HazMet

By Jim

The first warning comes from two rows in back of me. "We've got to stop! It's a biohazard!"

Huh? It's my bus pal Jackie, whom I see occasionally on the southbound No. 12 late at night, leaving downtown. We've just passed the Capitol Highway Safeway. She sounds the alarm again: "We've got to get a new bus. It's a biohazard."

Other riders stare at Jackie, then begin to look around, the first wave of panic, like a herd of wildebeests beginning to sense that lions are nearby. Attention turns toward the front of the bus, to a silent, still fellow with black hair, his head hung low.

He has just finished vomiting.

The bus slows. Riders cover their faces with garments as if they are air filters certified by the Centers for Disease Control. But the smell spreads quickly, a potent, bad blend of . . . fermented muskrat and spoiled deviled eggs? . . . of a garage freezer that lost power three months ago and the greasepit in a Portland food cart? This odor is surely not of the living world.

The No. 12 pulls to the curb and stops. Riders begin to move away from the contaminated man, who, strangely, just sits there blankly, surrounded by his own filth. Even Rosa Parks would have given up her seat and moved to the back of the bus.

"Really, it's a biohazard," Jackie reminds everybody, authoritatively.

The driver opens both sets of doors. A few people leave. I join them, bailing out the back. I think of my co-worker Bob. At exactly 10:30 p.m. I said to him, "Let's go, man."

"Naw, you go ahead," he said. "I've got a few things to do. I'm catching the 11:05."

"OK." And I jetted out of the building. I do whatever it takes to catch the next bus, including running until I erupt in a coughing fit.

Now, standing outside on the sidewalk next to our stranded toxin wagon, I look south down Barbur. At least in this section, there is a sidewalk. I move to the open front door of the bus and say to the driver, "Are we staying here?"

"Yes. We're going to have to get another bus."

Excellent news. Wonderful. I figure I am about three or four miles from home; I could walk it in an hour. So I start trudging, giving a mental, obscenity-laced shout-out to Bio Boy and fate.

I've walked for about 15 minutes when I hear the unmistakable TriMet diesel engine that is hard-wired into my bus-catching DNA. It's the No. 12, up and running again. In the blackness, it hurls by me. Why doesn't the driver stop? Doesn't he know it's me, with my huge backpack and beat-down, Friday-night-after-work demeanor? He saw me walk away. Did I insult him by giving up on TriMet?

I walk for another 10 minutes and reach the Barbur Transit Center--and there is the No. 12. There are all the passengers, milling about. There is Bio Boy, sitting on the ground against a wall, head down, unmoving.

But there are no men in hazmat suits, no ambulances, no fire trucks. Just the quiet, blacked-out, empty hulk of our bus. I find my friend Jackie, the Paul Revere of puke, and get the details. Another bus is coming to meet us at the transit center. This happened to her once before, which is why she knows the drill, knows that TriMet considers vomit a biohazard.

In just a few minutes, the substitute bus arrives, coming all the way from the Rose Quarter to rescue us. We all board, except for Bio Boy, and continue off into the night. If fate is kind, we have not been exposed to plague germs.

Applied physics

By Bob

The No. 54 was making its way toward downtown on a weekday afternoon. The bus, one of TriMet's newer models, was about half full.

As the bus left the Swan Mart stop on Barbur Boulevard, a thirtysomething guy sitting in the back pulled the cord. The next stop was the last one on Barbur before the bus would turn onto Naito Parkway. The man rose to make his way to the rear door. He was carrying a large sack. He reached the landing at the rear door and waited.

The bus approached his stop, but didn't slow and instead roared past. He yelled to the driver, "Hey, hey, what about my stop?" The driver acknowledged him with a wave and pulled the bus over with a lurch at the auto lot just before Naito. The driver hit the brakes and the thirtysomething man, apparently caught unaware and holding only his sack and not a pole, fell hard into the landing's wall, bounced back into the rear wall and hit the deck. His sack went with him.

"What the ...," he cried. No answer from the driver. His fellow passengers just stared. The upended man slowly got to his feet, cursed again, then grabbed his sack and pushed open the rear door. Shaken, he unsteadily made his way down the sidewalk.

Often on the No. 54, a departing rider will say "Thanks" as he or she leaves the bus. Kind of a Portland thing. There was no "Thanks" this time.

Gotta go

By Bob

Late on a Friday night around the Portland State campus, the bar-goers and party people were making their way home. Three such happy folks, smelling of beer and smokes, wandered from the Cheerful Tortoise to the bus stop at Jackson and Broadway.

As they waited for the bus, one guy said to his two college-age companions, "I gotta take a leak." One of his friends said, "I do, too." The third guy just nodded his head as, a few blocks away, the No. 12 came into sight, stopped at a traffic light. "We'd better hurry," one of the three said.

This particular block on Broadway has a row of bushes and hedges along the sidewalk, next to fencing that walls off a PSU parking lot and tennis court. Not stupid, just drunk, the three guys took advantage of their surroundings. They separated themselves a bit, and each one squeezed into various openings in the hedge to do their
business.

Conducting their tasks with dispatch, they emerged about a minute later -- just as the No. 12 was pulling over at the Jackson Street stop. As they climbed aboard the bus, the last one on said, with obvious relief: "Man, I'm glad those bushes were there. I don't think I could have held it to Terwilliger. I probably would've peed my jeans."

A fortunate fellow. As were his friends and, unknowingly, his fellow passengers.

Mr. Bobblehead

By Bob

On a hot Saturday night, the midnight run of the No. 12 was crowded -- standing room only and the aisle was filled. The rear of the bus was loud with talk, as usual, while the riders near the front were mostly into their cells and iPods. But the real show took place in the middle rows.

Sitting next to the window in the last row before the back door was a fortysomething guy who obviously had been into his cups all night long. As the bus moved, he moved. He was prisoner to the forces of acceleration and deceleration. When the bus would pull away from a stop, the drunken fellow would fall all the way back in his seat, with his head tossed back as far as it could go. And when the bus would brake for a stop, he would mimic its slowing, his body gradually edging forward until his head made contact with the back of the seat in front of him.

Depending of the severity of the driver's braking, the drunk's head would gently tap the seat's back, or hit with a loud thud -- amusing and alarming the passengers around him. And on this night, the bus came to a halt at a nearly every stop. Back and forth, Mr. Bobblehead would rock, his eyes closed, his breathing loud and labored. The fumes emanating from his direction smelled like Mad Dog or Two-Buck Chuck. But he was blissful in his stupor, with a kind of grin on his sozzled face.

After this entertainment had gone on for a dozen stops, the bus started to empty. The woman sitting next to him, unable to stifle her laughter, moved to a vacated spot. As did the smirking guy who had been standing behind Mr. Bobblehead. As the guy found a seat, though, he also found compassion. The guy said to the woman: "Maybe we should try to wake him before he hurts himself."

She took matters into her own hands, ignoring the maxim of letting sleeping drunks lie. She returned to her old seat and nudged Mr. Bobblehead. No response. She then clasped his nearest shoulder and shook him. He slowly opened his eyes into a squint. He mumbled something. She asked, "Sir, are you OK?" He mumbled something more, equally unintelligible, and then leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes. She backed off and moved away again.

The No. 12 continued on its way, and soon Mr. Bobblehead resumed his routine. And no matter how hard he hit his head on the seat's back, he never opened his eyes again or said anything.

Both the woman and the guy who had taken an interest in Mr. Bobblehead's safety left the bus at various stops. But Mr. Bobblehead maintained his antics. The bus would pull away from a stop and his head would fall back; the bus would slow for a stop and his head would lurch forward and strike the back of the forward seat.

Finally, the bus headed down the long hill on Barbur that leads to Tigard. The force of gravity overcame Mr. Bobblehead. His head fell forward and hit the seat back. He remained in that position, his forehead resting on the back of the seat, even as the bus pulled away from a stop. He was in repose. He started to snore loudly.

The No. 12's journey continued, but Mr. Bobblehead had reached his destination.

Results may vary

By Amy

Another day, another spin in the vortex of humanity known as the Mighty 6. Yesterday's ride in was so bleak that for a moment, after I got off the bus downtown, I began to doubt why I write about this topic in the first place.

Sure, like any halfway decent bullshitter (I majored in English in college), I can rationalize my habits: Since I am a captive audience on the bus twice a day, five days a week, anyway, why not share my quirky experiences and get some writing practice in to boot? Or, my favorite: The bus ride is a microcosm and metaphor of the overall human experience, so work with it. Explore it. Feel it. Analyze it. Well fuck it, I say. The best reason is that it gets me to write, which is something I couldn't claim three months ago, and writing is something I care about.

But I still can't answer the question: Why the bus? And on bad days: Is there something wrong with me for focusing on this depressing shit?

And yesterday was especially heinous. One of my all-time favorite quotes, from Snoop Dogg, seemed to apply: "If it ain't one thing it's a motherfuckin' other."

First, there was the driver, a silent, poker-faced man in a cop mustache who neglected to turn on the air-conditioning, even though it was hot and humid and the bus was stuffed full of people. Also, you can learn a lot about a driver's capacity for compassion by how willing they are to engage with the people in the front passenger seat opposite them, what in the bus operators' parlance is known as the "creep seat," "drone throne" or the "fool stool" (This precious insider knowledge is brought to you thanks to the public transportation 'zine The Constant Rider). This driver was having nothing to do with the talkative, eager and most likely mentally ill woman sitting there, though she had adjusted seats for two people in wheelchairs, fastened them in after they boarded, and alerted the driver when the bus reached their stops.

No seats were open, so I stood. I tried to avoid clobbering the sitting passengers in the head with my purse. To my right sat two young women who looked just out of their teens. One, in a short, flimsy brown dress, was talking loudly on her cell phone, saying "Where you at? I'll meet you on 82nd. I'll call you when I get there." After she hung up, she said to her seatmate, "With that motherfucking punk ass, I'm not Tanika. I have to remember that. My name is Ashley. My name is Ashley, Ashley, Ashley, Ashley." Both women busted out laughing.

Ashley and her friend got off at the MAX stop and a new pack of passengers replaced them. A clean-looking white couple scootched past me, and I, along with some other standing passengers, recoiled when I saw the brown-red bloodstains on both upper sleeves of the man's button-down shirt—two matching spots right over his biceps. The couple got off at the next stop—having ridden only about three blocks.

Toward the front, the lady in the fool stool had made a new friend, and the two women were having a lively discussion. Another passenger boarded: this time a big black man, probably in his late 50s, who looked like he could put some serious whup-ass on someone if he weren't so loaded. He teetered down the aisle, wearing a sports shirt that had the word "RESULTS" on the front in big letters. If he were the results, I thought, then I would not wish to undertake the endeavor that brought him about. He looked weary: The lower lids of his eyes sagged in red crescents like a basset hound's. "Spare some change," he chanted in a monotone over and over as he made his way to the back of the bus.

Seats were beginning to empty up front, so I grabbed one near the window, adjacent to the women in the fool stool. I wasn't there for very long when Results sat next to me, hemming me in.

"Spare some change," he said to the women.

"WHAT?" one of them yelled, and she looked at him as though he were covered in raw sewage.

In just those few seconds, I knew an invisible trigger had been cocked. There would be a fight. I would be pinned in.

"Excuse me," I said to the man, and he popped up to let me out. I scooted over to what had been his seat and was about to stand up, but hesitated because it seemed like he was going to remain standing while he argued with the women.

No luck. He glared down at me. "If you say 'excuse me' then get the hell off the bus," he said. I got the hell out of his seat. Quickly. He continued to shoot me dirty looks for the remainder of his ride, after I had found a new seat toward the back.

I no longer question my instincts. Although I chose not to fight that battle, I walked away in rage, which eventually deteriorated to depression stemming from a feeling of powerlessness. Then I had to go to work and stare at a computer screen, all pumped up with adrenaline.

A while back I watched a similar situation go down on the bus. A young man, maybe a PSU student, had the window seat, albeit there was a wall where the window would be. A hardened-looking woman in the seat next to his was arguing on her cell phone and gesticulating wildly. The two obviously weren't together. The man ignored her, though her hands at times flailed awfully close to his face. I got the feeling that something bad was going to happen. It did. The woman, screaming at someone on the phone, jumped to her feet and slammed her fist into the wall, inches above the man's head. He didn't do anything but sit there, motionless, and stare ahead.

Was he frozen with fear? Was he high on tranquilizers, or in a deep state of meditation? Or was he just dumber than me? Or braver?

Do your stuff

By Amy

I was waiting for the No. 6 bus at the stop on MLK and Fargo on a terribly hot afternoon, one of those glaring days when the sun lit up every crevice of the boulevard, exposing dried up grass and weeds and cigarette butts in the patches of dirt that escaped being covered with concrete. Things were hopping: Cars whooshed past me, adding to the gritty, heavy aroma of exhaust hanging in the air, and workmen were pulling their trucks into the parking lot for a lunch break at the Popeyes chicken across the street.

 

About a block away from my stop sits Reggie's barbershop. Reggie's building displays one of my favorite neighborhood works of art on its northern wall: a painting of a bespectacled barber and his young client, both smiling a little too broadly. In the left lower corner of the mural, there's a blue ghostlike figure that never fails to fascinate me. What's it doing there? Are the men wearing happy faces to conceal their fear of the blue specter? What were the intentions of the mysterious artist "Lissette"?

 

In front of Reggie's some children had set up a table and chairs—a lemonade or Kool-Aid stand, I assumed. I could tell from afar that they were young kids by the way they couldn't sit still—popping up and down out of their chairs and bopping to and fro around the table like ants near a hole to their colony. The kids reminded me of my 5-year-old nephew, Tavish, who on Thanksgiving, wearing pajama bottoms and a towel fastened around his neck like a superhero cape, ran about 60 laps around the first floor of my house—through the dining room, living room, front entryway, kitchen, dining room, over and over—while Beck's CD "Guero" played. Sometimes when he passed us, he would tilt his skinny white shoulders in a sly little dance move in time to the beat. My brother and I, creaky and weary from L-tryptophan, aging and the necessity of having to work long hours for those things that were freely and happily provided to us when we were small, wished aloud that we could harness about one-fourth of his energy for ourselves.

 

The bus wasn't coming anytime soon, so I started to walk the block toward the stand. I don't have children, and for me, happening upon one of these beverage rackets, designated by their construction-paper signs written in shaky childish block letters, can be as rare as seeing a bear in the woods. But following this summer's trend among the preschool set, even Tavish had put on a lemonade and cookie stand at his home near Seattle. Over the phone, I asked him about his sales pitch. "I told them you can have some strawberry lemonade and cookies," Tavish explained, "but first you have to give me the money." He ended up raking in the bucks. Sometimes being direct pays off.

 

As I approached, I saw that three little boys manned the stand on the sidewalk in front of Reggie's. Except these kids weren't selling mere lemonade—no—they had a snow cone machine, a clear plastic box filled with ice of the rare consistency and texture to hold its shape when served in paper cones, which these tiny entrepreneurs also had in supply, along with paper cups.

 

"You want a slushie?" a flirty little boy in French braids asked me. "How much?" I asked. "50 cents . . . I mean a dollar," he said, grinning. "You mean a dollar for two slushies," I said, citing the price advertised on their sign. 

"What flavor do you want?" all the boys asked me, talking over one another. "We have cotton candy, cherry and blueberry." And indeed, they had professional quality bottles of syrup, the kind found at ballpark concession stands—not anything so lowly as fruit juice or Kool-Aid or things their parents could buy at a regular grocery store.

 

I chose cherry flavor and the boys set to business. As I watched them scramble around the table, it slowly dawned on me that each boy had a designated chore: The charmer in braids was the salesman, the boy at the machine filled the cups with ice and provided the straws, and the third kid, who had waves and curlicues shaved into his close-clipped hair at the temples—probably the son or grandson of Reggie—was in charge of flavor.

 

I chose a paper cup, figuring it would be easier to smuggle on the bus than a cone, and after a loud and long discussion and negotiation, I went with a straw with a spoon built into the end instead of their other model, a spoonless straw that bent near the top.

 

After Mr. Ice packed my cup to maximum capacity, he handed it off to the boy with the designer haircut.

 

"All right Syrup Man, do your stuff!" the salesman shouted as he performed a crazy bendy-legged, stretchy dance. Syrup Man drowned the ice in red cherry syrup, pouring it on so heavily that he elicited a loud "Whoa!" from his partners. I gave the salesman two quarters, and they all thanked me for my business.

 

That cherry syrup was mighty powerful stuff—my tongue remained red and the back of my mouth tasted like Robitussin for the rest of the day—not even Extra Polar Ice mint gum or strong coffee could cloak it. Maybe I should have chosen cotton candy instead. Funny how tastes change over time. When I was those boys' age, while walking home from Beaumont kindergarten, I'd buy bubblegum ice cream from Rose's on Fremont, not caring if it stained my mouth a bright blue. Now I'd prefer an organic green tea gelato drizzled with raspberry coulis, please.

 

 

Spate of late

By Jim

TriMet is a complex, dynamic nonlinear system. That's why a woman who got pregnant three years ago put my job at risk.

It's "the butterfly effect." That's the theory that something small, the swimming of a sperm in Portland or the flapping of a butterfly's wings in China, could cause something large, the loss of my job or a tornado in Kansas.

So the No. 44 pulls into the stop across the street from the Jewish community center. There's Mom with her gigantic baby stroller, waiting. Great, I think, with the mindset of an oft-burned, burned-out commuter, this is going to take an extra five minutes to lower the lift, get her stroller on it, raise the lift, get the stroller on the bus, and lower the lift again, to hoist Mom herself onto our bewheeled slave ship. And Mom probably won't have her fare ready to put in the box.

Wrong! Not five minutes. Much longer.

The driver presses the button to lower the lift. It stops halfway down, sticking out over the sidewalk, pointing at Mom like a cosmic middle finger. The driver presses the button again. The lift is stuck. The driver presses the button at least 20 more times. Then -- newsflash -- he says to Mom: "The lift isn't working."

Instead of walking away, Mom stands there, expectantly, looking at the lift. The bus driver begins pressing the button again, maybe 15 more times. Nothing, not even a mechanical grunt. "It's still not working," he says. She stands there. Then the driver tries to get the lift to come back up. It won't move. He presses the button repeatedly. "It won't come up, either," he says.

The driver reminds me of computer tech support guys: "Have you tried rebooting?" "Yes," I tell them, "three times." Then they always say, "I'd try it again."

Now just two days before this great sperm/butterfly fiasco, every single person in our little work group had been late. Our boss sternly reminded everyone that if we want to get paid for a full shift, maybe we ought to work a full shift. Hard to argue with that logic.

Mom had already doomed me, though. I would be late, at the worst possible time. The question was only: How late would I be?

"Is there another bus coming?" somebody asks the driver.

"Probably," the driver says. He's a regular Vegas oddsmaker.

In about 10 minutes, the No. 1 shows up. Twenty riders on the beached 44 jump off and, like escaping rats, board the 1 -- which takes an agonizingly slow, circuitous route behind Wilson High School. It will eventually get downtown, but it ages you.

Obviously, I was late for work. But it wasn't my fault. Thanks again, TriMet.

Listen, if you think you're going to get pregnant, let me know, and I'll give you a condom. Twenty years from now, when the kid you didn't have is not a drug-addicted high school dropout still living at home, you'll thank me. You might even call it "the butterfly effect."