The Bus Stop.

I check the internet screen on my phone for the fourth time to verify the time the bus will arrive to the transit center. 9:33 AM. I check the internet screen on my phone for the fifth time to verify the address of the transit center. Literally one block from my apartment. Still, I nervously watch the clock and mentally map out what time I need to leave and the path my steps need to take. As a 28-year-old Non-Driver, I have become highly neurotic about partaking in any form of transportation whatsoever. Usually a lot of time is wasted in the over-preparation I deem necessary for any sort of departure, and usually much sweating is involved. Okay, fine. Always much sweating is involved.

I arrive at the transit center. 9:12 AM. Damnit. I'm much earlier than I need to be. I sigh. I watch a mother distractedly assist her toddler in climbing the steps of the city building behind my green iron bench. Huh. That child is incredibly small to be walking already. The steps are as tall as she is. I smile, remembering my niece's attempts to charge up the Mission steps last summer. She had wild white curls and large pink sunglasses and kept leaning back precariously so that if I'd let go of her hands she'd have toppled head-over-heels to the Mission Square below. I had protectively clutched her tiny fingers and inwardly bathed in her need for me. Watching the mother and her infant, it keeps striking me that my niece had to have been twice the size of this miniature doll dallying before me.

A yell pulls my attention in the opposite direction. One street up, a weary, travel-ridden man pulls a suitcase on wheels toward my block. He is hailed by a 350-pound man leaning against a cement wall encompassing a field of government grass. The large man hollers again, waving an arm whose cellulite ripple appears clearly to me even from this distance. His tablecloth of a shirt leaves him wanting, as it fails to cover a four-inch peepshow of his belly's curving underside. I stare. He can't see me. He's the one yelling and drawing attention to himself. Self-consciously I tug at my own clothing, pulling it away from my own overly soft parts, trying to make it render me hidden.

I didn't realize the mom and wee walking girl had joined me on the distastefully dark green bench. Really though. Such a bad color. I guess what it is good for is stating, "this is a public bench." I guess that's the point. Okay, fine. The mom is talking loudly to her daughter. Remarking on her every move. Narrating in a tone of utter adoration. I am three inches away. I feel it is rude not to acknowledge their presence. "She's adorable," I say encouragingly. The mom continues to speak to the child. She looks older than me. (How old do I look?) She acts younger than me. (How young do I act?) I pick up my phone and press buttons, looking busy.

The mom's phone must have rung because all of a sudden she's speaking to someone on the other end of the line: "Hi. Yeah, but I have such a headache. I have a concussion." My ears impolitely perk up out of interest in what is none of my business. "There's brain damage." Shit. Was she in an accident? "And my skull is split open in the back." What the fuck? Thankful for the shield provided by my sunglasses, I am now staring at the profile of her ponytail, examining her for any evidence of injury. "No, it was the baby's daddy." My heart drops. "Yeah, there was a knock on my door at midnight last night, some woman saying she was the sheriff. My mom answered. Turns out it was his sister and him. She works for the police department.... Yeah, I know. She was all in uniform and everything. My mom let them in and he started asking for the baby." The tiny girl takes a bag of chips from her mother's purse and dumps the contents all over their situation. "Shit! Oh my God, you kidding me? No, it's fine... she just-- anyway, she was sleeping so I told him he couldn't have her." She's angrily brushing corn puffs off of her lap and shooing her daughter away. "He got mad, came after me. My mom called the cops. The real cops. They almost arrested his sister since she used the sheriff thing to get inside. He kept saying he wanted to take the baby, but she already has a black eye from him so they didn't let him." My jaw drops to the sidewalk where my stomach has already plummeted. I now see the purple "U" under the tiny, baby girl's left eye. I feel sick. The mom's voice is so nonchalant. She might as well be describing a botched manicure she received. There is no fear, no passion... nothing but a slight annoyance in her tone. I am staring at the child. Is it okay that this is her mom? I think of my best friend and her baby that I am about to see. It makes me feel even more sick, knowing that the opposite spectrum of complete care and responsibility exists and that this child will never know it.

The bus pulls up.

The door opens, two people step off. It's 9:22 AM. Eleven minutes early? I approach the driver. "Is this going to Atascadero?" He frowns at me. "Eventually, yeah. Let me let some people off before we think about that, will ya?" I take both a mental and physical step back, apologizing profusely for my perfectly acceptable question that invoked his unprofessional demeanor.

A line is starting to form next to me. A young black man with a sparse goatee and an attitudinal jaw stance that makes his lips puckered pushes in front of all of us and forces his way onto the bus. I watch patiently, organically, as the bus driver forces him right back off. He drops his shoulders in an intentional drawling limp and mutters irritably under his breath. He turns to me but looks past me. "Sheeiiit. This thing s'posed to leave at 9:33. It's 9:33, mutherfuckas. The fuck." I do a double take in between checking the time on my phone (it's only 9:20) and looking down from his face as I realize that he is a she. A she with a goatee. Or is she? Gender ambiguity thrills me. I am so curious about it, fascinated by it, jealous of it. I'm flummoxed by him-her. As I'm Ray-Charles-sunglass staring at him-her trying to form a more definitive opinion about his-her gender intentions, a frail meth-addled woman ambles by skeletally. She reminds me of Portland. But without the nostalgia. Another seemingly meth-wrought victim stumbles jerkily off the bus. His left trouser leg is taped up in tree-ring fashion. He limps heavily away from the vehicle, northbound. I wonder if the masking tape is helping or hindering his situation.

A man in his thirties rolls up on a skateboard just as the Goateed Wo-Man turns to address me: "Yo. You know-- can-- hey, is it walking distance to the-- to the... the, uh Cal Poly... educational... facilities?" His-her speech is rapid, jumbled, amplified by something, whether it be a substance or crossed brain wires. I pause, swiveling my head and shoulders, trying to place my bearings on where I am and if I do in fact know how far away the Cal Poly campus is. I don't. I defer to The Skateboarder, relieved that he's there to bail me out. He points in a very exact direction and says it's about ten blocks away. Goateed Wo-Man explodes. "Ten blocks? Ten blocks?! You call that walking distance?!!" He-she turns away in a huff, shaking his-her head. 

I smile apologetically, gratefully, at The Skateboarder.  He shrugs. "I guess that doesn't seem so far when you're used to skating all around town." He wears a backpack. He seems kind. Suddenly Goateed Wo-Man is back in the conversation. 

"You got a license for that thing?" He-she is pointing at the skateboard. The Skateboarder shakes his head no, makes a small joke about how he probably wouldn't pass the test to obtain the license if it were needed. I'm getting uncomfortable about all this talk about "licenses" and "the passing of tests" to get them. It's a touchy subject for me. Goateed Wo-Man seems riled up about the topic; he-she bounces in his-her bright white Nikes and says loudly, "What about having them big ol' boobies though--- can't put your seatbelt on and shit." My ears are frowning at the direction the conversation is turning. 

The Skateboarder laughs, unfortunately. I scoot a couple of inches away from him. I feel like I've lost a friend. He rallies back to Goateed Wo-Man: "Yeah, man, all you need is some big titties and big ol' doe eyes, and you don't need a license for nothing."

Why am I so near this conversation? I turn back to the line forming in front of the bus. Oh no. It's him. Goddamnit. I unhappily eye the elderly, crabby man with thinning slicked-back hair that I had to kick out of my restaurant last year. He had come in with a rolling suitcase and a file of papers and he kept shuffling from part to part of the building, aggressively starting and stopping without seeming purpose. When I approached him and asked him if I could be of assistance, he told me to stop following him. Naturally, being the manager (mom) of the restaurant, I became concernedly aware of his actions and watched him after that to see if he was going to join us as a diner or what the fuck else he might be doing. He became upset at seeing me and yelled to my bartender that I was a "stalker" and shouted at me to leave him alone, finally selecting a bar stool upon which to roost. I immediately un-roosted him and let him know he wasn't welcome. It was very unpleasant trying to escort him from the building amidst the barrage of insults he was hurling at me. Plus he wasn't efficiently steering his rolling suitcase and it kept hitting the walls and my feet, which made it very difficult to look cool/confident/composed in any professional capacity because I kept tripping on it while awkwardly ushering him toward the front door. Today he appears to be sans rolling suitcase but he's clutching his paper files to his chest. My peripheral vision becomes guarded against his recognition.

Goateed Wo-Man is now honing in on Angry File Man and starting to crowd his space. I watch excitedly, keeping my face cold, distant so that neither one of them sees me as a comrade. This seems important in the moment.

He-she makes his-her move. "Hey. You got a cigarette, maa-aan? I see you smokin' up there."

Angry File Man stalls. When he speaks, it is in a cold, low voice: "I... have already given out... half a pack." He looks defensive. Fierce. I've always known he's not good. It's his eyes. There's something bad, awful behind them. He kicks at the pavement. "I'm smoking half-cigarettes. That's how few I've got, and how many I've given." His body language is feigned casual but his aura screams of intensity. It's an inorganic ebb and flow, the way he talks and enunciates.

Goateed Wo-Man retaliates: "I don't need your fucking life story, man. Sheeeeeiit." He-she turns to an audience of no one. "You don't got a cigarette, just fucking say so. I don't wanna hear your shit. I mean, fuh-uck!"

Angry File Man gets even angrier. This is his moment today to matter, I can just feel it. He starts to stammer, some spit happens: "I--I'm not telling you my life story! Fuck! You can't have one of my cigarettes. Okay?! Okay?! You can't! Okay! Fuck!" He mutters some obscenities to his shoes, to the sidewalk. "Get your own, you stupid bitch!"

My body bristles. I feel my cells respond protectively, relating to the woman in the genderly ambiguous situation next to me. Angry File Man is the enemy. I nervously prepare for the tension between the two of them to escalate and am surprised that they each resort to an internal battle-- static electricity crackles around their skulls as they mutter fitfully to themselves. 

The Driver starts allowing passengers to enter the bus. I wait. I always do. I hold doors for people, forever, even if it's an uncomfortable amount of time before they cross the walkway to where I'm standing in a bout of public chivalry. This is probably worse for them in the long run, because they then feel like they have to rush... but... I do it. I'm an awkward person.

I let everyone crowd on the bus before me. I hang back, checking for dawdling passengers. Angry File Man is still behind me. "You going on?" His voice is deep. I feel surprised by the note of humanity in it.

I quietly, conservatively respond. The intense, aggressive insanity around me has humbled my volume. "I am."

He jerks his head. "Go on. I'll wait." I smile and nod in half-cautious, half-genuine appreciation. "But I'll only give you 'til the count of three. Because this is fucking ridiculous." He furls his eyebrows, grasps his files. "Ten... nine--" he counts down from what is clearly much more than "three."

I stare at him for point-five seconds. I am now The Angry Woman. 

I get on the bus, fumbling with the dollar bills I've been neurotically keeping accessible for this moment. Cash transactions also make me nervous. I can't smooth out the paper money to make it go in the electronic slot. I feel the weight of the world pressing in behind me impatiently. Years go by. I've had three strokes, two heart attacks. Finally The Driver takes pity on me. "That'll do. Go on, you're good." The look exchanged between us haunts me: suddenly I am a young mother in a village under siege, grasping my ash-streaked infant to my chest as I hurtle past fires, and The Driver is the strong hand pulling us in to his shelter. No words are spoken. The Look is all we need.

I have to choose a seat. The war rages on around me. 

I check the internet screen on my phone for the fourth time to verify the time the bus will arrive to the transit center. 9:33 AM. I check the internet screen on my phone for the fifth time to verify the address of the transit center. Literally one block from my apartment. Still, I nervously watch the clock and mentally map out what time I need to leave and the path my steps need to take. As a 28-year-old Non-Driver, I have become highly neurotic about partaking in any form of transportation whatsoever. Usually a lot of time is wasted in the over-preparation I deem necessary for any sort of departure, and usually much sweating is involved. Okay, fine. Always much sweating is involved.

I arrive at the transit center. 9:12 AM. Damnit. I'm much earlier than I need to be. I sigh. I watch a mother distractedly assist her toddler in climbing the steps of the city building behind my green iron bench. Huh. That child is incredibly small to be walking already. The steps are as tall as she is. I smile, remembering my niece's attempts to charge up the Mission steps last summer. She had wild white curls and large pink sunglasses and kept leaning back precariously so that if I'd let go of her hands she'd have toppled head-over-heels to the Mission Square below. I had protectively clutched her tiny fingers and inwardly bathed in her need for me. Watching the mother and her infant, it keeps striking me that my niece had to have been twice the size of this miniature doll dallying before me.

A yell pulls my attention in the opposite direction. One street up, a weary, travel-ridden man pulls a suitcase on wheels toward my block. He is hailed by a 350-pound man leaning against a cement wall encompassing a field of government grass. The large man hollers again, waving an arm whose cellulite ripple appears clearly to me even from this distance. His tablecloth of a shirt leaves him wanting, as it fails to cover a four-inch peepshow of his belly's curving underside. I stare. He can't see me. He's the one yelling and drawing attention to himself. Self-consciously I tug at my own clothing, pulling it away from my own overly soft parts, trying to make it render me hidden.

I didn't realize the mom and wee walking girl had joined me on the distastefully dark green bench. Really though. Such a bad color. I guess what it is good for is stating, "this is a public bench." I guess that's the point. Okay, fine. The mom is talking loudly to her daughter. Remarking on her every move. Narrating in a tone of utter adoration. I am three inches away. I feel it is rude not to acknowledge their presence. "She's adorable," I say encouragingly. The mom continues to speak to the child. She looks older than me. (How old do I look?) She acts younger than me. (How young do I act?) I pick up my phone and press buttons, looking busy.

The mom's phone must have rung because all of a sudden she's speaking to someone on the other end of the line: "Hi. Yeah, but I have such a headache. I have a concussion." My ears impolitely perk up out of interest in what is none of my business. "There's brain damage." Shit. Was she in an accident? "And my skull is split open in the back." What the fuck? Thankful for the shield provided by my sunglasses, I am now staring at the profile of her ponytail, examining her for any evidence of injury. "No, it was the baby's daddy." My heart drops. "Yeah, there was a knock on my door at midnight last night, some woman saying she was the sheriff. My mom answered. Turns out it was his sister and him. She works for the police department.... Yeah, I know. She was all in uniform and everything. My mom let them in and he started asking for the baby." The tiny girl takes a bag of chips from her mother's purse and dumps the contents all over their situation. "Shit! Oh my God, you kidding me? No, it's fine... she just-- anyway, she was sleeping so I told him he couldn't have her." She's angrily brushing corn puffs off of her lap and shooing her daughter away. "He got mad, came after me. My mom called the cops. The real cops. They almost arrested his sister since she used the sheriff thing to get inside. He kept saying he wanted to take the baby, but she already has a black eye from him so they didn't let him." My jaw drops to the sidewalk where my stomach has already plummeted. I now see the purple "U" under the tiny, baby girl's left eye. I feel sick. The mom's voice is so nonchalant. She might as well be describing a botched manicure she received. There is no fear, no passion... nothing but a slight annoyance in her tone. I am staring at the child. Is it okay that this is her mom? I think of my best friend and her baby that I am about to see. It makes me feel even more sick, knowing that the opposite spectrum of complete care and responsibility exists and that this child will never know it.

The bus pulls up.

The door opens, two people step off. It's 9:22 AM. Eleven minutes early? I approach the driver. "Is this going to Atascadero?" He frowns at me. "Eventually, yeah. Let me let some people off before we think about that, will ya?" I take both a mental and physical step back, apologizing profusely for my perfectly acceptable question that invoked his unprofessional demeanor.

A line is starting to form next to me. A young black man with a sparse goatee and an attitudinal jaw stance that makes his lips puckered pushes in front of all of us and forces his way onto the bus. I watch patiently, organically, as the bus driver forces him right back off. He drops his shoulders in an intentional drawling limp and mutters irritably under his breath. He turns to me but looks past me. "Sheeiiit. This thing s'posed to leave at 9:33. It's 9:33, mutherfuckas. The fuck." I do a double take in between checking the time on my phone (it's only 9:20) and looking down from his face as I realize that he is a she. A she with a goatee. Or is she? Gender ambiguity thrills me. I am so curious about it, fascinated by it, jealous of it. I'm flummoxed by him-her. As I'm Ray-Charles-sunglass staring at him-her trying to form a more definitive opinion about his-her gender intentions, a frail meth-addled woman ambles by skeletally. She reminds me of Portland. But without the nostalgia. Another seemingly meth-wrought victim stumbles jerkily off the bus. His left trouser leg is taped up in tree-ring fashion. He limps heavily away from the vehicle, northbound. I wonder if the masking tape is helping or hindering his situation.

A man in his thirties rolls up on a skateboard just as the Goateed Wo-Man turns to address me: "Yo. You know-- can-- hey, is it walking distance to the-- to the... the, uh Cal Poly... educational... facilities?" His-her speech is rapid, jumbled, amplified by something, whether it be a substance or crossed brain wires. I pause, swiveling my head and shoulders, trying to place my bearings on where I am and if I do in fact know how far away the Cal Poly campus is. I don't. I defer to The Skateboarder, relieved that he's there to bail me out. He points in a very exact direction and says it's about ten blocks away. Goateed Wo-Man explodes. "Ten blocks? Ten blocks?! You call that walking distance?!!" He-she turns away in a huff, shaking his-her head. 

I smile apologetically, gratefully, at The Skateboarder.  He shrugs. "I guess that doesn't seem so far when you're used to skating all around town." He wears a backpack. He seems kind. Suddenly Goateed Wo-Man is back in the conversation. 

"You got a license for that thing?" He-she is pointing at the skateboard. The Skateboarder shakes his head no, makes a small joke about how he probably wouldn't pass the test to obtain the license if it were needed. I'm getting uncomfortable about all this talk about "licenses" and "the passing of tests" to get them. It's a touchy subject for me. Goateed Wo-Man seems riled up about the topic; he-she bounces in his-her bright white Nikes and says loudly, "What about having them big ol' boobies though--- can't put your seatbelt on and shit." My ears are frowning at the direction the conversation is turning. 

The Skateboarder laughs, unfortunately. I scoot a couple of inches away from him. I feel like I've lost a friend. He rallies back to Goateed Wo-Man: "Yeah, man, all you need is some big titties and big ol' doe eyes, and you don't need a license for nothing."

Why am I so near this conversation? I turn back to the line forming in front of the bus. Oh no. It's him. Goddamnit. I unhappily eye the elderly, crabby man with thinning slicked-back hair that I had to kick out of my restaurant last year. He had come in with a rolling suitcase and a file of papers and he kept shuffling from part to part of the building, aggressively starting and stopping without seeming purpose. When I approached him and asked him if I could be of assistance, he told me to stop following him. Naturally, being the manager (mom) of the restaurant, I became concernedly aware of his actions and watched him after that to see if he was going to join us as a diner or what the fuck else he might be doing. He became upset at seeing me and yelled to my bartender that I was a "stalker" and shouted at me to leave him alone, finally selecting a bar stool upon which to roost. I immediately un-roosted him and let him know he wasn't welcome. It was very unpleasant trying to escort him from the building amidst the barrage of insults he was hurling at me. Plus he wasn't efficiently steering his rolling suitcase and it kept hitting the walls and my feet, which made it very difficult to look cool/confident/composed in any professional capacity because I kept tripping on it while awkwardly ushering him toward the front door. Today he appears to be sans rolling suitcase but he's clutching his paper files to his chest. My peripheral vision becomes guarded against his recognition.

Goateed Wo-Man is now honing in on Angry File Man and starting to crowd his space. I watch excitedly, keeping my face cold, distant so that neither one of them sees me as a comrade. This seems important in the moment.

He-she makes his-her move. "Hey. You got a cigarette, maa-aan? I see you smokin' up there."

Angry File Man stalls. When he speaks, it is in a cold, low voice: "I... have already given out... half a pack." He looks defensive. Fierce. I've always known he's not good. It's his eyes. There's something bad, awful behind them. He kicks at the pavement. "I'm smoking half-cigarettes. That's how few I've got, and how many I've given." His body language is feigned casual but his aura screams of intensity. It's an inorganic ebb and flow, the way he talks and enunciates.

Goateed Wo-Man retaliates: "I don't need your fucking life story, man. Sheeeeeiit." He-she turns to an audience of no one. "You don't got a cigarette, just fucking say so. I don't wanna hear your shit. I mean, fuh-uck!"

Angry File Man gets even angrier. This is his moment today to matter, I can just feel it. He starts to stammer, some spit happens: "I--I'm not telling you my life story! Fuck! You can't have one of my cigarettes. Okay?! Okay?! You can't! Okay! Fuck!" He mutters some obscenities to his shoes, to the sidewalk. "Get your own, you stupid bitch!"

My body bristles. I feel my cells respond protectively, relating to the woman in the genderly ambiguous situation next to me. Angry File Man is the enemy. I nervously prepare for the tension between the two of them to escalate and am surprised that they each resort to an internal battle-- static electricity crackles around their skulls as they mutter fitfully to themselves. 

The Driver starts allowing passengers to enter the bus. I wait. I always do. I hold doors for people, forever, even if it's an uncomfortable amount of time before they cross the walkway to where I'm standing in a bout of public chivalry. This is probably worse for them in the long run, because they then feel like they have to rush... but... I do it. I'm an awkward person.

I let everyone crowd on the bus before me. I hang back, checking for dawdling passengers. Angry File Man is still behind me. "You going on?" His voice is deep. I feel surprised by the note of humanity in it.

I quietly, conservatively respond. The intense, aggressive insanity around me has humbled my volume. "I am."

He jerks his head. "Go on. I'll wait." I smile and nod in half-cautious, half-genuine appreciation. "But I'll only give you 'til the count of three. Because this is fucking ridiculous." He furls his eyebrows, grasps his files. "Ten... nine--" he counts down from what is clearly much more than "three."

I stare at him for point-five seconds. I am now The Angry Woman. 

I get on the bus, fumbling with the dollar bills I've been neurotically keeping accessible for this moment. Cash transactions also make me nervous. I can't smooth out the paper money to make it go in the electronic slot. I feel the weight of the world pressing in behind me impatiently. Years go by. I've had three strokes, two heart attacks. Finally The Driver takes pity on me. "That'll do. Go on, you're good." The look exchanged between us haunts me: suddenly I am a young mother in a village under siege, grasping my ash-streaked infant to my chest as I hurtle past fires, and The Driver is the strong hand pulling us in to his shelter. No words are spoken. The Look is all we have. I will be forever grateful. 

I have to choose a seat. The war rages on around me.