I swipe my Metrocard, and enter, with my cousin right behind me. But when she swipes, before she actually enters into the contraption, she takes her left hand and unwittingly rotates the turnstile so that she has a bit more room to squeeze into the iron maiden, but in doing so, rotates her paid entrance away and looses her "swipe." It's an amateur mistake and New Yorkers see this happen about once a day. Because she had an unlimited Metrocard, she would either have to wait 19 minutes until her card allowed her another swipe, or she would need to buy another cash Metrocard, which is what she finally did. She then swipes the new cash Metrocard and I see her hand moving to do the exact same mistake of rotating the turnstile before she is actually in it! From the other side of the cage, I stop her before she does it but then she swipes again without actually entering, and the machine tells her that the card is not valid. I try to tell her to just go through, because she already swiped it once and has yet to use that valid swipe. She is still stuck on the fact that it is telling her it's not valid so she goes to another turnstile with the (now already used card) and of course it won't allow her entrance, and some stranger enters the first turnstile, thus invalidating her valid entrance!

Meanwhile I am looking around the inside of the station to see if I can locate a station operator who might be willing to help. All I see are a couple of cops, and I know they won't do shit, so I turn my attention back to my cousin, and by now I'm completely exasperated in a way that only a true New Yorker can be when dealing with such an amateur. But she has a solution of her own. With no warning, as a complete stranger swipes and enters the turnstile nearest her, she rushes in behind him, so that the two of them are squeezing through the little space meant for only one. No doubt the strange man though he was getting robbed, as her little body slams up against his back, but the funniest part was that the purse that she was carrying got jammed in the turnstile, which stopped the turnstile from rotating through, trapping the two of them, back to belly, inside the iron maiden as my cousin desperately tries to pull her purse through. She finally manages free her purse, and in doing so, free the two of them. As the Maiden regurgitates the two of them into the station, the guy spins around and shouts at my cousin, "You could have at least ASKED first!" Meanwhile my cousin thinks she is so damn clever that she is laughing, but what she doesn't know is that there are two cops somewhere nearby, and I'm not sure precisely where they are now, or whether they saw her pull that trick. So I grab her by the wrist and say, we need to go, NOW!

We manage to make it unmolested to the platform, where we caught the Q train up to Hooters on 56th. We meet with my roommate and his friends, and all of us had a good laugh at the retelling of how J raped this poor man out of a Metrocard swipe. During this story, my cousin let it slip that she just got a summons earlier that week for entering a subway station (through an emergency exit door) without paying! This girl is a wild woman! We closed down Hooters and convinced J to come home and sleep on my couch, rather than try and navigate the subway system again.