Riding the bus uptown one day, I sat minding my business until we approached the stop at 116th and 7th Avenue. At this point the bus ride goes from being uneventful to straight ghetto. A man gets on the bus and informs the bus driver that he'd lost his metrocard and he just needed to ride up a few blocks. He sat in the set of sits across from the driver. A thin young woman had entered the bus at the same stop and she sat behind the driver, across from the man who didn't have his fare.

The man begins to lament about old age and informed no one in particular that he'd recently turned 42 years old. Then he begins telling some convoluted tale about his wife and a car incident. At this point the story starts to go awry. The next thing you know he is trying to hit on the thin woman asking her 21 questions. She politely nodded her head and humored him until he asked what she did for a living. She then asked him, "are you taking a survey or something?" When the man pressed on she firmly told him, "it's none of your business." This is where the man began to get salty. He went from asking if she had a man and if she had air conditioning in her bedroom to, "You must be a New York woman. New York women are chickenheads. Skank ass New York woman." This man went on and on for the rest of the bus ride talking about skanky chickenhead women. He asked the bus driver if his woman was a New York woman. He asked an older lady if she was from New York. He probably would have asked me but I refused to make eye contact with him. He told the thin woman, "that's why you ain't got a man. You don't know how to treat a man." This is the same man who just got through telling her that he gave his wife (who he later claimed was an ex-wife after the thin woman questioned him about it) a black eye when he discovered she was checking with Floyd somebody or another. He was obviously bitter about the affair and kept saying the Floyd man's full name saying, "I didn't beat him, I beat her ass." He kept waiting for someone to be in agreement with him but neither the bus driver nor the thin woman would say anything. He said to the thin woman, "You ain't ready for this country boy" and she responded, "probably not." He informed everyone that is why he needed to find a country woman but hell, you are in the middle of Harlem homie. He was in the wrong place to be looking for a country woman.

This whole incident is so ridiculous because it happens so often to insecure men. If a woman doesn't want to talk to them they become ugly, fat, lesbians or some other derogatory term. The same thing happened one day on the number 2 train where a man who was on the train with his young son began berating a young woman when she didn't give him any play calling her a lesbian and he cussed her out from the Bronx to Harlem.

The other thing that struck me about this scenario was the fact that the very men who love to say "you don't know how to treat a man" and "that's why you ain't got a man" are the same ones who don't know how to treat a woman. Otherwise, why would you even say something like that, especially to a woman you don't even know? They always talk about a woman scorned but a bitter man is no bargain either.