On the bus you can usually spot the crazies by their look, but sometimes they’re in disguise, like the perfectly normal late-20s white man who got onto the bus at Miller Playfield. He was wearing a shirt, tie, and shorts, and I would’ve guessed he was a grad student or a bank teller. He fumbled in his pocket for his transit card, flashed it at the box to pay the fare, and then walked toward a seat chanting loudly, “Hwa! Hwa! Hwa!”
A homeless black man who’d been babbling to himself briefly hushed. An old Chinese lady held her groceries closer. Two giggling adolescent boys actually shut the hell up. “Hwa! Hwa! Hwa!”
The guy was quiet after the bus pulled away, and the normal transit soundtrack of homeless babbling and giggling boys and all the other noises resumed, until he rang the bell and got off, saying again, “Hwa! Hwa! Hwa!”
At another stop, a pretty but pregnant young blonde girl in a flimsy blouse tried to board, but she was with her boyfriend and the driver said no to him. “You I don’t know,” she said to the blonde, “but he’s trouble, and trouble’s not riding with me.”
Trouble didn’t like that, started objecting that he’d ride anywhere he damned well wanted to ride. The driver said no again and threatened to call 9-1-1, but then from the middle of the bus came a man who looked my age (old) but in much better shape (flat, not round). He charged at the kid, and shoved him out the front door.
Which, to be honest, was not a feat of great strength. The young guy looked downright emaciated, like we’d caught him midway through a 40-days fast. Hell, I could’ve shoved him off the bus, if I was a shove-people-off-the-bus kind of guy.
The pregnant blonde went after him, of her own choice, so the bus rolled along without either of them. The driver thanked the old man, of course, and said “that skinny tweaker” had been on her bus earlier the same day, without the blonde, and he’d been obnoxious to two other passengers. “I don’t know anything about the girl,” the driver said, “except she looks too young to be pregnant, but if he’s her boyfriend I don’t want her on the bus either.”
“Damn, it must be crazy to be a bus driver,” I said.
“You would not believe it,” the driver replied, and that’s all she said for the rest of my ride, except when that other old guy got off, she said to him, “You can ride free on my bus, any time.”
6/27/2022
Republished 11/3/2025
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