Hop on the magic bus of doom
Date Thursday, March 28, 2024 - 10:20 AM PST
Topic Experiences


The bus is always a fun ride.

A group of young men engage in a kind of rap debate in the back of the bus; leaning out into the aisle from the back seats that face each other and slapping hands and shaking and talking all at the same time. As the exchange hastens it's amazing to watch; they take turns each involing in two seperate conversations along different strains and joining in the middle somewhere, crossing, and slipping away again with different partners. The four of them trade hands and slaps and laughs to show agreement or belief; high-five to make different points that their peers or to show diusagreement with the other's opinion. What sullies the experience is that they are talking about how women are just out to get your money.
Three punkers get on the bus; a chubby girl and her boyfriend, a thin boy who looks like a record store junkie type with the various borrowed looks from mods, punks and grungers. She is ostentatious at the best; clashing colors collide and leave you senseless but with a vague feeling of having been involved in a hard night of liquor. And their third companion is a DDR type; If she had a glowstick in a hand I'd slap her, but the rainbow-brite backpack she sports interests me. Because there is a small black labrador in it. A baby; his muzzle sticks out from the mini backpack to nuzzle her hand as she caresses his head while listening to her companions talk. As they debark outside the tattoo parlor, I ask for the name of the puppy.
"Anubu."

A small group of international students traveling throughout new orleans for some sort of vascation board and continue conversations started with the locals that they had begun while waiting at the bus stops; a young russian jewish girl hits on another student; the german couple speak quiet words to eachother while cuddling in a corner, and a Swedish med student discusses philosophy with a stoner wearing far too many beads for the off-season Mardi Gras times. And they all debark to go to a catfish po-boy shop near the mid-city rented apartment they are staying at.

An older man accosts me in the back of the bus; his current job is a runner giving out pamphlets for the various businesses that hire plasterers like him to go around and mug people with advertisements. He starts talking quietly and shaking my hand repeatedly as if each period a new personality awakes and needs to greet me. He produces blue condoms from one pocket and starts talking about how blue is his favorite color; a moment later he produces a watchtower brochure and begins quoting the plight of christian Germans who protested the holocaust. And all this time the only thought that enters my mind and repeats itself, screaming louder and louder and louder, is: "You live in the murder capital of the U.S."

A detoxing addict falls asleep while eating his sub, his body limp and his veins standing out on end as his body limply shakes with the movements of the bus and his hands occasionally grab at the slipping sandwich which will probably be his only meal for quite a while. The bus intercom announces his stop, and a brief moment later, he stands panicked and flings half his sandwhich into the air, a bad slice of salomi landing on the high-heel shoes of a Marriot hotel worker, who curses him openly as he staggers out of the bus, falls back to the last step of the bus, screams as the doors automatically close on him, forces them open, runs out on to the street, collapses, stands, walks towards the raging electrical fire that was at that moment being actively fought by half the fire crews in the city, and sits, outside a small laundromat mid-city just outside the projects, crying loudly.

Everyone loves being in the big city.

This article comes from Shmeng
http://www.shmeng.com/

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