The Mutter Man
A Participant Observation in the Ethnography of Transit
There is a man who rides my train from time to time — actually, I think I’ve only ever noticed him three times. He must have some sort of disorder like Tourette’s or something. In a train packed with commuters, with each encounter I notice him first for his random incoherent muttering. This isn’t noteworthy on a CTA train. At any time, day or night, you may run into many such mumblers — I may even be one.
You stop and listen, working out if the person is talking to someone out of sight. Are they on their phone? Listening to an iPod and forgetting themselves enough to sing along with music we don’t hear? Every now and then you get one who is none of the above and keeps on muttering.
What marks this man is the way he oscillates between a softer muttering and sharper, louder yelps of single words or short phrases that make a kind of punctuation to his vocalizations. These are almost always harmless non-sequiturs spoken with such vigor and spontaneity it startles all riders around. As for me, it takes every ounce of my restraint not to giggle when I hear him spike his mumbles with a nonsense shout.
“PUPPIES!” He shouted once — suddenly, violently.
Harmless enough, right? No matter how adamantly stated? Another time I caught him saying :
“…got a WALK like a GRAND FINALE!”
I don’t know who he meant but I wished I had written that line.
Today is like the other days — a crowded train; he leans against the wall often closing his eyes. He might very well make eye contact while in an episode but nobody on the train cares to find that out.
A policeman might describe him as a roughly six foot three, two hundred pound African-American male between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. I just notice at a glance that his clothes are in decent shape and not terribly outdated. His shoes are clean. He’s dressed warm, which I’d say is good as the cold outside is dangerous and low, and that ought to be a sign of some mental stability. I’ve seen (or smelled) people in worse condition on the train.
He has a deep authoritative voice somewhere between Randy MachoMan Savage (Snap into a Slim Jim!) and Busta Rhymes (I got you all in check!) I imagine him as a grad student in the midst of some real world experimentation, messing with commuters and noting their response to his unusual affront. Maybe he’s just disturbed.
Today, the first intelligible word I make out from the other end of the train, is:
“TITANIUM!”
This is followed by some confrontational sounding mutters.
Something is odd about the quality of sound on a packed commuter train where every rider sinks into a hesitant state of attentive listening, waiting for the moment to erupt that might evoke a flight or fight response.
“Made with real FRUIT JUICE!”
He barks near the woman in the seat next to the door but not at her. That makes it really hard to laugh. It also makes it really hard to know if he might flip out and hurt someone.
But the mumbler, he dances around this state; often violent sounding and nearing the line that might prompt a call to the authorities, but mostly just forcing a captive audience to stare at their own shoes and hope for a speedy commute.
The mutters reach a fever pitch.
“Hey, you! YOU!” he shouts.
This is new. Nobody looks at him.
“I don’t like you.”
He admits, quietly — painfully.
“Hey, you! YOU!”
He could not have repeated it more exactly if he tried.
“I don’t like you.”
He admits again with exactly the same quiet pain.
A third time, “Hey, you! YOU!” Everyone assumes they are the one he does not like. Nobody looks up. I risk a glance enough to see his eyes aren’t even open. The one he doesn’t like isn’t even on this train, but no less real for him.
“I don’t like you, I don’t like you, I don’t like you…”
People are now actively stepping away from him.
“Outspoken!”
We hear through the mutters and the clatter of the tracks.
“Protest! Free to protest!”
A new rider gets on and cranes her neck to assess. Those around her snap a stare at her as if to say “what are you doing, dummy, don’t look at him; you’ll just make it worse.”
My stop arrives. I don’t look. Who is this man, the Mutter Man, the Shouting Man for whom the violent cries of puppies and titanium must burst forth? I’ll never know his name, may never know more of his story; but he is in mine. Yes, he is in mine.
