Re: The passion of the foamer
I had never heard the expression "foamer." The Conrail guys that I knew back in the 80s referred to them as "toots," as in, I'm going to make a mess in my pants if they toot that horn.
At any rate, back then one of the neighbors, a rather stuck-up example of Euro-trash, got it into her mind to invite my wife (now ex) along on a round-trip excursion from Newark, NJ into a PA trainyard with a roundhouse on some sort of vintage equipment, probably steam. Naturally, I got shanghaied to be the picnic toter, handbag minder, and baby sitter for the culture vulture's obnoxious eight year old.
So, the train is just about totally full up, and a lot of the passengers are decked out strangely, sort of Choo-Choo Charlie from Good-n-Plenty meets Fire Island. Just about every one of them is drinking like a fish, and I mean two-fisted, half-an-hour, open bar style. They're all over the train, back and forth and up and down the skinny aisle, talking animatedly about their common interest and making me wish that I managed to con myself into a window seat.
The train stops, the lot of them get off, the train goes back down the tracks, and then comes forward around a curve, a-choo-chooing, with all the bells and whistles going off. All the toots, or foamers, if you will, are drooling next to the tracks, cameras in hand, going ape-shit. Everybody gets back on, the train lurches on to the turnaround point, folks get off, do the tour, and then get back on as we get reoriented to go back home.
Euro-PITA and her kid decide to break out the food, so we're sitting there beginning to munch. By now, the toots are in rare form, and the inadequacies of rail equipment from days gone by is starting to make itself quite evident. The line for each bathroom is backing up and snaking through the cars.
So, we're sitting there, me across from Madame La-di-da on the aisle. She's starting to push a sandwich through her less-than-charitable face, and there's this guy standing in line right next to her, red-faced and wobbling, in striped denim, with engineer's coveralls, a matching cap, and a red bandanna around his neck.
I hear this strange sound that I can't quite place, and as I figure it out, it becomes very obvious. Mr. Toot has lost it, and all the beer that he has merrily consumed through the morning and early afternoon is slowly exiting southbound in a burbling flow that is becoming an absolute rush.
I look over at my luncheon companion, and motion for her to look to the side, and as she revolves her head, sandwich in motion through pie-hole, the train lurches, and pissy train whack goes from a foot away to less than six inches from her nose.
Her eyes go wide, the sandwich looks like it's about ready to all come flying back out, and she's screaming and choking through flying flecks of egg salad as she tries to claw her way up and out of the seat. She's got nowhere to go, though — she can't get up and around the old-fashioned arm rests, and we're all packed in there anyway.
Really, it was everything I could do not to laugh out loud, and she knew it. Funny how I had to put up with her less and less after that.
