I started out what I thought was a normal-everyday trek home, but it was anything but as I was soon to find out, and in the end it was making me wish I was some kind of badass Kung Fu Master.
I casually alighted the first bus, and much of the ride through the construction infested 1st Avenue South went by with minimal occurrences. Near the end of this first leg, one lady halfway back commences to speak on her cell phone in extra loud enunciation. In fact, her side of the dialog is so voluminous that myself and the driver (who resembled Clarence Williams III the actor) discerned quite easily the following phrase:
“Yeah, the bus is running a bit late and I’m coming up on 4th and Jackson, so I should be there…”
“Au contraire my friend,” the driver spoke to himself glancing both at his watch and thumbing the paper-printed riveted schedule in his right hand and then continues, “looks like the bus is right on time! I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about.”
I laughed to myself and actually felt this inherent need to pat the driver on the back…
I ended up unscathed when I arrived at the transfer point thus far, and quickly found a seat under the shelter to wait along for the final leg home. Almost immediately, a devil bearded man replete in snakeskin cowboy boots and a black flat-brimmed round cross-sectional hat swaggers conspicuously by in egocentric ambulatory gait. Before I am able to contemplate too much of what I just witnessed the bus finally arrived to take me home.
I choose a seat behind the articulation-accordion and as the bus got underway I quickly noticed a dude at another stop through the window with a barracuda-under bite peeling away at his left hand’s cuticles with such gusto it made me cringe like a school girl to a set of raggedy fingernails scraped along a blackboard. It was then that I spotted a wannabe gang banger dressed to the hilt in a white under-tank top (wife beater style), baggy shorts, pristine white high tops, and stylish European framed shades seated in the port side-facing row just ahead of the articulation, to which he turned himself sideways to face front toward an old wrinkled guy that managed to hold a cigarette by sheer hydrogen bonding; in other words the bottom fifth of the ‘cancer stick’ was stuck to his lower lip hanging vertically in a precarious craze and quivered there on the brink with every word spoken.
“Yer a crazy asshole!” I heard the magical cigarette possessor state as a definite insult to the wannabe gang banger who up to that point provided an unsolicited stream of utter nonsense, and then the magic cigarette guy slowly stumbled up and departed at the Post Office on the corner of 3rd and Union.
The wannabe gang banger abruptly belly flopped onto the entire row of seats and balled like a hysterical baby.
“How could he call me ‘crazy’? I’M NOT CRAZY! Oh! Uh, no!”
This was the moment when I knew there was something definitely ‘off’.
By the time he completed his sorrow-fest, he realized that the bus had already passed the last stop downtown, so I perceived his swaying saunter to the driver’s canopy was to request to be let off before we got to be too far outside of downtown. Instead, I watched through the rearview mirror as the driver nonchalantly tossed presumed sunflower seeds into her mouth and chewed them with great disinterested gumption while the wannabe gang banger simply stood in place, and his head every now and then swiveled this way and that as the bus maneuvered to the downtown tunnel entrance and then turned a ninety-degree bend to the express lanes of the Interstate.
It wasn’t until we neared the prescribed exit that things really started to get out of hand. First, the wannabe gang banger appeared to be talking calmly to the driver, but then without warning he curiously commenced to pole dance like a stripper using the entire front gangway of the bus as a makeshift runway stage. His movements became quicker and swifter, growing at every instant with ludicrous lunacy until I finally decided, given this and his behavior thus far that he was wasted, wasted on a good amount of something. Soon, he began to screech and shriek, point at and molest the passengers with verbal come-ons and goads. Some of the riders affected by his commotion began to file backwards, seeking refuge behind the articulation. As the driver directed the bus up the exit ramp (still chomping away at her seeds), the wannabe gang banger ferociously leapt ahead of the ‘yellow line’ dancing erratically and with no regard to anything within his immediate surroundings.
“Get back!” the driver imperatively ordered him, but he refused totally, and instead after a short dwell he jumped back to harass this one lady, saying all kinds of guttural axioms. She quickly sprang up out of her seat, gathered all her belongings and made her way back as others had before. He sneered after her, making her burst into tears while she dialed someone on her cell phone. The wannabe gang banger then dove back-forwards, unmistakably beleaguering the driver with a shoving of his drawers down to the floor and then back up again exposing everything in the process. At last, after the driver managed to find a good road shoulder to park the bus, she unstrapped herself and blurted, “GET OFF NOW!”
“Oh no!: the wannabe gang banger exclaimed and ran back to about a meter from me and the very reserved lady seated next to me.
“Hey! I got your glasses, you dropped them. Got your glasses” the driver taunted in an attempt to lure him back up to the front doors and away from the crowded passengers in the rear of the bus. –But he wasn’t buying it. He then did something totally unexpected: he vehemently shoved both his pants and boxers to the floor again exposing all his wares for the populace to see. Both myself and my row-companion averted our eyes as if we almost looked into Medusa’s face herself lest we turn to stone. Most everyone streamed out of the bus by now since no one was sure what the wannabe gang banger was going to do next. Both my even-tempered row companion and I were not too far behind, but then neither was the wannabe gang banger, for he had gone utterly psycho and fled an enraged driver still ordering him to vacate. Just as he was forced out the rear doors, the wannabe gang banger acted as though he’d slam his fists on the driver’s head with upraised arms, she who was three-quarters his height.
She barked, “Be cool man!”
-And he lowered his threatening guise and trotted like he was going to jump back to the open front doors. She threw his sunglasses on the ground in the wannabe gang banger’s vicinity, and in frustrated response he angrily tossed everything in his hands (a set of keys, a wallet, and some kind of rag) against the side of the bus and in perturbed style said, “Aw man!” then proceeded to freakishly hide in some nearby bushes while the driver ushered us all back into the bus.
Once everyone loaded back in and the two sets of doors hissed closed, the driver picked up her handset and immediately dispatched the police; but not two seconds later I could not help but detect a ridiculous one-sided mobile phone conversation from a dumpy-looking girl behind me that had dialed her ‘BF’ to report on the dramatic sequence of events:
Dude, ohmygod. There was this kid totally buzzed out on coke. Yeah, there’s some bad coke out there now…huh? You already started drink’n? Gett’n drunk? DAMN! –Hey ya know I need to find me some drugs right now, like some coke…nah! OHGAWD! You should hear my therapist talk…and she asks and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, been straight off that horse fer eighteen straight months now, clean, baby clean! She’s so stupid…Man you are gett’n drunk! Man, you know I think maybe should find me some ecstasy, oh yeah!...
This capacious and capricious conversation continued for some time, and in the end my alleged reserved row-companion could not take anymore of this madness and bolted up to the front of the bus: the new refuge from yet another downward spiraling hedonist.
I wonder if
The Seattle Times would be interested in this story…
