The #3 bus starts its southbound run near the boring corner of Bellevue Avenue and Bellevue Place. It’s a rather random place for a bus stop, on a narrow, very residential street in an ocean of apartment buildings on the near side of Capital Hill.
This is Seattle’s gayest neighborhood, where most of the residents seem to be double income, no kids, walking the dog. Seriously, waiting too long for my bus, at least twenty same-sex couples walked by, and 19 of them were walking their dogs. With nothing better to do, I took notes, and now I’m starting my bus review before the bus even gets there.
One of the few dog-walkers unaccompanied by a boy- or girlfriend was a skinny white dude of about 50, walking with a slight limp. Which, who cares, of course, except that his tiny shiatsu dog also walked with a limp. The man was favoring his left leg, the dog its front right, and limping together they presented a triumphant image, like the end of a Hallmark movie, or “I get knocked down, but I get up again…”
Still waiting for the bus, another moment that made me smile was when three young men walked by together, two of them walking dogs. The man in the middle, dogless, had lovely dyed-blonde hair over dark roots, stylishly tuffed over his forehead like Clark Kent’s curl. I watched the three men approach, gave them a pleasant nod, then watched them pass. Ten steps later, the dogless Clark Kent guy very theatrically swooped both his arms over his head, then downward, and squeezed the other two men’s buttockses (buttocki?), one in each hand. The sound of their laughter bounced off the apartment buildings, and I wistfully wished for a friend to squeeze my buttocks.
Finally the bus came, and as we rolled along, I’d never seen a more apartmentized roadway than Bellevue Ave — apartments on both sides, all the way to Olive Way. Nice-looking old apartments, though, not modern atrocities.
I once lived in an old apartment building like these, here on Capitol Hill, on a very narrow street similar to Bellevue Avenue. Mine was a lot more run down, of course. Nostalgia and all, I’d like to see that old place on one of these rides, but never will — I can’t remember the name of the street or the building, and there are a thousand streets and ten thousand buildings just like it all over this hill.
Off Pine Street is Seattle’s LGBTQ+ Center, which seems a generic name for a community center in the gay hood.
Downhill on Pine were the first homeless people I’d seen on this trip, sitting on the sidewalk, huddled in blankets, nowhere else to be. We were headed downtown, so of course there’d be countless homeless folks out the window, America’s forgotten people. Such a familiar sight, I won’t even mention it again, but as always, they were legion.
After crossing over the freeway, we came to the Paramount Theater, a fancy place for fancy people seeing fancy plays and concerts. Never been fancy, but from the cheapest expensive balcony seats about three feet below the roof, I saw George Carlin perform there, in the 1980s.
I spent a few years living in this neighborhood, too, on the edge of downtown, when I was impossibly young… 20 or so. Most of the businesses and buildings I remember are gone, replaced with glitzy new high-rises.
A few blocks further, we came to the world’s worst McDonald’s, at 3rd @ Pine, and the bus turned onto 3rd, making the same trek through downtown that most city buses make.At James Street, we turned east, climbed up the hill, and at 9th the bus jumped a block and turned onto Jefferson Street, which the route hugs for a few miles.
After crossing back over the freeway, we crossed Broadway, and passed a corner of Seattle University that’s unfamiliar to me.
Oh hey, there’s Garfield High School — I protested there, against “Operation Desert Shield.” America killed at least a couple of hundred thousand Arabs in that war, 1990-91, and then the entire USA was shocked and bewildered when what goes around came around, on September 11, 2001.
There are wise steps at the adjacent Garfield Community Center, words engraved on a long, outdoor stairway, but the bus passed too quickly for me to read the steps. Found a photo online, though, and ain’t it cool?Sure, the words are platitudes, but they’re fine platitudes, and I’m an enthusiastic believer in public art like this. Every busy street and sidewalk in every neighborhood should have public art, as necessary as the streets and sidewalks themselves.
A black guy got onto the bus, carrying his toddler daughter. As he walked back, looking for a seat on a 3/4-filled bus, the girl’s jacket lightly brushed against a stanchion, and a surprising quantity of feathers and fluff and flotsam flew off the jacket, but neither dad nor kid noticed.
This happened right in front of a white man in a sideways seat, who definitely noticed, even sort of stuck out his arm as if to tap the dad on the shoulder, but he stopped short, said nothing. Dad and daughter took seats near me, but they were still unawares.
When the bus stopped at a red light, the white man popped out of his seat and scooped up all the feathers and stuff. He didn’t return it, though, simply sat down again, holding what he’d picked up.
Of course, the black guy, his daughter, and your humble reporter had all been watching as the white guy did his scavenger hunt. For half a block, nobody said anything, but finally the black man said, “Man, are you really going to keep my daughter’s feathers?”
White guy turned and look at him and said, “Finders keepers, man,” and he jammed one of the feathers through the tiny metal hole in his baseball cap.
I thought we were going to have a fist fight on the bus, but before the men could start swearing, the little kid started crying. The white guy slumped and took the feather out of his cap, walked down the bus aisle, and handed everything to the girl’s father … who did not say thank you, or anything at all.
People are such assholes. Had the white guy been just ‘joking’? Is it a joke anyone would’ve found funny? Even the driver was glaring at him in the rear view mirror.
Then the bus jiggered over to Cherry Street, and color me intrigued as we passed Fat’s Chicken and Waffles. I’ve never had chicken and waffles together, but I love chicken and also love waffles, so why not love ’em at the same meal, off the same plate? Fat’s has good prices, and you can’t go wrong at a place called Fat’s, so I’m adding it to my “To Eat” list, of cool-looking diners and restaurants.
Among the many election lawn signs, all for Harris-Walz, my favorite said simply “Harris Walz, obviously.” I jotted it into my notebook, and want to find it as a t-shirt. (Update: Just found it, and ordered it.)
Toward the end of the line, the bus went onto some extremely tiny, narrow streets, and on 33rd Avenue, a driverless FedEx truck was parked blocking traffic. The bus driver talked to himself about it, with pleasant profanities. “Motherf*cker,” he started, and kept it coming.
I understood his frustration, but also enjoyed the driver’s anger. Where’s a delivery guy supposed to park, anyway? There were no lots, the street parking was entirely taken, and someone in one of the houses needed their flatscreen. Our driver hit his horn, and then again, and then he just softly swore.
After a few minutes the FedEx guy emerged from a building, and either waved or flipped him off. Couldn’t tell which, but the truck moved, so the bus moved.
We rounded a few corners and came to the last stop, at 34th Avenue and Union Street. I stepped off and walked around, and it’s a neighborhood with pleasant but expensive vibes.
Cookies with Tiffany, shouted one storefront sign, but a maple doodle costs $3.75? I am not a man who eats just one cookie; I’d need half a dozen at least, which would get pricey fast, so I bought nothing and kept walking.
Next door is a travel agency, to my surprise in the Expedia Era. My father-in-law was a travel agent, until the on-line giants forced him out of business some twenty years ago.
Across the street is the office of The Facts, a black newspaper I remember seeing around the city 50+ years ago. I sometimes read it, then, so now I crossed the street to peer in the window. This was in the evening hours so the place was closed, but they still print the paper on paper, it’s free, and there’s a newsrack out front. I almost took a copy, but the front page headlines were “Praise the Lord,” and a few obituaries, and nobody needs to praise the Lord or read strangers’ obits.
I walked up a slight hill to a city park, where two 30-something white men were coaching eleven kindergartenish boys and girls, just having them run around.
The park, the kids, the coaching, and the neighborhood all seemed very wholesome, but I needed to pee, and Seattle of course has zero public restrooms. So I whipped out the pee-bottle from my backpack, slipped it discretely into my pants, filled it up and dumped the liquid into the bushes, the bottle back in my pack.
And then came my bus, with the same driver who’d brought me. That was slightly annoying, actually. He’d driven the bus too fast for such narrow streets, and my preference would’ve been for a slower ride back. But the neighborhood was far too wholesome to wait half an hour for the next bus, so I climbed aboard.
We rolled back into downtown, and along the hell that is 3rd Avenue, and then, soon as we turned onto Pike Street, the ride got briefly interesting. There was a middle-aged white guy in a wheelchair, wearing a star-spangled red white and blue jacket, and he said, “Hey driver, what the hell are you doing?” He said it twice, then shouted it, and the driver didn’t respond.
Can’t blame him. You have a question, ask, but don’t ask it like an insult.
It was an easy question, though, so easy even I could’ve answered it (but I didn’t, because like I said, ask nicely). The #3 bus has always gone up Queen Anne, but the route was redesigned a few weeks ago. Now it’s a much shorter ride, just Capitol Hill to Madronna and back. This guy clearly wanted the old #3, not the new #3, but he was nearly foaming at the mouth about it.
The driver, still saying nothing, pulled over at 4th and Pike, lowered the ramp, and motioned for the man to roll off the bus.”What the fuck is going on!” the man shouted, and the driver made a very long face and stood silent, waiting, until wheelchair guy was finally quiet.
“The #3 has been permanently rerouted,” he said, loud and impatient. “There’ve been signs everywhere for a month. There are still signs everywhere. There’s a sign right here, at this bus stop (he pointed at the sign) explaining everything. Read it and it’ll tell you how to get where you’re going.”
Then he again gestured for the red-white-and-blue wheelchair man to exit the bus. Stars and Stripes muttered but rolled away, and as the bus drove off, I could see him reading the sign that’s been posted since August.
The bus went past the Sheridan and the Convention Center and lots of other businesses not for me or anyone of my class. Then we crossed over the freeway, back to Capitol Hill.
As the bus turned off Olive Way onto Summit Street, I rang the bell and got off, to ride back downtown, and then come home.
Kinda sucks that the #3 bus only comes every half hour. My bus home runs just as rarely, but I live almost in the suburbs, surrounded by houses and more houses. Everywhere the #3 goes is much more dense and urban, and most city buses run at least every 12 or 15 minutes. Never knew there even were city buses that ran only twice hourly.
The long wait at both ends of the line had made this more of an epic journey than a bus ride, and I’d had the same cranky bus driver coming and going, and he drove too fast. Still, overall, I’d give the #3 a borderline thumbs up. It goes to some interesting places, and I want my chicken and waffles.
10/2/2024
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