I Know Why The Sheltered Bench Stinks, or Talking To Drunk People at the Bus Stop in the Morning

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.

 Warch trailer for "Attack" -- this scene is 1 minute into the video

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.

Zoo Bus

The Zoo Bus, custom-painted with long-legged flamingos, pulled up to the downtown stop, and I put away my highlighter and Nutrition in Sows and Boars. As the bus doors whooshed open, I slipped my bus pass out of my purse for the fifty-eighth time.

"Hi Sheila," said the driver. He waved away my pass. Of course we recognized each other. He also drove the route I took home from Children’s Hospital on work days.

I looked down the narrow aisle to see if the center back seat was free. From center back, it was seven steps to the exit door. From the rear door, I could step onto the brick walkway and avoid the mushy grass near the curb.

Behind me,I heard children’s voices and the squeak of stroller wheels. I stepped to the side as two boys thundered down the long ridged rubber mat, and right to the spot I’d planned to take for myself.

"No fair!” the smaller, rounder boy cried, as his wiry brother, smirking, threw himself onto the orange plastic seat.

"Jerome, make a space for Jeremy to sit!” called his mother. “And scoot over! I have to put Mandy’s stroller where you’re at.”

I gave up, turned around, and took a seat where I was. The tall man with brown hair, the one who'd been sitting two rows from the back on the driver’s side of the aisle for two months, had already felt too close for me when I had been sitting in my regular seat.

Now I had inadvertently chosen a seat across the aisle from him. A camouflage-pattern plastic badge, identical to mine, was, as always, pinned to his sweater. The man used a portable keyboard balanced on his long thighs. The keyboard was attached by a black wire to a smartphone. A large brown book lay on the next seat. Each time I'd passed thos man on my way to the back center seat, the man had raised his eyes briefly. I could tell he was always waiting for me to walk by, but didn't want me to know it.

Now he and I were looking right at each other, from opposite sides of the bus aisle. He looked very pleased. He unplugged the portable keyboard and folded it in half. He stowed the smartphone in his pocket, and picked up the leatherette book lying next to him.

“Another Tuesday at the zoo,” he said, smiling down at the oversize volume in his lap. “It's been about a year. I guess, since we both started to ride the jungle bus.”

“Week fifty-eight,” I said. “My first shift was on a Thursday." Now that I'd spoken, I feared he'd come sit with me. I didn’t like to talk to people; that’s why I always had a book with me. But the man with the brown hair just smiled and settled back with with his own large book. I spotted three meted binder rings.

It wasn't a textbook, I realized; it was some sort of photo album or scrapbook. I quickly opened my own textbook to reed about selenium deficiency in older sows.

I was only pretending to read. I kept feeling distracted by a noisy back-row argument between Jerome and Jeremy over who would hold the zoo membership card. And my thoughts were wandering. What kind of photo album did that brown-haired man have? Why would someone use a scrapbook as reading matter, especially on the Zoo Bus? I personally could easily read a book per week using the forty-five-minute ride time. Yet this man simply paged through a scrapbook which he'd probably compiled himself. He evidently had extra time on his hands, or he hadn't developed a strategy for effective time management.

The bus swung around the big left-hand curve which took us west to the river and then up Riverside Drive. I stopped looking out the bus window  and returned my eyes to my text. I was facing an exam that evening. Jerome and Jeremy kept squabbling, which irritated me confirming my error in spending twenty years as a dietician conducting useless research into childhood health. I didn’t like kids.

My current job involved research the world didn't need because we already know how to help children with obesity. The secret to a low body mass index? Fewer Twinkies, more kickball. But I had to keep working away at the study because I needed the paychecks while I was going back to school. I was forty-two and forced to fit my graduate work around my hospital schedule.

The Zoo Bus made the final turn into the front gate entrance, and I put away my textbook on swine nutrition. I was the first person to line up at the back entrance but as I exited, I sensed that the tall man from across the aisle was right behind me. I felt a little tense, but he and I took different paths away from the bus stop.

My morning as spent as a backup vet tech in the Rhino House, where a two-ton male had his hooves trimmed. I leaned back against the tiled wall end watched the vets attend to the rhino's three-toed feet. As e trampling alternative. I gave the vets a better chance of escape if the sedative level was too low. It was a good learning experience. At the Zoo, just as everywhere else, the newbie would be first to be stepped on.

I survived. At noon, I carried my satchel to the Flamingo Bay outdoor cafe. I saw the tall brown-heirer man from the Zoo Bus there, eLone at a grillwork table. The plastic name badge pinned to my sweater, I now noticed, said "Anthony." In front of him were the leatherette album, the smartphone and keyboard, and a small white paper plate on which which portobello mushroom slices neatly arranged on it. I glanced briefly at his table as I carried my satchel toward an empty table at the far end of the food court, then I pulled out the chair at an empty table. I waited a moment, then pushed the chair back in and went to Anthony’s table instead.

"May I join you?” I asked. Anthony nodded. His expression was both pleased and surprised.

1 sat down and took my insulated lunch cooler from my satchel. I hesitated over the front compartment, where my swine text was tucked away, then decided that I would take the book out but place it to the side.

I looked at Anthony’s scrapbook. "Project documentation?” I asked. “Family photos?”

"Cats,” he said, spinning the album around on the black mesh tabletop for me to see. Four vinyl pockets, two per page, each contained a color photograph of a different cat. “I’m digitizing these into here.” He tapped the screen of his phone.

“You must have had some reason for using emulsion film,” I said, lifting my salad container from my cooler.

“I can’t adjust the pixel count for the warm, fuy look I need,” said Anthony. “So I take an old-fashioned picture and then scan it.” A plastic-wrapped salad, with a packet of bleu cheese dressing sitting on top of the tightly-stretched plastic wrap, sat next to Anthony’s little plate of mushrooms.

“Saving your salad for later?” I asked. I shook my bottle of vinaigrette till the herbal flecks swirled in spirals from top to bottom.

“I can’t get my dressing packet open,” he said, turning a vinyl page to reveal a photo of a Maine coon cat with a very fluffy face. He continued to lift the pages of the album, settling each page carefully after its trip over the bifurcated arches. “It says ‘Tear Here’ but evidently they had trouble with the perforator.”

“I have plenty of oil and vinegar,” I said. “Would you care for some?”

“Yes, that would be nice,” he said, He carefully moved the photo album out of the way and then pulled the salad container close. I handed him the little jar. He carefully tipped the jar so that none of the herbed oil ran down the bubbled outer surface. He set the jar down near my plate, clean and dry.

I could not to take my attention from the album of cat pictures. I indicated it with my salad fork. “Are you a cat person, Anthony?” I took a bite of romaine leaf. “I’m Sheila, by the way."

“I know,” he said, and that made me a little nervous. I kind of had craziness, cat-loving, and stalking a bit conflated in my mind.

But then he said. “Wondering how I knew? The driver always greets you by name.” He poked the leaves of his salad, distributing the dressing evenly. “I am a cat person, but no cats actually live with me.” He carefully wiped his fingers on a paper napkin, then picked up the smartphone, tapped the screen and held the device so that I could view the web page on the screen. “Adopt-A-Pal Kitty Companions,” said the heading, above a row of cartoon cats: a tabby, a Siamese, a Persian, and one which was surely a jellicle cat.

"Oh, I see," I said.

Anthony finished his salad and his plaste of mushrooms. He dabbed dressing from his mustache, pushed the dishes away, and then picked up his phone again. He swiped through the smartphone photos in rapid succession. "This is the hospice page, companions for people who are, um, at the end of their lives. And here are cats good for lonely people who have lost a spouse. This next page are all very loving cats for kids with attention deficit disorder, or former prison inmates, or formerly homeless people who now have a stable place to live.”

“Do you match older animals with people in hospice?” I said. "Kittens with the children™

"I sort the matches by temperament,” said Anthony. “Human and feline."

"So you think animals have personalities?” I said.

"You don't?” he said. “What about the animals here at the zoo? Or the ones you study in school?”

“I started out with poultry,” I said. “We measured feed taken in and waste produced. Too much waste means profit loss.”

“I’m not sure chickens are the best choice for a study of the animal mind,” said Anthony. “Those little pointy faces are hard to read.” He smiled. “You’ve moved on to large animals, then?” He indicated Nutrition in Sows and Boars.

“Yes,” I said. “I work with swine. If I was twenty-five, I might look at more options. But I need to get my degree while I’m still young enough to get into a practice.” I used my fork to lilt carrot shreds from the bottom of my salad container.

Anthony shut the album of cat photos. “Would you like to come over for dinner on Thursday? I promise you won’t have to eat with a cat sitting on your head.”

I opened my scheduler, and Anthony whistled at the colored-coded rectangles.

“I’ve got so much to do that I have to stay organized,” I said.

“But you enjoy it, too,” he said. “Being organized.”

“I do,” I said. “I do enjoy it.” I colored in the Thursday evening slot and shut the schedule.

Anthony looked at his watch. “I’m supposed to go clean buckets at Manatee Coast. I'll ie: you finish your lunch in peace.” He rose, tossed his trash into the mouth of a hippo-shaped trash can, and headed for the gift shop.

“Anthony?” I called. “Aren’t you going to Manatee Coast?”

“What?” he said, stopping to look at me. “Am I turned around again?” He shaded his eyes toward the gift shop, where long-armed monkey puppets hung from a mini circus tent. "They keep changing the layout on me.”

I pointed in the right direction, and Anthony crossed to the correct walkway. He stoppea “On Thursday, do you want to ride the Zoo Bus to the Park & Ride lot, and I can give yu a lift to my place? I can show you the shelter, too, if you want.”

“Sure," I said, nodding. He smiled. I watched him pass the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cart. Then I pulled The Nutrition of Sows and Boars closer, and turned to Chapter 4.


*****


The Park & Ride parking lot was three blocks from the bus stop at the courthouse square. Anthony's car, a Volvo station wagon, had four huge tubs of cat litter in the back bay.

"Good for traction in the winter,” Anthony said as he unlocked my door and went around to the driver’s side. “My dad will come by some weekend and help me haul them in. My back's not great. The walking at the zoo is good, therapeutic and all that.” He waited for me to fasten my seat belt, then he started the engine. He made a left turn to get out of the lot, then drove down the two-lane street, past a row of older modular homes, all in light pastels.

"The shelter’s up the road,” said Anthony, when we reached his driveway. "We could leave our things here, and walk up.”

"I always walk if I get the chance,” I said. “I’d walk to the zoo if it was five miles closer to my house.”

"I’d walk with you,” said Anthony, swseetly. “I would miss you too much to keep taking the Zoo Bus." He hurried ahead. The asphalt driveway ended and we now walked on pea gravel embedded into hard-packed dirt.

Anthony slowed his pace so I could catch up. “I hope you’ll like my cooking. I’m a vegan so it's hard restaurant food I can eat.” He grinned. “I bought some organic chicken. I bet you're a carnivore.”

"High-protein, low-carb diet,” I said. “Keeps my blood sugar regulated.,"

The corrugated-steel warehouse was unmarked and a bit corroded in places. I wondered if I was foolish to go inside it with Anthony. Maybe all those cat photographs were a ploy. But no, even as we stood outside the building, I heard a faint but insistent chorus of meows from inside. These grew louder as Anthony stepped up to a gray steel door with metal grillwork over the window. He tapped buttons on a security panel.

“Cat kidnappers?” I said, looking at the panel.

Anthony tilted his head to indicate he’d heard me. The speaker over the button panel buzzed, and with a click, the metal door popped open. “I thought I better keep it secure. Thieves might think there’s machinery or tools in there.”

Inside, Anthony used his foot to push aside some boxes. “I could be using the space a little better,” he said, shifting a wobbly tower of cat chow bags out of a path between carpeted scratching posts and plastic jugs of scoopable litter.

Anthony’s makeshift shelter wasn't unpleasant, really. Cluttered, chaotic, and overfilled with cats, yes, but it had a good pine-cleaner smell, and cozy areas for the cats to congregate. Pieces of yard-sale furniture made the walled-off areas look a bit like my first apartment. I liked a funny little 1960s side table with a dark faux-wood finish on it, a lamp rising through its second tier. A fat cat with tufty ears sat on the main surface while a second feline sat on the upper ledge, tapping the big cat on the back of the head with a playful paw.

The air was filled with cat sounds, some faint and some noisy. Several American shorthairs circled my ankles, adorning my slacks with wavy tendrils of whitish hair. A tiny calico cat stood in the improvised pathway, yowling. I could see to the very back of its ridged tongue. But now my attention was drawn to an overhead network of elaborate walkways, tunnels, scenic overview and nesting cradles, where a sleek black cat was being chased by a similar one. I looked at Anthony. “Did you build all this?”

He looked proud. “My father was a contractor. See all the garage doors?”

I realized that many of the walls had raised panels and tiny windows.

“Dad and I installed most of the garage doors on this side of town,” he said. “I worked fo him every summer. We sold the business a couple years ago. He didn't need the warehouse, and when I made the nonprofit for Adopt-A-Pal, Dad donated the building to us.”

“It’s truly amazing, Anthony,” I said, spotting an aerial ziggurat which offered plush-covered stairways for streams of cats. Inside the kitty-size Babylonian monument, cats perched in oval cubbyholes. In the shadows, I saw tiers of green and yellow eyes with narrow pupil slits. There were oddities: a mismatched pair, a single eye, a pair of copper-colored eyes which drew me in. These particular eyes held a meaningful glow, like that of an indicator light signaling in red, orange, or pulsing yellow that one's attention is required. The glow in the copper eyes said. "I have seen what I need. You are what I need.”

As I looked at the cats, all contented or curious or busy, Anthony drifted next to me. I understood I, like the cats, had found a refuge.

Fast Forward Twenty Years

The #2 bus goes north and south on High Street, which is a main drag in Columbus, Ohio. When generic foods and membership shopping clubs were new concepts, a low-cost chain called Cub Foods opened at the Graceland Shopping Center on North High. On its opening day, Cub offered newspaper coupons to attract shoppers.

The southbound #2 which left from Graceland was a bus I rode three or four times a week, and so I happened to be in a front-facing seat across the aisle from the rear exit doors when a happy woman, carrying two Cub Foods bags, got on greeted the driver. She looked around, spotted me, and I thought, "Well, I am about to have a conversation."

Normally, I like happy people, on or off the bus. And I do like to talk about bargains, which the woman's plastic shopping bags were filled with. She showed me each item, giving me the coupon or sales value on each: "The eggs were free with a coupon! And the orange juice was buy one, get one free. And this bread was forty-nine cents, regular a dollar forty-nine."

"With a coupon?" I asked, half-interested even though I wasn't sure I wanted to be encouraging this discussion.

"No, just regular!" she said, and smiled. "And I got my good Folger's coffee I like," she said, tapping the can with her forefinger like Mrs. Olson.  "Same price as store brand, so I figured I would get the --"

I thought "richest kind," but the woman across the bus aisle really said "kind I like."

"Sounds like you did great," I said, starting to admire her for her shopping acumen.

"I figured it up," she said, ticking off the items by pressing the pads of each finger against the pad of her thumb. "With the eggs free and the bread fifty cents -- less than fifty cents--even with juice and coffee, my whole breakfast today will be a quarter!" She leaned back and settled her bags around herself.  "And a quarter tomorrow too." She truly radiated joy.

And I thought "Why do I feel so uncomfortable? She's sane, she's clean, she's cheerful." And slowly I let myself realize that it's because this woman was me, or rather the person I would become. At the time I was forty-ish, and still hoping to age into an eternally-cool artistic type like May Sarton or Laurie Anderson.  And here was this woman, close to sixty, with her bright-colored camp shirt and comfortable slacks, which didn't clash exactly but didn't quite go together either. And she was on the bus with a discount card, and her whole morning was good over a free eggs coupon. No, no, no -- not what I wanted for myself at all.

And now, twenty years later, I am indeed that woman. I have a discount bus card, my tee shirt is blue-gray and my pants are blue but the wrong kind of blue to go with the shirt, and I just relished my lunch of clearance-shelf gefilte fish, thinking "75% off!" as I forked two pieces out of the jar.  And you know, I'm better with that than I thought I'd be, that day on the ol' #2 South.

                                                                   

Rich Vs. Poor #1: Clueless White Woman in Fur Coat Endangers Me

"Will you stand with me?" says the sixty-ish woman in a full-length real fur coat "I don't like it out here."

 It's 1974 and I've spent the day at the downtown library in Indianapolis. It's October, and I'm a little chilly as I'veall I've  got on is a thin chambray shirt, a jean jacket, and blue jeans with rips which let the wind in around the knees. (I have repaired the hole below the back pocket with a piece of red bandanna so at least my butt's not cold.)

I look at the white woman. Her hair has been done earlier in the day at a beauty parlor. She's got on pearl earrings, a fancy mink coat, and high-quality black leather high heels. She's obviously not taking the bus but instead is waiting at the curb for her husband to come get her in the Buick. She's spent the day shopping, and she's got two large white paper shopping bags with white cotton-cord handles.

The rich woman is about twenty feet from me where I stand next to a rusted bus stop sign. The sign's up  on a green metal pole which is bent in the middle at a 45-degree angle.

Behind the woman's cat's eye glasses, darting eyes are scanning the street on one side and then the other. The woman's red-lipsticked mouth is pulled tight. The sun is about to go down, and she's worried that Black people are going to emerge from the impending darkness like zombies.

I know we're supposed to bond because our skin is the same color but I can't imagine what she is doing so close to run-down Monument Circle in a fur coat and jewelry which would pay a family's rent for half a year, and then on top of that, holding two large bags of easily-retrunable goods still in their original boxes. The receipts are probably in one of the bags. If not, any of that stuff would glide right into the inventory of A-1 Pawn with no questions asked.

I have no fear for myself. I obviously have nothing and no one is going to mug me. There's extra security in the fact that I've taken the precaution of putting my real wallet in my sock. The thin naugahyde-over-cardboard billfold in my back pocket had cost 99 cents at Woolworth's. It now holds an expired library card and two worn one-dollar bills, one of which badly torn and mended with yellowing Scotch tape. If a gang of hoods hassles me on the bus, I will act like I really want the fake billfold so the bad-ass kids will feel like they really won when they demand the wallet or they will get off the bus at my stop.

I say nothing to the worried woman. Why on Earth would I stand next to this dumb-bell and get hassled or robbed by proximity? Not only will I not go stand next to her or invite her to come closer to me, but I am tempted to pull a 10-cent mini spiral notebook and pen out of my raggedy jeans pocket. I would like to write an "I'm Not With Stupid" sign and add an arrow pointing to Expensive Fur Coat Lady.

Fortunately for her, a burgundy-color Buick Riviera (Did I call that or what?) pulls up and the woman hustles her two big white paper shopping bags over to it. Her husband, who has filled the interior of the car with gray cigar smoke, does not lean over to open her door for her, and she has to put down a bag to jerk her door open. With a resentful glance at me, she settles herself in with one bag in her lap and the other wedged in on the floorboard near her high-heeled feet. The passenger door slams and the car roars off in a blast of invisible but hot and smelly exhaust.

Now I am all by myself on a dark street downtown in crummy Indianapolis, waiting on a bus, and I feel much, much safer.

The People on the Bus #2: Rescued

                 Part A.  Loud Friend
                                                                      

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.

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.

The Honest Answer

Yet another radio commentator will meet with a panel to discuss why people say they want public transport but then they don't use it. We all know what the problem with public transportation is: the public.

Weird Al gives us a detailed rundown

Buses in the Movies: "Desk Set"

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Spencer Tracy's character has brought big changes at work, and Katharine Hepburn's character Bunny isn't sure what will happen to her huge plant.

Bunny's co-worker Peg:  I'd like to see you get that on the Lexington Avenue bus.

Bunny:  I'll say it's alive and pay an extra fare.