As I stooped my head to sip through the slot in the plastic lid of my latte, my upper denture dropped out of my mouth with a clack and clattered across the white and yellow tiles of the subway station floor. I made no move to fetch it for a moment, but rather looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. Luckily a train had just departed and no one else was around, except for an individual sitting on a bench under the security cameras. This person appeared to be suffering from an iodine-deficiency and ogled me as I finally moved to grab my denture which had come to a stop near a blue recycling bin, teeth-down I might add, diminishing the horror I would surmise, had someone stumbled across it at that moment.

The person continued watching me as I seized the denture and slid it back into my mouth without looking at or wiping it. People were approaching and I needed no further attention. As I secured the denture by creating suction with my upper palate, I nodded to the ogler for some reason. The nod wasn't reciprocated. This raised my blood pressure, and I'd been warned about that by my cardiologist. I'm not an old man as one may conjecture. Indeed, I lost my upper teeth playing hockey as a teen. And several years ago I suffered vaccine-related blood clots, but I won't get into that. Suffice it to say, I've been advised to take behavioral and emotional measures, in addition to physical and chemical therapies, to avoid catastrophe.

When the train arrived and the doors, after a long but meaningless pause, opened in front of me, I allowed an elderly woman behind me to go ahead. But she moved so slowly from the platform onto the train, her thick rubber soles squishing under her like giant black slugs, the person behind me pushed me into the fragile senior, who keeled. The quick reactions of a young woman in a nun's habit--and save for the blackwork tattoos edging out from her sleeves, she may have actually been a nun--who caught the elderly woman as she fell forward, averted disaster.

Grumbling and mumbling erupted--even the nun griped, though fell short of using God's name in vain--and the person who had pushed me into the elderly woman conveniently wriggled through a throng of sibilant Catholic schoolgirls and lanky spectacled lads with acne and overbites all staring at their phones, and disappeared into the abdomen of the train.

I moved the opposite way, past several sleeping heaps of rags, a woman in shades with a white cane and a black dog, and people lacking teeth and in one instance a nose, until I spotted an empty seat and swerved myself into it without spilling a drop of latte.

The train had yet to move and I settled in and surveyed my surroundings. An incomprehensible voice buzzed over the speakers, perhaps delineating the issue or giving warning, hard to say. Brute graffiti zigged and zagged throughout the cabin. Neglect or art, my eyes felt assaulted. Then I noticed a bloated man in a fleecy orange wig with a complexion like sponge toffee staring at me, his bloodshot eyes unblinking. What did he want? His wrinkled baby blue suit fell short on his bare ankles, exposing oozy leg ulcers. He looked like he wanted to say something. I almost asked him what. But suddenly his eyelids shut, his chin dropped, and he started snoring.

I sipped my latte which had now cooled into a cloying scum and waited for the doors to shut and the train to depart. Delays had become commonplace. The system was under duress. Only a matter of time before the real shit show commenced. Was I ready for it? No one was.

A tinkling electronic bell preluded the closing doors and they almost succeeded in coming together when an arm plunged between their rubber guards and caused them to recoil. The arm spearheaded the advance of a long-haired man with a tattered yellow safety vest squeezed over his bomber jacket. A miasmic stench of rotting meat and charred cabbage accompanied him. He stood at the still open doors, hands on hips, and swung his head left and right, muttering. Upon spotting the dozing fat man, he stepped toward him and shook his shoulder.

"No sleeping on the train!" he screamed. "No sleeping on the effing train!" The dozing man's eyes bugged open and he stiffened up in his seat, moving his mouth but issuing no protest.

The raging man now turned to me, and I thought it best to let him blurt his piece without getting heated as I often do when people invade my personal space or aggress me, and without putting myself in danger of an aneurysm or infarct. He pointed at my latte.

"No coffee!" he screeched. "No coffee!"

I smiled, but wanted to smash his face.

As he moved closer, and his stench enveloped me like a tarry tarp, I shot to my feet and cried,"Stop!" But at the same moment my upper denture flew out of my mouth, skittered across the grimy floor and landed teeth-up at the feet of the man with the orange wig who jerked in his seat. The man in the safety vest wiped a strand of greasy hair from his face and gawked at the denture.  Then a dark-haired Catholic schoolgirl chewing a wad of gum appeared, stopped in her tracks, stopped chewing, and also gawked at it. We all gawked at it for an interminable length of time. The train remained stationary, humming and ticking as if impatient.

Finally, when I moved to retrieve the denture, all eyes followed me.

"I'm not old," I said. "I'm not fucking old."