Bus Stories
Last night I went and saw "Prozac Nation" at a local art film house. It was pretty good. Christina Ricci is terrific. I've always had a crush on her anyway. Yeah, I know she's pretty much just a kid. So shoot me. Actually it was a little too close to home, because Ricci plays this unstable girl with serious father/abandonment issues who is unable to maintain a healthy relationship, and gawd knows I've had my share of screwed-up relationships. Maybe it was them; maybe it was me. Probably both. I hope I've learned something from them. I'll let you know, as soon as I find one I can hold onto myself...
But I digress.
Came home on the bus, the way I usually do -- I have a car, but here in San Francisco it really doesn't make much sense to drive anywhere. Parking is abysmal, and you can spend quite a bit of time driving around looking for somewhere to leave your vehicle. And then when you get back home, you have to do the same thing before you can crash out for the night. Consequently, like in NYC, most of us take public transportation or taxis everywhere. When I have a hot date or just get annoyed waiting forever for a bus, I'll jump in a cab -- but that add$ up pretty quickly, so mostly it's the bus for me.
So I was waiting for the bus, freezing to death in an icy, windy downpour, and some grizzled old homeless guy who looked remarkably like Chuck Berry asked me for money. I said "Hey if I had any money, do you think I'd be standing here in the rain waiting for a bus?" He said "I get ya" and turned to walk away. Then he stopped, looked back at me and said "Do you know you look like Jerry Seinfeld?" which puzzled me, because I don't think I look at ALL like Jerry Seinfeld. So I said "Do you know you look like Little Richard?" To which he replied, "No, Chuck Berry. Everybody says Chuck Berry." And I said, "Yeah, HIM. Man, you GOTTA be Chuck Berry!" But did I stop there? Nope. I added "Chuck, my man -- you're my idol. Whenever I'm bangin' some girl, to this day, right as I hit that point of no return, I scream out 'Good Golly Miss Molly!' But I never seem to get a second date though. What is UP with that?" He just shook his head and walked away, laughing and waving his arm at me like I was the best entertainment he'd had all night. Then I noticed he didn't have a jacket, and here I was, freezing my ass off in my black cashmere trench coat -- the kind of coat you'd see Seinfeld wearing while waiting for a cab. And suddenly it all made sense, and I felt sorta absurd and serious, happy and sad at the same time. Ya know?
OK, fast-forward like twenty minutes. I was sitting there on the bus, and some guy went to jump out the door at his stop, dropping something at my feet in the process. I looked down, and it was a syringe. So...what does one do when a guy drops a syringe? Do you say, "excuse me, sir, but I believe you have misplaced your drug paraphernalia?" I mean, I was sure he'd be grateful, but it just felt kinda surreal. So I said "hey man, you dropped something," and he reached down and picked it up with a sheepish grin on his face. Then he disappeared into the night. I wondered if I'd helped him, or if I'd somehow ruined his one chance to change his life for the better. Then again, who am I to judge? I've done my share of substances -- though I've never gone the way of The Needle. Besides, he was probably a diabetic. I probably saved his life. Yeah, that's it.
* * *
One time I was riding on a half-empty bus with a typical, fairly mixed crowd in this diverse city -- a few other whites, a few asians, etc. The back of the bus was filled with a bunch of youngish black kids jostling and laughing, and the front/handicap seats were taken up by a very large black woman and, facing her, a very old, maybe seventy-five or eighty, white woman with a cane and those wraparound cataract-sunglasses that look like Arnold Schwarzenegger's ski goggles. I mention everybody's race because it's a big part of the story, as you will see.
The bus soon came to a stop and the driver, a black man in his forties, announced to the old white woman that this was her stop. Apparently, she'd requested that he tell her when to get off the bus, or else he knew her as a regular rider. I guess she didn't hear him; perhaps in addition to being almost blind, she was almost deaf. She was pretty old -- but she appeared to be just a kindly old woman who needed some assistance.
Anyway, after telling her twice, the man reached around and tapped her gently on her shrivelled hand as it rested on the top of her cane, repeating that this was her stop. Or at least he TRIED to repeat it. He got about halfway through with his sentence when this frail, up until now silent old white woman yelled, in a loud voice with a distinctly Alabama accent, "YOU GET YOUR BLACK HANDS OFFA ME, NIGGER!"
Now, I was born and raised on the West Coast, mostly the suburbs up until a decade or so ago when I decided to become a city-dweller. My family was pretty fucked-up in a lot of ways, but overt racism was never something I was exposed to, at least not in such a direct and hateful way. It bothers me to even TYPE that word, and here was this crazy old woman SCREAMING it on a bus where she and I were clearly a racial minority. The driver seemed stunned, like it had come completely out of the blue. The woman across from her had her enormous jaw pretty much on the floor, and the entire bus was completely silent, as if waiting for the riot to start. You could hear the proverbial pin drop as the old lady struggled to her feet, and nobody seemed quite sure what was going to happen next. San Francisco is certainly not a perfect town, and there are racial issues here like anywhere else. But this was a whole other thing; this was like 1950s Birmingham all of a sudden. If it were a guy like me who'd said the dreaded N-word, all hell would have broken loose. But this was a hundred-year-old crone who could barely walk, and so nobody knew how to react.
So the driver started laughing. I guess that was pretty much all he could think of to do.
You would think that the crazy old hag would simply hobble her racist ass off the bus without further comment at that point, right? Wrong answer. While we all sat there stunned, the bus frozen in some space-and-time-warped candid camera study in Jim Crow insanity, the old woman launched into a tirade. Yes, a tirade. Sounded like some meandering apocalyptic bible-thumping Klan speech, about how all "you people" were soon gonna be forced "back where you belong," wherever THAT might be.
At some point I decided I'd had enough, and I was a little worried that my much younger but still lily-white ass was gonna get lumped in with the crazy woman's, and subsequently stomped by the formerly harmless but now probably angry black teenage gangsta-wannabes in the back. I thought of just getting off the bus, but instead I opted, in the moment, to make a bold move.
I stood up and said, "hey grandma, we've all heard enough of your shit."
She turned to me with her ghostly twig-like finger pointed as if to say "race traitah" or "nigga-lovah" or one of those other weird-ass sayings you supposedly hear way down in The Bayou, but I didn't give her enough time. I picked up her purse and her small bag of dog-biscuits or whatever it was, and threw them out the door of the bus. Then I looked into that brown-tinted UV-coated Terminator windshield on her face and said, "now get the hell off this bus before I throw you out and snap every bone in that mummified hateful body of yours."
She seemed shocked that a white boy would talk to her like this, and, mumbling god-knows-what under her breath, she picked up the pace and shuffled down the stairs and out the door. I turned around, looked around the bus at the still-silent crowd, and suddenly everybody started laughing, whistling and clapping. I smiled and sat back down, feeling just a tiny bit like a hero, both disgusted and amused at the strange absurdity of it all.
* * *
Nothing compares, however, to the time when, on yet another miserably rainy day, I got onto a crowded bus near Chinatown, and as the double-doors slammed shut behind me, I was accosted by a smell so putrid it nearly made me gag. The bus was as filled with the smell as it was with people, but it didn't seem like anyone else noticed. My eyes were watering and my stomach was beginning to gurgle uncomfortably; the bus lurched back and forth in traffic and I pushed and shoved my way through the crowd toward the exit door, determined to get off at the next stop and get on a better-smelling bus. Or walk home in the rain; surely that would be better than this.
It was then that I saw it.
As I squirmed through the crowd of riders, I found a pocket of standing room. And right there, on the seat in front of me, was the source of the foul stench. It was, I kid you not, a pile of fresh human feces, exactly in the middle of the only unoccupied seat on the bus. I looked around me, and nobody seemed to think anything of it, other than having created a small bubble of space around it, in which I was now standing. There was an elderly asian woman on the seat next to it, casually reading what appeared to be a Chinese newspaper. Next to a pile of shit.
Now, I've been around the block a bit. I'm an urban guy. I've seen some crazy things, and some ugly things, and some downright hysterical things. But now I knew I had reached what would be the pinnacle of my urban experience. Because at some point, quite recently, in the middle of a crowded bus, someone had simply dropped trou and taken a crap right there on the seat. And all the riders were pretending not to notice it. In fact, many of them had surely seen the previous owner of this horrid little sculpture as s/he created it. Perhaps the creature responsible was now standing nearby, or perhaps it was the woman with the newspaper. Most likely, the fecal performance artist was the only one with the good sense to have actually exited the bus in a hurry already.
All that I knew for sure was that I had to get off that bus, or I'd be adding the regurgitated contents of my own entrails right there next to it, and likely splattered on some of the seemingly oblivious patrons of this vehicle. For a brief moment, I wondered what would happen then. Would they keep standing there while I threw up all over the place, simply ignoring the horrible spectacle? After all, none of them seemed to mind sharing their daily commute with Mister Hanky.
After what seemed like interminable hours, the bus reached another stop, and I pushed my way out the back door, swallowing huge lungfuls of comparatively fresh city air as I scrambled down the steps and watched the bus continue on its journey, crammed with people whose personal levels of sociological tolerance I would hopefully never understand.
* * *
But I digress.
Came home on the bus, the way I usually do -- I have a car, but here in San Francisco it really doesn't make much sense to drive anywhere. Parking is abysmal, and you can spend quite a bit of time driving around looking for somewhere to leave your vehicle. And then when you get back home, you have to do the same thing before you can crash out for the night. Consequently, like in NYC, most of us take public transportation or taxis everywhere. When I have a hot date or just get annoyed waiting forever for a bus, I'll jump in a cab -- but that add$ up pretty quickly, so mostly it's the bus for me.
So I was waiting for the bus, freezing to death in an icy, windy downpour, and some grizzled old homeless guy who looked remarkably like Chuck Berry asked me for money. I said "Hey if I had any money, do you think I'd be standing here in the rain waiting for a bus?" He said "I get ya" and turned to walk away. Then he stopped, looked back at me and said "Do you know you look like Jerry Seinfeld?" which puzzled me, because I don't think I look at ALL like Jerry Seinfeld. So I said "Do you know you look like Little Richard?" To which he replied, "No, Chuck Berry. Everybody says Chuck Berry." And I said, "Yeah, HIM. Man, you GOTTA be Chuck Berry!" But did I stop there? Nope. I added "Chuck, my man -- you're my idol. Whenever I'm bangin' some girl, to this day, right as I hit that point of no return, I scream out 'Good Golly Miss Molly!' But I never seem to get a second date though. What is UP with that?" He just shook his head and walked away, laughing and waving his arm at me like I was the best entertainment he'd had all night. Then I noticed he didn't have a jacket, and here I was, freezing my ass off in my black cashmere trench coat -- the kind of coat you'd see Seinfeld wearing while waiting for a cab. And suddenly it all made sense, and I felt sorta absurd and serious, happy and sad at the same time. Ya know?
OK, fast-forward like twenty minutes. I was sitting there on the bus, and some guy went to jump out the door at his stop, dropping something at my feet in the process. I looked down, and it was a syringe. So...what does one do when a guy drops a syringe? Do you say, "excuse me, sir, but I believe you have misplaced your drug paraphernalia?" I mean, I was sure he'd be grateful, but it just felt kinda surreal. So I said "hey man, you dropped something," and he reached down and picked it up with a sheepish grin on his face. Then he disappeared into the night. I wondered if I'd helped him, or if I'd somehow ruined his one chance to change his life for the better. Then again, who am I to judge? I've done my share of substances -- though I've never gone the way of The Needle. Besides, he was probably a diabetic. I probably saved his life. Yeah, that's it.
* * *
One time I was riding on a half-empty bus with a typical, fairly mixed crowd in this diverse city -- a few other whites, a few asians, etc. The back of the bus was filled with a bunch of youngish black kids jostling and laughing, and the front/handicap seats were taken up by a very large black woman and, facing her, a very old, maybe seventy-five or eighty, white woman with a cane and those wraparound cataract-sunglasses that look like Arnold Schwarzenegger's ski goggles. I mention everybody's race because it's a big part of the story, as you will see.
The bus soon came to a stop and the driver, a black man in his forties, announced to the old white woman that this was her stop. Apparently, she'd requested that he tell her when to get off the bus, or else he knew her as a regular rider. I guess she didn't hear him; perhaps in addition to being almost blind, she was almost deaf. She was pretty old -- but she appeared to be just a kindly old woman who needed some assistance.
Anyway, after telling her twice, the man reached around and tapped her gently on her shrivelled hand as it rested on the top of her cane, repeating that this was her stop. Or at least he TRIED to repeat it. He got about halfway through with his sentence when this frail, up until now silent old white woman yelled, in a loud voice with a distinctly Alabama accent, "YOU GET YOUR BLACK HANDS OFFA ME, NIGGER!"
Now, I was born and raised on the West Coast, mostly the suburbs up until a decade or so ago when I decided to become a city-dweller. My family was pretty fucked-up in a lot of ways, but overt racism was never something I was exposed to, at least not in such a direct and hateful way. It bothers me to even TYPE that word, and here was this crazy old woman SCREAMING it on a bus where she and I were clearly a racial minority. The driver seemed stunned, like it had come completely out of the blue. The woman across from her had her enormous jaw pretty much on the floor, and the entire bus was completely silent, as if waiting for the riot to start. You could hear the proverbial pin drop as the old lady struggled to her feet, and nobody seemed quite sure what was going to happen next. San Francisco is certainly not a perfect town, and there are racial issues here like anywhere else. But this was a whole other thing; this was like 1950s Birmingham all of a sudden. If it were a guy like me who'd said the dreaded N-word, all hell would have broken loose. But this was a hundred-year-old crone who could barely walk, and so nobody knew how to react.
So the driver started laughing. I guess that was pretty much all he could think of to do.
You would think that the crazy old hag would simply hobble her racist ass off the bus without further comment at that point, right? Wrong answer. While we all sat there stunned, the bus frozen in some space-and-time-warped candid camera study in Jim Crow insanity, the old woman launched into a tirade. Yes, a tirade. Sounded like some meandering apocalyptic bible-thumping Klan speech, about how all "you people" were soon gonna be forced "back where you belong," wherever THAT might be.
At some point I decided I'd had enough, and I was a little worried that my much younger but still lily-white ass was gonna get lumped in with the crazy woman's, and subsequently stomped by the formerly harmless but now probably angry black teenage gangsta-wannabes in the back. I thought of just getting off the bus, but instead I opted, in the moment, to make a bold move.
I stood up and said, "hey grandma, we've all heard enough of your shit."
She turned to me with her ghostly twig-like finger pointed as if to say "race traitah" or "nigga-lovah" or one of those other weird-ass sayings you supposedly hear way down in The Bayou, but I didn't give her enough time. I picked up her purse and her small bag of dog-biscuits or whatever it was, and threw them out the door of the bus. Then I looked into that brown-tinted UV-coated Terminator windshield on her face and said, "now get the hell off this bus before I throw you out and snap every bone in that mummified hateful body of yours."
She seemed shocked that a white boy would talk to her like this, and, mumbling god-knows-what under her breath, she picked up the pace and shuffled down the stairs and out the door. I turned around, looked around the bus at the still-silent crowd, and suddenly everybody started laughing, whistling and clapping. I smiled and sat back down, feeling just a tiny bit like a hero, both disgusted and amused at the strange absurdity of it all.
* * *
Nothing compares, however, to the time when, on yet another miserably rainy day, I got onto a crowded bus near Chinatown, and as the double-doors slammed shut behind me, I was accosted by a smell so putrid it nearly made me gag. The bus was as filled with the smell as it was with people, but it didn't seem like anyone else noticed. My eyes were watering and my stomach was beginning to gurgle uncomfortably; the bus lurched back and forth in traffic and I pushed and shoved my way through the crowd toward the exit door, determined to get off at the next stop and get on a better-smelling bus. Or walk home in the rain; surely that would be better than this.
It was then that I saw it.
As I squirmed through the crowd of riders, I found a pocket of standing room. And right there, on the seat in front of me, was the source of the foul stench. It was, I kid you not, a pile of fresh human feces, exactly in the middle of the only unoccupied seat on the bus. I looked around me, and nobody seemed to think anything of it, other than having created a small bubble of space around it, in which I was now standing. There was an elderly asian woman on the seat next to it, casually reading what appeared to be a Chinese newspaper. Next to a pile of shit.
Now, I've been around the block a bit. I'm an urban guy. I've seen some crazy things, and some ugly things, and some downright hysterical things. But now I knew I had reached what would be the pinnacle of my urban experience. Because at some point, quite recently, in the middle of a crowded bus, someone had simply dropped trou and taken a crap right there on the seat. And all the riders were pretending not to notice it. In fact, many of them had surely seen the previous owner of this horrid little sculpture as s/he created it. Perhaps the creature responsible was now standing nearby, or perhaps it was the woman with the newspaper. Most likely, the fecal performance artist was the only one with the good sense to have actually exited the bus in a hurry already.
All that I knew for sure was that I had to get off that bus, or I'd be adding the regurgitated contents of my own entrails right there next to it, and likely splattered on some of the seemingly oblivious patrons of this vehicle. For a brief moment, I wondered what would happen then. Would they keep standing there while I threw up all over the place, simply ignoring the horrible spectacle? After all, none of them seemed to mind sharing their daily commute with Mister Hanky.
After what seemed like interminable hours, the bus reached another stop, and I pushed my way out the back door, swallowing huge lungfuls of comparatively fresh city air as I scrambled down the steps and watched the bus continue on its journey, crammed with people whose personal levels of sociological tolerance I would hopefully never understand.
* * *
posted by brioSphere at 1:21 AM
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