Besides kickball, there were a lot of games the neighbor kids and I used to play where we could stand in a free zone or touch a ritual object and no one could "get" us. In the city, bus stop benches and/or shelters are like that for alcoholics.
If someone has been to a tavern half the night, and now walks, with a bit of a wobble, down the sidewalk, or sits unsteradily on a retaining wall, or leans against a post, he or she is likely to chat with a police officer (or ossifer). But the bus stop seems to be a police-declared free zone. If someone appears to be waiting for a bus, even three hours before the routes start, that person is much less likely to be "tagged" in this game -- or tazed.
As a person who's at the bench or shelter because I'm actually catching the bus, I have mixed feelings about this informal policy. On one hand, the shelters stink because people who've drunk a can of beer an hour have to pee often. And they have learned from experience that the bus shelter rule is a little like baseball; if they take too large a lead off third base, they might end up "out" (or rather in, for thirty days). So a person full of cheap beer waits for traffic to clear, then returns that rented beer at the convenient drop-off zone, determinted by the users to be two feet from the bus stop bench, and nccessarly uphill, away from the street.
Now, if U.S. cities had public urinals like Paris and Amsterdam do, that'd be really good. Or if we could use spray-paint on the pavement or some signs or something to create roomy Heavy Drinker Zones away from the bus stops, where loaded people couldn't be tagged "it" -- oh wait, we have those already: the Old Port in Portland, the Short North in Columbus, Bourban Street in New Orleans.
But there's another side to it, too. People who left the tavern at two a.m. and have been sitting outside for four or five hours, drinking Pabst in warm cans from the convenience store, are interesting, especially in pairs. And they are mostly gentle souls. The truly problematic people at seven a.m. aren't at the bus shelter. Those people either passed out next to an alley dumpster, or they already got hauled off to the pokey, or they've found their way to one of those "argument corners" where groups of eight or ten people stand and yell at each other to work out their differences. These street corners aren't free zones, exactly, but a two-person police patrol isn't going to get into the middle of that. Neither would I.
So my early-morning bus stop companions tend to be the mellowest people from last night's partying crowd. Would I want them as neighbors, tenants, or someone with whom to share custody of children? No. These folks laugh at rules, they become angry over very small things, and they're pretty focused on themselves. But man, are they funny. And insightful. and creative, ingenious, crafty. And they've been where I've never been, and seen what I've never seen. Of course, they love people like me, who enjoy a good story.
The stories often involve the Cold War betseen the intoxicated and those who wear a badge. "See him?" says one of two mostly toothless skinny men sharing a bus shelter with me near the Graceland Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio. He (the man closest to me) is waving a lit cigarette between his first and second fingers to indicate a police officer sitting in a squad car at the intersec of Morse Road and High St. "He knows me!"
Thus begins a tale of years-long rivalry, foment by this guy's drinking buddy, into the dramatic moment of the speaker being loaded into the back seat of a squad car and driven out into the hinterlands. He was let out, in shirt sleeves during damp cool weather, along Route 310 between Reynoldsburg and Pataskala, about twenty miles out of the city. Since the guy had no phone, no one to call anyway, and no money, he walked back to Columbus. This took a day and a half, including a nap he took in a weed-filled drainage ditch. The ditch "wasn't bad" to sleep in, he reported, "except for the chiggers." He extended his leg and indicated, with the lit cigarette, that he'd been bitten from groin to ankle. When he got back to his favorite tavern, three people bought him beers. (The drinking buddy claimed to have been one of these buyers, but I had my doubts.) Lisening to this tale of unchosen adventure I thought "The cage in the back of a cop car is really like a Have-A-Heart trap on human scale, and this guy is like that furry creature that finds its way from the woods back to your house."
Other stories the bus-bencheers tell are about family. These tales often begin with a listing of my companions' adult children. Most of all of them, unsurprisingly, live a long way off.
"My oldest boy lives in Cincinnati," says a woman who has her hair in the same loose topknot which makes Ma Kettle so recognizable. When the straps of this woman's tie-dye tank top move behind her bare shoulder, I see the overlapping deep tan lines, in three or four patinas, of skin exposed to outdoor sun for nine or ten months out of the year.
The weather this particular day is brisk, as it often is in Portland, Maine. I myself am wearing a denim overshirt over a tee shirt, and I'm still a bit chilly. The woman next to me, who's my age, seems totally acclimated and comfortable in the tank top paired with jersey pedal-pushers which have a drawstring waist. There are beads and tiny bells (without clappers) at the drawstring ends. My companion is clean, her teeth are both white and all there, and her outfit matches. But her exhaled breath smells intensely like some sweet hard liquor -- rum? peach brandy?
The woman in tie-dye is not just comfy, but happy. She knows everyone and waves and smiles at people walking and driving by, and at drivers of buses going up the other side of Congress Street. Some of them yell back.
"My youngest son joined the Navy," she tells me, "and then when he got out, he liked it so much in San Diego that he just stayed. He calls me all the time and says he wants me to go out there and live." She stops talking long enough to yell "How you doin'?" through the open driver's window of a city utility truck driven by a uniformed man. The woman glances back at me again. "He sends me money orders for bus fare, or an Amtrak itcket, but I just send them right back to him. I don't like California." She scans my face to see if I believe her; I don't. She turns away to wave at a man in a red-and-yellow striped kitchen apron who is setting up a lunch cart on Monument Square. He doesn't seem to see her, so she cups her hands around her mouth. "LIONEL! Yo, LIONEL!" He looks up, a little startled, to see her enthusiastic wave. "It's Cathy!" she calls. "You know, CATHY?"
Lionel is not sure what to do, because he thinks she's yelling at him aboutnot putting the lunch cart where it is. He stands for a moment, holding a bundle of long white waxed paper bags which will hold hot dogs in buns later. Cathy smiles at him, and Lionel looks relieved and turns to tuck the hot dog bags into a compartuent under the grill top of the lunch cart.
Cathy has returned to the listing of her children. "Now my two girls, they're both -- you know, in between. . .the two girls are together in the middle between the two boys is what I'm trying to say. Autumn is getting herself straightened up; she's made some mistakes and she's paid for them, and I'm proud of her for what she's done to make things right. She gets to come home in the fall." Cathy pauses and this gives me time to process her interaction with Lionel. He really doesn't seem to recognize her, despite her friendliness and knowing his name.
Now Cathy flaps her hand energetically at two sight-seers who are looking at the Tour Hours sign in front of the Longfellow House, and I put it all together. Cathy knows none of these people. They just wave because she smiles so broadly and has so much energy.
"Tasha, now, has two kids of her own," says Cathy and though she continues to beam at strangers, her voice is tinged with emotions that aren't happiness. "I don't see 'em too much. She has them on lessons, you know, piano and all that. I got both girls both matching sundresses, like this color" -- Cathy tugs at the stretchy fabric of her tank top, which actually has splashes of every color -- "because they want to be like Grammy." Cathy stops to put a piece of chewing gum into her mouth, after offering me the crinkled green pack of Wrigley's spearmint. The combination of mint chewing gum and fruity alcohol, as Cathy exhales, is not as unpleasant as I'd feared it would be. "I got 'em the outfits for Christmas, but I decided to wait and see 'em closer to summer. Too cold for sleeveless anyways." She looks down at her tank top, then laughs. She sounds happier again. "They're not like Grammy. They get cold. So it's better to wait and see 'em and give 'em the outfits when it's warm anyways." Cathy checks my face again but I hide any sign of disbelief and we smile at each other.
Cathy leans forward suddenly, over her crossed arms, to yoohoo at a substantial woman in a hot-pink sweatshirt who's come out of an office building on the other side of Congress Street. The woman's expertly using a hand cart to load a very large tropical fern in a heavy terra cotta planter into the back of a hot-pink van with the logo "Pat's Plants." Pat slams shut the rear door of the van, hops into the driver's seat, and gives two toots on the horn as the van pulls away from the curb. Cathy looks pleased, though I really don't think Pat saw or heard her.
Even when intoxicated people aren't all that fun at the bus stop, they are often fascinating. To me, nayway. Part of it is that I can't figure out how they are even alive. I remember a wizened old fellow -- not the creepy one who suddenly reached up to run his fingers throgh my hair and I had to go home and shampoo twice, but a different one. This was a diferent guy, probably in his late eventies judging from his worn-out face and stooped posture as he sat. I was on the same bench with him, in downtown Bloomington, Indiana. I sat closer to the street and leafed through a left-behind issue of the local paper, then called The Herald-Telephone (aka "The Horrible-Terrible"). The man was sitting to my left, I remember. While he didn't look or smell as though he'd been drinking that morning. his face was a map of decades of honkytonkin', fightin'. and runnin' from the law.
This was in the early 1980s, on a really nice summer day. I worked second shift in those years and I was killing time till I got on a southbound bus to start work at five in the evening. I remember it was breezy that sunny afternoon, and the ground was covered with ever-changing dappled shadows from the gently swaying tree branches. All the leaves all rustled in a pleasant way. If it hadn't been such a nice day, I might not have talked to the older man, because I was still skittish after the awful hair-touching incident of a couple weeks before.
At that time, the single central bus stop in downtown Bloomington had old-fashioned wooden slat park benches, made with wood planted green and with two metal side supports. Three long narrow slats formed the seat and two slats served for the backrest. Paired benches, facing each other, were set ninety degrees to the street, which was probably Lincoln. (The north-south streets downtown have Presidents' names and now I can't remember if Grant came before or after Lincoln.) In other places, bus benches are usually parallel to the street so that you sit and look at the sides of cars and trucks you aren't riding in. But the benches in Bloomington, near the shoe-repair shop next door to Ladyman's Cafe, were set at right angles to the street. There was no shelter, because people were worried that a shelter would attract homeless people, who might try to get out of the rain.
That breezy day, the older guy started the conversation by saying something about some photo in the newspaper. I am a sucker for anybody's story that begins with a picture from history: "I fought over there," or "I worked there in the 1950s," or "I had a yellow Plymouth Fury just like that." I glanced over to see his pointing finger, and noticed that his long thin arm came close to looking mummified. The skin was of a similar color and texture to smoked herring. This webbed, tight skin wasn't just age, but rather the kind of pickled preservation I saw in biology specimens in high school biology class. Sixty years of all whiskey and no water had virtually preserved this guy while he was alive, and when this guy died, the embalmer wouldn't have much to do.
I was already impressed, without even hearing his stories, that he'd lived this long. My amazement level went up as he began listing his surgeries. Doctors had sewed him up a number of times. He'd been shot twice, once by an enemy soldier, I assumed at the very end of World War I, in the calf of his left leg. The second shooting involved some sort of mix-up around playing cards for money.
That second bullet had fragmented after bouncing off a rib and a piece of the metal had gone into his spleen and no one realized that till a couple days later, when he got a fever of a hundred and five. The docs had to do an emergency splenectomy after giving him gas with some sort of portable canister. The surgery happened as he laid on an unsterilized gurney, wearing his street clothes, in the hallway on the way to the surgical suite. As he explained the procedure to me, the wizened man indicated the location of his spleen to me by vaguely waing his palm over the wrong side of his body; just for a moment I thought he was going to pull up his sport shirt to show me the operation site, like Lyndon Johnson showing reporters his gall bladder scar. The spleen is on the left side of the body, but he was indicating an area near his liver, more to the right. I wans't clear if he was just remembering the discomfort in a mirror-like fashion or if the bullet had maybe hit his appendix and not his spleen.
It didn't matter as he'd moved on. It turned out he'd also had been stabbed with a steak knife by his ex-wife after she caught him with a floozie at a nightclub (cue either "Attack of the 50-foot Woman" or "Pistol-Packin' Mama") but the knife had been the cheap aluminum kind you buy at K-Mart, with the flimsy plastic handle, and she'd only gotten his scapula anyway. Shortly after that, this same woman rammed this guy's car with her own car, and that hadn't been too good for his neck. Then he had tried to chase her down by driving seventy-five or eighty miles an hour on a rutted, winding two-lane road, and she made the curve but he didn't and that was also not too good for his neck.
Listen to "Pistol Packin' Mama" on YouTube
There were, I learned, various other uninteresting surgeries and repairs for this and that. Then we got to the big one: Legionnaire's Disease. Are you old enough to emember that first big outreak? A bunch of people got sick in 1976, at a Philly hotel where a lot of American Legion members had gathered for a convention.
My bus bench buddy wasn't in the American Legion, or if he was, he wasn't at that convention. He contracted the illness in 1979, while managing a crummy motel somewhere near the Indiana-Kentucky border. The job paid badly, with no benefits, but he got a free room next door to the Manager's Office. Before we got to this illness, I was really starting to feel pretty bad for this guy; here he'd been, before even getting sick, spending what should have been his retirement years managing a downscale motel and living in Unit 1-A as a perk.
The room was decent, he said, with some type of ancient metal steam or radiant hot-water wall unit which supplied what passed for heat. Apparently the last motel manager had lived with his girlfriend off-site so this old radiator heating thing hadn't been turned on for a while. Whatever the ambient temperature was at the No-Tell Motel, it was in the perfect range for growing plenty of Legionella bacterial cultures. So after this guy lived through war and various shootings, stabbings, and vehicular mishaps, not to mention downing several hundred bottles of Old Crow, it was teeny bacteria that nearly did him in.
"Kind of like Alexander the Great," I said, mainly because I wanted a chance to say something. "That's why he never finished conquering the world. All his men got dystentary."
"I had that in the Army," he said. "Dys -- dyst -- dystentary. Caught that in Guam. They give you sulfur pills for it. Them things taste awful."
Guam? The Army? Sulfa drugs? I started doing math in my head. Okay, if this guy was in Guam in the Second World War, and he was on the island in the middle 40s, when sulfa pills were available. . . I did some quick adding and subtracting. He must have been say, 20 years old in 1945. Which meant that he was born around 1925. Which meant that he was, in 1982, he was. . .fifty-seven years old?? And here I was thinking he was a well-preserved seventy-seven or so. So it wasn't that he looked great for seventy-seven, it was that he looked rough for fifty-seven. Yikes.
Lay off the booze, kids.
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