I'm tolerant, which in real-life terms means that I am sometimes that one friend remaining when a person goes into a downward spiral. My longtime buddy Mary was in such a spin, and I'd spent several hours being as supportive as I could. At a Chinese buffet where we could have lunch/dinner for seven dollars each if we got there just before two in the afternoon, Mary had first become agitated when her eyeglasses had slipped off the top of her head and fallen under the restaurant booth seat.
After her glasses were returned to her Mary had been talking a bit too loudly and someone in the next booth had politely come over to ask me to ask Mary to keep it down a little. I had done my best to filter the complaint, but of course Mary had gotten upset, and thus louder. I'd said "Mary, please" out of the corner of my mouth because I was afraid the restaurant manager would toss us out. I hadn't eaten my fill of vegetable lo mein, which had the nicest little bits of red bell pepper and crisp green scallion in it.
I should have realized Mary would blow up at me. I guess I was thinking Mary ought to be grateful that she still had a friend who would put up with her, but she wasn't. At all. So I'd slid out of the red-leatherette booth with its chipped gold-painted detailing, left a generous tip, and fled to a bus stop near the buffet place.
Alas, Mary followed me out to the sidewalk, and she continued to rage at me as I stood near the bent, dirty COTA sign on its post made from a flat strip of metal perforated with a vertical row of holes. I couldn't do anything about the situation, so I just stood at the curb silently, and ignored Mary while I wished the bus would hurr\y up.
The #2 coach eventually pulled up, and as the bus doors shut behind me I could still hear the muffled sound of Mary's grumpy shouted complaints as I let a handful of pocket change rattle down into the fare box.
Being on the bus was a relief. I was happy just to give someone else a turn to experience
Mary's feelings, but then when I dropped into the first open seat, I discovered an easier friend to be with. Bess, whose personality was the antithesis of Mary's, was in the seat behind me. It was now four-thirty and she was on her way home from work, and quite cheerful for someone riding the crowded #10 Broad Street bus.
Bess had seen Mary losing her sh*t out on the sidewalk and now she gave me a wry look. She knew I didn't want to say anything mean about Mary, as everybody in the world was aggravated with Mary right now, and while Mary was hard, she was doing the best she could.
"If somebody gets you trapped at a bus stop, there's nothing you can do," said Bess. "One time a drunk guy had me pinned down at the stop across from the Workers' Comp building, and he said 'I know you work at Woolworth's' twice a minute for ten minutes and the High Street bus was so late."
"How long has Woolworth's been gone?" I said. "Seven or eight years?"
"At least," said Bess. She rummaged in her purse. "I have gum. Juicy Fruit or Doublemint?"
"Doublemint," I said gratefully. "Thanks." I peeled away the serrated edge of the foil
wrapper and the fresh scents of peppermint and spearmint rose from the sugar-powdered paper liner. I put the stick of gum into my mouth and settled back comfortably for the slow ride west, then north. The sugar in the Doublemint flooded me with endorphins. Temporary joy, I knew, but enough to get me to the stop up the street from my apartment.
Part B. Church's Chicken
As I moved quickly along the cracked, summer-heated pavement, I knew I was in trouble when one person, a skinny teenager, walked in the street along the curb while another person, a man in his forties, accompanied me along the sidewalk at my left. The second man used a motorized scooter with tan faux-leather upholstery. It looked like a dentist's chair on wheels.
The two men were talking about me as though I couldn't hear them. I had my white cane with me (I am legally blind) and that does cause some people to behave as though I am deaf. The COTA bus sytem encourages this, I feel, by trying to cover the blind and deaf bases with loudspeakers which emit blasts of bus numbers and street names at top volume: "NUMBER FOUR, GRACELAND SHOPPING CENTER!! EIGHTEENTH STREET!!" This makes no sense to me. We blind people tend to have sensitive ears and of course the deaf people get their information from the interior LED display with the stops in red letters in a continuously moving display which runs to the right and then disappears.
So this afternoon, it's no wonder, with the bus loudspeakers constatnly blaring from the bus stop ahead, that my traveling companions on this crummy little street think I can't hear them talking about me.
"Wonder where she thinks she's going," says the wheelchair user, and the teenager replies, "She probably don't even know."
I do know where I'm going, though it's true I have never been there before. My friend Lucille, who I'd been visiting, had told me to go four blocks south and catch a city bus into town. I haven't felt weird about this until now. It's not the first time I've been the only white person in a neighborhood, and I've never had any real trouble except for a few really drunk teenagers one time, and even they left me alone after five minutes of hassling.
But now I feel a little worried. The two men who are discussing me as they accompany me to the bus stop do look like the kind of spectators who go to the stock car races hoping to see a wreck. As I get to the bus shelter, I see why.
There is a knot of people near the plexiglas shelter, and none of them look as though they are up to any good. I've turned the corner to the main street, and my companions withdraw, I assume so they can watch the ensuing trouble without being questioned by the police afterward.
I put the tip of my white cane against the sidewalk, and loop the black nylon wrist cord around my right hand. I am standing near the bus shelter, and I've turned myself toward the left so that I will be able to hear, if not see, my bus coming from the east. I'm positioned near the trash container, which is covered with graffiti and blackened in a way that tells me it's been set on fire more than once. Of course it really stinks in the summer afternoon heat. I would not even like to guess what is in it.
I am standing, with my white cane, with a group of other miserable people in the bleakest urban wasteland I could possibly imagine. It truly looks post-apocalyptic here. Diagonally across the way is a huge rubble-filled lot where some old building burned down and the remains of it were mostly hauled away by dump trucks. There are no signs offering a number to call for possible development. No one would ever build anything new in this neighborhood.
Next to the burned-out lot, there are a couple of other old houses with boarded-up windows. Similarly decayed homes are lined up on this side of the street. Once upon a time, a hundred years ago, a single family would have occupied each of these old brick houses, and they'd have employed at least two servants to cook and clean. Each place has enough room to be divided into three or four modern apartments. I have no idea if anyone lives in any of them, legally or otherwise.
I'm trying not to look down on the people who live here. I know my own neighborhood looks shabby to people who live twenty blocks north of my place. But this poor, gloomy place is eerie. There is a kind of unearthly Twlight Zone emptiness along this part of East Broad. No cars have gone up or down the street for a long time. Odd, because it's a major street that goes right into the downtown district.
The only traffic in the road, actually, is an old bicycle ridden by man about twenty years old. The bike is small for him, and not in that cool way like the bikes of the guys who do tricks by jumping curbs and riding up walls and stuff like that. No, this guy's bike has a banana seat, patched with duct tape, and this is clearly the same bike he was given (or he took by force) when he was about twelve.
He has pulled the bike up along the chipped yellow concrete curb to chat up the only person standing inside the shelter. She's a young woman about the young man's age, nineteen or twenty years old. I imagine they probably went to school together. She is dressed in a shrink top, glittery hot pants, and strappy sandals. She smokes with both hands, a joint between the thumb and first tinger of her right hand, and a Kool cigarette in a ladylike finger-V in her left hand. It's about two o'clock in the afternoon, and I realize that the young woman is soliciting, and that the young man is hopeful that they can do business.
They have a short conversation, in which I believe she explains that he will need a car to make this transaction work, and he says but he has money, and she says again that he has to come get her in a car. She is not going to walk in those strappy sandals across a parking lot to perform sex for money in the alley behind the Church's Chicken. She is a lady and she expects to be picked up in a vehicle with doors and a windshield.
The Church's Chicken takeout place, which has the bus shelter in front of it, is the only building around with people inside it, but it is uncomforting. In the last few minutes I've become downright anxious because, in the reflection of the plexigas bus shelter surround, I can see a very large man who looks like LL Cool J's evil twin, and he is really, really high and also really, really mad at me for being at the bus shelter. My intuition tells me that he is connected to the young woman with the joint and the cigarette. He is exploiting and/or protecting her, and now he's mad because the woman in the hot pants has spotted me. Evil Cool J and I know she's seen me, because she has first given me the look a high school student gets when she'd been caught cheating during a history test, and then she has defensively moved to the other side of the bus shelter. This is silly as the walls are clear and I can still see her. But, you know, she's high.
The fact that I can see her, even though I have the cord of a blind person cane wrapped around my right wrist, and the fact that the young woman is now nervous, are why the guy in the white Kangol cap is now freaking out. Well, and the drug he's taken. He is not a pot smoker like the young woman; he's taken some kind of stimulant and now he is pacing back and forth behind me like a caged tiger. I can see in the reflection which shimmers on the plexiglas wall of the bus shelter that, three or four times, he has set his body squarely, put a very grim expression on his face, and shot forward in a lunge toward me. Each time, his drug-fueled brain has then been weirded out by my white cane, which seems like either a magic wand or a potential weapon, and he has panicked and done a big circle back to the stop sign at the corner. He is there now, doing his caged-tiger pacing routine again.
There is still no traffic in the street, and I am wondering if the bus really does come this far east.
I have no one to ask. It's true that there are people working inside the Church's Chicken place, but it's also true true that there is an early 70s lime-green Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme parked in the corner of the lot, clearly visible to the crew inside the chicken place. At several intervals, other cars have pulled up right next to the Cutlass with the open driver window next to the Olds driver's window, and drugs and money have obviously changed hands. I feel that when this is happening a hundred feet from your front window, you are not the type of restaurant manager to come out and save some blind stranger from a bus stop mugging by someone who is really high and really big. Would I confront the guy in the white Kangol hat, to save someone I didn't know? I would not.
All I can think to do is to seem humble (I'm really close to the stinky trash can), free of the desire to start trouble (I'm looking down at the ground), and extra handicapped (I'm sort of leaning on my cane as though I am feeling a bit weak). And then mercifully, I hear the roar of a bus engine from far away up the street, past the railroad underpass.
It will be a little while till it gets here, but already the tension level in Urban Hell is way down. A roaring bus is breaking up that old gang of mine. The young woman in the sparkly hot pants has finished both her joint and her cigarette, and she now slings the narrow strap of an evening bag over her bare shoulder and adjusts the black satin bag over her tube top. Then she steps out of the greenish-tinted bus shelter and walks both daintily and briskly down the street as though she is late for an important business engagement. I assume that the COTA bus management team has spoken to her in the past about the proper and improper use of their bus shelters.
Before the bus reaches this corner, the young man on the banana-seat bike pedals by, notes that his former classmate has left the bus shelter, and he does a skillful U-turn and puts on some speed. Maybe he knows where the woman in the hot pants is going, and he is going to offer her a ride on the handlebars, maybe. Or make her an even less attractive offer. I try not to think about it.
The bus, with a mobile phone ad on its side, finally pulls up, brakes squealing, and the loudspeaker roars, "DOWNTOWN! LONG STREET!" The driver stops the dirty white coach so the door is right in front of me, and while I know it because of the white cane and not white privilege, I still feel weird about it. The folding doors, with their black rubber edges streaked in clay-colored dirt, whush open and I eagerly scramble up the steps, holding my cane against me so I can get up to the fare box.
I see only the side of the driver's head as he is looking out the windshild. Without a glance at me, he reaches over to push the button to print a transfer when I ask for it. But there's a row of older men sitting ine three horizontal seats behind the driver and all three of the men look at me with different versions of "What on Earth are you doing at this stop?"
And I think, "I am lucky because I am just an unwilling tourist. Imagine being a little kid and living here." I sit down in air-conditioned comfort, though I have to breathe through my mouth as the old man in the window seat smells almost as bad as the burned-out trash can I 've just left behind.
No one else from the bus stop actually gets on the bus besides me, and the doors shut. There's a jerk, and a deep roar and a big whuff of gray-black exhaust pours out over the people still standing near the shelter. None of them, I can see through the dirty window across from me, reacts to having a faceful of sooty gray diesel smoke blasting them. Off we go, and I make a mental note for the future not to get off anywhere east of the grocery store with the Walgreen's next to it.
Part C. East Washington Street -- Downtown to Burger Chef
In 1970s Indianapolis, Washington Street went straight east-west, or as straight as a street could go from a downtown plan developed in spokes from around Monument Circle. Before the downtown area was modernized, the streets radiated out from the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in wheel fashion. Whenever I was in town, I would wander around downtown a bit but always stuck close to East Washington, as that's where I would need the bus to take me later.
In January of 1976, I moved from Indianapolis down to the college town of Bloomington, which is about fifty miles south of the city. Bloomington is where Indiana University is. It's also where the hippies lived, and that's why I'd gone there as soon as I was both eighteen and had enough money to get there.
Three or four times a year I would come north to visit my parents. I took a Greyhound up Highway 31, past Martinsville, to the heart of Indy. Once I got off at the bus terminal I was never quite ready to face my folks, and I would goof around downtown for an hour or two, back when there were lots of little mom-and-pop storefronts in the dilapidated downtown.
After an hour or so of looking at fountain pens I couldn't afford in the upscale stationery store and plug-in pictures of Jesus at the Catholic store, I'd go buy cashews, sold in a striped bag made of waxed paper, from a candy store. The salted nuts on fluted aluminum trays were kept warm under a spotlight. Once they were scooped into the striped bag I'd pay and then nibble cashews and wander over to Washington Street to catch the next bus going east. Once I was on, I could pretty much ride till the coach got to the end of its route and stopped to turn around. That end-of-the-line stop got me near an area south of the Irvington neighborhood. This was fairly close to the street where my parents lived in a bedraggled one-story ranch house near the International Harvester plant.
During one of these trips to the city, instead of getting on the bus after the store with the cashew nuts and then staying on, I decided to go on some sort of side venture. I rode the Washington Steet bus east for a dozen blocks, then got off and did whatever. I can't remember what, but whatever I did, it took a couple of hours. Finally, I knew I couldn't put off the visit any longer so I went to stand at the closet bus stop, noting that the sun was dropping rapidly toward the horizon.
I had no idea what time the next bus was due, but that didn't matter. There was only one bus which went east on Washington Street, so as long as I had the fare and stood on the correct side of the street, I knew I was good.
But on this autumn day, I waited and waited and waited. The late afternoon sky darkened from eyllow-orange to a mixture of blues, violets, and pinks. And then, after the sun had gone down, I waited some more. I felt no conern, except for boredom and my feet being tired on standing on a concerete sidewalk in cheap sneakers with no arch support. I was used to Indianapolis buses being way late, or an entire route being missed. Many times, I'd had to hang out at the bus stop and smoke cigarettes till the next driver came by. The buses were not clean and they weren't safe and I was hardened to all of it. So on this particular evening I just kept waiting, and then I noticed that it was really getting really quite dark. Not a problem for me, but my mother was probably starting to worry.
If I had missed the last bus -- it seemed early in the evening for that to have happened, but still -- then I had a long walk ahead of me in those cheap sneakers. I'd have to go six or seven miles on foot, just to Emerson Avenue, and then I'd still need to walk south along the burm for another half-mile or so till I got to the corner of my folks' sgreet where it ran into Emerson. But what choice did I have? There was no pay phone to call a taxi, even if I thought a cab would really show up, and even if I could afford to pay for one. My other option was to call my parents to come get me, making them leave the house after supper and drive at night, which they would hate.
I looked around, searching for another choice. To my right, I spotted an official-looking building down the street about a block or so. It had a lot of windows. I thought it might be a hospital, and there were some lights on outside the building. Door awnings lit from below? Security lights around the parking lot? I squinted. I recognized that some of the lights were red, and in small rows. Those didn't seem like building lights, but more like vehicle lights. The small colored lights you saw along the tops of trucks and buses.
Buses. . . Could the bus I needed be there, for some strange reason? And more importantly, would it stay there long enough for me to get to it?
I hoofed it across a vast parking lot and yes, there was the Metro bus I'd been waiting for, the one that said "E. Washington St" on a dingy white cardboard sign clipped in place along the bottom rim of the windshield by two dull metal bars. By the time I got close enough to read the sign, the coach doors had just whooshed shut and the air brake had just been released in a long hiss, but then the driver saw me, and popped the doors open for me.
"Just made it," he said, as I climbed the steps and dropped sixty-five cents into the fare box.
"Oh," I said, looking at my cheap plastic sports watch. "How long is it till the next one?"
"This is it," he said. "Last run of the night."
It turned out that the East Washington bus route changed at six in the evening, and coaches stopped coming far enough out to reach the stop I'd been standing at. While I'd been standing there and smoking one Vantage after another, four or five buses, which came out only as far as the hospital complex, had looped around the circular drive and gone back east again. I'd missed them all. If I had not looked around to figure out what was wrong, and I hadn't spotted the row of little red bus lights, I would definitely have been stranded halfway between the middle of town and the outskirts where my folks lived.
It was maybe eight o'clock when I got off the bus at Washington and Emerson, and then I began my half-mile walk down the burm, against traffic so that the headlights half-blinded me. Of course, every eighth or tenth car honked at me, even though I was safely way off the road and up on the gravel burm. The drivers just wanted me to know that they were in a car and I was walking, I guess. Ten or fifteen minutes later, I got to the corner at the end of my parents' street. When I reached the intersection I didn't turn left on East Minnesota. Instead, I waited for the bumper-to-bumper city traffic to clear, and then I crossed Emerson and made my way through pedestrian-unfriendly drive-thru hell to the Burger Chef fast-food place. I needed to use the coin telephone in the narrow, yellow-tiled lobby. No customers went in or out while I was there; the drive-thru lane had just been put in and now everyone was using that.
I put a quarter and a dime into the shiny metal touch-tone pay phone and punched in 267-1879.
After a ring and a half, the receiver was picked up. "You're kinda late," said my mother in her Westt Virginia drawl. "Have any trouble getting the bus?"
"Nah," I said. "Just lost track of the time. I'm at the Burger Chef."
"Just let me put my car coat on," said my mother. "I'll run up and get ya."
I hung up, considered going to the counter for a cheap, really flat hamburger and limp French fries from the last fry-basket of the night, but decided against ordering anything. Mom had probably made meat loaf and she'd make me a sandwich on white bread with ketchup.
While I waited, I went to the cigarette machine in the lobby, dropped in four quarters, and got a pack of Winstons for Mom. She was probably out and would be mad later that she'd forgotten to get cigs while she was up to the Burger Chef anyway.
Standing inside the way-too-brightly lit lobby, I looked out through the smudgy window glass at the night until I saw a familiar sweep of headlights. The front lights of my folks' old Chevy moved over the Burger Chef's parking lot, the twin white circle spotlights picking up little areas of the black grainy asphalt, littered with brown crinkly leaves and empty soft-drink cups. I pushed open the glass lobby door and went out to my parents's dusty car where the Detroit-built engine rumbled comfortingly in the dark.
