I take the bus to my office most days. It is a twenty minute ride and is usually uneventful. Today was filled with all of the events that had not occurred on the other days.
A red bus goes by as I leave the house. Red busses only stop at main streets. They avoid lots of little stops. When one whizzes by on the way to the bus stop, it means that I can go to the closer stop. Orange and Red busses are staggered. An Orange bus will be coming by next. Orange busses stop at almost every other block provided someone is waiting there to get on the bus or is on the bus and pulls the string to get off there. What is preferable is to get a red bus, but barring that, it is great to have an empty orange bus late in the route because it will not be dropping off many people and will not be filling up with them either.
Of course, this is all bus riding theory. This happens enough that one can get used to it, but as we shall see, reality can interfere with one’s perception of reality.
So at the bus stop there is a lady waiting. I ask how long she has been waiting, she says quince minutos which means the bus will be there any minute. It is rare on this route to wait more than twenty minutes for a bus during the day. I hear the southbound bus roll by once an hour in the middle of the night sometimes. But they run much more often under the sun. This woman proceeds to walk into the middle of the street and look. She walks back and asks me if I will watch her bags. She points to them on the bench and just walks off. It is a hot sunny day and I am standing behind the bus bench in some shade and am like …what if the bus comes and she is not back here… and I look over at her bags. It is not her purse, they are plastic shopping bags and they are full of empty bottles. She has crossed the street and is digging through the trash can at the opposite bus stop. She pulls out a few bottles and walks back through the crosswalk.
As she walks back over, a van pulls up the red light and a guy starts howling at her, whistling. She is maybe five feet tall and has shoulder length hair that has a few dyed streaks in it. She is wearing a denim outfit that fits tight, shows off her curves. She is not gorgeous nor slim but is still attractive. She is not hooching it in the crosswalk, but anyone with a week on the barrio clock can tell you she is a trashdigger, she is carrying the recyclables. But she still gets the whistles. She makes it back and is smiling as she puts these new bottles into the bags. "Treinte centavos. Seis." Six bottles at a nickle apiece is thirty cents. And she is thrilled over this. She is saving the planet with her recycling efforts and being compensated for it.
She walks back out into the street and looks. She returns with the facial expression of one who knows we will be waiting a bit longer. From one of her bags she pulls out a smaller bag. In it are boxes of Ivory soap. She pulls one out and explains to me that you cannot find these for less than a dollar-twenty-five anywhere but she will sell me one for a dollar. It was hot, I was a little sweaty, but all the heat waves in your lifetime will never make you feel quite so aware of your sweat as much as turning down a trashdigger selling you soap.
The bus comes. We get on. She sits up front and I walk to the back. I always go to the back of the bus. You get a seat back there. If you stay up front you stand most of the time. People who stand and block the aisle out of stupidity, laziness or antisocial malevolence all stand up at the front. Sit always goes down up in the front of the bus. I go sit in the back. The best thing is to sit in the back seat at the window, either left or right. Actually the middle seat in the back is good if you think you might need to get off that bus in a hurry. This time I get a window seat past the back exit door (which is always about in the middle of the bus) just up the two step staircase to the left.
So we go about two or three stops down the road and some guy gets on with a bag of recyclable bottles and cans. The front is filling up. Then a guy at the next stop gets on and is slow to get out the money. The guy is a rail thin crackhead without teeth but with a Lakers championship teeshirt. He sets down his bag of bottles and starts to slowly dig through his pockets. It is a game people play with the driver. It goes like this: Can he drive me far enough to where I am going that if he kicks me off for not having the fare I will be a lot closer …OR will I hit the jackpot and he will get so sick of me standing here digging for coins that he he just motions for me to go get a seat. Well this driver was having none of it. A half-block into the trip he pulls over and waits for the guy to dig through and find the dough. Instead of hopping out, though, the guy magically speeds up the production of fare and deposits it. A testament to the scalding concrete heat bouncing off of factory walls moving up Santa Fe Avenue through industrial Vernon on the way to Downtown L.A.
A few stops later, a few more people have gotten on with bags of cans and bottles. Some of them play the bus-fare-empty-pocket game but this driver stalls his rig with masterful authority. They all pay. Something tells me that if the weather were a bit nicer today that none of them would be on the bus. The heat is good for business, but the ride up front is cramped. Hot and cramped.
The bus turns onto Seventh street and passes the old Fifty Bucks gallery. So many good times a decade and a half ago are still jumping out in my memory as the wide turn slows the bus down for an extended glance over to the old hangout. A movie crew is there filming a scene – the exterior has a nice red "BAR" sign attached for the occasion. Then a woman gets on the bus right there. She is looking rough. White trash sticks out like a fresh morning zit on Los Angeles public transportation, and from personal experience on my rougher-looking afternoons, people would rather that zit be popped than sit next to the basura on the ride. She is looking like a junkie. Fuck it, I’m not going to be nice, she is junkie corpse that can’t yet get her overdose right. It is over ninety degrees and she is wearing shorts. Her legs have track marks, scabs, scars, tattoos, rough patches and lots of hair. But she is a junk-sick addict bundled up in a gray, filthy hoodie. She also has two large canvas luggage bags. There is a little movement up front as people make way, move back quickly and some even give up their seats to get toward the middle of the bus. This is a universal signal that this poor bitch stinks to hell. She sits down on one of the newly-unoccupied seats and drops the bags to the floor. They clunk with something heavier than plastic California-Redemption water bottles and Pepsi cans. If I had to bet I would guess the bags are filled burglarized scrap metal, but hey, it is still America, innocent until proven guilty, it may have been utensils she was taking as a donation to the soup kitchen. She pulls her hood off and begins scratching at her scalp beneath the matted filthy hair on her head. Someone moans and then someone says something in Spanish and then a few people all get up in unison. There seems to be an orderly panic as her bowed head semi-nods in rhythm with the scratching. The bus pulls up to the Alameda stop and a lot of people from up front make way for the exits. This chick is oblivious but she got fifteen people to get up and go. If yo have a bus pass, you can be choosy on behalf of your health or aesthetics. I’m far enough away that I can’t smell her, but then someone says "LICE" and makes a hand motion of two fingers touching together near the scalp and then jumping away. A few more people push out the back. I’m out of the jumping zone if there is one and am wearing a baseball cap. I don’t want to stand around and wait for the next bus at seventh and Alameda and I don’t want to dig for another buck-fifty. Call me petit-bourgeoise, I ain’t moving my petard on a claim of hair care.
American Apparel’s main factory is located here and a huge crowd of people get on the bus. They are all wearing American Apparel teeshirts. None of them know about the headlice accusations. They stand around Miss Junkie and her luggage and one sits right down next to this health hazard. Twenty people done with a day’s work at a real job. As they crowd on, a woman gets on and plays the money shuffle. Again with the game. The driver is having none of it. He pulls past the intersection and then stops. She is a stubborn one and is reorganizing her purse. Taking her time. Slowly digging. Everyone on the bus is Mexican but me, the crackhead in the Lakers shirt, this purse-digging woman and one other guy in a Michael Jordan Wizards jersey near the front seat. There are no Asians. None of those other three are white. Do the racist math. She says something to the bus driver. I don’t hear it, but the Wizard Jordan guy up there does. He loses it. "Ya damn liar, you know the bus ain’t FREE, we got places to go, pay the damn fare, I wanna get off this damn bus dammit." He might have said those words a little more excitedly than I am relaying here… and with some slang terms that emphasized his emotional commitment to getting to where he was going quickly. She totally ignored him and just stood there digging and digging.
I did not have enough coffee, I did have a headache, I kind of dozed off. The bus was moving for a bit, it might have been three or four minutes. Then someone pulled the string to ring the bell to signal they wanted off and the temple of my skull was against the window and the string (it is a coated wire cable, not a thread, sorry for calling it a string but everyone basically says "pull the string" when the stop is coming). Well that woke me up and I turned around to see a little girl, she might have been three. She was standing on the seat behind me pulling the string for her mother. Of course I had to smile. If it had been a thuggy homeboy sitting there pulling the string to wack my head I would have asked him what stop it was rather than accelerate the aggression, but I had to look because to be whacked like that with the string might have been someone testing to see if I was a cowardly mark who let people push him around. It is a give and take with fate, this bus riding, but at a buck fifty it is cheaper than the ten dollar parking lots near my office. One day I will have to write about the time three vale drivers kicked my ass when I spit on one of them. It was years ago but I take the bus whenever possible because, well, fate again, it dances well with me wen I am a passenger, it lurks with mocking intent when I am behind the wheel.
We were moving through the part of downtown where the garment district becomes the pirated merchandise flea markets and that woman up front was still on, not digging anymore, so I suppose she finally found a few coins at the bottom of that purse and paid. The junkie carried her heavy luggage toward the back and got off at 7th near San Julian. Some women had crowded the front of the bus with wheeled laundry carts of bags of bottles and cans. They got off before Main Street. The guy in the Jordan jersey helped them unload their carts. I got off on Olive and went to the office. The headache went away when I had some more coffee. I met some friends for dinner at a nice steakhouse later, dropping about eighty bucks on my dinner. I took a cab home. It was 21 bucks for the ride but there appeared to be no chance of catching lice. I’m posting this at 2:30 in the morning and then going to wash my hair before bed just in case.