She used to work in porn. This is what the woman will tell me. She will also admit to being a bit of a gold-digger, say that girls with fros are violent, that no whites live in Africa and state that she borrows money from Jesus. This is what Tuesday, January 12th will mean to me. At five o’clock on the 217 bus, I will be audibly assaulted by crazy.
I’ve figured out (mostly) how not to become ensconced in conversations with strangers when I pay my $1.25 to catch a ride home. For starters, sunglasses are helpful. They obscure your focus, and everyone else’s gaze into yours. Naturally, a set of headphones help, for no one feels more invasive than interrupting your musical experience when you’re clearly enjoying a personal melody. Finally, if you are loaded with bags, shove a thick book in front of your face, sit facing toward the front and not towards others, and affect a certain abstinance from others by piercingly admiring the view from the window or aimlessly wandering your eye as to appear slightly awkward or cracked, then you’re on your way to avoiding the dreaded deranged conversation. I mean, all I want is to sit still for fifteen minutes to relax from my day and look forward to my puppy without idly nodding to someone’s maniacal dribble. Instead…
The man behind me is hissing audibly. It’s unstoppable, this hissing. I hear him mumbling, but I can’t make out any of his words, and they sound angry. Which leads me to believe he is either passionately cursing the bus driver or rattling a satanic verse; this last thought makes me shiver – with images of burnt candles, charred remains and concealing robes – but I’d curse the bus driver too (they are forever too early or too late, and never apologetic until you see the transportation authorities waving them down to check their arrival time (which does happen on occasion and definitely improves their accuracy for several weeks after)). With not a foot between us, he has decided that instead of occupying a free seat, he will stand next to me near the bus driver. A decision that leaves all incoming passengers only space enough to clumsily squeeze against my body, as I juggle a ten pound box, two wine bottles and my purse. I defend my right to stand at the front, because my stop is minus ten minutes away and pushing through twelve passengers to get to the door before it closes is hardly appropriate when you’re carrying weight. The old man hissing behind me is therefore despicable. There is no reason he should not sit down. But that’s what happened today. This is what happened yesterday…
I never caught her name, but she walked onto the bus while yelling at an elderly woman with gray hair and skin that sagged at the mouth. “OBAMA” was all I heard. Wearing an Ed Hardy hat, a red puffy jacket, tall laced boots and tight jeans that wrapped around her ample bottom, she took the space next to my seat. Not the seat, just standing. Next to me. I can be an easy mark as an open ear (it could be the female thing, or that I look so deflated at the end of the day). She starts looking around at the passengers, and promptly shakes her head. The old man beside me is muttering. “Oh, what a day. Oh, WHAT a DAY” he says. There’s a television on the bus that sits high in the front right corner, broadcasting local news and comedy segments. During the trivia portions of the program – questions from jeopardy and trivial pursuit pop up on the screen – he loudly reads the questions to himself, but his answer is always “I don’t fuckin’ know” and he presses his leg into mine.
The woman shaking her head looks at me and asks me where I’m from. “Originally?” I say, “Colorado.”
“What about you? Were you raised here?”
“I’m from West Hollywood.”
“So you were born and raised here?”
“I was born a black American. Illegal immigrants are the ones born here.”
Checkpoint reached. I’ve got eight minutes.
Later, when two young African-American High School girls enter the bus, she turns to me and says, “Those people are violent. I always have to fight them on the streets, but I don’t get physical with them, I just cuss them out badly. They’re just so violent. You have to stay away.”
Every two minutes, this woman frisks her head with rhythymic beats to her left temple. She is lightly smacking herself. She later says her head itches, but it looks too compulsive to be anything other than an obsessive or frequent tick. Her low speech continues. I cannot hear everything she says, but from what I can tell, she describes being a stay at home mom to two boys once upon a time; one of whom got into trouble with the son of a celebrity. The celebrity was someone she got involved with for monetary reasons.
“He suspected I wanted his money. I did. I won’t lie. I just wanted some of it, not all of it. Just enough for some liposuction, get my skin clear, my hair done, maybe a Jeep. You know, not all of it.” She seems anxious, and nervous and continues to look towards the back of the bus.
A tall man enters the vehicle. He looks like Jesus, or rather, the traditional portrait of Jesus. His long, dirty beard and scraggly hair hang past his shoulders, and the long white dress he wears – tied by a slight rope at his waist – is dirtied from his peripatetic wanderings down the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Fairfax Avenue. I can’t even tell if he wears sandals. The woman stops her pulsating head smacks and says hello to him. They are obviously acquaintences, but not friends.
She turns to me again. “I borrowed some money from him. I wanted to know if he got my repayment. I gave it to Spiderman to give to him, because I didn’t see him around. He says he got it back.”
Another dubious man, whom I’ve neglected to mention since he has not quite entered my narrative along this fieldtrip just yet, and who seems to be happy staring at strangers and then immediately laughing to himself while he smiles widely, sits two seats away with a rod, circled by bracelets he (I assume) is selling, resting on his lap. He yells “Jesus wasn’t a tall white man. He doesn’t look like that. But if I were a tall white man with a beard, I guess I’d dress like that too.” He laughs at his statement, and the imposter sits behind him.
There isn’t much time left here for me. The driver has turned the bus onto my street and I’m three blocks from home. The woman turns to me and says, “you probably won’t like me after I tell you this, but I worked in porn. Yeah, you should work in the entertainment business.” I stand up. “See, you’ve got the height and everything.”
I feel bad for her. Not pity, but sad. I really do want to know what her life is like and what she wants out of it. This is where my practiced social abstinance fails me. I can’t think of the right questions, and I don’t have enough time. I think of all the broken dreams here, and I shudder again. If we reach for the moon, and land in the stars, what happens then?
NO SAINTS IN L.A. 