"She must have him over a barrel."
The guy had entered the subway car and thrown his jacket over the railing that holds up the hand rail near the door where I sat. He spoke to me as though continuing a conversation we'd been having already which should have clued me in, but I'm a total sucker for a fantastic opening line.
"Who does?"
"Elena Kagan...Obama! Why else would you give someone a job with no experience?!"
"She's got tons of experience, just not any experience being a supreme court justice! You can't blame her for that!"
The guy argued amicably with me for a few minutes (another red flag in this city) and I enjoyed the conversation. After a moment though:
"We've got to be very careful. You never know. You never know. They have..." (at this point he started pointing to his arm with his finger).
"They have applications. They have cloning and viruses. You never know. You have to be very careful, really see who she is! They have robots they control."
Since we'd been talking loudly, I knew that the rest of the people around me on the train all had the same realization I did at the same moment that I had it. The difference was that I liked the guy, and had a lot of practice making conversation with folks with ideas like his, so we kept talking. I have a hard-won habit of "do not confirm or deny" when it comes to ideas that don't match my reality in a serious way from the old days at Angeline's, so we gently switched topics whenever he brought up technology this way. I asked him some questions ("How do you get to be a mastermind?" and "How do you know..."
He told me about a guy in Bethel, ME who burned down all sorts of places; houses, cars, fire stations but who did it for the money and then used his money to buy himself a gas station. He told me a little bit about his wife, who had something in common with this fellow. They were both masterminds who took all the money and hoodwinked the people around them. At one point, a guy across the train said "I can't believe I'm hearing this." in a very dramatic way. When I looked across the speaker had his head in his hands. My new friend told me about people who want to get into your conversation, about how they're probably stoned or hungover from the night before. Right before his stop, the man asked me what I do, and I told him "I teach little kids." He had to get off soon and he started talking fast "Take them to the Apple Store. Show them Tips and Tricks. They need the Tips and Tricks. Teach them about each of the applications! That's what they need to know!" Then the door shut.
