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.