The Lady on the Bus

And here I am, sitting on the bus. I sit at the front, having to slide by a carriage to get to my seat. I sit idle; my stop is not for an hour. My iPod is the companion for the day, as it always is. And there she is, the lady on the bus. She climbs in through a doorway close to the back.


She stumbles her way over to me after ten minutes or so. I have a romantic view of things. She went, to me. That sounds nice.

It's peculiar. The way she sits down next to me is not a sit but a squat. It appears as though she is bracing herself for some kind of effort. I glance over at her, and now at the rest of the bus. It is crowded; it's the commute home. However, she doesn’t have to sit next to me. There are a few seats across the aisle. I look at my iPod, keeping secret my hope she makes conversation with me by outwardly hoping she doesn't. The lady on the bus has a pretty face.

It's a simple face. The clean contour is what gives it its beauty. The brain is not quite creative enough to invent the faces you meet in dreams; it borrows them from reality. Pleasant dreams favor the face of the lady on the bus. She wasn’t dreamlike, but dreams want to allude to her.

She squats right in front of the carriage, with a cellphone on her lap. She isn’t comfortable. She's placed herself with both legs to the right side of the carriage. The lady on the bus places a hand on my shoulder and says, “I'm sorry honey, this will take but a mo'.” I nod and smile.

Grabbing her left leg with both hands, she picks up dead weight. It is a bum leg. The leg's mass is but only appreciable; it's half the size of her right. She grunts sharply, I think, for the benefit of those looking on. Not for herself. I wonder if she has done this many times before, if the pains called for in this drill are expected. She drops the leg to the left of the carriage. Her phone falls out of her lap.

“Oh my goodness, I'm sorry,” she laughs. I pull myself out of my detached trance, just to see her frown. The laugh was not out of delight.

The lady on the bus struggles with herself for a minute, trying to get a handle of how she wants to go about picking up her cellphone. She bends to the right and she bends to the left. The carriage is antagonistic. Nobody offers her help. After a significant time she manages to pick up the phone. I didn’t see anybody offer their hand and I didn’t offer mine.

She brings the phone to her face. “Oh,” she moans. The battery and its guard have fallen off. The laborious process of manipulating useless gravity to pick miscellanea off the ground is well practiced by now, so there is no show for the people on the bus. She picked up the pieces in half the time it took for the first.

She is trying to put the battery back into the cellphone. She is fumbling and then there is more fumbling. I feel uncomfortable. I take my headphones off my ears, and say, “Would you like some help?” The lady on the bus leans on me, smiles, and whispers into my ear, “Oh, would you kindly?”

I take the phone from her and put it back together. As she is reaching her arm across to take it back, I notice her loose, leathery skin. I think of Glenda.

Glenda is from my mother's past; she is not from her future, and she certainly does not preside in the present. Gloria is a wonderful lady with a wife and a kid from a previous affair. She did some coke and heroin, “back in the day.” She has the same saggy, tough skin as the lady on the bus. They share a hearty laugh, one that gives the impression that they don't want to stop because something horrible is waiting on the other side.

The lady on the bus says to me, “Oh, thank you darlin'! Where do you come from?” I tell her Norwood, and now we are talking. She shows depth to the gregariousness that extends into humanity. She compliments the baby in the carriage directly, saying “you have a cute smile.”

She then adjusts her focus back onto the cellphone and mutters, “Oh man, this is quite the hassle. I just want to listen to my music, you know? None of my boyfriend's fucking rap bullshit.” I find myself sympathizing with her. Somehow, I do know. The invitation to “know” with her gets me.

She wires her headphones into the phone and then turns and smiles at me. A beautiful face, a modest smile, fowl breath. I smell alcohol.

She dances as much as she can, in her little space on the bus. She does not exhibit any kind of modesty or shame. She just dances and dances, mumbling the words to herself. Though she is not concerned with viewers, she is concerned with listeners. She does not sing loud enough to be heard. A man calls out to her from the back of the bus and comes forward.

He chooses a seat across the aisle. The captivity of the lady on the bus has been, in practical terms, invaded. He is wearing a Budweiser baseball cap, a wife beater t-shirt, and work jeans. He has blue eyes. The same blue eyes John Smith has.

John Smith was a lucky man who found himself an unlucky family which left him all the luckier. He was once also my uncle. He had a beautiful boy, Nick Foley, with my once aunt. As part of the deal, he became a facsimile of a father to my once cousin Henry. One evening he crept into Henry's room, slow and with care. He gently woke Nick up by whispering his name into his ear. “Henry, Henry. Wake up. John has something to tell you. If your mother ever leaves me, I'm taking Nick to New Hampshire and you are never going to see either of us again.” The man has the same blue eyes as Larry which refuses to steady because they are afraid of seeing.

The man says, “What the fuck you doing, walking around? Where in the fuck is your cane? And fucking-a, this tyke hittin' on you or something?” All the while, he is jabbing fingers at her face. Perhaps he means to scare her or perhaps he means to scare the people on the bus. I don’t think he knows his intent.

That night I went home and cried. This day I sit here and write. I don’t think there is a neat way to wrangle the emotional loose ends of my lady on the bus.

A Tall Tale

It was the time of sunshine recline, and two men drove into Sierra Leone.

“Santa Clause ain’t writing Christmas Cards no more,” the man with the hat said.  “That’s why.”  The man understood people, so he gave the fellow sitting next to him a quick glance to emphasize his words.  “You must understand that.”

That was how the man chose to break the silence.

“Must, as you should, and you should if you don’t.”  He crumpled his brow into a furrow.  The newfound slope found itself smoothly parallel to the rim of his ten gallon hat, an existence in cannon with the world.  The hat wasn’t a one-off thematic choice; the man had much too much intentionality running through his soul.  It went along with his whole western suit.  A callback to rodeos which the man was sure never existed.  He turned to the man without a hat, which ended up being a good thing; no hat had something to say.

“I got in this car because you asked me to.  I don’t see that it matters I understand why I did it or not.  I mean, you don’t expect a man to understand love for him to feel it; he just feels it.  What is love, anyways.  That was a statement not a question.”  He ended with a fidget.

“That’s quit the tenuous connection you got there between doing your job and love.  But listen here, young-blood.  I don’t have anything more complex than words, but I can perfectly relate to you what love is.  That’s something.  Isn’t it?  Like an inverse holism.  Individual words become stronger when they have a community to bounce off of.”

No hat was confused.  “People don’t actually talk like that.”

About two days before, Santa Clause decided he didn’t exist.  The certainty of the time and the certainty of the why are known to the best of human knowledge.  Santa Clause most certainly did not have much reason to believe in himself, and Santa Clause most certainly did not have a specific time of existentialism.  It could have been while brushing his teeth, when he is most careful not to look in the mirror only to see his torrent of face.  It could have been while watching a Christmas special, where his existence is contested by animated children on the behalf of smug Hollywood writers trying to find themselves through art.  It could have been while writing a Christmas card to Jiminy Cricket.  The only matter of the situation is that Marry-Ann Clause, his spouse of four super-generations, found him sitting on the edge of his bed the following morning, despondent.  His last Christmas card was his hand and it read, “I love you with the intensity the sun keeps its daily vigil, Marry-Ann.”

Mrs. Clause reacted the only way she knew.  She called “Hat and No Hat.”

Having found their destination, the man with the hat parked.  The men got out of the car and sat in a coffee shop.

“I’m a serious man.  Do you know what that means, son?  It means I take life seriously.”  The first of the two picked his hat off his head as he would a berry off a bush and placed it on the table.

“If I were the hero of some kind of fictionalized piece, this would be symbolic.  But I’m not, and it ain’t.”  After a pause so long the air in his lungs had its own time to consider what needed to be said, he finally spoke.  “It’s a similitude.”

Hat and No Hat was founded in the year twenty when the man with the hat woke up to a cry of a thousand thousand goats screaming in terror.  He lived on a goat farm, so that was pretty OK, except for the part where the thousand thousand goats were screaming in terror as compared to just being a thousand thousand goats.  He jumped up and sprinted right outside to see what the problem was.  He came upon a horrible lizard beast with seven mouths, each of which was acquired from the devil through seven trials that cost him seven of his eight lives.  As it turns out, that was how he earned the moniker “horrible.”  Our friend the man with the hat had come upon El Chupacabra.  The man asked the horrible lizard beast why he was eating his goats, and good ol’ Chupe, he said, “No me gusta el pollo,” and ran off into the night.  Realizing that he had a gift for talking to supernaturals, the man with the hat founded Hat, a not-for-profit organization with an explicit goal of learning about “things in the world that regular folk just don’t understand.”  About forty years later, he came upon no hat, and as they say, a watched pot never boils.

The man with the hat placed his hat back upon his head, stood up, and said, “We’re going to the beach.”  They went.

There was the sun, clouds, hot air, and Santa waiting for them there.  Santa Clause knew that people would come for him.  It wasn’t off-season.  He just didn’t know what would happen when somebody tried to touch him.  Santa didn’t move or speak when the pair reached him.  He just sat legs folded over another, hunched over with his torrent of face squished firmly against his hands.  The two men sat opposite Santa, to form a perfect triangle.  Santa faced exactly opposed to the ocean.

“I’m here, Santa, armed with nothing but words,” the man with the hat said, while making special care to wink at no hat.  However, Santa was having none of this.

“Everybody is in limbo.  This world is limbo.  It’s a place to punish those who lived nobly.  That is what happened to us, my dear chaps.  We lived nobly in a former life, and when we died, sinless, we were sent here.  Somehow I have ended up with a neat little duality to my penance.  I enjoy the special privilege of having exactly as many people speculating my existence as there are doubting it.  That cancels a man out, I think.  Do people go when they die again?  I’m not much concerned with the whereabouts of location three.  Just.  Just I’m not sure.  You, sir.  Touch me.”  Santa gestured at no hat.  No hat understood the importance of defining a philosophy system in pragmatic terms, so he reached out with one finger and went to poke Santa Clause right in the stomach.  He collapsed right into him.  There was an absence of an absence of hat; no hat fell wholly into him, body aligning with Santa’s as he fell.

The man with the hat stood up, took his hat off, and threw it alongside the curls and flows of the ocean wind, an existence concurrent with the world.

That Christmas, every single child in the world, independent of any binary alignment of belief in Santa, received a large mirror which didn’t work.