The Old Man and the Seat

            Another comes on and another comes on
            Another one rides the bus
            Hey, who's gonna sit by you?

                        Al Yankovic

            The young man took the steps up into the bus in a leap and landed not far from where I sat. Facing the small number of inattentive passengers with his feet spread, eyes wide, and arms outstretched, he announced loudly, "They threw me out of the house. Said I'd broken every rule they had. Now where do the f***ers think I'm gonna stay?"

            Maybe he had to out-shout his earbuds. White spaghetti leads dangled past his teenage face -- eighteen or so, I guessed. Clean-shaven and not disheveled, he wore blue jeans, a t-shirt with a faded Beastie Boys logo, and sneakers. He was defiant and agitated.

            "I broke curfew a little bit, and some sonofabitch said I brought drugs into the house which is a goddamn lie. I said tell me who and I'll ask him to his face. And I know who the asshole is, but they wouldn't tell me. I asked Carolyn where's my check then. She said you paid the month, the money's gone. I said bullshit on that, so they piled my stuff on the porch. My sponsor's on vacation."

            The bus sat at the terminal, an un-busy hub in my small town. The driver got back on the bus and the boy walked past me and found a seat. The conversation continued behind me. A middle-aged couple with matching backpacks and ponytails sat across from the boy. Like him they were trudging the Road to Happy Destiny (see "The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous") and commiserated with him. They swapped stories about the unfairness of life, which AA meetings were rad and which ones sucked, sponsors who bailed, and how "this one dude I used to score from had over a year then went back out!" To their credit, they hung in there with the boy and talked him in off the ledge. They'd take him to a meeting.

            I was a rookie at this bus business - just hopping a ride home on a maiden voyage on our city's excellent transit system. I'd like to report that I was doing this out of respect for the environment or even to strike back at the thieves who manipulate gasoline prices. No, this expedient presented itself because I was in recovery from a lousy accident and wasn't able to drive. No better time, though, to see how part of my property tax was being spent, and also see who, um, "bus people" were.

            Across the aisle from me sat a tiny woman in a faded floral house dress. She wore a scarf over her gray hair, Russian peasant-like, and dead giveaway, had the gnarled hands of an undocumented cleaning lady. I thought at first she was hunched over rosary beads or was thumbing some sort of religious tract. Then she looked at me, smiled and asked, "Do you play Angry Birds?" In perfect English!

            She handed me her iPad. "How much would it cost them, really, to put WiFi on these buses? I need to email my broker. Did you see what the Footsie did today!" I didn't know which question to answer first. (Or what a "footsie" was, until I looked it up later. The British FTSE - stock exchange. Well, slap my forehead!)

            "No, I guess a lot, and no," I replied, handing her back her iPad. I whipped out my Blackberry, vintage 1998, and pretended to take a call. That would show her I was tech savvy -- until I noticed I was holding it backward.

            Just then, a disturbance broke out and people clambered to the windows. A trope in any number of monster flicks features a creature with enormous legs attached to its body. It strides through the city crushing automobiles and destroying streetlights and people as it goes. Maybe it was War of the Worlds, or The Fly, or The Monster that Devoured Cleveland -- I don't recall which. And here we had a normal-sized human, striding creature-like across an intersection, against the light of course, lifting his legs high in the air one after the other, and waving his arms like broken windmill vanes and snarling as he went.

            Up the concourse he came, this, the next passenger to approach our bus and seek admittance. He wasn't allowed on. Probably because he barked at the driver like Rin Tin Tin, or didn't have the correct fare. A few hearty howls and he stood down and strode off, shirttail flapping and arms waving and all the rest.

            Other passengers didn't seem as relieved as I was, but then the public transit menagerie was probably old hat to them. Either that or they actually dug horror movies.

            We pulled out of the station.

            Let me report how impressive these vehicles are. Some are over thirty feet long, eight or so feet wide, and ten to eleven feet tall, and inside they're cleaner than my house. Windows are wide and tall with transoms at the top to let in fresh air.

            The seats are comfortable if not cushy. The driver's seat is a marvel of modern ergonomics, physics, and La-Z-Boy: a cushioned seat and back, hydraulic lifts to adjust to weight, steering wheel in just the right place, and enough assorted dash and steering post levers and dials to make an airline pilot proud. She or he has convex mirrors to view the interior, a microphone to announce stops, a radio to headquarters, a rearview mirror the size of Nebraska, and a wrap-around front windshield that reminded me of the Starship Enterprise.

            A pedestal stands next to the driver's seat to receive coins, bills, or swipeable passcards with magnetic strips. A drink holder attached to the pedestal and two small fans on the front of it add to the operator's comfort level and to the ambience as well. The bright yellow cord above the windows runs the length of the bus and when pulled, sounds a pleasant chime to request the next stop. Not the offensive claxon I expected.

            At a stop, the bus "kneels" to the curb to receive passengers that might have difficulty entering. I thought it was just for me, naturally, until my wife informed me they do that most of the time. All in all, I began to think "Coach," not bus. "Custom Coach," maybe. How about this for a working title: "Custom Coach Cultural Kaleidoscope"? My completely unscientific guess is that ten percent of passengers are mobility challenged; maybe another ten percent are unable or unlikely to drive a car. "Mobility challenged" included me, of course.

            Bus people are quite polite. No one seemed to begrudge me taking up an additional seat for my cane. The characters singled out in this narrative to the contrary notwithstanding, riders are quiet, don't chew their food loudly, and invariably say "thank you" to the driver on departing.

            Bottom line: With my Medicare card, fifty cents a ride. Senior seating in the front. This is a great country!

            A young woman with a stroller, another with a toddler, two college students, a young man wearing a tie (headed to his job at Macy's no doubt), and a Starbucks barista I knew slightly all boarded. So did "Helmet Man" after affixing his 38-speed to the front of the bus and clambering down the aisle in those noisy shoes with clip-on cleats. Does it strike anyone but me as cheating to take the bike on the bus up the hill, then coast back down?

            Confession: If I sound snarky, you should know that the lousy accident referred to earlier occurred on a bicycle. I wrecked a beat-up hybrid affair that my son left behind when he flew the coop -- and because I'm too cheap to buy one of my own. That, and my helmet is really dorky; Helmet Man's looked like Lance Armstrong's. At any rate, he seated his no doubt performance-enhanced self down a few rows back, and off we went.

            Scenes of what transpired along the way include what follows, some difficult to watch.

            A man across from me and one row back had on a chartreuse vest like flaggers wear zipped up tight. Shiny black opaque glasses covered his eyes, tiny wire temples hooking around surprisingly small ears. He sat slouched, with his head tilted backward - except when from time to time he uncapped a white pint carton container like you buy ice cream in and started sucking out of it a milky, semi-gelatinous liquid the consistency of clotted cream. Bad enough, until it started slopping down his vest which he unsuccessfully tried to wipe off with both his hands. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to wipe off his mouth with the back of an already messy hand and left splotches of whatever-it-was on his face.

            He did this a couple of times over the next few blocks, then said goodbye to whoever he was listening to through an earpiece and got off the bus. I go on at this length because (a) it was truly revolting and (b) it taught me a lesson; to wit, I think others saw him do this, but in what is apparently the accustomed practice, no one visibly took notice. There must be a lot of this visual avoidance on a bus -- a kind of spatial-denial etiquette, if that's a phrase.

            A few stops later, a street person boarded - a frail woman with a dirty gray cloth bag in her hand, wearing a dirty gray dress and dirty gray knit socks that gathered around her ankles. She smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. I know because she chose a seat directly behind me.

            Later we were joined by a young boy, middle school I'd guess, carrying a brightly colored skateboard with a grinning skull decaled on it. He had three piercings in one ear and a long dangly Coptic cross hanging from a chain on the other. In typical banger style, his black chinos hung low, his black Chuck Taylors were untied, and a ratty black vest sort of covered his boyish chest. Full-on Goth wannabe.

            His bravado was palpably scary. He stared at me unfazed as he passed. So young! So full of a world he scarcely understood. So alone … except, I almost hoped, for the boyz in his `hood he was traveling to join. I thought about what might be one sentence I could give him. Son, can I buy you a cup of coffee? At which he'd just as likely yell that I was creeping him out. "Fag!" he'd yell.

            Visual avoidance and denial.

            Let me tell you about Lieutenant Sulu. Perched behind the Starship's massive window, our pilot wheeled the coach through narrow streets, past road construction, and in and out of stops with the precision of a surgeon. A fast and punctual surgeon. (Newton's little-known Fourth law of Inter-Transitory Motion: Large people-carrying objects may arrive at a stop late but must never, ever depart early.) Seated as I was in the "elderly and infirm" section parallel to the direction of travel and facing the corridor, the resulting lurches were sideways rather than backward and forward as our coach maneuvered along its route.

            Also, inside a coach this size perspective is skewed. It seems so much larger than it is. No way can he make that right-hand turn without taking out the stop sign; look out! person, we're turning left! But it worked, of course. Impossibly tight corners, suddenly emerging cars, pedestrians miraculously fleeing for their lives. All in a day's work. Eventually I stopped backseat driving.

            The ride smoothed out, and I pulled out my book, good old Hemingway "The Old Man and the Sea." I drifted off in the old man's prose ...

"... the fish was big, too big. It would never fit in the boat, but the boat rolled on and the people got on and off the bus. And it was grand. The fish fought, and the islands were fine and dark in the distance out past the blue bay. The old man taught the skateboard boy to fish but they were unlucky. The sun beat down somewhere ... "

            I woke up! Damn, where was my stop? Some time ago for sure. My cane had slipped off the seat and lay on the floor. At the next stop, the driver told me to just stay on because we'd circle back that way soon enough.

            The coach had emptied somewhat. The AA couple and their young charge had departed. So had the skateboarder and the smoky woman behind me.

            Instead, it turned out I had been joined by a pretty young woman. She sat down in the first row of seats facing front, just adjacent to where I sat. I decided to try to break bus etiquette. Bingo! A connection.

            Our conversation revealed that she was from the Midwest, newly arrived in the state and on her way to work. She and her boyfriend, an engineer by trade, had just moved into their first house. The boyfriend rebuilt mountain bikes in his spare time while he looked for a job. She worked part-time for a local non-profit I knew of and was on her way to work.

            She was seriously attractive. Her face lit up as she talked, the sun slanting across her blond hair with cotton-candy pink highlights and glasses to match. There was a tattoo of a butterfly peeking out of her modest peasant blouse. What a change! What a counterbalance. Bright colors in the Custom Coach Culture Kaleidoscope, indeed. My chakras realigned. I realized I was old and infirm, but not dead.

            Not a bad seat after all.