Ladies and gentlemen, the sad story of how I acquired my Metro Face. For those of you who don’t spend two hours of each day getting sweated on by other people in the Moscow Metro system, the Metro Face is the expression that virtually all locals wear while taking public transportation. It’s basically an Out of Order sign for your face, a visual cue that you’re going to spend the next 40 minutes zoning out and avoiding social contact, and would appreciate it if other people did the same.

To get the picture, stand in front of a mirror and first relax all of your facial features until your IQ dips 12 points. Then imagine that the guy standing next to you smells like garlic and is elbowing your ears. The best Metro Facers look like they’re listening to meditation tapes by Charles Manson. Some of the little old babushki who have been riding around Moscow since before Stalin jumped ship have Metro Faces that are virtually bulletproof. Or maybe the bullets just got lost in all the wrinkles.

The Metro Face is the key to successful transportation in Moscow. I believe it was John Locke’s Ukrainian brother Boris who wrote about the Social Contract of the Moscow Metro: All who benefit from the safety of the system must agree to sacrifice any and all signs of human emotion.

This is a problem for me: as an American, my default expression is irony; I even walk with an accent. After two weeks, I managed to whittle my Metro Face from barely-suppressed laughter to mere smirking. But still almost every day I got stared at, jeered at and once quite rudely shoved on the shoulder. Just for smiling. How did Russians ever get a reputation for being uptight?

Anyway, the legendary night of my first Metro Face incident started as a simple trip with a friend to an indie bar across town. We elbowed our way onto the car and were just congratulating ourselves on finding seats when we heard a belch. The culprit: a fat Asian man wearing a newsie cap catatonically drunk in the seat in front of us. He was sitting in such a way that every jiggle of the car made him sway precariously into the handrail at the end of the seat. It took the guy sitting next to him a stop and a half of surreptitious ogling to figure out that he was just drunk and not dead.

Much to the chagrin of the crossword-solving man sitting next to my friend, I let slip a chaste little chuckle.

Then apparently we hit turbulence on the tracks. The car was a-rocking and a-reeling like the walkers-only section at a Bruce Springsteen concert, and every time it moved, the man’s head slipped farther through the handrail and toward the floor. To prevent this, a man jumped up from his seat and stood by Drunk Asian Guy, using his ass as a buffer from the floor. Drunk Asian Guy started drooling on Ass Pillow’s slacks, but nobody in the entire car moved a muscle.

I giggled so hard I snorted, causing Crossword to lean halfway across my friend’s chest, staring reproachfully at me with his Bassett hound eyes, close enough to count my pores. Without even looking down, he opened a Big Gulp-sized beer that was concealed in a bag in his lap and calmly raised it to his lips. Sipping and judging, judging and sipping.

Before I could stifle it, out came a full-fledged guffaw, causing the two men standing over my shoulder to stop their screaming match about Ukrainian independence (or maybe the latest episode of “House” — I missed some of the subtext) and stare. The bolder of the two put one hand on my shoulder and inexplicably started snapping the fingers of his other hand in front of my eyes.

As I sat there with one man snapping his fingers in front of my face like an epilepsy test, Crossword’s eyeballs creating physical humidity on my shoulder and Ass Pillow bopping along to his iPod like a stranger’s nose wasn’t halfway up his Hanes, the drunk man’s hat fell off.

I lost it. I laughed so hard for two stops that a nearby doctor wrote out a prescription for morphine. I laughed so hard I hyperventilated — my abs are still sore. Between the disapproval, confusion and outright loathing of my laughter, I think the only person in the car that still had his Metro Face on by the end was the drunk man. But it might have just been a coma.

That’s not when I acquired my Metro Face, by the way. The Metro Face part came later at the bar, as I watched some sloshed sorority girl types engaging in attempted cultural exchange with a Russian chick. I think it revolved largely around shoe shopping tips and trying to translate the phrase “I heart you,” but honestly I tuned out. I had my Metro Face on.

Ever get kicked off the Marguerite for being too chipper? Kat doubts it. Send your own harrowing public transportation stories to klewin@stanford.edu.