No Joke

A Filipina woman and white guy walk onto a subway.
Then they proceeded to sit next to me.
I glanced up for a moment to notice an ajushi (older man) was swaying and staggering, although the train was not the cause of this movement. I noticed from the corner of my eye that he was gripping a green bottle. You already know where this is going...he was drunk on soju, the devilish potato liquor sold for about two bucks all around Korea and my own first encounter with it when I arrived in Korea made me swear off the stuff for my tenure here abroad. It is a sneaky little bastard. Cause you won't feel it until much later when you awake from stupor unaware of where you are. Soju is b-a-d news.
So, I tried to continue reading but through the melodic sounds coming from my headphones and the aura of funky drunkiness near me, my peaceful Sunday was disrupted as I noticed he began to harass the couple sitting next to me.
Get this, he was speaking English too! Soju makes you bilingual, you ain't know? Cause my uncle who doesn't speak a lick of English began telling me off his adventures, in English, one night when he was lit like a tiki torch.
Because I am who I am, I knew I would become the next victim of his English rants...also I knew it didn't help that these foreigners decided to sit next to me thus amplifying...

Three of these things just doesn't belong here...

Well, from what I gathered he kept repeating that he wasn't a liar. Made me wonder who called him one long time ago.
The white guy didn't do or say anything as the ajushi held his cigarette scented finger in his face.
Then he began to ask if that was his wife and he said yes.

Here we go,
then he came to me and asked the lady if I was with them and she said no.
I turned the page and pretended to read...thinking about if I had my emergency contacts from school just in case I would need to be bailed out of jail for fighting an old man.

I could see the Korean Herald headlines... American woman fights helpless old man on subway.

Who are you? Who are you?

I ignored his drunken ass and kept reading.

Then he pointed his finger in between the pages of my book and then turned the book to look at the cover, I just ignored him, but the Filipina lady waved his hand away from me.

I just ignored him and as he spilled soju on the subway floor, I thought about how he must be going through some shit to really be drunk at 1230 on a Sunday afternoon.

The couple devised a non-verbal plan to get off at the next stop. I just sat there as the drunken ajushi circled around in front of me.

The couple got off and others boarded and I guess the ajushi realized no one was going to pay attention to him and he staggered off.

No joke.