14 days later...
Here's installment number four:
4
The coin slots on the metro were all busted after some disgruntled bus driver filled them all in with quickrete during a labor strike a few years back. The city council never caved in and after about six months of public transport stagnation the drivers limped backed to their buses for the same meager pay. The organizers of the strike failed to realize the fundamental fact that their only bargaining chip, the cessation of the entire metro system, didn’t concern the local government. These men didn’t rely on the bus to go to city hall every morning, but pulled up in all manner of Beamers, Benzes, and chauffeured town cars. This left the transportation union clinging to the slim hope that city council would be so distraught by the droves of folk having to walk mini-marathons every morning to get to work that they would be driven by their conscience to raise wages and help their constituency. But a politician with a conscience is about as rare as a shooting star and just as fleeting. Gordon Gecko’s axiom that “greed is good” applies to Pennsylvania Avenue as much as it does for Wall Street, and anyone who thinks the green-eyed monster was subdued after the death of Reaganomics and the free-wheelin’ eighties is either monumentally ignorant or naïve beyond repair. Long story short: no pay raise, no sympathy, and back to work.
Since council decided there were insufficient funds in the city coffers for any bus repairs, all the coin slots remained sealed shut. I tossed my 35 cents into the empty Big Gulp that now served as a makeshift collection bucket, while Lucas pitched in 18 cents and his plastic silverware as collateral. It wasn’t as if the driver gave a damn what we paid with. He didn’t work on commission and still had to drive this piece of shit for another 5 hours until his shift ended. The man’s face was drained of all fluid, the craters of his sunken cheeks big enough to hold a pair of golf balls and his wispy gray hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. His pockmarked face hadn’t moved an inch since we climbed on and I doubt very much if he’d been able to visibly emote for years. Each depressed circle on his face had been formed over decades as tears slowly eroded the terrain of his skin, leaving his tear ducts bone dry and his cheeks looking like the moon underneath the lens of a telescope.
I sat down at the very back of the bus, the hard plastic seats searing my coccyx with a cold that felt like dry ice on my ass. As abrasive as the seat was, it was a great relief simply to be sitting again and I tried to push the discomfort away by sinking down so that my head was resting against the back of the seat. Lucas had avoided the dilemma entirely by setting up shop underneath the seats, lying splayed out on the floor with the crock of baked beans balanced precariously on his chest. Since he had given his plastic spoon to the bus driver’s collection plate, Lucas was forced to slurp down the baked beans from the lip of the crock like he was drinking out of a child’s sippy-cup. When the bus took a corner too fast the crock was tipped over and Lucas’s face and chest were covered in cold baked beans. Lucas began spitting bean fragments wildly and turned to me, screaming, “It’s no good man. It’s no good anymore.” I asked him what wasn’t good anymore and he stared blankly at me for a few seconds before responding, “change of plans buddy. We gotta go skins.” With this Lucas bolted up, neglecting to remember where he was lying down, and crashed his forehead into the back of one of the seats. Lucas began frantically rubbing his head: “Fuckin’ shit man. Somebody should remodel these fucking things...They’re a danger to, like, the fuckin public AT LARGE man! These things are deadly man.” After this sage wisdom Lucas rolled into the center aisle and, with a measure of difficulty, pulled his bean-soaked shirt over his head. He stayed half-naked in the center of the aisle for the remainder of our ride.
With no one else on the bus, a prolonged silence descended upon us, the low rumbling of the engine providing an ambient white noise in the background. A glance out of my window towards the sky revealed nothing but a murky purple night. The decades of smog had billowed to the earth’s ceiling and taken roost, blocking the stars from view. The only constellations to be found were on the street lights and lamp posts. Without my glasses on the lights exploded into starbursts as we passed by, leaving green and yellow tails of bright air in our wake. This was my night sky, with no big dipper and Orion’s Belt thrown to the floor. The homeless huddled together underneath bridges and back alley awnings in a congregation of poverty, the stench of despair hovering about them like a cloud of Pigpen’s dust. Their cardboard signs lay face down, stacked on the pavement bleeding ink as they became soaked with stagnant rainwater. Part of me envied the bums for the freedom they had. At least when you’re outcast from society you’re never held to account. No one expects anything from you’re at the very bottom of the pyramid, bearing the brunt of the cruelty that others spend their entire lives trying to shove off on others. To look at Lucas, lying half-naked and passed out in the aisle of a metro bus, baked bean juice dribbling down his chin and pooling in his clavicle; this all reeked of failure and tragedy.
We are the great American middle class, highly educated and increasingly obsolete. My father never went to college and worked his whole life so that his sons could get the higher education that he never had. By the time the money had been saved and tuition paid, that education was as ubiquitous as water and the diploma just as valuable. And so we were set on a path that expects so much from so many and which was bound to disappoint from the start. No matter how many people save for an education and graduate from university there is the inescapable truth that somebody has to follow humanity with a broom to sweep up all the shit we leave behind us. For me to work at a coffee shop is to squander the life I was given, but for the homeless man that same job allows him to exceed any expectation society had formed. Four years of my life and $80,000 in tuition all for one piece of paper that brands me a slacker for the rest of my life. I can feel myself again and need to stop the bus.
Unedited first draft and all that jazz...
4
The coin slots on the metro were all busted after some disgruntled bus driver filled them all in with quickrete during a labor strike a few years back. The city council never caved in and after about six months of public transport stagnation the drivers limped backed to their buses for the same meager pay. The organizers of the strike failed to realize the fundamental fact that their only bargaining chip, the cessation of the entire metro system, didn’t concern the local government. These men didn’t rely on the bus to go to city hall every morning, but pulled up in all manner of Beamers, Benzes, and chauffeured town cars. This left the transportation union clinging to the slim hope that city council would be so distraught by the droves of folk having to walk mini-marathons every morning to get to work that they would be driven by their conscience to raise wages and help their constituency. But a politician with a conscience is about as rare as a shooting star and just as fleeting. Gordon Gecko’s axiom that “greed is good” applies to Pennsylvania Avenue as much as it does for Wall Street, and anyone who thinks the green-eyed monster was subdued after the death of Reaganomics and the free-wheelin’ eighties is either monumentally ignorant or naïve beyond repair. Long story short: no pay raise, no sympathy, and back to work.
Since council decided there were insufficient funds in the city coffers for any bus repairs, all the coin slots remained sealed shut. I tossed my 35 cents into the empty Big Gulp that now served as a makeshift collection bucket, while Lucas pitched in 18 cents and his plastic silverware as collateral. It wasn’t as if the driver gave a damn what we paid with. He didn’t work on commission and still had to drive this piece of shit for another 5 hours until his shift ended. The man’s face was drained of all fluid, the craters of his sunken cheeks big enough to hold a pair of golf balls and his wispy gray hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. His pockmarked face hadn’t moved an inch since we climbed on and I doubt very much if he’d been able to visibly emote for years. Each depressed circle on his face had been formed over decades as tears slowly eroded the terrain of his skin, leaving his tear ducts bone dry and his cheeks looking like the moon underneath the lens of a telescope.
I sat down at the very back of the bus, the hard plastic seats searing my coccyx with a cold that felt like dry ice on my ass. As abrasive as the seat was, it was a great relief simply to be sitting again and I tried to push the discomfort away by sinking down so that my head was resting against the back of the seat. Lucas had avoided the dilemma entirely by setting up shop underneath the seats, lying splayed out on the floor with the crock of baked beans balanced precariously on his chest. Since he had given his plastic spoon to the bus driver’s collection plate, Lucas was forced to slurp down the baked beans from the lip of the crock like he was drinking out of a child’s sippy-cup. When the bus took a corner too fast the crock was tipped over and Lucas’s face and chest were covered in cold baked beans. Lucas began spitting bean fragments wildly and turned to me, screaming, “It’s no good man. It’s no good anymore.” I asked him what wasn’t good anymore and he stared blankly at me for a few seconds before responding, “change of plans buddy. We gotta go skins.” With this Lucas bolted up, neglecting to remember where he was lying down, and crashed his forehead into the back of one of the seats. Lucas began frantically rubbing his head: “Fuckin’ shit man. Somebody should remodel these fucking things...They’re a danger to, like, the fuckin public AT LARGE man! These things are deadly man.” After this sage wisdom Lucas rolled into the center aisle and, with a measure of difficulty, pulled his bean-soaked shirt over his head. He stayed half-naked in the center of the aisle for the remainder of our ride.
With no one else on the bus, a prolonged silence descended upon us, the low rumbling of the engine providing an ambient white noise in the background. A glance out of my window towards the sky revealed nothing but a murky purple night. The decades of smog had billowed to the earth’s ceiling and taken roost, blocking the stars from view. The only constellations to be found were on the street lights and lamp posts. Without my glasses on the lights exploded into starbursts as we passed by, leaving green and yellow tails of bright air in our wake. This was my night sky, with no big dipper and Orion’s Belt thrown to the floor. The homeless huddled together underneath bridges and back alley awnings in a congregation of poverty, the stench of despair hovering about them like a cloud of Pigpen’s dust. Their cardboard signs lay face down, stacked on the pavement bleeding ink as they became soaked with stagnant rainwater. Part of me envied the bums for the freedom they had. At least when you’re outcast from society you’re never held to account. No one expects anything from you’re at the very bottom of the pyramid, bearing the brunt of the cruelty that others spend their entire lives trying to shove off on others. To look at Lucas, lying half-naked and passed out in the aisle of a metro bus, baked bean juice dribbling down his chin and pooling in his clavicle; this all reeked of failure and tragedy.
We are the great American middle class, highly educated and increasingly obsolete. My father never went to college and worked his whole life so that his sons could get the higher education that he never had. By the time the money had been saved and tuition paid, that education was as ubiquitous as water and the diploma just as valuable. And so we were set on a path that expects so much from so many and which was bound to disappoint from the start. No matter how many people save for an education and graduate from university there is the inescapable truth that somebody has to follow humanity with a broom to sweep up all the shit we leave behind us. For me to work at a coffee shop is to squander the life I was given, but for the homeless man that same job allows him to exceed any expectation society had formed. Four years of my life and $80,000 in tuition all for one piece of paper that brands me a slacker for the rest of my life. I can feel myself again and need to stop the bus.
Unedited first draft and all that jazz...