Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Back Off the Bus

I was in a challenging phase.  I’d already been out of work for too long; I had begun to entertain my depression as one endures a revered but disliked grandparent.  I had to go down to the EDD - “Employment Development,” or the unemployment office, which was the sort of activity I could count on to deflate my mood even further.The office had thoughtfully been sited in an area of high local usage, down in the lower inner mission.  I rode two busses to get there at a time when my car was still my primary mode of transportation, so the trip down in itself took me rather out of my element.  As I got off the bus my feet felt foreign on the pavement, and the landscape bristled with rejection - of every kind and towards us all, each of us individually and all of us as a group.

The office itself brought a fresnel focus to the misery, served as a pit into which it could be concentrated for wallowing.  People from all over the city, every walk of life, all sharing only a sudden vocational bankruptcy, a ragged hole punched through the middle of their meal ticket, stood around waiting for their slice of the dole.  And lord love me I was one of them. 

I completed my business, whatever it was, and then trudged outside again into the tarnished sunshine and across the trash-strewn street to wait for my bus back to my bus back home.  I did as was being done - kept my hands in my pockets and my eyes on my shoes. By the time the bus lurched up in a cloud of diesel exhaust and bitterness, there were a fair number of us waiting to board.  I wove myself among them as best I could and took a seat like everybody else did. I’d completed a very unpleasant, somewhat humiliating task, and just felt relief to be on my way back to terra cognita, if not firma.  I really didn’t notice that I was the only person on the bus who looked remotely european in ancestry.  And religious distinctions were certainly the furthest thing from my mind.

These circumstances came into clear relief, though, pretty much as soon as the bus started rolling. “‘Fuck is that doing here?,” I heard muttered behind me. My ears pricked at the possibility of an interesting conversation as the voice - female, hoarse, crude of content and articulation - continued: “Think he better than us.  Think he so fuckin’ great.  Fuckin’ asshole.  Jew trash. He ain’t so big. Christ-killin trash.  You hear me, kike?  This is our bus. Get the fuck offa it before we kick your fuckin’ ass.”

The voice was low but loud enough for me to hear clearly as she growled invectives at the back of my head.  I wanted so badly to turn and look at her but I was afraid that would only infuriate her further.  I just stared into my lap and tried to experience my feelings.  I had been typed and graded by the color of my skin and the shape of my nose - and I’d been found wanting.  A woman who knew nothing, absolutely nothing about me, knew that she hated me with a libelous fury.  My stomach knotted; my heart burned.  If only she knew me, I thought - if only I could explain it to her, help her understand… but I knew that would only backfire, make her angrier and crueller.  I really had no recourse.  I was on her bus, I was alone and no words that fell from my lips could have made up for her lifetime of expectations - positive ones cruelly dashed, and negative ones insidiously reinforced.  I could feel faces all around me, some vaguely embarassed, most quietly revelling in schadenfreude (though, I thought as I thought it, not under that name) - not wanting to own the small satisfaction they took in my castigation.

The woman giving voice to the offense that my very presence inflicted on her soul, was older than I - deep creases lined her face and her hair was shot with silver. I don’t recall how she wore it.  I just recall looking into her eyes as I got up to leave her bus, walked past her to the door.  With my eyes I tried to convey an apology on behalf of others; a confession of my own prejudices, known and hidden; a promise that I was not who she seemed to think I was; a plea for reconciliation.

It was too much. It didn’t fit into the mote in her sepia eye.  She watched me walk past as she might watch a stray dog drag itself outside to die.