When I was 18

Digging through my old papers again, found another gem worth saving. It is, at points, embarrasing upon reflection, but I was young...

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The bus pulled up to the stop with a whooshing roar. Dried leaves rose from the gutters, dragged upwards by the draughts of turbulence around the wheelshafts. The doors opened with another whooshing sound – a whooshing whimper – as though the compartment inside was being depressurized. Those of us at the stop had to wait impatiently as an elderly woman with a hunched back crawled down the front steps. The moment her foot landed on the pavement the eager line of passengers surged up into the bus. The woman in the front of the line paid her fare in coin. One, two, three, four… five… oh, shit. Of course, she’s paying with dimes. The next man… naturally, he can’t get his dollar into the machine. When I reached the top step, I handed the driver my transfer ticket and scanned the bus for a place to sit.

It was moderately crowded… crowded only because everyone traveling alone insists on sitting in the aisle seat. Not wishing to dislocate any of these people, I sat down on the edge of the section reserved for the elderly and the handicapped. More often, it falls to the garrulous middle-aged Latina housewives. This day’s conversation seemed to be about Yolanda’s husband, Martin. My rudimentary knowledge of Spanish made it impossible for me to discern more than an occasional noun, so I felt very little shame in eavesdropping. When that grew tedious, I cracked open the paper I’d already carried long enough to stain my fingers black with newsprint.

The bus rumbled down Main Street, stopping every two blocks. I read an article about declining test scores in California’s schools. The man in the grass-stained T-shirt disembarked. A white teenager grabbed the spot. I read about a recent homicide involving a two-year-old boy. Yolanda and Maria vacated their seats and were replaced by two young girls with bags full of recent purchases from the mall. I turned to the front page to read an article about a belligerent Middle Eastern dictator. A white man in a green suit boarded the bus. He surveyed the bus as the driver pulled away from the stop, then sat down next to me.

He smelled strange… clean, but old. I turned back to my story.

“Ah-ha… Saddam Hussein. He is an officer.”

“Excuse me?” I was slightly taken aback.

“He’s just an officer. He’s doing his job. But he’s gotten himself into more trouble than he realizes this time.”

“I don’t know about that… I wouldn’t be surprised if he knows exactly what he’s doing… and stands to win more by bringing action than by being ignored.”

“You know, it’s just like Hitler. People say Hitler was an evil man. But he wasn’t. He was just an officer. Now Jesse Owens… he was an evil man.”

Oh, shit. Suddenly self-conscious, I glanced about. The dark-skinned lady across the aisle was now watching us pretty attentively. Maybe it was better to try and defuse this little situation after all. “I don’t, I, I… I don’t know anything about that.”

“His problem was that he was too smart. That’s all. They know if you’re too smart. You can tell if a person is smart, you see. They make you uncomfortable. They try to convince you that it’s you, but it’s not. It’s not your fault that you’re uncomfortable. It really is them. But they’re too smart to let on.”

I turned my head to look at the man. He appeared to be around fifty. He wore a bright green hat with a brim. A yellow feather was stuck into the elastic band around the hat. His suit was a drab olive green and made from the same anachronistic fabric as my grandfather’s clothes. His slacks were a dull grey and stopped just short of his ankles, revealing argyle socks. He wore brown loafers. He spoke out of the side of his mouth nearest me. A toothpick jutted out of the other side. At least half of his teeth were missing, giving him a somewhat dopey gap-toothed look. His eyes were fixed half-shut, in a permanent squint. His face bore a faint resemblance to Jack Nicholson.

“Are you a Democrat or a Republican? Neither? That’s right. There’s really no difference. That’s another way to tell how smart you are. Have you noticed how quickly the independents are disappearing? They’re killing them all. Why just this morning there were seven stormtroopers in front of my apartment. They said they were there to film a movie. But I didn’t see any cameras. I knew what it was. They had come to make a hit, you know. They may have wanted my green suits. My mother passed away recently, God rest her soul. She was poisoned. Just one week after my father died, also under suspicious circumstances…”

“Really, really, hmmm…, how interesting, I’m sorry to hear that.” The responses sprang forth spontaneously, indifferently.

“I studied Californian trees at USC back in the sixties. That’s when they started these nurseries. Good idea. Have you ever noticed that they only grow them under power lines? It’s like that in Watts. Funny thing. Probably a good idea. Do you go to the race track? No? Well, I do. But they need to make it more comfortable for low-class audiences. I think I’d plant a victory garden in the in-field. Grow some tomatoes or something. That way the farmer and his wife can come in their straw hats and watch the races. They already have enough high-class people. They need a victory garden to get the low-class ones, and so they don’t feel uncomfortable in their straw hats.”

It felt like I was sitting in a puddle. This man was sloshing all over me, the thoughts lapping over the brim of his mind, spilling all over my clothes. But even peering directly into his mind, as it were, did not illuminate the mystery of this person. It was like staring into the muddy waters of a well. How did he come into this muddled state? Was he self-sufficient? What was he seeing when he read the newspaper or watched the television… or even sat next to me here on the bus?

My eye wandered to the seat that had been occupied by the dark-skinned lady. I hadn’t noticed her get off the bus. She witnessed this scene too. Maybe she was thinking about it as she walked home. I would be in those thoughts too… some strange teenager listening respectfully to the ravings of a nut as though they made perfect sense. My own passive behavior intruded upon her consciousness in much the same way as this man’s far more assertive ego.

It seemed a world in which everyone carried a giant pot filled to the brim with water on their head. The water in each pot would be dyed a unique color. Water would splash everywhere. As people ran to catch the bus, it would spill into the gutter. When they leaned over chessboards water would pour from one pot to another. Their beds were stained with the colors of their lovers. Women leaning out windows would muddy the waters of pedestrians below. Soccer fields, pavement, carpets would all be stained with the hues of these careless porters. The colors would all run together into a bland shade of grey. Carelessly casual interactions would lead to constant exchange of liquid, contaminating even the waters in the pots. People would forget what their colors had looked like…

As my mind grew more and more muddled, I began to feel intensely frustrated by the presence of all these strangers. What significance could they possibly have? Even my mother and my best friend seemed like mere abstractions. A thin film hung over the world, obscuring essentials, casting all other human beings as vague silhouettes whose realities were unknowable, beyond the grasp even of intuition.

“I don’t know why somebody doesn’t tell the nation that Kansas’ soil has all blown away. It would destroy Bob Dole on the spot if people knew that nothing grows in Kansas…”