Along the "N" train in Astoria, Queens, only one stop separates 30th avenue from Ditmars Boulevard. It's a stretch of track that I have ridden many times seeing as its the commute from my house to my girlfriends.

The train rolled in and I sat down next to two not-unattractive hipster girls who were chatting about something boring. They sat to my right and gave me that gentrification-in-progress feeling that has been sweeping the neighborhood since I first moved to Astoria two-and-a-half years ago. So I sat there for a couple of seconds, thinking about the demographic shift in the neighborhood, thinking about how, in fact, I, was part of that shift, and what to my wandering eye does appear, but a homeless man flashing me a picture of two gigantic breasts in a porno magazine. "Ahhh," I thought, "not total homogenization." The hipster girls had looked, too. "Oh my god," whispered one to the other. She turned away from the picture and placed her right hand over her right eye, apparently with the intention of shielding the periphery of her vision from contamination by any porno light that might reflect off the magazine.

Porno Man was in his late fifties, maybe early sixties. He was sitting on the opposite side of the car about five or six people down to my right. I think he originally caught my attention by waving the magazine and saying, "Look at this one, eh!" Sitting down and being immediately presented with a picture of two huge naked breasts made me laugh - maybe not really laugh, but I let out a big puff of air that made my lips vibrate in a kind of loud, loose raspberry sound. Or maybe I sounded more like a horse. Anyway, Porno Man followed suit, laughing and taking my noise as an endorsement of his behavior. "It's good, it's good, no?" The entire train looked at me, and then at him, and then at me again. I don't think I have ever been the impetus for so many a head turn. "Alright," I thought to myself, "I just made a loud noise on a somewhat crowded train, and that noise has linked me to this guy who is flashing pictures of naked women to the general public." I had scoundrelized myself in the eyes of the passengers. I had become that guy, that guy who indulges the other guy who shouldn't be indulged. I put my head down and chuckled a little more; I couldn't help thinking that the situation was quite funny, and on the whole rather harmless. If these people were mad at me for unintentionally supporting a guy who wanted to flash porn around on the train, then maybe a guy flashing porn on the train was just what they deserved.

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Porno Man was obviously not in good mental health, but he seemed content with flashing pictures of boobs and crotches to the passengers. I didn't think that he was going to take his routine, if you could call it that, any further. He was what I had always imagined a dirty old man to be, and I had always imagined dirty old men as somewhat harmless so long as no children were around. This said, I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that the question, "What would Judith Butler do?" careened off one of the mores made explicit by the situation. Moreover, what was going on in Porno Man's head to make him think that flashing porn around on the train was a good idea?

Well, Porno Man kept trying to get my attention all throughout the five minute ride: "Pop-pee, ey ey Pop-pee! Look at this one! This is a good one, no!" he would say and hold up a new picture, first to me, then he would give it a nice slow pan so that everyone on the train who made the mistake of looking at him would get an eyeful of porn. He also made several gruntish noises like, "Ohh yeah! Ohh yeah!" nodding his head and smiling with approval as he flipped the pages of his magazine to find the commuters another treat. It was becoming obvious to me that my little vibrating lip laugh had egged him on, and now he was getting really excited (not sexually excited, at least from what I observed. It seemed more like "kid showing off his new toys," excited.)

The train was about to pull into the Ditmars station, the final stop. The door at the opposite end of the train opens and in comes one of the regulars. Now, by regulars, I mean one of the people who generally works the "N" or "W" train for donations. This woman looked healthier than she used to, and I fished in my pocket for change to give her. She was standing in the middle of the train, giving her usual speech, when Porno Man decided to grace her with his porno presence. "Hey hey," he yelled, and held up a picture bearing some kind of explicit content. "Oh that is fucking disgusting!" she screamed. And when I say screamed, I mean loud.

And so began the escalation.

"Put that shit away, put that fucking shit away you sick fuck! There are women on this train, don't you have any respect for women!" She was screaming. Porno Man didn't seem to care what she thought. He just wanted to show off his porn. She rans over to him and grabbed the magazine. Things were beginning to get a bit tense. "There are fucking women on this train you asshole. That makes me so mad. Don't you respect women?"

Porno Man and the regular, lets call her The Feminist Avenger, were now engaged in a loud tug of war over the magazine. "Is that what Judith Butler would do?" I asked myself.

Porno Man would not let go. The Feminist Avenger reared back and began to slap Porno Man as hard as she could. Not a gentle 'Sir, I demand satisfaction!' slap that comes from the elbow and wrist, but a flurry of fully wound-up at the waist open fist punches that resonated off Porno Man's rapidly reddening face. He finally let go of the magazine and put both of his hands in front of his face to try to lessen the impact.

At first it appeared that the medium-sized man in leather jacket and bandana who had entered the scene from my left was going to break up the Porno Man/Feminist Avenger bout. No such luck for Porno Man. Let's call this new guy Displaced Anger Man. While The Feminist Avenger was busy whaling on Porno Man's face with her open hand, Displaced Anger Man saw it fit to grab Porno Man by the forehead and slammed the back of his skull into the train wall. His head went thwap into the aluminum, and his baseball cap took on an awkward, half on, half off, tilt. Porno Man, looking visibly shaken, straightened his head only to have it thwaped again against the aluminum, this time harder than the first. The force of the blow knocked Porno Man's hat off and Displaced Anger Man leaned forward with all his weight, grinding the skull under his palm against the aluminum.

We weren't in funny Porno Man Land anymore. Everyone on the train had just entered Witness to Assault Land. And the gravity in Witness to Assault Land was much stronger than the gravity in Porno Land. I started to feel a little cold, like something physical had just kicked into high gear. A noticeable adrenaline boost made my neck tighten. It was as if a strange, cold, frightened feeling settled down on the people in the train car. Anyone who had been talking stopped.

Displaced Anger Man now held the porno magazine in his right hand. Standing over a quivering Porno Man, Displaced Anger Man slapped him in the face, as hard as he could, with the porno magazine. Now came the really strange part. Displaced Anger Man yelled at Porno Man, "What's wrong with you, huh? Don't you respect women? Haven't you got respect for women?" Porno Man groaned a little, and was whaled again with the magazine. The questions continued, "There are women on this train. Don't you respect women? You got no respect for women?" The entrance of Displaced Anger Man, the head shove, and the porno smacking, all took place in maybe fifteen or twenty seconds. During this time I had three distinct thoughts:

1) Damn this is strange. 2) I should really do something. 3) Does Displaced Anger Man really care about Porno Mans respect for women? What on earth is his motivation?

The train was finally in the station. The doors opened and the hipsters sprinted out the door, along with everyone else on the train except for me and the three quarrelers. I was still sitting down watching what was happening, and I had another thought. It was very clear: "I can't let this guy keep getting hit. The guy hitting him doesn't look like he is going to stop anytime soon. In fact he looks like he is enjoying it."

One more time Porno Man was whapped in the face with the magazine, and before I knew it, I was standing in front of Porno Man face to face with Displaced Anger Man. He was older than I thought, some gray in his goatee, and a couple of inches shorter than I am. He had a big flashlight in his jacket pocket and I kept scanning his person for something that he might hit me with. He lookeds really confused. "You gotta stop," I said.

"What?" asked Displaced Anger Man.

"I said you need to stop. Look, the guy is obviously screwed up, you can't just go hitting him like that." Behind me Porno Man groaned pathetically.

"What if that was your mother?" said Displaced Anger Man. I really couldn't believe what I was hearing. Not because it was logically impossible for this guy to have a grasp on gender inequality; assuming that I was feeling very charitable with my attributions of feminist stances at the time, maybe, just maybe, I could credit him with a very rough form of militant feminism. No, it's just that, if this guy really was a militant feminist, I don't think he would have waited for The Feminist Avenger's explosion of anger to make his own position evident.

"I don't care who it is, my mother, your mother, you need to stop hitting him. End of story. Get off the train." I think I was yelling and cursing a good deal, but it is hard to remember, what with my heart in my ears and all. I know I was screaming when I said, "Get off the train." The Feminist Avenger grabbed Displaced Anger Man's arm and started to pull him off the train.

"Come on," she said. "Just chill out. Let's go." I watched them get off the train, and I got off as well.

Since then I've thought a lot about why I did what I did. Maybe I felt guilty because I laughed and somehow motivated Porno Man to pursue his public service porn announcements. Maybe that's why I got up and stood in between him and Displaced Anger Man because I felt in some capacity responsible for his actions. During the whole escalation I kept asking myself, 'What does Displaced Anger Man have to do to Porno Man in order for me to intervene? Hit him really hard? Hit him enough times? Stab him? Take out a gun?' In the midst of firing off all of these questions, (at the base of every one a normative question when should I act? when should I help someone who obviously cant help themselves? ) I was struck by the fact that no one was doing anything. Did they think he deserved it because he was flashing porn on the train? Was it because he was obviously homeless? (I tend to think it was the latter, but that's a different story.) Even given these mitigating factors, didn't they think that they should help him? That kept echoing, that underlying feature of all these questions: shouldn't I help? Then I suddenly found my mind articulating the proposition, "I should, I should help." I'm not sure what made me conclude that I should do something, there was no clear if a then b, a therefore b. There was just a sequence of events and a vague transition from the question, "Should I do something?" to the assertion, "I should do something."

It was at about this point, the point that I decided that I should do something, that, as Wittgenstein would say, I hit bedrock. My spade turned, and explanation gave way to practice. Because even if I could find some way to explain how I concluded that I should help Porno Man, there was nothing I could see that took me from the belief that I should help Porno Man to the actual action, the thing that got me off my ass and in between some guy flashing porn and some other guy who was hitting him for flashing porn. It was simply as if something rose up, not in me, but under me, and pushed me between the two. I just took it from there.

Daniels Parseliti is a writer living in Astoria, NY. He spends his time making fiction, philosophy, and pasta sauce, though only the sauce yields income. He has co-written a play that was produced twice in NYC, and is currently working on a novel. Daniels can be reached at intuitconcept@hotmail.com