Marry Me?

I get it. BART is really weird. For some reason it seems to attract the strangest people, and yet I still choose to ride it every day. I can usually just pop in my earbuds and tune out the rantings and ravings of the crazies, but every so often something happens that is just too odd not to take notice.

I was riding toward San Francisco in the early afternoon, and was considering myself quite lucky that I had just happened to step into a fairly clean and odorless train car. I mean, a clean car? An odorless clean car? I should have bought a lottery ticket.

Anyway, I was sitting toward the rear of this car, counting my blessings. It was just about then when the sliding doors between cars opened up and a man slowly stepped into the car. The guy was about 50, was a little overweight, and he was wearing a tuxedo.

Yeah, you read that right. A tux. On BART.

He slowly sauntered down the aisle of the train car, and approached the first woman he came to. Said poor victim was, at the moment, trying to concentrate on reading a magazine on her e-reader.

Mr. Tux Man took his time leaning on the seat adjacent to her, straightening his sleeves and removing his white-banded velvet hat.

He turned toward her, and, like a magician, pulled out a small ring box from his jacket pocket and dropped to one knee.

The lady looked up from her e-reader just in time to witness Tuxedo’s move.

“Hey, baby,” the dude asked her from one knee, “Will you marry me?”

He opened the ring box to display a lackluster fake diamond that probably cost a little less than my daily parking permit.

The dude then flashed the woman a toothy crooked smile.

“Um... No.” The lady responded, a little freaked out.

“Really, baby? You sure? I’m a reeeeeeealy nice guy,” he said.

It was at this point that I reached into my backpack to ready my can of mace. I really didn’t want to get involved, but if I needed to be the good Samaritan, then dammit, I was going to be the good Samaritan.

The woman said no once again, and the creepy dude closed the ring box, stood up, and moved on. He took about ten steps before he turned to the his next victim. This girl appeared to be a student, some 32 years his junior, yet he still repeated his act and asked her if she wanted to be his wife.

He moved on pretty quickly when the girl pulled a taser out of her purse.

In the end, the man made five attempts at securing himself a spouse before heading toward the next car.

Right before he moved on, he gestured wildly and raised his voice in frustration.

“I GOTTA do SOMETHING with this RING!”

Hey, buddy. You could try to get your money back, but I’m not sure Dollar Tree’s return policy applies to items from the plastic toy dispenser.