The Panty Rat and Other Happenings

Four of us left work tonight at the usual hour. We step into the elevator, one guy pushes the button, we start zipping down. Two feet we drop…we stop.

We. Are. Stuck.

I think my first words were, “Shut up.” Which, I have to say, surprised me even then. I don’t know when I turned into Stacy from “What Not to Wear.”

We laugh—we don’t cry—we call our managing editor, who is still about half a floor above us. We ring and ring the “Emergency” bell, until a rough-sounding guy comes on the speaker and says, roughly, “What? What happened?”

“We’re stuck!” we all shout.

Minutes go by, and my three colleagues and I sink to the floor, one by one, by one, by one.

Just last week, one of the reporters now in the elevator with me and I were speculating on how we could climb through the fingerprint-smudged hatch in the roof if we’re ever stuck. Clearly, I would be hoisted up somehow and wiggle right through it and stand on the top of the elevator car and, you know, do something to save us. But the way we settled on my getting up there was that my friend would stitch his fingers together and allow me to step into them, boosting me up to the hatch. I find, always have found, this method of hoisting difficult to believe as possible. Apparently, movies tell us, it is.

The moment is upon us, and there is no finger-stitching, no hoisting.

A few minutes pass. The harsh voice comes barbling through the speaker again to ask us, “How many of you are there?”

“Four!” we shout.

“What, is he ordering us pizza?” I ask.

A few more minutes go by. He comes back on to tell us, “I called the repairman.”

I picture a guy getting in a van in Jersey.

“Nobody here is claustrophobic, right?” one reporter asks.

Nope, nobody is. We laugh loudly, contemplate a pizza magically being lowered with a bunch of beers down through the ceiling hatch, and wonder silently how long we might spend in the elevator. To alleviate tension, I share elevator-specific knowledge I have from a book I once worked on. You know, handy facts like the one about the woman who fell 73 floors, when a plane smashed through the Empire State Building way back when, and lived.

“She broke all her bones, though,” I add.

We sit on the floor until the speaker voice tells us to pull out a particular knob for 20 seconds. Two of us count out loud. Counting to 20 out loud feels long. The guy pulling the knob seems to want to pull it longer than the 20 seconds. But he lets go at maybe 24 seconds. Lights flash up and down all the button-numbers, and we start moving.

We live.

Adrenalized and free, we leave the building and venture into the subway, thrilled we didn’t spend the night in the elevator.

So it’s over, but hey, it ain’t.

The colleague and I who envisioned all the hoisting end up changing trains at West 4th. We’re waiting for the train when suddenly he does a double take at the tracks.

“I just saw a rat carrying panties,” he says.

Immediately, I see pink, satiny frilly panties in my head, although I see nothing on the tracks.

Our bug eyes don’t leave the spot where he saw the rat until the train comes, hoping beyond all hope to see it carrying what my friend eventually describes as “functional, white, maybe with a pattern on them, cotton panties.”

It didn’t happen. The panty rat does not reappear. I take his word for it—that there really had been a panty-carrying rat. The train comes.

We joke that these sorts of strange things always come in threes, so really, we’re still due one more odd happening before we get home. Ha ha, we step onto the train. Directly in front of us is the Man with the World’s Worst Comb-Over who dumbfounded us into complete, dazed mutedom last week. And directly in front of him is the Man with the Creepy Green Eyes who equally weirded us out last week, possibly on the same trip.

Three it is, possibly four, and finally I’m home and all is quiet.

For now.