getting hit by a train
really it’s because DJ also believes in stories
It’s from Twitter that I hear about DJ getting hit by a train, like wait I can’t fucking believe it, everyone that knows each other chimes all at once in the group chats. A famous Internet figure, Cremieux, blasts it out, and it becomes even the sidebar news of the day, reminding me of the 2007 MySpace.com era where the site had bulletins or whatnot where you could post announcements in a separate channel from the rest of your profile. Even if in 2026 we’re all ‘posters’ who broadcast all of our wayward thoughts casually, this specific tweet felt more important, like a bigger Capital A Announcement (a bulletin, have you). People that probably have Cremieux blocked for his controversial views were retweeting the post — there was a bit of a political angle tucked in that I feel loath to not acknowledge, but let’s just say no matter your opinions on the matter, the sheer need to respond and exclaim about DJ’s incident overcame those who would typically start to argue about it. There’s something about the impetus of almost-death that brings us all together…
Bring us all together this sure did, because as far as I can tell, not many of us in this part of Twitter have ever grieved one of our own dying. We were all open mouthed with horror and disbelief (“wait, that wasn’t a joke, oh my god I can’t believe this,” my friend Madison recounted her hearing about it); incredulousness (“dude did you hear about DJ?” “yeah, I could not fucking believe it because someone sent me the Crem tweet… what the actual hell how do we know if he’s even alive!?” said Nathan and Jordan); and relief (“wait he’s Tweeting… that’s a good sign!! Let’s make him go vIRAL!” said Xavier). Best friend Nicki considered flying in from San Francisco. His ex reached out. Even DJ’s frenemies, people who had made a face sometimes if he showed up at a party, were suddenly regretful at how they treated him. It was surely something I’d only seen in the movies before. It certainly didn’t help that everyone has legendary wit around here and so had some original joke to fire off or well-worded quip about not taking people for granted that somehow toed the line between cheesy and repressed.
When I found out through Crem’s tweet, I posted it to my IG story freaking out and texted DJ to see when we could come visit. A few hours later, he didn’t text me back but had heart reacted the message. I bark at him to stop scrolling and tell me where he is and when can we see him. The next day he tells me he’s going to get transferred and to hang tight. By 3pm, Tori and I are on our way to Lower Manhattan to bring the good tidings of the group chats.
There have been tragic notifications of suicides passed around in this part of Twitter over the years; someone knew one of the dead former OpenAI employees at some point and we all talked about that. But this was different. More local, more intimate. When you hear that one of your earliest New York friends who you’ve done a sheer number of drugs with just got pushed off the First Avenue stop, literally had his lower body sliced open by the train, several broken parts, they are monitoring his temperature right now… he can’t walk but he can wiggle his toes… like wow thank God he’s even with us still and doesn’t have a shattered sacrum just a lot of other stuff going on that’s too gnarly to maybe fully recap (you should ask him yourself…) but he will be able to walk at some point also, hopefully soon… they kept him in the ICU for three days! He’s waiting on a couple MRI scans! Holy fuck!
Tori thinks it’s funny that I am wide-eyed the whole time since I have barely ever set foot in a hospital (she’s way more familiar with these ‘classics of the genre,’ she and the experienced DJ both say affectionately). I meekly clarify that I’m sensitive because I bruise easily and have never broken a bone, but I’m learning so much.
Nevertheless, a 99% recovery may be on its way, as DJ is really doing fine; he can ‘walk if I put myself through a lot of pain’ but we’ll get around to that soon. I showed up to see him at the hospital on Tuesday with Tori, who had been one of the first to DM him after the accident. We all met in 2022 through the same group chat centered around a different infamous Internet personality (which is also how I met other main characters in my New York life, such as Andy, Macro Sweetynickels, and Tammy, and friends who’ve since moved away like Cursy, Vogel, Nicki, and Jeffrey, and even former love interests like Tommy), although Tori and I only became close in 2026. DJ was one of my earliest Twitter friends though, so walking through the beautiful and old and eerie lobby that afternoon to see him in his gown and bed did fill my stomach with dread, even though I already knew he was doing okay.
We’re still not sure if someone pushed him, for real, as that’s what DJ remembers. (“I don’t want to assume it was a homeless guy either,” he says, wincing a bit at Crem’s possibly well-intentioned but overly politically savvy side comment in the announcement tweet). The police haven’t showed up to ask him any questions as of this post on Tuesday night. Nevertheless, the fact remains that DJ got hit by a train, which as he pointed out, is more impressive than getting hit by a bus. In fact, it was an L train, but even if “last night took an L, I can always bounce back,” DJ jokes with finger guns. He is charging his vape beneath the covers and is hooked up to a few wires, but otherwise looking in good shape. Tori and I take pictures of him for the chats. He groans. “I look like a cokehead!” “No you don’t,” Tori says brusquely. “You just look like you’ve been up til 6am, you have a messy head of hair, but you’re otherwise rallying.” “Fineeee,” DJ says, “you know I’m vain, I need to look good for the e-girls messaging me condolences…” Tori and I giggle.
Soon they’re bantering. She wants to see the photos the medics took. Holy fuck that’s going to be a gnarly scar. I throw my hands up and squeeze my eyes as he’s showing his screen to Tori because I’m queasy with blood and guts even if I would take a bullet for some of my friends (just not like a lethal one). “Did they give you the good stuff?” Tori asks, smirking at DJ. Apparently he’s on oxycodone. We joke about giving him weed. It’d be a bad idea to give him champagne apparently but he will gladly take a shot. We’re going to throw an “I LIVED!” rager when you’re out, Tori promises. Events are her thing, so this is the best gift DJ could’ve expected to hear about from her, DJ exclaims proudly. He also tells us that he let his work know that he was going to be delayed for a few days because he got hit by a train, but that he would be back online to deploy some more —
“Okay, no, you focus on healing.” the CEO had said. Nevertheless we will possibly need to force DJ to not be able to work, as he already had requested to company staff that they bring him his work laptop (this did not happen). Speaking of staff, did any nurses hit on you? me and Tori slyly ask. Only one was pretty to DJ, but she’s married. Was the ring any good? Tori asks. Oh it was excellent, unfortunately, DJ said, before launching into a tangent about how one time he started talking to a girl who confided in him later that she hated her engagement ring which led to her breaking off her relationship for him. DJ is sheepish about the fact that he is popular with some women, “trying to not only end up with the crazy ones though,” he promises. We speculate if any girls DMing him will visit. He had laryngitis before and they’re fixing that too now, he tells us.
DJ has such a sense of humor about the whole thing. He’s holding everything lightly, but seems genuinely surrendered. “I’m so lucky I’m alive, and also that my injuries in the grand scheme of things aren’t that bad,” he said. We point out that most people couldn’t laugh at getting hit by a train the way he could. DJ has a lot of trauma over being the perennial caretaker to his family, and also an ex-fiance or two, and yet he is genuinely very wholesome, unexpectedly so to many who find his babbling a little hard to dissect. But when you realize he means no harm, truly, that’s when the friendship can morph into a dynamic with a genuine cheerleader in a tech bro’s body. His generosity means that even if he’s smart, he always wants to explain whatever for the spirit of spreading knowledge. According to his chart, which I read while staying at my parent’s house after moving out of LA in September 2022, DJ is supposed to become the kind of person who becomes close to people when he can engage mutual curiosity. It also warns he is predisposed to fall in love easily but not always deeply. “Cancer risings have it hard, right?” he asked me once a few years after the reading. “Yeah, it’d be more intense for you if you had a Cancer moon and or Cancer Mars,” I pointed out. DJ said he had no idea what I was ever talking about but he appreciated me deeply enough to be okay with not asking.
At the hospital, we wonder where his keys are, and if the intercepted ones his landlord sent him are anywhere to be found. I post a picture of him posing in the hospital bed. It gets 15 likes within an hour and then some people from the downtown scene gasp and others from the tpot scene ask me how they can get a hold of him. As if!
Get hit by a train, your mutuals all talk about it, and I love it, DJ says. All attention is good attention!
This makes me think. If I got hit by a vehicle I wouldn’t want a million randos DMing me. I’d want to carve out space to give my friends what I want them to know and leave out the rest. Even the frenemies, if they’re useful enough. Yet DJ is okay with getting a few hundred new followers for anything obliquely morbid. He actually is just voraciously curious and so here we are.
There are plenty of people who told me in 2024 or so that they don’t like DJ and don’t want him at things. I agonized over how to handle this information for a bit; the core of it, which I uncovered, was sometimes his manic energy is too much for people, especially if they’re unsure how to start engaging with the topics he leads with. I think he’s agonizingly sincere and has a bit of a jumpy squirrel vibe to him when he’s overstimulated, and this combination makes him seem “scary,” or “unstable.” But I truly have never seen the guy mad, perhaps horny at times sure, but he reads the room far better than he realizes. It also became more abundantly clear after the news hit the air waves, that DJ is really not a bad guy at all — even if he annoys you, you’d never want him to get hit by a train. Or even if that’s fine, you want him around because he does try his best to comply with rules anyway and will just be a jolly good fellow regardless.
This is kind of why DJ is one of the few I have told about my love life over the years — all the men I suffered over, often silently as most people don’t hear about. We got dinner at Spicy Moon a few weeks before a house party I was going to throw on May 30, a few days after his birthday, that he’d been excited about. I didn’t respond when I cancelled the party and he texted me hoping I was doing okay. A month before this current accident at Spicy Moon, I broke down, cried and told him how hard it was to be me and be misunderstood, what a burden it had historically been for most men to consider dating me because of my appearance as a “doing fine detached” socialite with a large network, how they always felt a lot of social pressure and refused to see me for the vulnerable but honorable person I am while torturously in love and too paralyzed to talk about it. He listened carefully about what had recently transpired, privately, over the last few months, that I was too nervous to explain to most people we knew, who would be judgmental and would project and wouldn’t understand until the plot got its deus ex machina, and by the end DJ was clapping his hands with genuine glee, something I’d hoped would happen, and said that he’d been through so much heartbreak himself. He was currently trying to decide between a girl he was just hanging with and the only person he still wanted to be with, and how he was gearing up to try to be with her again, but how he knew what it was like to lack the courage to reach out. Yet as he believed in anything in the divine and highest order, you must above all believe in love. “Maybe I’ve seen too many DMT elves, but what else is there?” he said.
“Well, what if love is pointless,” I said faintly. “Fascist, even?”
“STAHP, NO!” DJ scolded me, shaking his finger comically. “After all you just told me about your reawakened artistic potential, you’re going to speculate if love is fascist?!” He shook his head. Of everyone he knew who needs to believe in love the most, it’s me. Because I already don’t settle if I’m not in love, he said. That’s the marker of a true romantic — abstaining unless it’s real. And why is that so bad! DJ said, if he is gonna be an idiot for anything in this life, he’s going to do it all the way and I should let myself also. I should in fact believe I believe in love.
I thought about this all on the way home. While it’s true DJ believes in love, a lot of people do so what’s the big deal. Really it’s because DJ also believes in stories. That’s why he’s okay with being hit by a train — he loves the narrative element of it, not the drama, but the fact that he has an opportunity to come out of it with a hell of a story and a hell of a perspective. He said at Spicy Moon that he’s rooting for me and my story, because he’s rooting for him too. That all ties in to how I’ve decided for now I’m willing to let that mean something. It’s the least I can do for a guy who survived getting hit by a train.
Crystal, you're an amazing writer!
Damn, this is awful. Turns out news breaks 3 days later on Substack than Twitter