Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The New Ride

Time for transit!  Here’s part 1.  Give me a freaking break.  I’m a busy man. 

The new bus is a new experience, an exercise in veneer.  I’m writing this on the old bus [note: “wrote"], on which I’m riding home after a rare night of camaraderie and carousing; getting on at its second stop I’m already surrounded by plenty of curious characters about whom I could write an essay each.  But my point isn’t the old bus, it’s the new one.  The new bus is a weird little ride, and not in the way that inspires too many essays.  I’d better make the most of this one while I can.

In my pre-fatherhood incarnation I’d take the 38 from the corner by my house, clear on downtown. That’s a bus with plenty of what we might call “personality.” Then, when Z started with the daycare, I’d drop him off a mile or so from home, cross the street, and board the 1BX.  That bus is a commuters’ special, populated mostly with wan grimaces and crackberries, a quick ride without much to distract me.  Good writing time, but not too inspirational despite still being a public conveyance.  It felt like I’d given something up.

Now Z’s in full-on preschool and we drop him off in the Presidio, a national park of over 1000 acres.  His school is about half a mile away from a shuttle stop, straight across parade grounds two centuries old.  I sign him in, give him a hug, say so long to his teachers and the sweetheart who runs the lunch room; I stroll past stately old barracks to one side and patina-green cannon to the other - weapons dating back to Spanish days, their plugged maws gaping as they stand impotent sentry over quiet lawns and parking lots.  There are plenty of cannon and mortar and field artillery pieces scattered about on concrete pads going slowly green in the bayside fog, their placidity eclipsing their bellicose origins just as a garden gnome bears no relation to its frightful pagan forebears.  It is almost unimaginable that those emplacements once belched fire and spat those carefully-stacked cannonballs in death-dealing fusillades.  Today they are nothing more than sculpture. 

At the end of my walk I’m at the Presido Transit Center, and if I’ve timed things right my bus is waiting.  But no longer is it big sloppy articulated public transportation - it’s a private mini-coach with restricted access, lowered, tinted, upholstered and sanitized.  Instead of graffito’d ads for health clinics and trade schools, the upper walls are lined with calming photos of intra-park stops - gorgeous forests and colonial structures and breathtaking overlooks. It’s all perfectly nice.  That is to say, after a few weeks it’s boring as hell. 

Similarly, my fellow riders offer scant distraction and less companionship.  They’re Presidio residents, which now means not soldiers but young professionals reeking of entitlement and privilege.  No more riding with winos and grannies, respectively clad in sopping blankets or mothball-reeking housecoats - it’s all suits with impeccably modern tailoring or slick bizcaz or stylish jackets over smirkingly ironic Ts.  They board glumly, sharing among them a single stale scowl - but not my selective old “sit thou not next to me, ye skungy creepster” scowl from my rides on the 38, the scowl that I drop the instant it’s not needed anymore.  Rather, this is a scowl that has settled in for the duration, upon lips that seem to have had their smiles surgically removed.  It may be that some of these people are perfectly nice in their own little worlds but that’s sort of my point - I’ve ridden that intimate conveyance with them for more than a month now and every day I’m struck by how their disdain for the rider and for each otehr permeates the humid air we all exhale upon each other.  Smiles can be counted on the fingers of one hand; interesting characters, on those of one foot. 

Up next: the route, and the “incident.” But a parenthetical note: as I wrote this one night some weeks back the bus filled with all kinds of folk.  I could hear over my earbuds the two college girls next to me debating seriously whether one’s “two-drink minimum” rule was in conflict at that particular moment with the other’s “three-drink maximum” rule.  The center aisle of the bus was crowded.  A man boarded and was unable to get a seat; I couldn’t see him clearly through the crowd but he seemed to be shortish, stocky, reasonably well-maintained in proletarian garb and a brushy little moustache.  He was accompanied by a dog - perhaps a cocker mix?  I was distracted, tipsy, not particularly interested… till I noticed that the dog had worked its way through the crowd to near where I sat and that its long blue leash had been carefully inscribed with tidy writing in white paint: “One of us has no balls.” I laughed, pointed it out to the girls near to me; they laughed too, loudly and lustily.  Now that’s a situation that just doesn’t come up on the new ride.