Bus 3
There’s something uniquely hilarious about watching it pull up to your stop and it’s packed so full of people that they stare at you wide-eyed, stuffed up against the front windows, silently pleading in unison for you to please not get on this one. They’re squished inhumanely as it is, standing hip to hip and back to front and armpit to miserable face, trying somehow to ignore each other. They’re all wordlessly begging you not to board, but you always will because there’s no way in hell you’re waiting another 15-20 minutes in the false hope that the next will be comfortable. This is how it goes. You get on and didn’t just imagine someone touching your butt - everyone is touching everybody’s butts.
I was standing on one of these rush hour sadness tanks this afternoon, pressed up against a mysterious trash bag full of what felt a lot like trash and a small man who is probably a nice person but whose face I still really wanted out of my shoulder blades. There were several couples snuggling on this particular ride. I sit there and do my best not to look at any of them while I got more and more intimate with someone’s stupid bag of trash.
There was a tiny old Mexican woman sitting in the seat in front of me, chatting to someone next to her, who was suddenly shoved roughly right in the face by a bystander’s backpack. I was horrified, but she just blinked a couple times and sort of waved it away and kept talking. The owner of the backpack, a super tall middle-aged blonde lady, had no clue, obliviously jerking around trying to read street signs outside.
I watched her backpack near-miss the older woman’s head a couple breathtaking times as she kept resiliently pretending this wasn’t happening, but it made contact again and the older woman had to duck away. I couldn’t picture telling this story to someone and having it end with “yeah, so I just watched this lady accidentally beat up this old woman and didn’t say anything,” so I tapped the enormous blonde lady on the shoulder. I barely got out “your backpack, um” and gestured at the older woman, when I froze - I suddenly found it very hard to say “ma’am, you keep whacking her in the face.”
“WHAT?” the blonde lady who could only yell and not understand gestures responded. The old Mexican lady froze, completely embarrassed, staring straight ahead at neither of us.
“Um…” The dozen people in our personal space got quiet, too.
“IS IT OPEN?!” She pulled her backpack around to her front, whooshing right by the stony Mexican woman who I think hated me for doing this to everyone.
“No, you… It’s bumping her in her… face.”
A fast realization came into her eyes, and she was very embarrassed, too. “I’M GETTING OFF NOW! IS THIS LA BREA?!” She unfolded a Razor scooter from the floor somewhere (…yeah) and, panicked, tore back to the exit.
Chatter slowly returned to our corner of the horriblemobile and, somehow just having humiliated everybody, I retreated to the bag of trash. My only friend.
There are no heroes in public transportation.