3-2-09 / Nights in White Tanktops

Attention all late teen/early twenties caucasian male residents of Springfield who ride the bus:

Unless you are The Fresh Prince, you are not allowed to wear your hat sideways.

2-28-09 / Metamushill

An old man gets on the bus. I’m sitting at the front, so I start to get up so he can sit down, but he stands, grasping a rail at the top of the bus with each hand. He tells the driver:

“If I sit down, it will take me half an hour to get back up again.” He laughs.

The driver replies “Ok, as long as you don’t fall down.”

The man shoots back “Oh that would take me forty five minutes.”

They both laugh. I chuckle to myself as the old man continues.

“I’m not good on my feet. Don’t ever have a stroke. That’s what did it.”

The driver asks him where he is headed.

“I’m going to the Busy Bee Cafe. They’ve got really good food. And, at a fair price.”

The impromptu review from an old man on the bus sounds good enough for me. I make a mental note to stop in there sometime after I am working again.

2-27-09 / I wonder what Macho Man Randy Savage is doing right now

At the bus stop I realise I have a few minutes to wait, so head over to a nearby market to offload a winning lottery ticket. I won’t be retiring anytime soon, but the $3 I won will be good for a day pass tomorrow. I try to make eyes at the pretty blonde, but she’s busy. I cash out with the other clerk and make my way back to the stop.

Later that day, at the Eugene Station, I head into the market and pick up a couple of jerky sticks and a soda. Truly, the Dinner of Champions. I walk out and take a seat at the EMX platform. To the right of me is a boy who looks like he is six or seven, and to the right of him is a mid-teen girl complaining into her cellphone about something. I assume it’s the boy’s sister. I look ahead listlessly and wait for the bus.

Out of nowhere, the boy turns to me. “I like Jerky” he says loudly.

“Me too.” I reply.

We talk about jerky for a few minutes while the sister talks on, oblivious.

“Do you like the teriyaki kind?” I ask the boy.

“I think so.” He says.

I break a piece off and hand it to him. He shows me his GameBoy. We talk about games, and then he tells me about his Poke’Mon for a while until the EMX arrives.

“Gotta go. See you later, dude.” I tell him.

“See ya.” He replies, and then tugs on his sister’s sleeve.

I get up to put my soda can under the trash before I get on the bus. I don’t think the boy’s sister knew I had even been there. It’s a good thing for the boy that I am not a kidnapper, and it’s a good thing for the sister that the chances of her parents reading this are practically null.

I don’t know what bothers me more, that the girl was so careless watching that little boy, or the fact that we live in a world where she should have to be cautious in the first place.

On the EMX I again get funneled toward the back. I’m checking out a gorgeous brunette when someone toward the middle starts singing Summertime. The bus is packed so I can’t see who it is, but whoever it was she had a pretty nice voice.

When my last stop of the night comes up I get off, and it’s still semi early in the evening. I don’t plan on taking the bus anymore today, so I leave my day pass next to the bench under a pebble.

2-26-09 / Honey on her Tongue

It’s early morning again as I walk up to the bus stop. At least it’s not raining this time.

I’m there for around five minutes when an old woman sneaks up on me. She starts asking me how my morning is and oh God she pulls out a handful of magazines. Watchtower. I knew it!

She tells me about God and Hell and helping people and teaching our next generation the right way to live for the next ten minutes while I smile and nod politely, throwing in an occasional “uh-huh”. When she is finished I tell her I hope she has a good morning and she leaves.

I feel nothing but confusion over a group of people that refuse to accept blood transfusions, and nothing but pity over a group of people who refuse to celebrate birthdays, but there is some admiration for an old lady running around at 5:30 in the morning in the freezing cold trying to (in her mind) better the lives of strangers.

I saw the True Love woman and her husband again today. They walked right by but I don’t think they recognised me. Her face looks a lot better.

2-24-09 / Olfaction Jackson

It’s a little after 5:40 in the morning and I’m hanging out at a bus stop.

I missed my appointment the other day for the annual physical that is a requirement when you donate plasma, so today I want to get in early, see if someone doesn’t show up, and then slide into their time slot as a walk-in.

On the way to the stop I realised that I only had a five in my wallet, so I figured I would stop at the coffee stand near the stop to break it. As I approach the window I see a brunette, her eyes are fixed on a something in her hands that looks like a small notebook. She’s cute. I say hi and she jumps. We laugh and she breaks the bill. The smell of brewing coffee reminds me of my first apartment, working nights and drinking it black because I couldn’t afford milk.

I make my way to the stop as the wind picks up and I feel the beginnings of a drizzle. This was a stupid idea. I should have bought a coffee from the brunette.

Later on, a middle aged woman gets on the bus and takes a seat directly behind me. After a minute I can smell her perfume. It’s the same perfume that an ex-girlfriend of mine used to wear. We were coworkers, and I ended up quitting the job after we split up. I miss the job. It was unfulfilling and the pay was shit, but I liked the people and it was easy. I miss her a little too. Of all the women I am not on speaking terms with anymore, I think she is the only one that I regret.

At the Station I get off and find my next bus.

I lived in San Francisco for a while when I was a child (in the Tenderloin, but those are stories for a different day), and there was an Asian family that lived in the same building as I did. Everytime I walked down the hallway past their apartment there was always a very strong smell that would sit in the hallway.It wasn’t bad, but it certainly was different. I don’t know if it was the cooking, or the fact that they had a ton of people living in the place, but every time I passed their door it was there. The exact same smell.

So, you can imagine my surprise when I stepped on to the bus and there it was.

Later on I find myself at a stop with a decent wait ahead of me. After a while a homeless man walks up and sits next to me. He pulls a set of headphones with a built in AM/FM radio out of his backpack. He can’t figure out which way the batteries go, so I help him out. We strike up a conversation.

First, it’s the weather. I wait for it. Then, we talk about local radio stations. I wait for it. The minute the topic turns to the economy I know it’s coming, and before too long it happens. He hits me up for bus fare. I shoot him down.

He looks at the headphones in his hand. “Gonna sell these for a dollar. At the Station.” He leaves.

At the Eugene Station the platform for the EMX is a crowd. I end up in the back. After a few stops, another homeless man gets on and sits in the seat across from me. He reeks. It seems like a 50/50 mixture of the stale beer smell that pervades the recycling center at WinCo on a hot day, and pure despair. The smell makes me think of sorting bottles and cans at the market I worked at. I’m not a germaphobe, but I always wore long gloves during, and scrubbed up like I was going into surgery afterward.

The man has two bags of empty cans with him, set down at his feet. The EMX takes a harder than average turn and one of them topples over, spilling cans everywhere. A couple of them start to roll past me and I stop them with my foot. Steel Reserve tall boys (big surprise).

The man gathers the cans back into his bag, and then fishes a napkin out of his pocket and tries to wipe some of the spilled liquid off of the floor. He gets off at the next stop. I think he does it because he’s embarassed, because we’re miles away from any places where he can recycle those cans.

2-14-09 / Locomotive Breath

A conversation struck up between me and a fellow passenger on my last ride home that was unremarkable except for the fact that the woman had the absolute worst breath I have ever smelled. I tried leaning away, but to no avail. I couldn’t think of a way to end the conversation without making myself look like a jerk (the lady was nice), so I lied to her and told her the next stop was mine. I got off, walked to a nearby market, bought a soda, and was back in time to catch the next one.

On the first bus ride of the day, though, I could barely keep my eyes open because I was so very tired. It was everything I could do not to fall asleep. If you ride the bus long enough, you’ll see someone sleeping from time to time. I always wonder if I should wake them up or not, but they always seem to wake up on their own whenever we pull into a station.

I’ve only fallen asleep on the bus once.

When I was a teenager I went to a party at a friend’s house on Halloween night. After the party ended, three of my friends and I all started walking home. We all lived in relatively the same direction, so we walked in a group, every so often one of us would branch off. Eventually, it was just me. I wasn’t able to get a ride home, and the buses had stopped running, so I was going to have to walk from right around Thurston High School all the way down to 4th street. It was cold, but I had a small blanket I had borrowed wrapped around my shoulders. I was pretty unhappy, but figured there were plenty of worse things than a long walk, and I wasn’t exactly relishing going home anyway. At least the walk would sober me up.

Walking past Albertson’s, I notice a number 11 is pulling up (this was before the EMX existed, back when the 11 went from Springfield to Eugene and back) as I walked up to a stop. Surprised (I assumed I had either read the timetable wrong or they were running a special bus because it was Halloween), I show the driver my pass, and get on. I sit down toward the middle of the bus, on the left side, lean up against the window, and promptly pass out.

I wake up to a passengerless bus, slowly turning. I look out the window and realize we are pulling into the bus garage. “Oh shit” goes through my mind “She didn’t see that I was still on because I was slumped over with a blanket covering most of me”, and I sit up. The driver is parking, and I walk down the aisle to tell her I’m still on the bus. I get to aboout two feet behind the white line and as I stop to tell her what happened, she turns around and lets loose the most bloodcurdling scream I have ever heard in my life. It chilled me to the bone. I had never felt more physical fear before or since that instant.

So, naturally, I screamed back.

“Oh Jesus!” She says “You scared me!” Her eyes are wide, she’s breathing heavily.

“S-s-s-sorry” is all I can stammer out.

I’m fairly confident we took ten years off of each other’s lives that night. I felt terrible. It’s dark, it’s Halloween, it’s so late, and here this lady is just trying to park her bus so she can go home and some doofus teenager scares the bejeesus out of her. I apologised, and we sort of laughed about the situation, and she gave me directions to where I was headed. Lucky for me, I wasn’t too far off.

I was thinking of this while I was on the bus, and it made me chuckle a little bit.

Then I remembered it was Valentine’s Day, and I was single, and I frowned again.

2-7-09 / The nEu Pornographers

On the EMX today I bumped into a guy who works at one of the businesses I’ve applied at. He asked me if I’ve gotten a call yet. I tell him I haven’t, but the last time I went in the manager remembered my name, and we had a conversation about Ernest Hemingway, so I guess that’s good. He laughs. He’s actually on his way to work, but when he hits the button to signal a stop the driver keeps going. He gets off at the next stop. He is less than enthused. It’s a long walk.

On another bus, four kids are sitting to the left of me, talking about what parties are going on tonight. One of them is eating skittles. He drops a green one on the floor, bends over, picks it up, and eats it. He’s braver than I am.

Later in the day I stop by Pita Pit, order a pita, and make eyes at the girl behind the counter. Nothing too overt, though, I figure a pretty girl working with the public like her gets hit on by enough creeps during the day. Afterward I walk across the street to the Eugene Station. As I walk toward the bay I walk past a man who is standing still, looking at a poloroid of a naked woman that he is holding in front of him. The two thoughts that go through my head at about the same time are “I wonder what his story is” and “I didn’t know Poloroid was still in business”.

I sit down on a bench, eat my Pita, and wait for my bus.

2-6-09 / The Old Man and the E (MX)

I walk up to my stop and notice an old man. It’s somewhere around sixty degrees out, so I find it a little weird that he is eating an ice cream cone. We both say hello. I notice the bus heading down the street. “There’s ours”, I say.

He asks how much it is to ride a bus nowadays and I tell him. He pulls three dollars out of his wallet as the bus nears. I ask him where he’s heading and he tells me he’s going to the Eugene Station. I tell him he can get away with just a dollar and a half, since the EMX is free. We get on and he thanks me for the info. I tell him I’ll be taking the same bus, so I’ll show him where it is when we get there. He introduces himself, I tell him my name and shake his hand.

At the station we pull up in time to walk onto the EMX. I show him to it, we get on, and he sits a few seats behind me. As my stop nears, I stand up. He says “Thank you for the info, young man.” He’s wearing blue jeans and a blue sweatshirt, very clean, with a beanie on his head. The beanie makes him sorta look like a WWII era sailor. I tell him “No problem, see you around”, and give him a mock salute.

I walk in to talk to the same manager from the previous monday. Within two minutes of me entering the building, our conversation has shifted to books written by Ernest Hemingway.

My next destination is the mall. On the ride there, two kids are sitting to my left, talking about the best weapon to use for a particular section of a level in a videogame. One of them has a piece of paper that he has drawn a sketch of the level on, and both of the kids are looking over it, pointing out different areas. A blonde woman sitting across from them overhears and pipes in:

“I don’t mean to offend you, but there is a difference between a machine gun and an assault rifle. Machine guns are mounted to the ground, but the assault rifle you carry around with you.I have several friends in the military and I’m dating a military man, soooo.” She shrugs.
“Wow, thank you for the info.” One of the kids replies. They go back to the paper.

Later, the woman is talking to a passenger next to her about her guns, and gun control in general. I catch “If anyone came to my house, tried to take my guns, I’d be like ‘Do you want to sign your own death certificate right now?’ I grew up around guns, ain’t no one gonna take mine.”

And later, as we pull into the mall parking lot and narrowly avoid colliding into a truck who has cut in front of the bus:
“I was born and raised in California” She says, “and we got some bad drivers, but the ones around here make my state look like a Saint the way they drive.”

On the ride home we stop, and a woman gets on that I recognise. She used to work at a food business near a job I used to have. I’d see her several times a week during my lunch break. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen her. She doesn’t notice me. She does see a friend of hers a few rows behind me and sits with him. They talk for a while.
“Yup, just found out last night, I’m twelve weeks.” Then “I’ve been clean for six days.” She continues “It’s weird though, your whole mind is different. It makes me want to stay clean. When I go to the store, I don’t look at all the cars, like ‘that window’s down’ and ‘that trunk is popped up’.” She laughs. Her friend tells her he has been clean for two weeks, then says “I only relapsed once, before that I was clean for three weeks. So, I’ve been clean for five weeks.”

“That’s hella tight.” She says.

2-3-09 / I wonder how sweaty her feet are

On the bus today I saw a tall woman wearing black slacks, a long black coat, and leather boots that go up her calf. It’s really hot outside. That can’t be comfortable.

A white pickup truck cuts us off and the driver brakes hard. The truck misses hitting us by a few feet and the driver mumbles something. Last year I was on a bus that rear-ended a car right next to the Eugene Station, turning into the corner where the tatoo parlor is. The car goes to turn, and the bus goes to turn behind it, the car stops, and the bus bumps the car. The car then tears off and is gone. I wonder if it was stolen or something.

At the Springfield Station we pull up just in time for me to catch the EMX. I get on, sit down, and notice a young woman who gets on carrying a life sized bust made of paper mache with a door in the chest. Another rider asks her about it. She tells him it’s a project for a class. She goes on to say that she fished all of the newspaper out of a recycling bin, and plans on recycling it again once she’s finished with the project. I think that’s pretty cool.
“Good thing it didn’t rain today” he says.
“Yeah” she replies, and laughs.

On the way home I get onto a bus and see a good looking woman with a couple of reusable grocery bags next to her, desperately clutching a box of Cheerios. She is holding the box as if the future of the world depends on her not dropping it.

Other than that, nothing happened. I guess not every ride can be an adventure.

2-2-09 / Bottles and cans, just clap your hands

It’s warm out today. I’m happy to be at a bus stop with a canopy. The sun is shining and, other than a few scattered airplane contrails, there is hardly a cloud in the sky. Wearing my coat seems like it was a bad idea.

It’s a nice coat though. I got it as a gift from a beautiful girl who not a week later went on to break my heart. I wonder what she’s doing as I step onto the bus and feed three dollars into the cashbox.

After I transfer buses I notice an old man who looks creepily like the guy from that X-Files episode, the one with the Life Insurance salesman who is a psychic.

After we pull into the Eugene Station I head over to the small market that adjoins it. Inside it’s packed, and waiting in line is a woman who is holding a baby in her arms, and is vainly trying to corral two other young children who are with her. They’re screaming about what candy they want and they want chips and give me those and hey those are mine and mom she took those they’re mine I want them and on and on. I don’t believe in people beating their kids (likely because I was on the business end of quite a few swipes myself until I outgrew my parents), but the longer I waited in line behind this woman and her kids, the more I grew to reconsider this. I buy my can of soda and leave.

Outside I sit down on a bench and open my soda. I notice a man with a half-cart digging through the garbage, looking for bottles and cans to return for their deposits.  Once, months previous, I watched a man walk up to a trash can at the Station, dig his way through it, pull out a crumpled TacoTime bag, fish out what looked like a half-eaten burrito, and cram it into his mouth.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for homeless people, especially the ones we have around here. What I will do, though, is put my bottles and cans in the gap between the bottom of the garbage can and the ground, beside one of the legs. This way someone who needs it can see it, but it’s one can they won’t have to dig through the garbage for.

The EMX pulls up. I finish my soda quickly and walk over to the man at the garbage can. “You want the can?” I ask, holding it out. “Yeah, thank you” he says quietly.  I notice when he reaches out to grab the can that his hand is shaking. I get on the bus.

Later, I get off of the EMX to stop into a business that probably won’t be hiring anytime soon, but it never hurts to check. Afterward I make my way out and see the EMX pull up to the stop I am walking toward. It’s across the street and down a little ways. I can probably make it if I run, but I’m not too concerned. It’s nice out, the sun is shining, and there will be another one along in ten minutes anyway. I’m in no hurry.

While I’m waiting a large pickup truck drives by pulling an electric roadsign on a trailer. The sign is still on.