Friday, July 18, 2008
Paco on the 14 Mish
I think I have more to say now. Last night I was tired and wired and stuffed full of nasi goreng borobodur, a dish in which rice is a medium for the injestion of plentiful spicy green peppers. I met up with Cecily and Sarah in the lobby of the jukebox Marriott and, once the obligatory complaints about it being cold ("and I don’t get cold!") were out of the way and temp tattoos were duly distributed (yay and thanks), we set off on a seven block walk to Borobodur restaurant. Supper was tasty, rendered moreso by the presence of “other" Sarah, in from Berkeley and therefore prepared for a bit of foggy chill. After supper we all meandered back to the St Francis where I dropped the ladies off for their BlogHer parties, and I went back home, iPodless (left it at work) and therefore discreetly focusing on other people’s conversations. There were several, and tragically, they were all as dull as dirt. Unsharpened dirt. From there, I can’t say things got any more exciting, so let’s skip ahead a bit:
This morning I dropped the soob off at THE BEST MECHANIC IN CALIFORNIA (contact me for details if you want’em) and walked four blocks to a bus stop. Down in that part of town the blocks are long, and I brought my camera to snap some shots of whatever I could find that was photogenic. (This was the same walk that led me, last week, to take that air conditioner photo I posted last night.) I walked up 9th street instead of 10th, to vary the scenery this time, but I found nothing worth memorializing (though there were a few distasteful sights I wish I could erase from my memory). When I got to the bus stop at Mish and 9th I was feeling physically tired, mentally dull, financially drained (the soob needs a lot of work), and artistically thwarted. I just stood there in the steady damp breeze, my mood the color of the pavement, and the pavement the color of the the sky. It was all very nicely coordinated and opened myself to the possibility of possibility. Thus it was that my bus pulled up.
I don’t often take the 14 Mish; it’s a prole bus like my 38 line but runs to the southwest corner of the city, not due west out to my side of rainbowville. But sometime the 14 is just what I need and I was glad to see it arrive before my glasses misted completely over. The door opened in front of me but I stepped back to allow a woman to deboard. She reminded me of a woman in my ‘hood, homeless and toothless, slim and smoke-steeped. Her hair is always nicely maintained and colored and she’s consistently friendly and pleasant to me when I pass her on the sidewalk, where she sits with a paperback, a cancer stick, and a cup of coffee. The woman coming off the bus had the same body type and hair, but her affect was much less sociable - she kept her head down, muttering to me or to herself as she limped down the steps in white sweats and pink nikes. It took her a while to navigate the exit and to step away so I could board, but I was not impatient. I figured she had something going on and I didn’t care to get close enough to figure out what it was.
The bus driver was chuckling as I flashed him my pass and stepped in, pointing his chin toward her as she limped down the sidewalk with a sour expression. “It’s starting early today, eh?” I wasn’t sure what he meant but he seemed to be an allied soul so I said something innocuously supportive: “Did it ever stop?”
The driver warmed to this response and agreed with me, “No, it probably never did. It just goes on and on. Your tax dollars at work! Well at least it’s Friday...”
I usually sit back in the mid-bus so I can watch the entire comic opera that is mass transit, but this time I had a short ride and seemed to be having the only conversation happening on the 14 Mish so I took an infacing seat at the front right of the bus and opened myself to an interaction with my driver. He was a man initiating his approach to his middle years, rotund and scragglebearded, with light olive skin and a latino accent. He was ready to enjoy his ride and take me along for it. I was game.
“Oh yes, it is Friday; thanks for reminding me.”
“Not that it makes any difference to me, I work Saturday too, but still, there’s that Friday feeling in the air....”
Glancing around the bus I noted a distinct lack of TGIFing. People coming up from the outer reaches of that route were typically hardworking immigrants who kept to themselves; those riding in from the inner reaches were often junkies or street folk with sketch etched into every line of their weathered faces. Nobody seemed to be riding in for a party. It made me curious. “Do you notice a difference in the ride on weekends?”
“Oh sure! You don’t see the regulars, the people you see every day. Sometimes you see somebody for just the one time. It’s a whole different set of people.”
That was not the answer I was looking for. “I mean, does the ride feel different? Is there a different mood? Do people act differently on weekends than they do on weekdays?”
“Yeah, they do. Saturdays you see more people out with kids. Sundays is senior citizens. That’s the day they get out to go to church and do their shopping. They really get out on Sundays. Last week I missed three lights because I was loading them up and there were so many of them. I’ve started to lower the chair lift for them now if there’s a lot of them, let’em ride up three at a time. They appreciate it.”
“Free ride. Sounds like fun.”
“Yeah they enjoy it. And you can’t get impatient with them; they’re old and they’re doing their best. I just hope someday when I’m that old I’ve got someone out there to be nice to me that way. I gotta hand it to’em. I gotta help’em out. You gotta treat people like you want to be treated.”
“You’re right. It’ll come back to you either way, and you’ll really know it when the negative stuff comes back to you. It’s sometimes hard to tell when people are treating you nice because you never notice ‘nice,’ but it’s easy to see when it’s bad stuff coming back your way. But I gotta say, some of those old folk are pretty tough. They don’t play nice either. On my usual line, the 38, you get some old ladies who will break your leg if you get in their way. Elbows, shopping bags… it’s a contact sport riding the bus with them.”
“Tell me about it! I was driving the 30 [Stockton line, out of deepest Chinatown] and this old lady got on with a cane and wanted a seat, but there was a disabled lady in it, younger. The old lady was yelling at her to get up and the other lady was saying, “I have a right to sit here, I’m disabled,” and next thing you know I hear a *bap* and a yell and you know what she did? That old lady picked up her cane and whacked the other lady right in the eye!”
“No way.”
“Way! And those canes they use now, they’re aluminum, like softball bats. She caught her right in the eye! She was crying and the blood was coming down; I didn’t see it happen but everyone was saying what it was so I called the cops. The old lady was already halfway down the steps making her getaway before I even knew what was going on. The cops came right away and caught her a block down the street.”
“With her cane I guess she couldn’t get away so quick. But that’s a good shot, right in the eye with a cane on a crowded bus. She must have been in training!”
“Yeah, ninjitsu with a cane! She’s a walking weapon! But a lot of them are. Those old birds are tough.”
Our conversation meandered to the importance of public transit in these times of prohibitive fuel prices, and then we pulled up in front of the TransBay Terminal, where Greyhound busses head in and out of town. A very tense breathless man with a big rollerbag had asked when boarding, shortly after I had, where the terminal was; the driver announced it for him in a clear strong voice. With thanks, the traveller deboarded, with a small, silent, and very pretty young woman, barely more than a girl, whom I’d barely noticed had even boarded with him. “Tell’em Paco Paisano sent you!,” the driver called to the departing dogriders.
I filed the information, with an asterisk. Paco Paisano, my fun busdriver. Something clunked in the undercarriage of my mind. This was a name I’d heard before.
“Remember Paco Paisano?” Dammit, he was calling me on it. Time to admit my ignorance.
“It sounds familiar, but I don’t remember....”
“The Flintstones! When Fred was a race car driver, that was his name! ‘Now racing, Paco Paisano!’”
“Oh yeah, that’s right.” I had been mistaken - I had no idea what he was talking about. My Flintstone familiarity was sorely lacking. If only they’d included it on the LSAT… but it did seem more like at GMAT thing. “Man, I have not seen that show in forever. It used to be serious television, right? It was prime time network stuff. And everybody would have to sit down to watch it when it came on or they’d miss it. No DVRs, no VCRs… I don’t even think they had syndication. There were three networks and this was what they gave us.”
“Yeah, and now it’s all cable companies and you gotta pay to see anything. What a rip off.”
“I’ll say this, though - you pay but you get a lot more than they used to show us. There’s dozens of channels, and you can watch what you want when you want it. And there’s enough competition that you’ve even got some better stuff than the Flintstones sometimes.”
“Well I don’t know about that. Paco Paisano was pretty cool.” We were turning the corner at Main, now, pulling up to the final stop. My office was a block away and I’d be there plenty early. We said goodbye to each other, and I wished him a good Friday and Saturday. The ride had gone quickly, and not just because of light traffic. Paco Paisano had piloted me to work, and, you know, he’s a champeen racecar driver. Or maybe it was just Ralph Kramden from the Honeymooners. Busdrivers can really get you where you need to be sometimes, even when it’s not exactly where you’re going.
(upon further research, the flintstone racer was named “goggles paisano.” not like that would have elicited a clearer recollection for me. but my busdriver was much more of a paco than a goggles. it’s not an ethnic thing - he just had a vibe, and it was a paco vibe, not a goggles vibe. maybe you had to be there. lucky for me, I was.)