The People On The Bus #1: Root Beer Guy

The lean, flexible, very tan young man on the bench next to me has his white T-shirt off. It is tucked into the right back pocket of his blue jeans so that it hangs down like a damp flag.
The young man's smooth-skinned back, with each vertebra visible, is deeply, evenly suntanned. His shirt is something he only carries around in the summertime,  in case a store manager or a police officer makes him put it on.

The young man's hair is blondish-brown, his eyes are green, and he is talking to me.  He doesn't use the same names for the places I call Faith Mission and The Open Shelter.  He calls one of them Main Central and the other The Central Office, or something like that, and he is laying out for me the multi-layered web which connects these two places with the CIA, Jesus, and a shadow military fending off evil forces too vile to be spoken of openly.

His theories are the kind of thing I can't decide about. Just because a person's thinking is scrambled doesn't mean there isn't any truth to what they're saying. This guy's complex analysis reminds me of an acquaintance, Bill. Bill's been diagnosed with schizophrenia but he doesn't accept that and he won't take the prescribed medication. His mental illness causes his brain to link a tangled chain of accusations about a reliable cast of characters: the Rockefellers, his psychiatrist, and his former mother- in-law.  Once, I stood and listened as Bill spun out his synchronicities for a solid twenty minutes without taking a breath. His mind leapt from one perceived connection to another. As Bill talked, my mental filter gave me messages like "paranoid" and "neurological short circuits." And yet, at the same time, I also thought "How do I know that none of that's true? I mean, okay, the specific details don't match up with the reality I accept, but maybe there's an unseen truth under there. Maybe you have to be Bill to understand this stuff."

Bill ran out of breath, paused, and we stood there looking at each other.   Bill seemed to be waiting for me to do something.  I didn't know what he needed me to do, so I waited.

"You listened," he said, in wonderment.  "People usually cut me off or tell me I'm crazy."

"I have no limiters on my information intake," I told Bill. "I take everything in and then I decide about it later."

Bill was not the first person I'd ever dealt with whose worldview really diverged from mine. I'd been riding the bus my entire adult life, so I'd had many opportunities to sit near people who wouldn't be allowed to express what they really thought anyplace except the bus. 

Now, in the sun-superheated bus shelter, sharing a bench with the shirtless man, I see that my current companion does not have the same needs as my buddy Bill.  This guy doesn't need me to listen to his fears. He perceives himself to be helping me.  He is explaining The System to me in the slightly-dry way a history teacher might explain the balance of executive, judicial, and legislative powers, only at a manic pace. Like someone with a PhD talking to a middle-school student, the young man (he's maybe 20 or 21) pauses now and then, and I can see he is simplifying the information so that I'll be more likely to understand it.

"Now, see, Jesus is the King of everything, and he runs the Central Office -- well both of 'em, the Central Office and you know, Main Central --" He turns and points toward downtown, where Faith Mission is located  "-- but he can't reveal all of it, not even to the higher-ups in the special military." He turns and gives me a serious look. "I am not even supposed to talk about them. It's against the code, you know, the structured code."

I re-evaluate the man who is waiting for the bus with me. Maybe his boyish features are fooling me, and he's old enough to be a veteran who was deployed to the Middle East. Hard to say. Maybe he wasn't like this before he went into the military, or maybe he was, and they took him anyway. I don't know what to think.

"Now Kenny Evans, over at Main Central -- the satellite office - "

I recognize Kenny Evans' name. He is a real person who works either within the mental health system, or in the administrative offices at one of the homeless shelters, or both. I can't remember now.

The young man suddenly become completely lucid and he leans forward to take a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket. "All right if I smoke? I can blow it out into the street."

"It's fine," I say. I smoked for years, and this is my second-hand smoke karma.

The young man takes a yellow butane lighter out of another pocket, lights a Marlboro, and puts the yellow lighter away. "Kenny said if I could get my caseworker to fill out one of those cards --" He puts his cigarette in the corner of his mouth so he can use both hands to show me a rectangular shape a little bigger than a standard large-size index card. He looks at me, but I don't know the social work system very well.

"So Kenny thought she should sign that for you?" I say.

"Yeah." He takes the Marlboro out of his mouth and really tries to blow the gray smoke away but the summer air is hot and stale and the smoke just hangs in front of the shelter until the passing traffic wafts it back towards us. "And then if I had the card and my military ID --"

"Ah ha," I think.

"-- or my food stamp card or something like that, then they could get me into a substitute --" He frowns, searching for the word, and waves his cigarette in a "what have you" gesture. "Subsidiary. . ."

"Subsidized housing?" I say. I lean forward, looking for the #83 but the bright glints of sunlight off car mirrors and street signs make it impossible to see if the bus is coming or not.

"Exactly," he said. He takes a last drag of his smoke, and then flicks it out onto the asphalt of East North Broadway. "But Jesus said to be careful, because the card, or anything with a bar code, you know, has your vibration on it. And then They --" The young man jabs his finger toward the alley behind the Kroger store, but somehow I know he means either the regular military or a dark paramilitary force "-- can get your Heavenly Record off there, and your genetics, and your grades in school and also they can control your wiring and your nerves, slow up your heartbeat, that type of technology." He looks out over the Kroger parking lot, and I wonder if he is looking for an unmarked government vehicle with a super-sensor wireless antenna which could pick up our voices. "So I lighted it on the stove and let it burn up in the sink."

"The card that the lady signed?" I say. I'm sad for him, but also don't know if he would have been a safe neighbor for the other people in the building.

"Fire will cleanse them off," he says, and he gives me an instructive look. "The personal vibratory -- uh, the connection. Because then they can read that off at Central Main Office. With their digital upload and whatnot."

"I wouldn't want that," I say, because I'm scared of the government too, and the loss of privacy, and mysterious private security officers. And I think what he's saying about the bar codes and vibes is not that different from RFIDs and the microchips veterinarians put in pet dogs and cats.

The young man lifts the corner of his white tee shirt and blots his forehead with it. And again, he tunes into the reality I can understand. "Wow, it's hot," he says, looking at the grocery store parking lot across the street, where heat waves rise from the pavement and make the lines between the parking spaces move and blur. "I wish I had a good cold root beer."

He isn't asking me for anything. He's forgotten I'm there. He has left the worldly sage's chair and now he is an unemployed veteran with some official diagnosis on paper at the Central Main Office Shelter Mission Caseworker System, and he is broke and thirsty.

"I have some quarters," I say, digging some change out of my jeans pocket. It's all the money I have, actually, but I have an apartment and furniture and food in my pantry and a computer and the internet. And I haven't ever been in a war.  I give him all the change I have. I don't know how much the pop machine costs outside the Kroger, but I think it's enough money. "Go get a cold drink. It's awful hot out here."

And I put the change into his tough, lined palm. He closes his fingers around it, and jumps up and heads forward to jaywalk across East North Broadway. He does stop long enough to look for traffic one way, and then he stands on the double yellow stripe to let traffic in the other lane clear. He doesn't look back at me, but I don't care. He seems happy and eager and for once, he can have something he wants without it being a giant ordeal involving the signing of cards and sitting on a hard plastic chair in the hallway to the Main Central Office.