Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Trans-It
It was a heavy ride, as the drivers say, all the way out from downtown. The bus was a tube of light and life, rolling back to the outer ‘hoods where I reside. I wore my buds in my ears and planted my butt in my self-appointed seat, doing what I could to smooth the passage of time as we bumped and stuttered along, potholes disturbing my orthography and the tempo of my tunes.
At stop after stop we waited interminably for deboarders to wriggle their way down to and out of the doors as new crowds clamored for a piece of the floorboards and a handful of strap or pole. You couldn’t avoid hearing conversations, noticing wardrobes, smelling things you’d just as soon not have smelled. Such environs drive people one of two ways - towards or away. I’ve seen it happen both ways.
“Away” is tough because there’s really no place to go; the distance folk seek to create is therefore psychological and they build scowlwalls around themselves in ineffectual attempts to push back the crowd. Such rides linger in my mind and on my palate as angry, acrid experiences.
More often it doesn’t go down that way. What usually happens is that we reach a point where most all of us recognize, individually, that the crowd around us has overwhelmed our proxemic limits, and despite our preference for defensible personal space we respond by reorienting our attitude toward the crowd. It takes too much energy to resent our unwilling neighbors, and to do so would merely invoke their reciprocal resentment in return. So we glance around and see our compadres, cheeks by our jowls, glancing back at us, and despite ourselves we start to laugh. People talk, first in commiseration but then in solidarity. People find themselves more willing to listen to each other, to share, to communicate. We become allies. These incidents are less uncomfortable than they might be, thanks to a rapid reweaving of the social fabric.
This was one of those rides.
It’s unusual for things on board my bus to stay so crowded that I need to give up my seat as far west as Masonic, but this time I was forced vertical by an old woman boarding with shopping bags just fifteen minutes or so from my home. I’d been lucky to have had a seat for so long but I wasn’t going to sit while ol’ Po-Po stood with two sacks of produce, so there I was, up in the thick of the mobscene at last. I found some space near the door, where just ahead of me a lovely young office wench had established a spot for herself. We stood and swayed along with everyone else and I kept my earbuds in and the volume high. Sure, we were all getting along fine, one big happy mass transit family and all that goodness, but I was there to get home, not to make new friends. Nobody held it against me. However, I did have to shut down the ‘pod eventually. It was making eavesdropping impossible.
A ragged man had boarded at the door near which I stood. His hair was kinky and greasy; his skin shone with grease and dirt. He was short and slightly built, his clothes shabby and his eyes restless. He smiled widely and frequently, using his whole face. He seemed inappropriately eager to bond with his fellow passengers. I sensed instability and kept him at arm’s length.
The young lovely ahead of me was less circumspect, and I watched as he snared her into a conversation. I had to admire his technique. Though I couldn’t yet hear them through the music in my ears, I could see that he was asking about our coordinates - what street, what time, what next. She was unable to extricate herself, mired in adjacency, too friendly and helpful to shut him down like the dog he was. And true to his ravenous canine nature, once he’d gotten in a good bite he was not about to let go. I hit “pause” and hovered attentively.
“Too crowded, hee, what a lot of people, eh?” His question was pointless, inviting no response and merely bringing her attention to the circumstances without which she would never have spoken to him in the first place. Her rueful grin required no further amplification. He regrouped and assayed a fresh tack. “Thas’ a nice coat.” She glanced down to her well-formed, well-dressed self. “Wazzat, wool? Wool’s warm.”
She nodded. “Yes, wool. Like yours,” she added, drawing a comparison between her designer outerwear and his old pea coat, blue yarn pilling and stained with blots and dribbles. He seized on the connection. “Oyez, this is a nice warm coat, I got it at the Salvation Army, nice an’ warm.” Her tight little smile spoke volumes to me but to him it appeared to be unintelligible. His manic conversational train careened along, dragging her with it like an unwilling stowaway.
He lowered his eyes to his haphazard wardrobe, opened his coat, plucked at the nondescript garment beneath it, and asked: “What about this shirt?”
“What about it?” It was the closest thing she had to a snappy comeback.
“It’s a woman’s shirt, isn’t it? Isn’t this a woman’s shirt?”
I took a gander too. The shirt was collared, buttoned left-over-right, unpatterened, unpressed. It was expressly unspecial. I didn’t notice anything feminine about it. The woman, whom I suspected possessed a keener eye than I as to such matters, knit her brows a little. “I don’t think so,” she earnestly replied. “No, you’re okay.”
“Naw you can tell me, I arready know.”
“I would tell you. It’s not.”
The dirty greasy man cast his gaze upon his clothes, seemingly trying to reconcile the advice he was getting with some lingering sense of sartorial impropriety. The bus was, by now, waiting at the light at Park Presidio, and I snuck a little closer to the door for my impending escape. The young lovely caught my eye as I eased past. “My stop’s next,” I explained. In palpable relief to be speaking to a person of demonstrably regular personal maintenance, she admitted, “Wish mine was.”
“Get off here,” I suggested, “and catch the next one.”
But she didn’t. She chose, for some reason, to stay on the still-crowded bus, talking to the greasy man. When I left her, despite her expressed discomfiture, I think I saw her crack a tiny, but genuine, smile.
