Tuesday, January 03, 2006
My Neighbor Seat
Well hello again Blogland, and welcome to 2006. My ’05 ended delightfully with a multi-day reunion party with the inlaws out here in Maryland, full of laughing children and healthful exercise and life-shortening meals and comfortable beds and beloved friends and entertaining movies and several excellent drunken games of Fluxx. Beer, indeed, was consumed, and lobster was grilled, and gourmet marshmallows and poundcake were dipped into molten chocolate, and lo, all was fitting and fine. Until, of course, today, when we were the last to leave the partyhouse and wound up getting to the airport only an hour and fifteen minutes ahead of our flight, which was not even enough time to work through the dreadful slowmoving line to check in. We missed the flight, and now I’m back with the inlaws waiting to try again tomorrow. This means an extra day of vacation burned and wasted, and a quiet opportunity to contemplate my recent experiences while the family watches Finding Nemo on tv.
Recent experiences: great times with great kids. A trip to the airport that turned out differently than I’d expected. Several chance meetings with a very wide variety of gracious people, who were all doing their best under extremely adverse circumstances. And all this brings to mind that I have yet to offer up a Transit Tale I wrote a few weeks ago. Which further brings to mind the notion to post it now, in the hopes of inspiring in the universe a more positive outcome to my return trip to Dulles tomorrow.
Therefore, without additional preface, I offer this recollection of a particular ride home from work. May it find you in good health, and leave us both a bit better prepared for the opportunities with which 2006 will be presenting us.
As I stood at the bus landing that night I was thinking that it had been a long time since I’d written about freaks on the bus, and this led me to wish idly that I’d find a new Transit Tale to write on my ride home. Lesson learned: Stop idly wishing for stuff. Think it through, and only wish for something if I really want it.
The ride began typically – I boarded the bus at the terminal, took my usual seat, and started watching. The bus filled slowly but steadily, with the typical assortment of wageslaves and bargainseekers. They filled up all the seats across from me, all the seats down behind the articulation, all the seats up front that are reserved for the elderly or disabled.... People were filing in steadily at each stop and soon started standing in the aisle, jockeying for the good spots near the doors. Yet the seat beside me remained empty. It’s almost always the last seat to be taken. By the time we reached Union Square, where the really big crush of riders boards, the oncoming enfilade marching up and onto the bus took on certain characteristics of the chambers of a gun to be used for Russian roulette – one of these people, I figured, would eventually choose to take that final seat next to my left elbow and thigh, and it was an absolute crapshoot who it would be.
There’s always plenty of slender young women from FIDM or the galleries, but they rarely take my neighbor seat, discreetly folding their sweetly-scented limbs beside my own. More usually, it’s an aged matriarch toting five heavy plastic sacks full of odiferous herbs and produce from Stockton-gao, or maybe a grimly glowering deskjockey with tired clothes and exhausted antiperspirant. I’ll even sometimes get the low-key homeless guy, who collapses on himself and sleeps between each stop. But when I saw her get on that particular evening, I just knew she was headed my way.
Even in the crush of the crowd she was hard to miss, because she was big. Her hair was a humidified mass of colorless frizz, and her nose spread far and wide across her florid face. Her hands were heavy and her fingers were thick; her body was softly globular. The seat next to me would have been a tight squeeze for most folk, but for her it would be the classic threading of a camel through the eye of a needle, if the needle was a sliver of plastic bench on Muni, and the camel had an unusually robust fundament. Yet she approached with the inevitability of heartburn. I knew that she would be my traveling companion this night, and I despaired.
As she worked her way toward me with her charity totebag and her broadside newspaper, I literally felt her gaze fix upon my neighbor seat. Her face lit up and she fought the crowd to attain it. When she descended into it, I felt her massive thigh slop, despite her efforts to the contrary, against mine. She sighed, and her breath bathed me with the scent of cheap cigarettes and stale carbohydrates. I glanced toward her and noted the rind-like skin of her face, all double chins and large pores and dense downy transparent hairs on her cheeks and chin. Her black dress hung shapelessly over her shapeless body. She looked back at me, nodding sagely with commute commiseration. I was, indeed, sorry – sorry that she was not a lissome art student, beautifying my commute with sultry exoticism. But I didn’t feel like inviting my neighbor’s sympathy on this matter, so I just nodded curtly and went back to my music and my thoughts, which were mainly having to do with why a big weirdsmelling person of very limited aesthetic appeal had to force her way into my vicinity when I seemed to be on a bus full of people whose company would have been infinitely more palatable to me.
It wasn’t thirty seconds later that she, reading her newspaper, leaned over and pointed out a headline to me, her face dark with significance. The article had something to do with efforts to impose greater control over children’s access to cable television. She clearly wanted to talk about it. “I’ve got control,” she repeated once I’d pulled off my left headphone; ”It’s called an off switch.” She gave me a complicit smile and nod and awaited my response.
“You’ve got to assert control if you want to have any,” I replied with a sense of fatalism. Her brows furrowed a micron and I knew the conversational chum I’d reluctantly thrown had been eagerly taken. She started talking. She really didn’t need my help to keep going, though sometimes she did pause for confirmation and reassurance. But it was really her show, all the way out to Masonic. Her sister’s kids; her other nieces; her friends and their kids on the ranch; family bloodlines; secrets of the family tree; ostensibly cute conception-related names for kids to remind the parents of where it all started; moms who love too much; taking good care of children…. As she spoke, her breath washed over me, a rank rattle from her laboring lungs, her eyes sunken and bright as chunks of obsidian dropped into warm suet, and her large heavy unadorned hands rested occasionally in the course of conversation on her broad formless thighs, and all she really talked about was kids and their parents, and how important it was to care for the children, who were everywhere in her life - except, apparently, her own home.
She left the bus at Masonic, having ridden with me almost the entire way home. I’d been impatient with her at Van Ness, eager for her to leave. At Fillmore I’d had my fill of her but developed a certain inurement to her pocky face and jiggling thigh and sour nasty breath; I had learned to put up with her a little. At Divis, she was talking about riding horses with the kids and the dogs on the ranch, and I actually didn’t notice the street going by. And by the time she alit at Presidio, out at the Muni yards and into the night’s embrace, waving goodbye and facing the darkness before her as an island, wide and buffeted and alone in a sea of life that surrounded her, I didn’t know what to think of her. I did, however, think a little less of myself.
So now let’s have a very happy new year, and a safe journey home. From my mouth to god’s ear, right?