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Riding The Bus: Adventures In Public Transportation By Zach Seemayer Waiting in the biting cold of an L.A. morning in fall, your legs frozen as you sit on a chilled metal bus bench, cussing under your breath about the bus being ten minutes late and angry at yourself and at the world for your annoying lack of a car. This is how many people, including myself, begin their days. It’s called using public transportation, and it’s a nightmare. I have no money to spend on a car. After all, once I purchase my new vehicle for a few grand, I’ll then have to keep it running with frequent oil changes, new break fluid, smog checks, ect. Also, since I’m too lazy to learn stick, I’ll have an automatic so when my transmission breaks, it’s going to set me back a lot. After that I’ll need to get registration on it. And, most revoltingly, I’ll need to pay gross amounts of money just to keep the thing insured so that when I inevitably hit someone or something I’ll be covered. So, until I get a higher paying job or my rich uncle dies and leaves me everything, I’m cursed to ride the bus. And, since I don’t have a rich uncle, my car-purchasing ability is going to mostly rely on the job thing, since I’m a full time student. It’s going to be a fun couple of years. For those of you who have not gotten to enjoy the nearly mind-altering experience of metro riding, let me tell you that you are lucky. No long waits in the cold, no angry metro drivers, no crazy homeless people trying to kill you or hit on you. One thing I will say that the metro has given me is a collection of interesting stories. Stories I can tell my children to terrify them enough to get a good job so they can afford a car. It was ten at night. I had just finished seeing some terrible movie in Hollywood and I was on the Number 2 bus going up Sunset toward downtown. It’s a weird section of LA during the day. At night, it’s like a ten mile long freak show. I clearly recall everyone on the bus. In the front was the mid-40s transvestite who said her name was Carla. She was wearing knee high fishnets and I would be willing to bet she was born with the name Carl. She hadn’t shaved her legs or her face for that matter in days, and to put it simply was one of the least-convincing transvestites I could imagine. Toward the middle of the buss was the guy in the Chewbacca outfit. He had just come from Hollywood, where his job was to stand around as the classic Star Wars hero and let people take pictures with him. He was incredibly drunk and, because he had a deep voice, when he tried to talk in that booze-besotted slur he actually sounded surprisingly like Chewbacca. There was an old lady wearing a dress that looked like it was made from a table cloth. She has a necklace of pearls, which was duct taped in the back because it has broken. She had a single tooth in the middle of her upper gums, and was yelling at the top of her lungs to have the driver take her to Save-On. I sat there feeling like I had ingested copious amounts of LSD. Someone had lit incense in the middle of the bus, which the driver hadn’t noticed yet, so the bus was starting to smell like patchouli and had a hazy quality. It had that same hallucinogenic feel like the USO show in “Apocalypse Now”. I felt like I was in some weird indie movie and I should run into Steve Buscemi. Suddenly, without any warning or precursor, a loud, deafening crack echoed through the whole bus and the vehicle came to a jarring halt. People fell forward, someone hit their head, and all I could here was the driver’s voice cussing incessantly. We had slammed, hard, into the back of a parked car. The car was trashed, the people had fallen into the isle and the transvestite had fallen on a very uncomfortable teenager in a two-foot Mohawk. So, here I was in a crashed bus with a transvestite, a Chewbacca, a crazy lady and it all smelled like the back of some Hippy’s VW bus. That was a fun night. In the end, I had to get off and walk a mile to another bus which came an hour later. A few months later I walked onto a bus that goes up Hollywood Blvd and down into Fairfax. The bus was crowded with people, which is rare for a mid-day bus. As I forced my way through the throng, I came to the back of the bus, which was completely empty of anyone for the last three rows except for one guy in the back corner. This should have been my first sign to stand with everyone else, but I ignored it. I decided to sit down anyway. People gave me worried looks. They glanced uncomfortably in my direction, and it didn’t take long before I figured out why. The man sitting in the corner was absolutely insane. When the bus began moving again, the man stood, and ran around in a circle, kicking the seats and licking the windows. It was uncomfortable and awkward to say the least. So to those who complain about high gas and annoying drivers and heavy traffic, I have this to say: Appreciate what you have because if you didn’t have a car you very well might end up getting hit in the head accidentally by a crazy man licking a window. With that car you can go anywhere you want. On a bus, either bring a bike or prepare to walk. If this was New York, I would have fewer complaints because the subway can take you literally anywhere. So, sit back in you chair without gum all over the seat and relax in the knowledge that, while your driving, someone out there is having to put up with a drunk Chewbacca.
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